Camden Arts Centre
Camden Arts Centre in the London Borough of Camden, England, is a place for contemporary visual art and education The changing programme includes exhibitions, artist residencies, off-site projects and artist-led activities, ensuring Camden Arts Centre remains a place for seeing, making and talking about contemporary art.
Activities
Camden Arts Centre provide a platform for its audiences to engage with the process of making art. Exhibitions feature emerging artists, international artists showing for the first time in London, historic figures who inspire contemporary practice and artist-selected group shows. Exhibitions and events are free.
Central to its programme is the residency programme, which seeks to develop artists' practices with practical support, resulting in new work and public participation.
Off-site artists' projects include new commissions and performance in areas such as King's Cross, London, and in local schools and community centres.
Educational activity includes events that engage audiences in talks and discussions, film screenings and live art performances, alongside family activities, schools and projects led by artists.
Over the course of the year Camden Arts Centre runs public events, including talks and debates, live-art performances, film screenings and family open days.
Director
Jenni Lomax OBE has been the Director of the Camden Arts Centre since 1990. In the 1970s, Lomax was part of the curatorial team assembled by Nicholas Serota at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Lomax sits on the Board of Raven Row, a non-profit contemporary art exhibition centre in Spitalfields[1]
Under her stewardship, the Camden Arts Centre has established a programme of exhibitions, including solo shows by Anya Gallaccio, Tal R, Victor Grippo, Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse and Angela de la Cruz whose first solo exhibition in the UK, entitled "After", was held at Camden Arts Centre in April and May 2010.She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.[2]
The building
Camden Arts Centre is a Grade II listed building sited between the areas of Hampstead and Kilburn. It is the largest arts centre venue in North London.
The venue began as the Hampstead Arts Centre in 1965, part of the former 1897 Hampstead public library. It was taken over by the local council in 1967 and renamed the Camden Arts Centre. It ran courses for artists, and also showed artworks. Exhibitions in the larger galleries were the responsibility of the Arkwright Arts Trust. These aspects of the centre moved away, along with most of the local artists who had frequented the centre, to become the Hampstead School of Art in 1992.
The original venue reopened as an Arts Council arts centre, after a £4.2 million makeover, in January 2004.