Beyond the Gallery: Rethinking How Opportunities for Emerging Artists Are Created

Recently we asked our community a seemingly simple question: what do artists need more: institutional opportunities or the right creative community? 60% of respondents chose the creative community.

This result is interesting not only because it suggests that artists no longer need galleries or institutions. They clearly do. Galleries, museums, foundations, residencies and other cultural institutions remain fundamental to how art is discovered, contextualised, collected and preserved. What the response does suggest, however, is a growing awareness that institutional recognition alone may no longer be enough to sustain a creative practice particularly for artists at the beginning of their careers.

The question feels especially relevant in London today.

Despite remaining one amongst the top art capitals of the world, London’s cultural infrastructure is facing significant pressure. Rising rents and operating costs, uncertain funding and a difficult art market are forcing galleries and creative organisations to reconsider how they operate. According to the Greater London Authority’s Cultural Production Spaces Health Check 2025, London lost 9% of its creative production spaces between 2022 and 2025, with 152 spaces closing and only 52 opening during that period. The average cost of artists’ workspace has risen by 37% since 2017.

The commercial gallery sector is experiencing its own period of adjustment. Some galleries have closed or reduced their physical presence, while others are experimenting with shared spaces, partnerships and more flexible operating models. The Art Newspaper recently described London’s gallery sector as being in the middle of a “reset”, shaped by rising costs, a slower market and changing patterns of collecting.

It would be too simplistic to interpret this as the decline of the gallery. New galleries continue to open and expand in London, and the traditional gallery remains an essential part of the art ecosystem. What is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore is that the structures surrounding contemporary art are changing — and the ways in which opportunities are created may need to change with them.

The particular vulnerability of the emerging artist

These pressures are felt differently by artists at different stages of their careers.

An established artist may already have representation, collectors, institutional relationships and a professional network surrounding their practice. For an emerging artist, this infrastructure might not be immediately available.

At precisely the moment when artists need as much freedom as possible to experiment, they are also expected to begin constructing the professional structure of their career. They must develop their practice while finding exhibitions, building visibility, meeting curators and collectors, dealing with admin and promotion, understanding the commercial side of the art world and creating the relationships that might eventually allow their work to become sustainable.

The conventional narrative suggests a relatively clear progression: develop a strong body of work, gain recognition, find representation, exhibit, enter collections and gradually establish a career.

In reality, creative careers rarely develop this neatly. Talent is essential, but talent does not automatically create access. Nor does good work necessarily encounter the right person at the right moment. Many of the opportunities that become significant in an artist’s career emerge through relatively accidental circumstances: a conversation, an introduction, a studio visit, a collaboration or an encounter between people from entirely different creative disciplines.

The creative process itself is similarly unpredictable and non-linear. Artists experiment, abandon ideas, return to them, respond to other people and discover possibilities they did not know they were looking for. Some of the strongest work emerges precisely because the outcome was not predetermined.

There is an interesting contradiction here. We accept that creativity is nonlinear, yet we often expect the structures supporting creative careers to be remarkably linear. Perhaps this needs reconsidering.

From creative community to creative infrastructure

Richard Giblett [2008] "Mycelium Rhizome". Illustration for philosophical concept of rhizomes developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

“Community” has become an overused word across the cultural and creative industries. It can imply belonging, mutual support and shared interests, but on its own it says very little about what that community actually enables you to achieve. For emerging artists, a meaningful creative community should be capable of doing more than providing a sense of belonging. It can become an infrastructure.

An artist meets another artist and discovers a new way of working. A collector encounters work outside the conventional gallery environment. A conversation develops into an idea for an exhibition. A creative from another discipline introduces a completely different perspective, then a business discovers an artist whose practice becomes the starting point for a collaboration, then an experimental project produces a relationship that becomes professionally important years later.

These exchanges can lead to exhibitions, commissions, sales, partnerships, collaborations and new audiences. In addition, they create the circumstances in which artists can continue experimenting before every creative decision is measured against an immediate commercial outcome.

Seen in this way, community and institutional opportunity are not opposites. Community can be one of the places from which institutional, professional and commercial opportunities eventually emerge.

This distinction matters because the opportunity frequently does not exist before the relationship that creates it.

Creating opportunities before they exist

This idea sits at the centre of Rabbits’ Choice.

Rabbits’ Choice creates opportunities for artists and new points of access to contemporary art through Creative Labs, community gatherings, conversations, artist development and collaborations. Rather than approaching these activities as separate programmes, they form part of the same ecosystem: bringing people into contact with one another and creating the conditions from which something new can develop.

Through collaborative projects and events, emerging artists encounter collectors, curators, other artists, creatives from different disciplines, businesses and audiences who may not otherwise have discovered their work.

Recent pop-up event with artist Maria Cohen and an edible AI experience with Deep Food

The objective is not always to plan the outcome in advance. We create opportunities before opportunities exist.

This is not a rejection of traditional institutions. Quite the opposite. Galleries and institutions offer expertise, context, credibility, market infrastructure and long-term relationships that independent platforms cannot and should not attempt to replicate.

But independent creative ecosystems can operate differently. They can move faster, mix disciplines more easily, experiment with formats and bring together people who would normally occupy separate parts of the cultural and commercial landscape.

The question, then, is not whether artists need institutions or communities. It is how these different structures can interact.

An art ecosystem with more than one point of entry

The pressure currently facing London’s cultural sector may ultimately accelerate changes that were already taking place. The Greater London Authority has identified the emergence of shared and co-located creative spaces as one response to increasing costs. Galleries are experimenting with partnerships and alternative operating models. Artists increasingly build audiences directly, collaborate across disciplines and develop careers that do not depend entirely on a single gallery relationship.

None of this makes the traditional institution obsolete. It suggests instead that the art ecosystem is becoming more plural. For emerging artists, this is significant.

A career might still develop through gallery representation, but it might also begin with an independent exhibition, a Creative Lab, a collector relationship or an unexpected introduction. What matters is creating more points of entry and more opportunities for artists to move between them.

There is also a wider cultural consequence. When contemporary art exists only within highly specialised environments, the distance between artists and potential audiences becomes greater. Alternative events, collaborations, conversations and private encounters can bring people into contemporary art who may not initially identify themselves as collectors or even as part of the art world.

Some of them may eventually become collectors. Others may become collaborators, supporters, clients or simply engaged audiences. Each relationship expands the ecosystem around the artist.

Adaptation is part of creativity

The difficulties facing London’s galleries and creative spaces should not be romanticised. Closures mean lost jobs, lost expertise, fewer physical spaces and, potentially, fewer opportunities for artists. Financial pressure is not inherently productive simply because it forces change.

But periods of disruption do expose weaknesses in systems that previously appeared permanent. If maintaining the existing infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult, the answer cannot simply be to ask artists to compete harder for a shrinking number of conventional opportunities. The cultural sector also has to become more imaginative about how those opportunities are produced.

That may mean shared spaces. New partnerships. Independent platforms working alongside galleries. More interdisciplinary projects. Different relationships between artists, collectors and businesses. Creating models for exhibiting, commissioning, selling and experiencing art which are more flexible.

There will not be one replacement for the traditional gallery model, nor should there be.

The more interesting possibility is the art world that’s made up of multiple interconnected models, each creating different forms of access and value.

Artists have always understood that creation requires adaptation. An idea changes when it encounters a material, a space, another person or an unexpected limitation. The process evolves, and the outcome often becomes more interesting because it was not entirely predictable.

Perhaps the structures surrounding artists should be capable of the same flexibility.

We already accept that creativity does not follow a straight line. There is no reason why career opportunities should have to.