NewBridge Gallery is now closed until Friday 16 October.

You can join us on 5 September and 3 October for Saturday Social. You can still shop NewBridge Books throughout the weekdays!

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How We Work

Our Vision

NewBridge is a space and programme for learning, gathering, making and sharing, where everyone can experience art as part of everyday life and where art is used for skill building and social change. This contributes to an active and inclusive region where artists and communities thrive, where creativity is valued, and where people care about each other and the world around us.

Our Mission

The NewBridge Project is a vibrant, sustainable and inclusive organisation and resource for artists and communities that makes social, economic, artistic and environmental impact.

NewBridge is responsive to its locality, and builds community solidarity through socially conscious programming, whilst at the same time being experimental and pushing boundaries artistically.

Our ambitious artistic programme is produced in dialogue and collaboration with studio members, artists, partner organisations and local communities.

We seek to operate as a welcoming and caring space where artists, residents and local communities can come together to work, learn, socialise and support each other.

NewBridge is a site of learning, nurturing artistic and curatorial practice through space for making and showing art, and through artist development and events shaped in response to need, interest, and context, that provide accessible pathways into and through the arts.

Values

  • Experimental in our approach: We provide artists with the flexibility to test out ideas, experiment and be radical, allowing innovative work and alternative approaches to develop
  • Artist-Led: An artist-led ethos is embedded across our organisation, generating a responsive programme and vision that is shaped by artists’ needs and interests
  • Responsive to the social, political and civic landscape: We champion artwork that is responsive to the location, situation and time from which it emerges. We believe art has the power to have great impact, introduce new ideas, alternative thinking, challenge convention, and become a tool for social change.
  • Development of artists at its heart: We position artist development at the core of everything we do, creating informal and formal opportunities for artistic practice and talent to develop and supporting artists from all backgrounds to progress, including those who are underrepresented, or who might not yet see themselves as artists.
  • Focused on collaboration and community: We instil a spirit of collaboration, collectivity and community in our activity to generate peer learning, critical conversation and social interaction.
  • Solidarity: We work in solidarity with artists, local people and community groups who are working toward social and climate justice and amplify the voices of those historically marginalised.
  • Care:We embed an ethos of care across our organisation, from the way we work with staff, freelancers, artists and communities, to the way we develop our programmes and policies – modelling forms of care in a society where it is increasingly undervalued. 
  • Listening & Learning: We strive to be a learning organisation, that listens to people and collectively reflects upon the way we work, and how we can develop responsively, accessibly, meaningfully and with integrity.

Strategic Goals

In order to work towards our Vision and deliver our Mission and Values, we have the following strategic goals which form the basis of our work.

  1. Developing Artists
    Develop artistic talent and provide opportunities for career development through artist development programmes, networking, curatorial opportunities, training and shared learning within the visual arts sector in the north east of England.
  2. Providing space
    Provide space, facilities and resources for artists in the north east of England.
  3. Supporting and presenting new art work
    Support the production and presentation of ambitious and pioneering new artwork in the gallery and off-site
  4. Creating a welcoming space
    Provide a welcoming environment and community hub, creating a resource and programme for artists and the local community alike.
  5. Engaging audiences and communities
    Create positive, in depth and quality experiences for audiences, participants and collaborators, and increase the number of people who experience and engage with visual art.
  6. Creating a good organisational and working culture
    Create a positive working and organisational culture across our organisation and for those that we work with through active listening and reflection so we can develop responsively, meaningfully and with integrity.

Some of Our Policies

Environmental Policy & Action Plan

POLICY

We recognise that environmental sustainability needs to be integrated throughout the culture of our organisation, as much as possible we must align what we believe, with what we do – ensuring our ethics, decision-making and actions correspond to reduce our environmental impact and bring about positive environmental change.

We fundamentally believe that our world is facing environmental crises and it is everyone’s responsibility to act. The significance of statistics stating that if our current level of consumption continues, we will require seven more planets, or that the earth’s temperature looks set to increase by more than two degrees leading to catastrophic climate change, can be difficult to grasp. However, these truths (and more) speak of an impending global ecological disaster that we can’t afford to ignore.

Whilst there are some serious questions that must be asked with regards to our current norms of behaviour and habits of consumption and production, we also realise that there are opportunities for change, for alternative narratives/visions to emerge. This may offer new hope and new opportunities for living differently and less extractively with our natural habitat.

We are keen to move these ideas forward and are asking questions about necessary changes that are required on an individual and local, as well as a national and global, level. We are aware that it isn’t only about the obligations we have as an organisation, but also our capacity to reach others, to inform & inspire, and bring about positive environmental change.

Black Lives Matter – Commitment and Anti-racist actions 

Full Statement

In June 2020, we published a short statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and our commitment to making real and permanent change across our public programme and our organisation, structure and policies.

We recognised then and now that it should not have taken the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer for us to interrogate our complicity in upholding structural racism and our understanding of white supremacy, and that much more needs to be done to affect sector wide change.

Our commitment does not start and end with a series of statements, but is activated through ongoing discussion, learning and anti-racist actions. We are sharing our next steps publicly as starting points for discussion and action with our community, showing our ongoing commitment to actively challenging racism and acknowledging that we need to do more and do better.

Through our public programme we have a commitment to centring discussion, bringing in and listening to different voices and learning together. But we want to be clear that this commitment is across our organisation, in some of the more invisible ways such as with our structure, governance, and culture as an artist-led space.

In our statement from June, we committed to sharing our plans publicly, and below is a list of actions and intentions that we are making in order to dismantle and challenge systemic racism and inequality within our organisation.