CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF OWN ART: Supporting Artists and Expanding Access Across the Art Market
In conversation with Mary-Alice Stack, Manick Govinda, Alice Black and Sarah Monk at London Art Fair 2025
Last month we celebrated our 20th anniversary with a panel discussion at London Art Fair. Own Art’s Chief Executive, Mary-Alice Stack, began by providing context for the talk.
“We’re turning over about five £5.5 million worth of sales a year to about 5000 customers. So average purchase price is around £1000, and our data over 20 years shows that we have consistently been able to grow the number of first time buyers. So year on year about quarter of the people who use the scheme say that they’ve never bought a piece of art before. That’s really important because everyone’s journey has to start somewhere.”
The challenge of ensuring that artist representation within galleries reflects the UK’s diverse talent remains, and the panellists explore steps in supporting underrepresented artists and broadening access and participation in the contemporary art scene.
Explore insights from the discussion in the excerpts below and listen to the full conversation on SoundCloud.
Mary-Alice Stack:
“I’m delighted to be joined by Sarah Monk, director of London Art Fair, who will be sharing her perspective on how things have changed within the art fair over time. Alice Black, founder of ArtULTRA and exhibitor here at the Fair, who will be talking about her business objectives and the context in which she has launched her own art gallery and consultancy. And finally, Manick Govinda, an independent writer and consultant in the sector who share his perspective on how the market has evolved over the last 20 years and discuss various initiatives designed to support underrepresented artists.
Sarah, please start by telling us a little bit about your role as director of the fair. What has changed over the last 20 years? How has your experience been?
Sarah Monk:
“An art fair in its purest form is a space that sells stands to galleries, who present their artists and sell their work. But, as you’ve mentioned, that is only ever going to work if the entire market maintains its health and every element of it keeps on moving. So, we hold ourselves to account, making sure that we are also looking at how the fair is more diverse in terms of the artist that are represented and the voices that are given a platform.
Whether they have exhibited at the same stand for 37 years, or its their first time, exhibitors must submit an application to the selection committee, and we continually review and evolve the criteria that galleries should meet over time. In the early years it was brick and mortar galleries who had stable programmes and a recognised stature in the market that tended to be the core of the fair, but we recognise that a gallery doesn’t have to have a brick and mortar building – we know how prohibitive and difficult that is in London alone […]
Photo Credit: Sam Frost, London Art Fair
This particular edition of the fair is our most international edition. We have 130 galleries this year. Alongside the strong contingent of London and UK based galleries, we’ve got 18 different countries represented. One of the major barriers to exhibiting at an art fair is the cost, so, in more recent years, we have supported and enabled more emerging UK and international galleries to exhibit with the subsidised rates we offer in the Encounters section of the fair, where the cost of having a stand is around 75% less than in the main fair area”
Mary-Alice Stack:
“Manick, please tell us a little bit about your background and experience in creating opportunities for artists who may be unknown and yet, if the conditions are right, have a potential future and sustainable career ahead. Can you tell us about your perspective on that?”
Manick Govinda:
“I work independently now, but I’ve worked for institutions, in particular Arts Council funded organisations, for several years. I don’t come from an art background. My parents were a working class, immigrant family and I left school at 14 – so I had no cultural capital whatsoever. I think the first exhibition I saw was a Salvador Dali show at the Tate in 1980 (?) when I was about 17 […] Now, I write about the arts and I appreciate not only the visual arts, but also literature and performance.
I found my entry point in the 80’s, back when, the Arts Council of Great Britain funded a quarterly journal magazine that a friend and I started, called Bizarre, which had a strong focus on the British Asian and Indian subcontinent arts and culture scene. I was the Assistant Editor, my friend the Editor, and it was like a little cottage industry in central London. You could afford an office in central London then! Through that, I met a lot of artists because we were interviewing, going to lots of exhibitions and there was an exciting burgeoning black and British South Asian art scene particularly developing in the UK. I was 25 years old then, very excited, and worked for nothing […]
I worked in supporting artists with awards and bursaries – once for the Paul Hamlin Foundation who celebrated their 30th anniversary of their awards for artists last year, I piloted that in 1993. Then I worked for Arts Admin for nearly 18 years, and we set up a bursary programme which has been funded by a number of sources but is still supported by Arts Council England as is a National Portfolio Organisation.
It’s so exciting to see artists that were underrepresented back in the 1990s and early 2000s having significant gallery representation, commissions, invitations and acquisition by public collections like the Tate, for example. Having a relationship with an artist from the very early stages of their career was a real privilege for me. That rapport you get from those conversations, with the support, a bit of funding, a bit of training and mentoring, that kind of combination really works so well. And advocacy, of course, is key to help an artist along their journey […]
So many artists who we supported through various investment programmes like the Decibel Visual Arts Award, which was another Arts Council funded initiative (2004-2008), gave lots of artists from Asian, African and Caribbean backgrounds significant awards of £30,000 to be used just to focus on their practise; whether that meant paying for a studio or for child care pay for childcare for example. We combined that no-strings-attached awards with mentoring, advice and someone to talk to. For example, Zineb Sedira, who we supported back in 2000 with a tiny bit of money for her to make her first video piece, and in 2022 she was representing France at the Venice Biennale, although she’s still London-based, the trajectory of watching her develop, was incredible and I could feel proudly feel that we were part of that journey.”
Mary-Alice Stack:
“What would you say the principal barriers are for artists today in terms of access to the market?”
Manick Govinda:
“The artists I’ve mentioned are with big galleries now, galleries in India and South Korea, for example, but with the economic crisis here in the UK there are a lot of artists from working class backgrounds where class and money is not a privilege. I think there is still a big issue there. So certainly, when I was mentoring artists who came from very poor working-class backgrounds, they just fell off the wayside. Some of the artists I mentored for Bloomberg New Contemporaries for example, where still having to do day jobs, weekend jobs to survive. Financial disadvantage is a key issue today with the cost-of-living crisis, the economic downturn, the aftermath of the COVID lockdowns and COVID-19 pandemic.”
Mary-Alice Stack:
“Alice, can you tell us a bit about your background and your decision to open a gallery and consultancy?”
Alice Black:
“My background has been in the cultural sector, and although I went to Business School and started my career in banking in New York, I then moved to the UK went into the museum sector where I held a variety of positions. I was the Director of the Design Museum in London for 12 years and during my time I moved the museum from a small venue on the Warf in Shad Thames to a building that we refurbished on Kensington High Street that used to be the Commonwealth Institute. It was a massive project, taking about nine years to achieve and costing about £80 million. I stayed on for a few more years after the opening of the museum, and then I felt I’d been there, done it, got the T-shirt and I wanted something completely new. I left the museum, and I had big plans to travel and do some consultancy work, and then COVID happened.
So, I stayed home like we all did, and I looked after my kids who were already quite grown up but were completely confused about what was going on, and then I thought, OK, I’ve got all this time, what am I going to do? At that time, if you were working in an institution, you had the furlough scheme, you could get by and even though wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, you were helped by the government. Meanwhile, artists were not offered any sort of furlough. Freelancers got nothing. It was incredibly dire I thought I could use my time and capabilities to help. I love the visual arts and although I was very involved with design and architecture, visual art is a very early passion of mine. So, I started to pull from the internet all the schemes and things and ideas that could help artists and I created a massive database which I made available for free. Artists could go through and search where to have a cheap studio, who was offering opportunities for exhibitions, who’s offering mentoring schemes and bursaries. We all had a lot of time on our hands, and I taught myself all of this.
I love the visual arts and although I was very involved with design and architecture, visual art is a very early passion of mine. So, I started to pull from the internet all the schemes and things and ideas that could help artists and I created a massive database which I made available for free. Artists could go through and search where to have a cheap studio, who was offering opportunities for exhibitions, who’s offering mentoring schemes and bursaries. We all had a lot of time on our hands, and I taught myself all of this.
I didn’t want to be the saviour with preconceived ideas of what artist’s needed so I worked with a collective of artists to find out what their needs were. What do artists need? Money. We don’t live off love and water, so number one was money, but also visibility, mentorship, and business literacy skills were important. What I found was that a lot of artists go through art school and developed their artistic practise, but left knowing nothing of the business skills you need to make it as an artist. How do you set yourself up? How do you create a website? How do you raise an invoice? I said, what do artists need? They need money and visibility, so I decided that one way I could help artists was to help them sell their work.
I think one of the biggest changes in the art market over the last decade is social media; with Instagram you don’t need to have an intermediary, you don’t need to have a gallery to sell your work. You can sell direct to your customer, and you have different channels to reach your market. But it’s you and 55 million other artists who are all doing the same thing. How do you cut through? You must become a bit of a marketer and understand how to hook your public with your specific brand and vision. I started to work at that end, and I just gave in and began to call myself a gallery because that’s what I was doing.
I have a showroom in East London, and I work with artists who don’t have an exclusive relationship with as it’s hard enough for artists to sell their work so if I prevented the, from selling through anybody else, that would not be very helpful. My pitch is that if I’m doing a good enough job, you’re going to stay with me. My hope is that by the time you’ve grown and developed, and you’ve got a market, and more buyers, and a bigger gallery to represent you, you will have graduated from the ArtULTRA ‘school’ and now you’re on to better things.”
Hear Alice discussing female artist representation, Manick exploring the direct relationships between artists and buyers, highlighting his work with South Asian artists, including Chila Kumari Burman, and Sarah sharing key moments from the London Art Fair, including exhibitor Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, who presented an all-female display featuring British and Indigenous Australian artists.
Click here to listen to the full talk
This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.