Glasgow’s Centre for Up to date Arts (CCA) has introduced it’s closing with rapid impact. The pioneering arts venue, which has championed experimental and up to date artwork for 33 years, is coming into liquidation, cancelling all programmes and actions and making its 39 employees redundant.
In an emotional assertion to companions and artists, the centre’s programme supervisor Annie Hazelwood described the closure, which got here into impact on 30 January, as “deeply painful” and acknowledged it as “a second of actual loss” for Glasgow’s cultural group.
The venue had been a cornerstone of Glasgow’s creative panorama because it emerged from the ashes of the Third Eye Centre, which ran up to date arts in the identical constructing at 350 Sauchiehall Road from 1975—however closed on account of mounting money owed within the early Nineteen Nineties. Its galleries, efficiency areas and café have hosted numerous exhibitions, screenings, talks and performances from the likes of Damien Hirst, Allen Ginsberg, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Connolly.
Inventive Scotland, which owns the constructing and leased it to CCA for £1 per 12 months, confirmed it has suspended additional funding funds because the organisation “is unable to display its ongoing viability”.
That is regardless of CCA profitable three years of funding price £3.4m from Inventive Scotland in January 2025. The centre had suffered a sequence of setbacks lately. For security causes it was pressured to shut for 4 months following a 2018 hearth which ravaged the close by Glasgow College of Artwork. This was compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic after which a employees dispute, inflicting the closure of its café.
In April of final 12 months the centre shut after a protest by Artwork Employees for Palestine Scotland calling on it to undertake a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions coverage on Israel. After calling the police to clear protestors from its premises, the CCA apologised for its dealing with of the incident and changed senior employees and board members.
In a press release printed on Sunday on its Instagram account, Artwork Employees for Palestine Scotland known as on Inventive Scotland to reverse the choice to chop funding for the centre. It added: “It was not our calls for and our marketing campaign that brought about this. It was years of mismanagement and moral rot and a last harmful act by the board.” The group additionally criticised CCA’s resolution to put off employees and not using a public session which may have “led to options generated by the sector”.
Hazelwood’s assertion emphasised that employees wellbeing stays the “absolute precedence” and praised the workforce’s “extraordinary care, professionalism and emotional labour” throughout “profoundly difficult situations”. She careworn the closure displays wider systemic points relatively than any failing by employees or programming high quality.
Regardless of the closure, Hazelwood struck a notice of cautious hope, suggesting the constructing would possibly “discover new types, formed as soon as extra by the communities and artists it serves”. She emphasised that “the situations that made CCA doable nonetheless exist: artists with bold concepts, communities that want house, and a shared perception that work can occur with out pointless boundaries. These situations will outlast this singular organisation.”
Of their assertion Inventive Scotland stated it could “discover future choices, alongside different companions, with the shared purpose of the centre re-opening as a cultural useful resource as quickly as is realistically doable.”
