ARTISTS ASSEMBLY: SHAPING THE FUTURE OF ARTIST DEVELOPMENT

On Saturday 26 April 2025, the Artist Assembly gathered artists, creative producers, and organisations from across the sector to reflect, challenge, and imagine together. This event, part of Lowry’s 25th birthday programme, kicked off with a clear message: artists drive change, so their voices and needs must lead how artist development evolves.

Through six provocations and eight rich roundtable discussions, we explored vital challenges and opportunities around supporting artists in a rapidly evolving sector. These honest and open conversations revealed the ambition, determination and demands that many in the arts community face.

Highlights from the day included calls to:

Recognise that space for artists isn’t just physical, but also time and permission to experiment, fail, reflect, and imagine differently.
Move beyond supporting artists solely as individuals - nurturing peer networks, collaboration, and collective practice that help artists grow together, not just alone.
Build sustainable ecosystems that include practical tools (like prop and set directories) alongside long-term support structures to sustain relationships, careers, and creative communities.
Celebrate artists’ ongoing creative energy and adaptability, while acknowledging the real risks of burnout and embedding care and wellbeing at the heart of artist development.

What We Heard and Learned:

Artists are generous but tired.

Burnout, precarity and exhaustion came up frequently - alongside continued generosity and energy.

Relationships matter more than one-off opportunities

Artists are looking for consistent, long-term support - not just project-by-project involvement.

Development isn’t always linear or individual.

Many artists work in collectives, across disciplines, or in cycles - current models don’t always reflect this.

Artists don’t always know what they need - and that’s okay.

Space to reflect, question, and redefine success is crucial to meaningful growth.

Systems still feel opaque and bureaucratic.

Open calls, applications and decision-making often feel inaccessible or unnecessarily complex.

Language is a form of access.

Language shapes access. The words we use can open doors or create barriers - and this matters deeply.

This event is part of a series of ongoing conversations about how to build a more sustainable and responsive artist development landscape now and in the future - one that listens, learns, and acts with artists at its core.
We will continue to explore the notes and outcomes from the event and share further updates in due course. Thank you again to our incredible speakers, facilitators, scribes, and everyone who contributed with curiosity, generosity, and care.

WATCH - Time lapse video by Beka Haigh @conversationscaptured