The support will seem extraordinary to young people trapped in unpaid internships and menial jobs. My entry into community art was by way of a full-time, year-long paid apprenticeship with Greenwich Mural Workshop, in South East London, where I was instructed in mural painting, screen-printing and the theories behind community art.  I earned £60 a week when my rent for a room in a shared house was £15. It was enough to live on without money worries, while the apprenticeship model was a safe and supportive way to learn by doing.

The following year I got my first job as a community artist, setting up a new project on a council estate in Newark-on-Trent, a market town in the East Midlands. The County and District Councils and the Regional Arts Association (from the Arts Council) had provided an annual budget of £12,000, half for a salary and the rest for a project budget. Crucially, the funding was provided to give working people access to the arts. No other outcome was expected; my job was simply to involve people who did not go to theatres or galleries in creative activities. In the three years I was there, we did theatre, printmaking, photography, puppetry, fireshows, murals, video and creative writing. If I didn’t have the art skills, I had funds to bring in people who did.

This range of work was necessary because I soon learned that the artistic specialisation possible in a London borough was inappropriate to an estate of 10,000 people. Variety was essential to keep people’s interest and respond to their different needs. It was possible because community art was barely 15 years old and there was not yet an established way of working nor expectations about its forms or aesthetic. With few precedents I had the freedom to explore, and I made the most of it. The funders seemed to have few expectations either, other than activities with good community participation and support. I’ve rarely had as much fun in my work as I did in Newark.

Each year, I wrote an annual report describing what we’d done but that was easy because we were proud to tell others about our projects. I did not hear the word evaluation in the first ten years of my working life: there was a general belief that bringing art to working class communities had value in itself. 

That support and freedom was mirrored in other aspects of my working life. For instance, in 1982, there was neither a national curriculum nor an Ofsted inspectorate, so it was easy to work with the local primary school on a fire show. Supportive teachers were happy to give a class the chance to do art for a week, believing that such experience would do the children as much good as English and maths. Likewise, we were welcome in hospitals and day centres and especially in the youth clubs that were still organised by a County Youth Service. Our resources were limited but we made good use of scrap materials and developed a distinctive aesthetic that made community art visibly different and approachable to participants and audiences. We rejected art world values and aesthetics—the newsletter of the National Association for community art was called Another Standard—and made work whose form expressed its origins.

There’s a line in an Elvis Costello song called Dirty Rotten Shame that I have always liked: ‘It isn’t youth, it’s fearlessness / That has been wasted on the young.’ I was fearless then, at least where my community art practice was concerned, ready to try my hand at anything, always believing that things were possible, that people would want to be involved, that doors would open – and they did. I said yes to everything and if I didn’t know how to do it, I asked someone who did and learned alongside them. I had energy and enthusiasm; I trusted that I was doing something worthwhile. I discovered what a very long way that could take me. 

I don’t mean to romanticise those fearless days. I’m glad that we now have better safeguarding and risk assessments in place and that we no longer rely on good intentions alone. Arts management is far more professional than it was but that has come at a high price: too often now, people tell me why something can’t be done rather than looking for ways to do it. It has become the norm to keep within the tramlines set by funding bodies and other authorities. But the essence of community art, at least for me, is to keep asking why things should be done in the established ways and to keep exploring alternatives in search of great artistic experiences and new places where people can find each other and themselves. A culture of trust is not only efficient, it is empowering too.  

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© 2025 François Matarasso