Trust the trustees?
Chisenhale Art Place (CAP) is the name of the registered charity that runs Chisenhale Studios in east London. Its website lists 37 artist members. Until very recently there were 40, but during the summer the board of trustees gave notice to three members that their licenses were being revoked and that they had to quit their studios. One of those three happens to be Madeleine Strindberg, my wife.
Madeleine has been a member of CAP for 25 years. During that time she has used her studio to produce work that has been shown in numerous exhibitions and that won her the Jerwood Painting Prize. Some of the money from that prize went towards building another studio at the back of our house, and in recent years much of her work has been made there rather than in her Chisenhale studio, which has been used for storage of earlier work, for showing this work to interested galleries, and also for the making of some new work. The reasons given for Madeleine’s eviction are that she is not contributing sufficiently to the aims of CAP and that her studio is not an essential part of her practice. Eviction means that Madeleine has to find alternative space for several hundred paintings; many are over 6 foot; they weigh, I’d guess, several tons.
There is no right of appeal. Nor has there been any opportunity to even talk with the trustees about their decision: all communication has been via the administrator, appointed by the board. And even if the board has reason to argue that Madeleine’s studio at Chisenhale is not being used as actively as they’d like, there are still things to talk about. Such as the irregular use of studios by many members other than the three being evicted (yesterday morning only one studio in the whole building was being used by its licensee, and a glance through the signing in/out book showed that there are very few days when even half the studios are being used). Such as the fact that one artist member (who also happens to be on the board of trustees) doesn’t even live in England. Such as the rumours about the planned redevelopment of the building.
The decision to evict Madeleine and the two others appears to be arbitrary. The refusal of the trustees to discuss the situation (I’ve seen an email from the chair of the board in which he says he has ‘more pressing issues’ to deal with) seems to me to betray the whole spirit of the place, which was established to give artists ‘secure premises’ to get on with their art in a cooperative spirit.
‘Board of trustees’ is of course a term that’s recently become familiar to many in the poetry world, where the Poetry Society has recently had to deal with the fall-out from some clumsy decisions from their own board.