Who Gets to Thrive as an Artist in the Northeast? Challenges, Change, and a Chance to Reimagine the Future

The Launch of Twenty Four North East 24NE - Artists Collective and Gallery - Sunderland

If you spend any time around artists in the Northeast, you’ll eventually get onto the subject of selling art to make a living and you’ll hear the same mixture of grit and resignation: “It’s tough… but we keep going.”

A new national report, Who Gets to Be an Artist? (Social Purpose Lab x Artquest, 2025), lays bare just how tough it really is. And yet, in the challenges it presents, as a member of a new artists collective and gallery in Sunderland –Twenty Four North East (24NE) – I see something else growing, an opportunity for us to collaborate and build our own ecosystem of creative resilience, together.

The Unequal Foundations of Becoming an Artist

The report confirms what many working-class creatives have known instinctively: the playing field is far from level. Artists surveyed were three times more likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the general UK population, showing how privilege shapes the earliest access to creative careers.

Almost half held postgraduate degrees—again placing the barrier to entry far above what many young people in the Northeast can realistically reach.

Regional inequality also looms large. A striking 60% of artists surveyed live in London or the Southeast, while only 1.9% are based in the Northeast.

That means our region—rich with creative heritage, generous with its talent—is barely represented in the national picture. Yet it’s not because of a lack of artists. It’s because of the persistent lack of infrastructure, the scarcity of studio space, and the financial precarity that makes relocation to London seem like the only viable route to “making it.”

The Reality: Artists Are Struggling to Survive, Let Alone Thrive

The report’s findings on finances should alarm anyone who cares about the UK’s cultural life.

• Only 41% of artists regularly earn money from their practice.

• 68% cite lack of income as their biggest career barrier, making it the most commonly reported obstacle.

• Over 25% of artists have less than one month of savings—some have none at all.

• Nearly 40% accessed mental health support in the past year, with many reporting burnout and overwork.

  
  

Add the rising cost of materials, unaffordable studios, and the expectation to work unpaid “for exposure”—mentioned repeatedly in the report—and we get a picture of a workforce holding together a cultural ecosystem on sheer passion and personal sacrifice.

Outside this report, contemporary commentary echoes these concerns. Recent studies by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre show that artists’ earnings have fallen in real terms for over a decade, while multiple investigations by a-n The Artists Information Company continue to highlight exploitative pay practices and shrinking public funding for the arts.

Put simply: artists are subsidising the nation’s cultural life with their own precarity.

And Yet, Something Is Stirring in the Sunderland

Despite these challenges, the Northeast is seeing a new wave of artist-led collaboration that offers a more hopeful blueprint. The Sunderland Echo recently featured Twenty Four North East (24NE)—a community interest company (CIC), gallery and artists collective offering space, visibility, and mutual support for emerging and established artists across Wearside, Tyneside, and beyond.

What strikes me about initiatives like 24NE is our insistence on community over competition. This stands in stark contrast to the report’s finding that 52% of artists feel held back by competition for too few opportunities. What emerged immediately as we set up the collective was the benefit of the varied experience and expertise each artist brought to the group together with our combined networks, provided shared resources and opportunities. The safe and supportive environment has seen a surge in creative activity, not just in creating artworks, but in creating unique approaches to how we run and market our community enterprise.

Collectives push back against that scarcity mindset. They create their own opportunities, their own platforms, their own audiences. They transform empty retail units into pop-up exhibitions, form micro-communities of peer support, and bring art directly to local people—rather than waiting for London to notice.

In regions historically underserved by arts funding, these grassroots structures are not just beneficial—they’re essential.

Turning Barriers into Possibilities

The report concludes with a clear call: if we want a fairer, more representative arts sector, we must address the structural inequalities that prevent so many from becoming or remaining artists.

But here in the Northeast, we don’t have to wait for national policy to shift before we act. We already have the beginnings of a more equitable ecosystem—artist-run galleries, collectives, peer networks, cross-disciplinary studios, and community-led arts programmes.

The opportunity now is to amplify them.

• More shared studios in repurposed spaces.

• More collaborative exhibitions that decentralise culture.

• More partnerships between artists, councils, universities, and local businesses.

• More mentoring schemes that help young creatives from Sunderland, South Shields, Hartlepool, Durham and beyond see themselves not just as hobbyists—but as artists.

  
  

Because if the national system is stacked against artists, especially those outside London, the Northeast can counter that by building its own system—rooted in solidarity, affordability, and access.

A Closing Thought

The question isn’t just Who gets to be an artist? It’s Who gets to keep being one?

In the Northeast, we have the chance to answer: Everyone who wants to be!, but only if we continue building the networks, spaces, and collective strength that help artists not only make work—but make a life.

Author - Dr Ron Lawson - 24NE Artist