A gallery without walls

From a hand-built kiosk to a Grade II listed building, the Ikon Gallery's history is one of expansion and adaptation, driven by the ambition to bring contemporary art to the masses. Founded by Angus Skene in 1965, the gallery was then staffed by the founding artists and sometimes their spouses on a voluntary basis. Their first exhibition in the same year displayed the work of John Salt. By 1968, the gallery had outgrown the kiosk and moved to the former mortuary in the basement of Queens College in Swallow Street.

Jeanette Koch was appointed gallery manager in 1968, and the gallery held 93 exhibitions and 40 group shows in the next four years. Under the direction of Simon Chapman and Jeanette Koch, the gallery expanded to include works of nationally and internationally recognised artists. In 1972, the gallery moved to The Birmingham Shopping Centre, fitting out a space four times larger than the Swallow Street gallery and virtually forty times larger than the original Bull Ring kiosk.

The number of visitors to the gallery rocketed into the hundreds with some days peaking at over a thousand. The opening show of large chalk on blackboard wall drawings by John Walker established Birmingham as a city with a gallery devoted to the contemporary visual arts. Ikon became one of the most important contemporary art galleries outside London. In 1997, the gallery moved to its current site, the former Oozells Street Board School. The refurbishment work of the current site was designed by Levitt Bernstein and partly funded by a grant from the National Lottery.

Café Ikon, on the ground floor, was designed by Birmingham-based architects The Space Studio and opened in December 1998.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons