Artists renew society. There will always be artists, and new artists are everywhere. For 75 years, New Contemporaries has supported emerging and early career artists with advice, introductions, opportunities, exhibitions and mentoring.

Our work takes place across a year round programme of artist development. This includes a structured annual programme that culminates in a national exhibition, alongside an open programme of opportunities, online workshops and in person events that are free and accessible to artists across the UK. Our programmes are shaped by the approaches, needs and ambitions of artists working today.

We partner with leading institutions including MIMA and the South London Gallery to deliver this work, responding to the conditions in which contemporary art is made. We believe that creating environments where artists feel supported from their first point of contact with the art world is essential to building a more diverse, inclusive and sustainable art world.

New Contemporaries is a registered charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.

Our 2026 programme is funded by Arts Council England, Art Fund, our Emerging Artist Circle, the Fenton Arts Trust, Henry Moore Foundation, OMNI and TfA London.

New Contemporaries began in 1949 as Young Contemporaries, an annual exhibition established to present new work by emerging artists in the UK. From our early years, the exhibition became a key national platform, recognised for identifying artists who would go on to shape post war and contemporary British art.

Over the decades, our programme has included artists such as Ed Atkins, Monster Chetwynd, Phil Collins, Tacita Dean, Antony Gormley, Sophie von Hellermann, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Isaac Julien, Anish Kapoor, Mark Lecky, Rachel Maclean, Haroon Mirza, Richard Mosse, Mike Nelson, Laure Prouvost, Paula Rego and Gillian Wearing, among many others. What connects these artists is not a shared style, but the moment at which they were supported, at a formative point before wider recognition.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition operated as an artist led initiative, organised and selected by students and artists themselves. In 1988, we re established as an independent organisation and registered charity, creating a more sustainable structure while retaining a commitment to artist led selection, strengthening our role between art education, professional practice and public institutions.

While formats and contexts continue to evolve, our purpose remains the same – to support artists at the point where new work, new thinking and new practices emerge.

New Contemporaries holds and manages its organisational archive from 1988 onwards. Earlier material relating to Young Contemporaries is held within the Arts Council England and ICA archives at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Libraries.

We welcome contributions to our archive from alumni artists, selectors and audiences. If you have material you would like to share, including catalogues, images or press coverage, please contact info@newcontemporaries.org.uk.

Artists change us

Through new symbols, new philosophies, and new practices, artists renew society. Society needs them. No generation of artists feels or thinks like the generation before. And so New Contemporaries changes too. For 75 years we have been led by the approaches, needs and spirit of the latest generation of artists.

Access is a practice, not a permission 

We ask what it means to be an artist today, and who gets to decide. Who is visible, who is supported, who feels able to enter, stay and thrive. We understand access not as a set of rules, but as an ongoing responsibility that asks us to listen, adapt and change.

We are working towards a de-colonised, non-normative, non-heteronormative and non-ableist New Contemporaries. We build structures that can flex, respond and be re made, so that artists are not asked to conform to fixed systems, but are met where they are.

A body-of-work is nothing without kindness

We have a body-of-work that covers three quarters of a century. The relationships we have formed, ideas developed and structures we have built have only happened because we behave with respect and care. Insist on a background of kindness.

Everything can be reinvented

Never think it can’t all be dreamed up again. Never say ‘that’s how we do things here’.

Director
Kiera Blakey

Assistant Curator
Sophie Bownes

Communications Manager
Rosie Gibson

Senior Curator
Séamus McCormack

Deputy Director
Carmen Juliá (parental leave cover)
Ella Snell (on parental leave)

Board of Trustees

New Contemporaries is led by a voluntary Board of Trustees and is a registered charity

Alice Amati
Gallerist and Curator
Lewis Dalton Gilbert
Independent Curator and Creative Director of A Vibe Called Tech
Fouad Kanaan
Head of Exhibitions at the Art Mill Museum in Doha
Harold Offeh (Chair)
Artist
Romilly Stebbings
Director of Business Development at Frieze

We’re not currently recruiting.