Fruitmarket Gallery
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The Fruitmarket Gallery is one of the front-runners in the contemporary art scene in Scotland. The Gallery is committed to exhibiting contemporary art of the highest quality, bringing the work of artists with both established and emerging international reputations to Scotland and presenting the work of Scottish artists in an international context. The Fruitmarket Gallery’s exhibitions emphasise new work as part of a consistent and developing artistic practice, and seek to engage new and existing audiences through an integrated education, interpretation and publishing programme.
Access to the arts underpins the policy and practice of the Gallery, encouraging discussion about and engagement with contemporary art, providing a context for exhibited work and enabling a variety of groups and individuals to experience high quality events. Interpretation is a key priority with each exhibition supported by a level of interpretation which seems appropriate. This may include introductory wall texts, extended labels, free education guides, a resource room stocked with reading materials and a DVD filmed with the artist or curator during the installation of the exhibition. Publications are produced to complement and extend the exhibitions whenever possible, designed in collaboration with artists and offering new insights into their practice. Ambitious survey monographs, quirkier artists’ books or inexpensive educational publications, all Fruitmarket titles are well-crafted objects, with high production values and an emphasis on the commissioning of new critical writing.
The Fruitmarket Gallery runs Scotland’s leading contemporary culture bookshop. Stocking an innovative and ever-changing range of titles including artists’ monographs, group exhibition catalogues, children’s books, anthologies of new writing, architecture, art theory, poetry, politics and film, the bookshop is a valuable resource for artists, students and all visitors. As it is Gallery-owned, all it’s profits are reinvested directly to support the creative programme. The Fruitmarket Gallery Café is a valuable resource for the Gallery too, offering visitors good, reasonably priced food and drink in a welcoming, stylish and relaxed atmosphere. It complements and extends the Gallery’s exhibition and bookshop spaces, adding value to a visitor’s experience of The Fruitmarket Gallery The Fruitmarket Gallery Café is run as a separate business and as well as enhancing the visitor experience of the Gallery, the café is also an important source of revenue.
The Fruitmarket Gallery receives core funding from the Scottish Arts Council which currently accounts for 43% of annual income, the remainder of which is sought through fundraising, sponsorship and donations, as well as through commercial activity which brings in a small profit for the Gallery through bookshop sales, a percentage of café profits and corporate hires of the Gallery spaces.
There are currently eight full-time and two part-time members of Gallery staff plus a small team of information assistants who are on hand daily in the Gallery to answer any questions the visitors may have. They also carry out random visitor surveys which the Gallery uses as part of its ongoing evaluation process.