Arcade is Good
Image courtesy of Jos McGookian
Arcade is Good: the first five years is a limited-run publication which reflects the first five years of the organisation, their contribution to Belfast’s art community, and showcases the resilience and creativity shaping the city’s cultural growth.
Designed by Stephen Connolly, Arcade is Good features contributions by Arcade Co-Directors Áine Gordon, Cameron Stewart, Eimear Nic Roibeaird, and Sophie Campbell, artists and educators Pádraig Mac Cana and Dougal McKenzie, and designer Anna Lockhart.
This publication is funded by Belfast City Council through Arts & Heritage Small Grants.
You’ll be able to buy it soon!
Here’s a sneak peak of the Foreword…
When we first got together – the four Co-Directors and I – to chat about what this book might look and feel like, we started – as artists do – with a folder of images. One of their number depicted graffiti – a purple heart inside which all caps declared ‘ARCADE IS GOOD’. This book could only have one title, and one purpose: to prove that graffiti correct.
This book attempts to draw together the things in Arcade’s orbit that contribute to how and why it is, indeed, good: its self-organisation, city centre location, a predominant (but not exclusive) focus on the discipline of painting, playful visual identity, unbelievable timing, immense popularity with artists and audiences, contribution to the city, and a whole lotta chutzpah. And the people. These four – and all the others that they have roped in (shout out to the parents redeployed as emergency plumbers) – have created places where it is not just possible to work, but also to dream, and to organise.
It’s a testament to the blood, sweat, tears and craic that have been meted out in the last/first five years. It’s a semi-colon in the story of a studio collective. A kind of ‘Arcade (Donegall Street) is dead! Long live Arcade (Linenhall Street)!’. A transition that at least publicly looks seamless. And a narrative pathway that always meanders, one way or another, back to Belfast School of Art.
To set this in context, Arcade are one of eight studio or grassroots arts organisations who will be displaced in Belfast in 2026. A range of factors – an embarrassment of inadequacies – have created these conditions in the city, from state disinvestment in culture to aggressive redevelopment. But it’s also a stepping-and-scaling-up, with a new postcode which enables a jump from 29 to 163 in the NISRA Multiple Deprivation Index. It’s a new route on the city’s Art Map, it’s spaces with light and height for their members to work in, it’s a gorgeous new gallery in the city for artists to exhibit their work.
Another image in that original folder showed Cameron sipping a coffee behind Sophia’s illuminated laptop screen blaring the message ‘A Practical Guide to Setting Up a Studio Space’. That’s how you do it. You just do it. Amidst the suspicion that nobody else cares about the arts and artists here, we really do care for one another. Arcade have made great things happen despite it all. And they do it together, for the common good.
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. [Under the shelter of one another, we survive.]
