Qualla: 126 Artist-run Gallery

126 Artist-run Gallery: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The gallery is named after the front door. Two artists, Austin Ivers and Ben Geoghegan, started 126 in the living room of their Galway home in 2005, because there was nowhere in the city for the kind of work they wanted to show. House number 126. The name stuck. Five locations in fifteen years, several near-deaths from funding cuts, and somewhere along the way an international reputation for ambitious programming - 126 Artist-run Gallery is one of those small, stubborn cultural institutions that Ireland produces and then forgets it produced.

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126 Artist-run Gallery: Living Room to Industrial Estate

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first two years were experimental. Ivers and Geoghegan curated shows out of their house, picked artists with a connection to Galway, and aimed for the gaps in the city's exhibition calendar. In autumn 2006 they staged a large survey show of contemporary Irish art at the Galwa...

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126 Artist-run Gallery: The Scottish Model

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What happened in 2007 was a quiet decision with long consequences. Ivers and Geoghegan reconstituted 126 explicitly on the model of Catalyst Arts in Belfast and Transmission Gallery in Glasgow - both of which trace back to the New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh. A democratic, artist-run...

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126 Artist-run Gallery: Surviving by Moving

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2009, with its future genuinely in doubt, 126 moved to Galway City centre near the docks. Since then the gallery has survived through repeated funding crises - bids for Arts Council Ireland support, applications to Galway City Council, the kind of grinding administrative work ...

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126 Artist-run Gallery: The Programme

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The roster of artists shown at 126 reads as a who's who of contemporary practice that wanted somewhere to take risks. Aideen Barry. Vivienne Dick, the New York no wave filmmaker who returned to Ireland. Hank Willis Thomas, the American conceptual artist. Rainer Ganahl, the Austri...

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126 Artist-run Gallery: Why It Matters

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jim Ricks edited a 2022 book called Artist-run Democracy: Sustaining a Model, 15 Years of 126 Gallery, published by Onomatopee in Eindhoven. The 2015 publication Footfall, by Joanne Laws, made the case for the broader value of artist-led organisations in Ireland. The argument tha...

Read more: 126 Artist-run Gallery on Qualla