Qualla: Ikon Gallery

Ikon Gallery: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthew Black from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the Ikon Gallery opened in 1965, it stood inside a glass-walled octagonal kiosk in the middle of Birmingham's new Bull Ring shopping centre. People going about their Saturday shopping found themselves walking past contemporary art. That was the entire point. The founders had wanted to set up a gallery without walls, with travelling exhibitions in a motorcycle sidecar that would visit cinemas and post offices, but the kiosk was the most viable version of that ambition. The Ikon's founding prospectus declared the gallery an antithesis to exclusive art establishments and a place where the exchange of visual ideas could become a familiar reality. Sixty years and four buildings later, the Ikon is housed in a Victorian neo-Gothic school in Brindleyplace, but the original principle, of putting contemporary art in front of people who did not necessarily go looking for it, has never changed.

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Image: Matthew Black from London, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ikon Gallery: Four artists and a collector

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Mabbett, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Ikon began with a painting. In 1964, the Birmingham art collector Angus Skene bought David Prentice's canvas Kate and the Waterlilies. The two fell into conversation about how little support Birmingham's institutions offered to living artists. Prentice brought in three collea...

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Image: Andy Mabbett | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ikon Gallery: From mortuary to shopping mall

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stowell, CC BY-SA 2.0. The kiosk lease expired after three years. With Arts Council support, the Ikon moved in 1968 to a former mortuary in the basement of Queens College in Swallow Street. Over the next four years they staged 93 exhibitions and 40 group shows, an extraordinary pace for a tiny organisa...

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Image: David Stowell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ikon Gallery: Oozells Street and the Lottery years

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1978 the Ikon had outgrown the shopping centre and moved to a former carpet shop in John Bright Street next to the Alexandra Theatre. It stayed there for nearly two decades. The breakthrough came in 1997, when the gallery moved into its present home, the former Oozells Street ...

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Image: Oosoom | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ikon Gallery: A real Birmingham family

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brianboru100, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2011 the Ikon started a long collaboration with Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing on a public sculpture called A Real Birmingham Family. Wearing put out an open call for nominations, asking what a typical Birmingham family looked like, and selected sisters Roma and E...

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Image: Brianboru100 | CC BY-SA 4.0