The Manton Centre presents a discussion between Patricia Bickers, Art Monthly’s editor since 1993, and Gill Hedley, a trustee of the Art Monthly Foundation, to look at its past, present and future in celebration of the magazine’s 500th edition in autumn 2026.
Art Monthly, published by the Art Monthly Foundation, is the UK’s leading magazine of contemporary visual art. Published ten times a year in bold black and white, it keeps readers in touch with the complex and ever-evolving art world through in-depth features, interviews with artists, profiles on emerging artists and coverage of major trends and developments by independent critics.
Founded in 1976, the mission of Art Monthly was and continues to be to support new and challenging art, and to examine the context in which it is made and viewed. The first issue contained an artist’s page by Carl Andre at the height of the co-called ‘Bricks in the Tate’ controversy.
“Art Monthly is a true light in the darkness of these very dark times. I had always thought that the spaces of art and culture were the last remaining spaces of freedom. Sadly, this is not true anymore. Free speech is under attack everywhere. But we must insist that artists will not be intimidated.”
Alfredo Jaar, artist
This event is organised by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, 91Ó°ÊÓ.
With contributions from:
Patricia Bickers is editor of Art Monthly magazine and director of the Art Monthly Foundation. Until 2011, in parallel with editing the magazine, she taught art history and theory at St Martin’s School of Art and the University of Westminster. Besides The Brit Pack: Contemporary British Art, the View from Abroad, Cornerhouse, 1995 and The Ends of Art Criticism, published in 2021 by Lund Humphries, she has written numerous articles, interviews, catalogue essays and book chapters. She was also co-editor and editor respectively of Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, 2006, Volume 1, and Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 2007, 2017 published by Art Monthly and Ridinghouse. In 2008 she curated ‘Print the Legend: The Myth of the West’ for the Fruitmarket Gallery which was accompanied by a book of the same title. She was a co-selector for the 1994 New Contemporaries; a selector for CAS in 2004, and for the 2011 Whitechapel Open. She was judge for the Turner Prize in 2001, and for the Northern Art Prize in 2009.
Gill Hedley has been a trustee of the Art Monthly Foundation, since 2017 when the charity was founded, and a reader for much longer. A Courtauld graduate, she organised exhibitions worldwide for the British Council from Francis Bacon in Moscow in 1988 to Richard Hamilton at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Until 2006, she was Director of the Contemporary Art Society, actively supporting regional museum curators to acquire challenging work of international contemporary art. In 2004, she was a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize and for the Paul Hamlyn Awards in 2005. Freelance from 2006, she then worked as an exhibition curator, consultant, trustee and chair of several organisations including Spike Island in Bristol. In 2020, she began to write full time, publishing three books on architectural history and biography. The next will be a biography of Peter Norton; she was a maverick gallery owner, Bauhaus advocate, collector and lifelong worker for Polish welfare.