The Ikon Gallery is an English gallery of contemporary art, located in Brindleyplace, Birmingham. It is housed in the Grade II listed, neo-gothic former Oozells Street Board School, designed by John Henry Chamberlain in 1877. The gallery's current director is Jonathan Watkins.
Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere.
David Moos is the president of David Moos Art Advisory and a co-founder of The Museum Exchange.
Susan Collis is a British artist working in Hackney, London. She is known for crafting ordinary looking, everyday objects from valuable materials. In her approach to sculpture, Collis manages to elevate the mundane, celebrate traditional craft techniques, and encourage viewers to take second, closer looks.
Atsuko Tanaka was a Japanese avant-garde artist. She was a central figure of the Gutai Art Association from 1955 to 1965. Her works have found increased curatorial and scholarly attention across the globe since the early 2000s, when she received her first museum retrospective in Ashiya, Japan, which was followed by the first retrospective abroad, in New York and Vancouver. Her work was featured in multiple exhibitions on Gutai art in Europe and North America.
The Birmingham Artists Committee was an English artist collective that organised exhibitions of painting and sculpture in Birmingham between 1947 and 1952.
Trevor J. Denning was an English artist, sculptor, writer, and art teacher who was influential in the Birmingham art community.
Sylvani Merilion was an English artist and former art teacher. In 1964 she was one of the four founder members of Birmingham's Ikon Gallery.
Angus Skene was a Scottish accountant, art collector and art gallery-owner, notable as the founder of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
Jonathan Watkins is an English curator, and the Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
David Prentice was an English artist and former art teacher. In 1964 he was one of the four founder members of Birmingham's Ikon Gallery.
Vanley Burke is a British Jamaican photographer and artist. His photographs capture experiences of his community's arrival in Britain, the different landscapes and cultures he encountered, the different ways of survival and experiences of the wider African-Caribbean community.
Hurvin Anderson is a British painter.
Grace Ndiritu born 1982 in Birmingham, UK. Ndiritu is an international visual artist. At the age of 22, she was taught art in Amsterdam by British film director Steven Rodney "Steve" McQueen. In 2009 her art had entered into the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York, gaining a place in Phaidon's The 21st Century Art Book published in 2014 and TIME Magazine in 2020. In 2014 she was named one of the ten most important and influential artists under 40 by Apollo Magazine. In 2012, she took the decision to spend time only in the city when necessary, and to otherwise live in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies such as shamanism, which she began over 16 years ago. Her ideas between the rural and urban have been documented in Whitechapel Gallery's publication: Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural (2019) MIT Press Ndiritu has also written Dissent Without Modification, published by Bergen Kunsthall (2021). It is a Post-hippie, Skate, Surf, Street, Neo-Tribal book on youth culture, which has inspired her pay what you can fashion label COVERSLUT. Founded by Ndiritu in 2018, the fashion brand focuses on issues of democracy, race and class politics. Ndiritu has declared that 2020 is The Year of Black Healing. A year long programme of exhibitions, performances and talks in collaboration with institutions across the world, which has been featured on The Sunday Times Radio show with Mariella Frostrup and Elephant Magazine.
John Myers is a British landscape and portrait photographer and painter. Between 1973 and 1981 he photographed mundane aspects of middle class life in the centre of England—black and white portraits of ordinary people and suburbia within walking distance of his home in Stourbridge.
Dinah Prentice is a British artist. She paints, and works in textile and in paper collage.
Pamela Scott Wilkie is a British painter and printmaker.
Jesse Bruton is a British artist, and a founder of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. He gave up painting in 1972, to become a picture conservator.
Kate Groobey is a British artist based in South Yorkshire and the South of France.
Mahtab Hussain is a British fine art portrait photographer whose work comments on cultural differences. His bodies of work include You Get Me?, about issues of identity in working class British Asian young men and boys; Going Back Home to Where I Came From, photographs of Kashmir and Pakistan where his parents are from; and Honest With You about the changing identity of British Muslim women.
(age 87)