What is an artist-run centre?

The short answer

An artist-run centre is a non-profit gallery or production space that artists govern. Its members, most of them artists, elect a board, and the board and a small staff decide what gets shown. The centre exists to present and support contemporary work rather than to sell it, and the publicly funded ones in Canada pay artists a fee to exhibit.

If you have walked into a small white room with a front desk staffed by an artist, a free exhibition text and no price list, there is a good chance you were in one.

Where they came from

Canada has a large, long-established network of these spaces. They took hold in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when artists working in performance, video and conceptual art had almost nowhere to show. A 2011 study for the Canada Council lists Intermedia (Vancouver, 1968), A Space (Toronto, 1971), Eye Level Gallery (Halifax, 1972), Véhicule Art (Montréal, 1972) and the Western Front (Vancouver, 1973) among the first. At the time people called them parallel galleries, and in 1976 administrators from 17 of them formed a national association, ANNPAC, to speak for them to government and share information.

Two federal decisions shaped the model. In 1975 the Canada Council made paying exhibition fees to living Canadian artists a condition of its grants to public galleries. In 1988 the Copyright Act gained an exhibition right, which entitles artists to a fee when their work is shown publicly and not for sale.

New centres have opened in every decade since. Gallery 101 / Galerie 101 in Ottawa (g101.ca), founded in 1979, is one example; despite the shared name, it is a separate organization with no connection to this guide. Today the national association, ARCA, says it represents more than 180 centres through nine member associations.

Who runs them

The usual structure looks like this:

• Members. Anyone who pays a modest annual fee can usually join, and some centres ask members to volunteer. Members vote at the annual general meeting.
• A board. Elected from the membership, often mostly artists. It hires staff and sets policy.
• Staff. Often a director or coordinator plus one or two others, sometimes part time.
• A programming committee or artistic director. The 2011 study found that almost half of centres employ a curator or artistic director, usually alongside a call for proposals.

Some centres serve a particular community or discipline, such as Indigenous artists, francophone artists outside Quebec, printmakers or media artists. Many also run production facilities: print shops, darkrooms, editing suites or equipment lending.

How they are paid for

Most of the money comes from public arts funding: operating grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (its core grants include a stream for artist-driven organizations), from provincial arts councils, and often from municipal arts programs. Memberships, donations, fundraising events, equipment rental and publications make up the rest.

That funding comes with expectations. The Canada Council’s eligibility rules ask arts organizations to show a history of paying professional fees and royalties to artists according to the standards of their practice and region. In visual art, that standard is the CARFAC-RAAV fee schedule. For 2026, its minimum for a three-month solo show at a centre with an operating budget under $500,000 is $2,574. Our guide to what Canadian galleries pay artists explains the full schedule.

What you will see there

Expect contemporary work, often in forms that are hard to sell or hang above a sofa: installation, video, sound, performance, research projects, artist publications. Many centres also host talks, screenings, workshops and residencies. Most are free to visit, and the staff are usually happy to talk about the show.

How they differ from other galleries

For a fuller comparison, including co-ops, university galleries and rental spaces, see types of art galleries explained.

How artists get shown at one

Most centres pick at least part of their program through an open call. In the 2011 survey, 96% of responding centres said they program through open calls, and that remains the main route in.

A typical cycle runs like this:

1. The centre publishes a call once or twice a year, with a deadline and a list of what to send.
2. You submit a proposal: a project description, images or video, a short artist statement and a CV.
3. A programming committee of members and outside artists, or the artistic director, reviews the submissions against the centre’s mandate.
4. Selected projects are scheduled, often a year or more ahead.
5. You sign an agreement covering dates, fees, installation, shipping and promotion.

You rarely need to be a member to apply, but read the mandate first. A centre devoted to media art will not show your watercolours, however good they are. Our guides on getting your art into a gallery and open calls and juried shows cover the proposal itself.

The national and provincial associations

ARCA (the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference) speaks for the network nationally. Representatives agreed to form it in 2004 and it was incorporated in 2005. Its nine member associations are:

• RCAAQ, Quebec, the oldest and largest regional association
• ARCCO, Ontario, active since 1988 with more than 40 centres
• PAARC, British Columbia, active since 1988
• The Alberta Association of artist-run centres
• PARCA, Saskatchewan, with eight centres in Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert
• MARCC, Manitoba
• AARCA (Atlantis), the four Atlantic provinces, incorporated in 2005
• AGAVF, francophone groups in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Manitoba
• Indigenous Affiliates, a non-geographic caucus of Indigenous-led organizations

To find centres near you, start with our list of artist-run centres in Canada or a city filter such as artist-run spaces in Winnipeg.

A note for US readers: the closest US equivalents are artist-run non-profits, sometimes called alternative spaces. The US has no exhibition right, so artist fees are voluntary; some institutions follow the W.A.G.E. certification standard instead.