For an arts organisation today, all birthdays are worth celebrating. To reach 20 or 30 years is a milestone. The closure of the CCA in Glasgow in February and the battle currently raging to save the organisations based at the city’s Trongate 103 are reminders of how uncertain the future can be.
Meanwhile, the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture (RSA) is celebrating its bicentenary. The RSA200 programme of events and exhibitions at its Edinburgh headquarters on The Mound is expanded by a partnership programme, RSA200 Celebrating Together, involving arts venues the length and breadth of the country. Scotland’s oldest artist-run organisation appears to be going from strength to strength, which is all the more remarkable since it receives no public funding whatsoever.
In many ways, the RSA is still recognisable as the organisation founded by a group of artists in Edinburgh in 1826. It is still run by a governing Council of artists and architects, and focuses its work on supporting practitioners. The Annual Exhibition, which is open both to members and non-members, remains the centrepiece of its programme.
“One of the core reasons the RSA was founded was to hold an annual exhibition to help promote and support contemporary artists in Scotland,” says Sandy Wood, RSA Head of Collections. “That exhibition continues, it’s for our Academicians to promote their work and it’s also a platform to see the best of Scottish contemporary art and architecture. In that respect, what the Academy set out to do 200 years ago it’s still doing today, but the way we support artists now is much broader.”
Of course, there have been changes too. The organisation is now supported by an expanded professional staff working in sales, exhibitions, consultancy, research and more. There is a year-long programme of exhibitions and events. Head of Programme, Flora La Thangue, says: “The Academy has had to modernise, diversify, to be a viable charitable organisation in the modern world. But it is still run by artists, it puts artists at the forefront of everything it is. That hasn’t, and won’t ever, change.”
“What the Academy set out to do 200 years ago it’s still doing today” – Sandy Wood, RSA Head of Collections
Training artists was a key part of the early years. Before Scotland’s art schools opened, the RSA Life School – one of few places where artists were trained by artists – ran for nearly a century. In the last 100 years, the organisation has switched its focus from training artists to supporting them in their careers with scholarships, bursaries and prizes, and currently offers support to individuals to the tune of nearly £450,000 per year.
Some projects, such as the John Kinross Scholarship, which offers 10 new graduates per year the chance to spend a summer in Florence, are long established. Recently, in response to a perceived need for more mid-career awards, the RSA launched two £20,000 bursaries, The MacRobert Award and the Blackadder Houston Award, for artists for whom it has been more than 10 years since college.
La Thangue says: “I’m not saying it’s easy, it can be really hard to make the numbers add up, but at a time when so many arts organisations are struggling, at the end of the day the RSA is independent and has to fund itself through art sales, consultancy and the various income streams it has enabled through being a modern future-facing organisation. There’s an urge within the Academy to remain relevant and modernise, to move with the times.”
While the support of Trusts and private philanthropy are important, the RSA is clear that often those who support the organisation to the greatest extent are the artists themselves. Its biggest cash injection of recent years has been the bequest of artist couple Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston, whose legacy was worth more than £7million.
Sandy Wood says: “Gifts like that come from artists who have a desire to see the Academy survive and continue to do what it’s always done – to do what it did for them, for their peers and mentors, and for the people they mentored themselves. They see themselves as being part of a lineage of support of the arts in Scotland. They look to pass their success as artists on to the next generation, and historically it’s through the RSA that they’ll think about how they might do that.”
Like any historical organisation, the RSA has had to weather crises. The most serious in recent years was the discovery, in the late 1990s, that the RSA building on The Mound needed major structural repair, well beyond the means of the Academy. A long period of negotiation resulted in the building passing into the hands of National Galleries of Scotland, and the £32million government-funded Playfair Project which created the Weston Link between the two galleries. The RSA retained its autonomy, its offices in the building and its right to exhibit there for a portion of the year.
Then, in 2020, Covid-19 came close to doing what two world wars had failed to do: cancelling the RSA Annual Exhibition. The country went into lockdown just as the work was being installed. In the event, the RSA became one of the first exhibiting societies to create an online show, developing a strong digital presence for all its shows, which continues today.
As I write this, the show currently occupying the galleries on The Mound is the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition, showcasing the work of 64 young artists selected from the 2025 Degree Shows in Scotland. Now in its 17th year, it replaced the crowded RSA Student Show, which aimed to show a work by every graduating student, with a selected, curated exhibition.
“It has been a big success story for us,” Flora La Thangue says. “When students have their degree shows, often it’s the award they are looking out for because it is an opportunity to show your work at the RSA in the centre of Edinburgh. It’s a massive jumping-off point for graduates going out into the world.”
Then, hot on the heels of New Contemporaries will come the 200th RSA Annual Exhibition, which features work by invited artists Martin Creed, Cathie Pilkington, Stephen Skrynka and James Geurts, along with academicians such as Kenny Hunter, Alison Watt, Jake Harvey, Caroline Walker and Robbie Bushe, all responding to the theme ‘In Time’, set by Fine Art Convener, sculptor Annie Cattrell.
October brings 200 Years, an exhibition which La Thangue describes as “a big exciting whirlwind of 200 years of the RSA” in which all the works, historic and contemporary, are for sale. La Thangue says: “The challenge we face in our programme is to create exhibitions which are curatorially rigorous and interesting and put research at their centre, but are also going to make sales. I’m hoping this is going to be a combination of both of these things.”
The RSA is aware of the challenge to remain relevant. In the 1960s, as students, artists John Bellany and Alexander (Sandy) Moffat displayed their large-scale experimental paintings on the railings on The Mound as a challenge to an organisation where there was, in Moffat’s words, “an overall atmosphere of timorous respectability”. Of the contemporary artists who have come to the fore in Scotland in recent decades, going on to win prizes such as the Turner Prize and work internationally, a relatively small number have become RSA members. However Wood and La Thangue argue that the RSA is broader, more diverse and more democratic than it has ever been, in its members, in their practices, and in the kind of work displayed in its galleries.
“It is still run by artists, it puts artists at the forefront of everything it is. That hasn’t, and won’t ever, change.” – Flora La Thangue, Head of Programme
Wood says the organisation must consider what further part it can play in a world in which government support for the arts is diminishing. Its successful Residencies for Scotland programme, for example, which supports between 13 and 18 artists every two years at all stages of their careers, began as a partnership with Creative Scotland but is now managed independently by the RSA. The RSA200 Celebrating Together programme is supporting – and lending works to – exhibitions in galleries all over the country.
Wood says: “The RSA is there to support artists and ensure they thrive, and it’s important that there are places and platforms for them to thrive in Scotland. We need to think how we can help develop those platforms in a world where resources don’t seem to be going in the right direction, certainly not from a Government perspective.
“It’s about looking for ways that we can use the philanthropy that we have received from artists to flow back into communities of artists. Hopefully we can play a part in building an ecosystem that can be sustained, even in the face of really challenging times.”
RSA New Contemporaries runs until 22 April; the 200th RSA Annual Exhibition runs 9 May – 14 June. For more information about the RSA200 programme visit www.royalscottishacademy.org
