Manchester is a great city for art. Yeah, we don't have a Guggenheim or a Tate, but the full spectrum of what you can see and do here as an artist or art lover is pretty amazing. I just wrote a piece for Art World Magazine about people who start galleries in their homes and in other non-traditional places, inspired by seeing a few around these parts, and in the process of reporting it I discovered a few more.
In addition to the venerable Apartment, located in a flat in what has to be one of the most culturally-leaning council tower blocks in the land, Lamport Court (also home to a literary magazine and at least a couple of musicians who record there), we've got Twenty + 3 projects, an art gallery in the front room of a terrace in Whalley Range, and Porch Gallery, the entrance vestibule of a house in Chorlton which is periodically turned into a kind of contemporary art vitrine.
And then there are totally off the wall things, like Bog Standard Gallery: Artist and recent MMU grad Melanie Warner turned a portaloo into a mobile mini artspace. It's currently at Urbis, exhibiting a series of Warner's photographs of toilet signs around the world.
Want more? Look out for exhibitions in abandoned buildings, private homes or utterly random locations around the city ( from folks like Interval, or Forbidden Arts.) Established art institutions like Castlefield Gallery are doing and supporting off-site stuff too. They recently did a show at the grand old derelict fire station near Piccadilly. Someone had to clean up A LOT of pigeon shit.
