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Twenty Years of the Eagle Gallery |
Peter Budek at the installation of the very first Eagle Exhibition in 2005
Celebrating our 20th year at the St.Peter's Street gallery in 2025
The First Members help to decorate our first Gallery
Children's Workshop at "The Big Draw" event in Castle road
Councillor Henry Vann talking to Janet Cook at our 20th anniversary exhibition launch
A Private View at the Eagle Gallery
Redecorating the gallery January 2012
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The Eagle Gallery is a unique artist-led gallery in Bedford. It is managed and run by a co-operative of 40 local artists and receives no grant aid or commercial funding.
Twenty years ago. Peter Budek, owner of the Eagle Bookshop, acquired the premises next door in Castle Road and offered the ground floor to local artists to use as an exhibition space for the benefit of the local community. The Eagle Gallery Artists co-operative was set up to bring together interested artists to make this a reality. It soon transformed the premises and established a programme of exhibitions, workshops and other events. Fast forward to 2020. Eagle Gallery and Eagle Bookshop moved into new larger premises in St Peter's Street. As well as gaining extra exhibition space, our new location attracts many visitors who are 'just passing'. We still have many visitors who remember us from Castle Road. Forty member artists bring to the gallery very different backgrounds and a variety of experiences. Our exhibitions reflect this diversity and present exciting and eclectic work that ranges from the traditionally figurative to the highly conceptual and includes ceramics, sculpture, textiles, photography as well as paintings in oils, acrylics and watercolour. We change our exhibitions at least monthly to ensure a varied programme throughout the year and hold a number of one-week exhibitions to showcase the work of individual members or small groups. This enables us to give all our members year-round exposure that would be impossible in a commercial gallery. A continuous programme of exhibitions is at the heart of what we do, but we have run a number of other arts-related activities at the gallery and offsite. These have included projects with local schools, evening lectures and poetry readings, weekend workshops and demonstrations, and the use of additional exhibition space in the foyer of the Place Theatre in Bedford. Our outreach work with disadvantaged adults, young people and local charities has allowed us to offer support to an artist in the community allowing them to exhibit with us. In 2025, this was a stroke survivor who discovered art as part of her recovery therapy. A very successful recent initiative was the creation of Bedford Arts Trail leaflet in 2023. This incorporates a map shows locations and a list with links of many diverse arts organisations in the town. Stocks are available in each of the listed venues and also taken to local hotels, garden centres, libraries and visitor attractions across the county. This leaflet was updated and reprinted in 2025. We are proud of what we have achieved - not least because we have survived the worst recession and worst pandemic in recent history. We continue to attract interest from local artists who want to join the cooperative and have seen sales increase year-on-year. As we receive no financial support and employ no staff, almost everything we do, we do ourselves - from staffing the gallery and hanging the shows to painting the walls and cleaning the toilet! When you visit Eagle Gallery, the person on duty to deal with any enquiries and sales, or to 'talk about art' with the visitors is one of the Eagle Gallery Artists. |