Royston Arts Society Autumn Exhibitions
Background
The Royston Arts Society Autumn Exhibition started in 1979. It was originally held outdoors in July but bad weather forced us to move to a more practical venue. The exhibitions have been held in Royston Town Hall, Melbourn Street, Royston, SG8 7BS (map) ever since.
In the early 80’s, we moved the date to the last weekend in September to coincide with the Royston Arts Festival. Over the years the Autumn Exhibition has continued to be a major feature of the Arts Festival.
In recent years we have typically exhibited 400 – 450 framed and unframed paintings by around 60 – 70 artists; including RAS members and non members. In addition we have exhibited 600 – 700 greeting cards. Admission has always been free but we offered a raffle, refreshments and comprehensive catalogue to our visitors.
The number of visitors depends on the weather and what else is happening in Royston over the exhibition weekend, but in a good year we have approached 1000 visitors.
Past Autumn Exhibitions
Click on a poster to see the details or click on the title to see the list of paintings entered into an exhibition.
Present Day
The Covid pandemic meant that we were unable to run the Autumn Exhibition in 2020 or 2021. Instead, we ran an online exhibitions from mid September through to end November. This built on the experience we had gained with the online members exhibition we had run in Spring 2020.
In 2022 we were finally able to return to Royston Town Hall where we ran a very successful Autumn Exhibition on the weekend of 23rd to 25th September. Sixty-three artists exhibited over 330 paintings. This was followed by an online exhibition featuring about half of the unsold paintings plus replacements for some of those that had sold. The visitors were universally pleased that the Town Hall exhibition was back and we sold a high percentage of the paintings on display.
The most recent exhibition in 2023 was an even bigger success; indeed it was the best for over a decade. We exhibited 330 paintings and 515 greeting cards from 65 artists. Over forty of the exhibiting artists sold something and the average sales price of a painting achieved a record high. The total sales were the highest in a decade. We has lots of positive feedback from people attending the exhibition.
Plans for Future Autumn Exhibitions
We removed most of the peripheral activities for the 2022 and 2023 Town Hall exhibitions to focus exclusively on displaying and selling paintings. We also limited the number of paintings on display. This resulted in a more attractive display of framed and unframed paintings giving them room to breath. It also improved the flow of visitors around the exhibition and there were fewer distractions. We plan to continue with this approach in future years although we will not run a subsequent online exhibition.
As in the past, future exhibitions will be open to members and non members of RAS; but non members will need to pay a hanging fee to submit their paintings.
Details are sent out to RAS members and non member artists, who have exhibited with us recently, three months before the exhibition.
Over the years we have developed some guidelines that we ask artists to follow if they wish to enter paintings into the autumn exhibition.
Click on the button below to view the exhibition entry criteria.