Help shape Manchester's art forum before it opens.

There's no live discussion board here yet - we'd rather tell you that than show you an empty shell pretending otherwise. A community forum for Manchester's art scene is planned, built around the questions artists already ask each other: finding studio space, hearing about open calls, discussing new shows, and sharing what's actually worth your time at a private view.

Until it launches, Manchester's art community already gathers elsewhere. Our studio space guide and curator and exhibition space guide cover the organisations - Rogue Artists' Studios, Islington Mill, Paradise Works, AWOL Studios and Castlefield Gallery among them - where a lot of that conversation genuinely happens, at open studios, private views and Associates events.

We want this forum shaped by what artists actually want from it, not what we assume. If there's something specific missing from how Manchester's art community talks to itself online, tell us before we build it via the contact page.

We're deliberately not launching an empty comments section and hoping people find it. A forum only works once there's a genuine base of people using it regularly, and that means having moderation and structure sorted before the first post goes up, not scrambled together after spam or bad-faith posting shows up. That's the actual reason this is a "coming soon" page rather than a live but empty one - we'd rather launch it once and have it work than launch it early and have to rebuild trust in it later.

Manchester's art scene already has a real informal network behind it - studio communities that have run for decades, galleries that know each other's programming, artists who move between Rogue, Islington Mill, Paradise Works and AWOL over the course of a career. A forum doesn't need to invent that community; it needs to give the practical knowledge that already circulates inside it somewhere permanent and searchable to live, instead of scattered across group chats, mailing lists and conversations at private views that nobody else gets to benefit from.

If you run a studio, gallery or project space in Manchester and would specifically use a way to post open calls, studio vacancies or exhibition opportunities once this launches, tell us that directly - it affects whether the forum has a dedicated section for that from day one.

The same principle applies across MCR.CITY's other creative sections - the film forum and the culture forum are in exactly the same pre-launch state, for the same reason. We'd rather open three community sections properly, one after another, than launch three half-built ones at once with nobody actively moderating them.

In the meantime, our studio space guide and curator and exhibition space guide cover the real organisations where a lot of this conversation already happens in person - worth reading if you're trying to plug into Manchester's art scene today rather than waiting for a forum to exist.

Open studio events in particular are worth prioritising if you're new to the city and trying to meet people rather than just read about them - Rogue, Islington Mill, Paradise Works and AWOL Studios all run them, and turning up in person tends to build faster, more useful connections than any online forum could manage on its own, launched or not.

Castlefield Gallery's Associates programme is another route worth knowing about while the forum isn't live, since it exists specifically to connect artists with mentoring, career development and a wider network of over 300 creatives - a lot of what a forum thread would otherwise be trying to recreate informally.

We know "coming soon" pages are a fair thing to be sceptical of, since plenty of sites use that phrase and never follow through. What we can commit to is that this page will be replaced with the genuine article rather than quietly forgotten, and that it will be built around what the people who actually asked for it said they wanted, not a generic forum template dropped in unchanged.

If you'd rather not wait, the guides linked above are kept as up to date as we can manage precisely because they're doing some of the job a forum would otherwise do - answering the practical questions Manchester artists actually ask, with real organisations attached rather than vague pointers.

FAQ

Is the art forum live? Not yet. This page will be replaced once it launches.

How will I know when it opens? It'll be linked from the Art hub the day it goes live.

Can I suggest what it should cover? Yes - get in touch via the contact page.

Will galleries and studios be able to post open calls once it launches? That's under consideration and exactly the kind of feature we want feedback on before building it.

Will the forum be free to use? Yes, that's the intention, in line with MCR.CITY's other community tools.