2022 was a year of profound and wide global change. Most poignantly we moved from the Elizabethan to the Carolean era on the sad death of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Geo-political events, war and economic uncertainties prevailed. The Covid pandemic with its variances continued to spread, mutate, and disrupt. Financial markets were stressed with capital losses and reduced dividends for shareholders.

Reorganisation of Jerwood Foundation

All importantly during the year we reorganised Jerwood Foundation. We established a new Jerwood Foundation in the United Kingdom which was registered as UK charity early in the year. Four new trustees have been appointed: Alan Grieve, Lara Wardle, Philippa Campbell and Tara Mayhew, all resident in the UK with wide experience in the art world.

Major Benefaction Received

Following an article and feature in the Financial Times on philanthropy and my 30 years as Chairman, we received a major gift of £5 million from an anonymous benefactor with a request that we continue to benefit the arts and education as we have since 1991.

With this generous benefaction of £5 million, together with Jerwood Foundation's assets, now held in the UK, we were able to embark immediately on grant giving during the year, although on a reduced scale. We would expect our capital to be fully managed and invested in the near future and we will then in a position to budget for continuing benefactions at scale.

Royal College of Physicians

We thought it appropriate to embark on grants which would reflect the sacrifices and work of those engaged in confronting the pandemic. To this end we supported Selfless, an exhibition of photographs by Jessica Van der Weert documenting the lives of health and care staff at the height of Covid.

In further commemoration of the extraordinary sacrifices made by the medical profession to confront Covid we made a significant grant towards a memorial sculpture, Shield Totem by the sculptor Nicholas Dimbleby, now displayed in the medicinal gardens in the Royal College of Physicians in London.

We look back on a year of exciting new beginnings and endings within Jerwood Arts (Jerwood Charity).

From 2023, all our exhibitions will be delivered with galleries, museums and visual arts organisations across the UK, so our funding will reach more exceptional early-career artists. This follows our announcement in April that this would be the last year of running an exhibitions and events programme at Jerwood Space in London. Over the last 18 years under three Directors there have been 1700 artists, 250 new works, 118 exhibitions and projects, and 75 touring partners.

This year, we opened three major new exhibitions beginning with five new commissions for Jerwood Art Fund Makers Open which toured to Newlyn Art Gallery and Aberdeen Art Gallery. Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 premiered two new commissions by Soojin Chang and Michael., which went on to Leeds Art Gallery. In the autumn we presented new work by Joanne Coates and Heather Agyepong for the fourth Jerwood/Photoworks Awards. We commissioned four new Jerwood Staging Series events, and Survey II continued to impress audiences at Site Gallery in Sheffield.

The Jerwood Developing Artists Fund offered 15 arts organisations a way to support artist development programmes, carving out critical time and space for their most promising early career artists. Opportunities for artists to apply have already begun, including Outburst Arts’ TONGUE + HEART programme for queer performance artists in Northern Ireland and New Diorama’s radical Intervention 01.

The shadow of the pandemic still hung over productions as we began 2022, evidenced by a more cautious approach to rehearsal room etiquette in the shows we took at the start of the year.

Mask-wearing and regular covid tests, whilst not mandatory, were still encouraged by most of the companies.  Symptomatic testing kicked in after 1^st April when it became financially unviable for the organisations working on more modest budgets to purchase test kits for everyone involved in the production and gradually covid inhibitions began to dispel.

Workshops and re-staged rehearsals for shows cancelled or postponed over the last two years seemed a recurring motif throughout the year as the sector struggled back to a semblance of stability. The Yard’s An Unfinished Man by Garen Abel Ubokan, directed by Taio Lawson, and Bartlett Sher’s version of To Kill A Mockingbird, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, were both slated to have opened in previous years.  Oklahoma, rebooted by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein, and staged at the Young Vic, was another show which took several years to cross the Atlantic.

As shows returned sporadically, theatre availability changed rapidly with postponed productions pushed around in the running order to accommodate short term star-driven vehicles or crowd pleasing revivals as a way to fill auditoria, particularly with the paucity of tourists and a work from home ethic still strongly in practice. 

Of those that rehearsed here, several became some of the most successful shows in the year. Ian Rickson’s Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth returned for a short spell, with Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook reprising their roles to great acclaim.  Prima Facie, written by Suzie Miller and directed by Justin Martin, rightly garnered all the plaudits for Jodie Comer’s performance and broke box office records for a theatre film running in the cinema in the UK.  Mike Bartlett’s Cock, directed by Marianne Elliott, similarly had a high profile short run, as did Jeremy Herrin’s production of The Glass Menagerie, with Amy Adams.  Long running productions remained in place for the most part during 2022, and we hosted recasts for (amongst others) Harry Potter, Cabaret, Lion King and Frozen.