Located in the beautiful historical Old Town Hall building in the centre of the lovely old market town of Somerton, ACE holds an annual programme of free exhibitions. The retail space allows visitors to purchase items from exhibitors and other mainly local artists.
In the light of COVID-19 please be aware that this event/venue might not be operating as normal so do check before you visit.
Set up in 2016 with the renovation of the stunning Old Town Hall building in the centre of Somerton, ACE Arts was set up as a charity with the principle aim of providing art and creative activity to inspire, empower and enable people to develop and grow.
ACE stands for Art, Care and Education to encompass the three areas of our organisation and support our ethos that everyone can benefit from creative inspiration in their lives. We encourage all sectors of the community to take part in good quality arts activity through a varied range of talks, practical workshops and outreach programmes.
We have an annual programme of exhibitions, many of which are by local artists and which is designed to be at the centre of everything we do as a charity. Our accessible gallery space allows all works to be showcased in a beautifully designed area of the building. Each exhibition is launched with a private viewing and is usually followed by an artist’s talk where people can meet the artist and learn more about their work.
Alongside the gallery area is the ‘making space’ which enables us to offer an exciting range of workshops such as artist-led drawing sessions. Regular sessions such as the art & craft and artists bookmaking groups are also held in the space with weekly life drawing classes held across the room in the more private Parish Rooms. Coffee mornings are held to coincide with the Somerton monthly market and other meetings include a newly established book club and ‘create and connect’, a monthly held session where anyone can come along with their own projects and interact with others as they work.
On the ground floor of the building is our retail space where visitors can purchase a huge variety of items from exhibitors past and present together with many other local and new upcoming artists.
Income from the shop and the various workshops, group meetings and regular sessions allows us to undertake our outreach programme which is a key part of the ACE ethos. Outreach work we’ve already undertaken includes creative sessions to those in residential care homes in the area, some of which were intergenerational projects with local schoolchildren. All of which focuses on the health and wellbeing of the local community, allowing all to benefit from lives enhanced by art.
This summer funding from Somerset Skills and Learning enabled us to hold a summer school with free courses available to all on numerous different creative art based subjects. The series of sessions was very well attended, with a great deal of very positive feedback. The success of this means we would look to be able to offer more such projects in the future together with our extending our existing programme, subject to being able to access suitable funding.