History

The Orange Dot has been a project my business partner and I have been running for a number of years – nearly 12 in total. We have worked from numerous spaces but never had our own space until we found a little run down shop in Bloomsbury WC1. We have always had a passion for art and inspiring projects but had to use other people’s spaces, so finding this space was amazing and it felt like the right time to set up our own gallery.

We are lucky to have worked on some great projects over the years but the highlights up until we found this space would be:

Banksy – Banksy’s first ever London show was held in a tunnel in – at that point not so fashionable – Shoreditch. We hijacked the Rivington Street (pre-Cargo) tunnel and held his first show there. I think on the opening we had around two-hundred and fifty people turn up and the atmosphere was amazing, it was quite funny when our soundsystem – in a back of an old transit van caught fire – but we held it together even when the police turned up and allowed us to carry on partying.

After that we managed to work with numerous street artists including Adam Neate and They Made Me Do It Collective but did not just stay in the realm of street art, we are not single-minded in our approach to art.

We next brought over the great hip-hop photographer Joe Conzo and put together the Born In the Bronx show which saw the likes of NYC legends Cold Crush DJ’ing along side some of the UK greats, and original flier artwork from Buddy Esquire sitting next to some of the most rarest first press Hip-Hop 12’s. It was great to be able to put this show together in a car park in central London and allow anyone entry over a 4-week period. This was the first time we ever produced a catalogue for one of our shows and sold out all 2000 of them in 2 weeks. The show is now a book and doing really well thanks to a friend Johan who I worked with again in 2008 on a may68 show.

For me the may68 show was a great achievement and being able to use a public space like the Hayward Gallery was a dream come true. Once again I teamed up with Johan and we had the chance to curate a show of posters and artifacts from the Paris May 68 rebellion. The show was a great success and getting a letter from the director was a smile moment. We upped the level of catalogue for this and produced a full-size 40 page/poster book that you could keep as a book or remove each page as they was perforated. We must thank Paul Smith, who with great faith in the book, took on distribution worldwide in his stores and dressed some of his shop windows to coincide with the Hayward show.

Now we have our own space it is all about showcasing talent whether it be an established artist like Matthew Rose, up and coming collective like IFC, or a new talent such as Jacob Perlmutter and great ideas like Zineswap or Hipstamatics.
- Jeff Boardman 2011