Heville & Rick began as a fashion house, with a set of values that eventually led us to what we do today. We never imagined that a gallery would be the best vehicle for our social-impact aspirations. That changed when we watched technology put artists and graphic designers out of business.

When the livelihood of those who have committed their lives to giving shape to our shared vision is threatened, we are all threatened with blindness. Without the dialogue that takes place through art, no discourse can be fully processed, whatever its subject.

This foundational threat made us realise that the fault lines have shifted to a deeper place than mere social justice. They now run through human discourse itself: through whether art, as a form of dialogue, can remain a viable voice against an economic expediency that has allied itself with the radical use of technology. The economy is structurally blind to the plight of poets and writers, artists and thinkers, because those who cultivate vision necessarily do so at the expense of economically legible deliverables.

The fault lines have shifted to a deeper place than mere social justice.

With every purchase, we vote for our values. Awareness of that fact is the only way to take part morally in economies of scale, which now exceed ordinary democratic government in reach, and therefore in power. We set out to create a space where those votes can be cast in support of working artists.

Some decisions followed from this conviction. The first is a revenue share system where a large portion of the proceeds goes directly to the artist, while the remainder sustains the house. The second is a seasonal rotation that allows us to platform a larger group of artists each year, with reliability and consistency.

A revenue share system where a large portion of the proceeds goes directly to the artist.

A third decision concerns which artists we aim to support. There was once such a thing as functional music. A musician’s experimentation was funded by venues that needed music, because without a musician there was no music to be had. With infinite reproduction and digitisation, functional music went out of business. It is the artists of this functional tier, not only those aiming at galleries and the Gagosians of the world, who most need a spotlight. Graphic designers and illustrators are the people we want our gallery to support.

Graphic designers and illustrators are the people we want our gallery to support.

Our answer is a marketplace where these artists can be platformed and supported, and where their audiences can gather around a house that represents their values. We are not among the one percent whose cheques could solve this outright with a fund or a trust, an idea that may sound naive even as a suggestion. What we can do is build a space where your money flows to these artists, through the more traditional practice of collecting art.

Each season, we commission our artists to compose variations on a single theme in their own style. From these we issue limited editions of gallery-quality prints, each with a certificate of authenticity and framed to the highest standard.