Museums and Galleries can Play a Pivotal Role in Reducing Stigma around Substance Use - Guest blog from Mark Prest

Mark Prest, founding director, Portraits of Recovery.

In 2023, Portraits of Recovery (PORe), delivered our first Recoverist Month. Its mission: to reduce societal stigma surrounding substance use and recovery through contemporary arts. And as a man in recovery with a professional background in the arts, the programme's aims are a deeply personal mission.

With Recoverist Month now in its third year, our ambition is to annually embed Recoverist-led events and exhibitions into national museums' and galleries' public programmes. Recoverist is a portmanteau word, combining recovery and activist. The term embodies agency, intention, and a commitment to social and cultural change. Recoverist includes those people identifying as in active recovery, their friends, families and other allies.

In Recoverist Month, we see a clear parallel to established awareness events like Pride Month and Black History Month. We advocate for the same approach as these movements, who took back control and reinvented themselves through their own artistic and cultural production

Firstly, Recoverist Month provides a platform for visual self-representation through authentically informed new work. And secondly, it is an opportunity for people to be acknowledged by cultural institutions as valuable members of society. 

I firmly believe that the arts and culture have a singular power to reframe what it means to be human by challenging culturally-embedded prejudices and tropes about a people who are perceived as not an acceptable social norm. 

I first argued this case in a chapter I co-authored with Professor Alistair Roy in a collection of essays called Addiction & Performance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014).

We traced this way of seeing recovery communities back to thinkers including Larry Davidson, now emeritus professor of psychiatry at Yale. Larry was amongst the first to assert that recovery should be seen as a civil rights issue - that is, that people in recovery are fundamentally human beings, the same as everyone else. This idea is useful in part because it helps to reframe the issues affecting people in recovery away from policy and services, and towards a focus on the relationships with wider society. 

A civil rights mindset also helps to align the citizenship struggles of people in recovery alongside those experienced by other marginalised groups including queer, Black and disabled people and women. These groups have sought to challenge and rewrite the ways in which they are seen and represented as a part of their fight for a seat at the table.

All the groups mentioned above have successfully used the arts as a way to regain some level of control over their collective representation, in finding a voice and seeking to alter public perceptions - and I am grateful for the blueprint their activism has provided.

Portraits of Recovery believes that contemporary arts practice and cultural and heritage spaces offer huge potential for visually redefining authentic explorations of addiction and recovery. Our argument then, as it remains now, is that the arts can be a key component of individual and collective resistance, and that meaningful artistic and cultural production around addiction and recovery can make recovery communities and recovery itself more visible, transparent, and better understood.  

This year, Recoverist Month will see exhibitions, an animated film premiere and more at venues around Manchester, including the Whitworth, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester Museum and HOME.

Three exhibitions, all co-produced by Portraits of Recovery, run throughout September. Recoverist Curators: Re-imagining The World We Live In at the Whitworth (until July 2026) is co-curated by six people in recovery. Over 12 months of exhibition development, they selected over 25 works that re-frame the Whitworth’s collection and simultaneously re-narrate their individual journeys of recovery. Personal testimonies, histories and artefacts intersect with works by artists including Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin and Wolfgang Tillmans, bringing new meanings.

ANEW Way to Peel an Orange at Castlefield Gallery (until 19 October 2025) showcases artworks co-created between designer Joe Hartley and Greater Manchester recovery community ANEW, where he spent five months as artist in residence. The collaboratively made exhibition includes a diverse collection of new work that developed out of the residency. Horsepower reimagines the Victorian botanical illustration as a 6m high spray-painted mural, whilst Pos and Negs explores how collectively hand-built sculptural teapots inspired a series of black and white photographs, which in themselves led to the making of a further teapot generation.

At HOME, Artefacts of Interaction, a collaboration between Portraits of Recovery, Venture Arts and HOME explores the intersection between neurodivergence, substance use (prescribed or illicit) and artistic practice. Four large scale co-created paintings, described as 'living meditative conversations' by lead artist Will Belshah, are on exhibition 6 September 2025 -11 January 2026.

African Objects: Psychoactives, Spirituality & Mental Health will showcase a project led by transdisciplinary artist Divine Southgate-Smith, in collaboration with people from Black and African Caribbean communities. Together they explored spirituality, mental health and recovery. Curated by Southgate-Smith, this event will be a collaborative and poetic response to the project’s outcomes and objects chosen from Manchester Museum’s Living Cultures collection, exploring their psychological and societal implications within the African diaspora (30 Sep 2025 at 6pm-8pm, Living Worlds Gallery, Manchester Museum).

The premiere of award-winning filmmaker and Royal College of Art graduate Oscar Wyndham Lewis’s new short film, Small Hours: A Portrait of Alcoholism, is at Everyman Cinema on 22 September 2025. Narrated by Robert Bathurst (Downton Abbey, Cold Feet, Toast of London), the 13-minute hand painted animation about an artist in the end stages of alcoholism, captures those critical moments in life that lead us down wildly different paths.

And finally, the Chaordic Symposium (25 September 2025, the Whitworth) will share insights into the transformative power of the arts within recovery, showcasing the learning and creative outcomes from a major three-year commissioning programme. It is delivered in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth and Castlefield Gallery. Speakers include Dame Carol Black, who was commissioned by the UK government to produce an independent review of drug treatment and Dr Clive Parkinson, former director Arts for Health at MMU.

Recoverist Month is more than an annual arts programme - it’s a call to action for reimagining who cultural spaces are for, and what narratives they hold. It invites audiences to shift their thinking, to question stigma in all its forms, to identify and not compare and to lift recovery communities out of the shadows and into the centre of cultural life. 

As the arts have done for others, they can serve as a catalyst for visibility, voice and Recoverist transformation. This September, through exhibitions, performances and conversation, we’re building a cultural legacy rooted in radical hope and authentic representation. By centring Recoverist voices in our galleries and museums, we’re not only challenging stigma, but we’re also creating space for reimagined futures made real.

Mark Prest, founding director of Portraits of Recovery