Broader based forms of community art were beginning to evolve in other parts of Scotland particularly with Edinburgh's Children's Theatre Workshop. Under the directorship of Reg Bolton and then Neil Cameron it ran community art projects throughout the city and beyond. It engaged Ken Wolverton to carry out art projects which included murals and sculptures. In 1977 he stormed a citadel of the Edinburgh fine art establishment by taking over the Fruitmarket Gallery to run a community art event "Organised Accident Is Art." It lasted a week and artists from all over the UK attended running projects, which attracted huge numbers of people to the gallery and to participate in the work. This was a one off and nothing like has happened since. Artist Chrissie Orr joined Wolverton. Together they formed a duo, called KWACO and moved to the island of Arran to form Arran Community Arts that ran for five years.

In 1975 the Scottish Arts Council, in conjunction with Tom McGrath, founder and Director of the Glasgow contemporary arts venue the Third Eye Centre, commissioned four large gable end murals in Glasgow. Only in one of these did the artist, Ian McColl, encourage local participation. One of the murals, painted by John Byrne in Partick, attracted graffiti which initially exasperated the artist. Byrne painted it out only to return to find a new inscription which read, "The artists work is all in vain, Tiny Partick strike again." Three of the buildings were due to be demolished which indicated a lack of commitment to the murals. Nevertheless it stimulated other large gable end mural paintings some of which involved the participation of local people. In the main they were solely the work of the artists and more related to environmental improvement. This became one of the main motivations for mural painting in the UK. Notable exceptions to this included the Greenwich Mural Workshop of Carol Kenna and Stephen Lobb, Brian Barnes of Battersea and, of course, the political murals in Northern Ireland. Unlike the muralists in the USA at the time, who were absorbed with the politics of ethnicity, class and poverty, UK murals tended to be apolitical and more to do with brightening up run down areas. In 1978 a group of artists, including John Kraska and Tommy Lydon, living in the Garnethill area of Glasgow, executed a number of murals and one major mosaic in collaboration with local residents. In the same year Hugh Graham was employed as an 'outreach artist' by Strathclyde Regional Council and committed himself to ten years of productive work with the community in the housing estates of Priesthill and Nitshill. In 1980 Liz Kemp, having written her degree dissertation on the issues of public and community art, took up the post of Assistant Curator at the city museum in Dundee and immediately used her position to inaugurate art projects as part of the environmental improvements of the Blackness area of the town.

Where was all this art activity going and what did the future hold? In 1977 artists began to lobby the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) for some formal recognition of their practice and some directed and specific financial support for its development throughout Scotland. The SAC response was lukewarm and it must be some form of indictment that the situation remains the same today. In the 'Charter for the Arts in Scotland' (1993) it states, "they (community artists) argued strongly that real artistic excellence and innovation can be achieved ..... that the best of community art be recognised as a significant art in its own right and drawn closer to the traditional SAC remit." And later, "Organisationally there is a notable lack of coordination in the Scottish community arts scene ... the SAC funds community arts quite extensively but in a piecemeal manner. But it seems that there could be a place ... for a forum or working group which could bring together all the strands of involvement in this complex form of art activity, identify and recognise outstandingly good practice, work to raise the profile of community arts generally and increase awareness of its contribution to the cultural scene." In the SAC Annual Report for '92/'93 there is only one reference to 'community based arts' and that is to be found in the report of the Combined Arts Officer under whose remit it is funded. It seems to indicate a continuing reluctance to have to deal with community art at all whereas, as the national arts funding body, the SAC should be giving a lead and be seen to be proactive.

How different it was in England and Wales. "In 1975, following the recommendations of a working party under the chairmanship of Prof. Harold Baldry and pressure from community artists, a Community Arts Committee was set up on a two year experimental basis to give advice on community arts funding and to act as a focus for the development of community arts activity." The two-year experiment was evaluated by a group which was chaired by the Vice Chairman of ACGB. The main conclusion of the report was that "the objectives and practice of community arts were consistent with the Council's chartered duties." The Depute Secretary General stated in the preface to the report "that the Council, after due consideration, unequivocally confirmed that community arts came within the scope of its function..." The report concluded that "the responsibility for the funding and assessment of community arts should ultimately rest with the bodies as nearly based to the community as possible." and recommended that "assessment and funding of the activity should be devolved, with appropriate resources, to the Regional Arts Associations." ACGB continued to fund groups and artists with national roles while the Regional Arts Associations proceeded to appoint Community Arts Officers and set up committees for community arts.

In Scotland the SAC took evasive action by commissioning, in 1978, a report on community arts activity in the country. This was carried out by Hugh Graham and Liz Kemp supported by a steering group which comprised Kirsty Adams, Neil Cameron, Rosie Gibson, Steve Lacey and Bob Palmer. The steering group made a submission to the SAC for funding to set up a resource service for community arts in Scotland. This was turned down by the SAC and it continued only to fund occasional projects.

The high point of the period, and in some respects its swansong, was The Gathering, a national conference on community arts, hosted by the Easterhouse Festival Society in 1980, which attracted 400 participants. Helen Crummy records in her book, Let The People Sing, that it was an arts conference with a difference in that, instead of presenting a paper on the art of their communities, the participants displayed and demonstrated the work going on in their areas. In the immediate years following many of the most committed artists in the field moved on or away from Scotland. The efforts to survive had become too great and the future did not hold out much hope for better things. I myself had moved to Dartington in Devon to teach on a course, Art and Social Contexts, and had been invited to The Gathering to lead one of the discussion groups. I came away from Easterhouse that day with a strong sense that active people in communities and city housing estates were going to continue to demand that the arts be an integral part of their lives.

Evidence for this was not hard to find. In the Cranhill area of Easterhouse itself, members of the local Community Council, who had been involved in the Festival Society, approached their local housing officer about setting up of some kind of arts facility. This effort got under way in 1979 and after much lobbying of the SAC it began under the direction of Alastair MacCallum in 1981. The Cranhill Arts Project, based on photography and silkscreen printing, became one of the most successful in the country. This was due to the ten years of imaginative and energetic leadership of MacCallum, the consistent support of Lindsay Gordon of the SAC Visual Art department and the wholehearted commitment and participation of the local community.

Clare Higney, with extensive practice and administration of community arts in England and a member of the ACGB Combined Arts Panel, returned to Scotland in 1985 with the express intention of setting up a community art activity. She founded the highly successful Needleworks project which produced, among many other things, the twelve massive and much acclaimed banners, Keeping Glasgow In Stitches. It was commissioned for Glasgow's year as European City of Culture in1990, and involved hundreds of participants. In her submission to the Charter for the Arts Higney offers her view of community arts in Scotland in 1992. She makes a cogent examination of how in Scotland it had "developed by default and not design" as opposed to England where clear policies and structures were set up. She went on "In Scotland separate and separated practice has led to an uneven development of geography, impact, experience and provision." She argues that this has been both a strength and a weakness and that left to its own devices Scotland has produced some of the most acknowledged and respected community art practice in the UK. It had begun in Scotland by communities demanding it as part of community development strategies, by artists committing themselves to it and by local authorities resourcing it. The SAC however continued to respond to these initiatives, as Higney states, "on an individual basis and has never treated community art as a networked or franchisable practice with collective principles, needs and opportunities it could service and develop."

Community art has survived in Scotland despite the problems and lack of formal recognition. It can throw up exemplary practice and occasionally singular manifestos such as Senses Alive, a community strategy for the arts in Drumchapel, Glasgow. Questions have to be asked about where it is going and how can it be better supported and developed? Evidence from the USA suggests that more and more artists have adopted socially based collaborative art practices which are given serious attention by writers and critics who are able to evaluate process, collaboration and context. There is an urgent need for this new breed of art critic in this country. Examples of good practice often go unrecorded. There is a woeful tendency to ignore the value of good documentation and publication whereas exhibitions always come with catalogues. The SAC could play an important role in this and, if it were to respond seriously to the recommendations on community arts in its very own Charter for the Arts, then at last this strand of art practices would be given the recognition it deserves. We would begin to see the development of the radical art practices, which involve greater numbers and broader swathes of the population that community art has long promised and occasionally delivered.