Visual Dialogues
Visual Dialogues: young people and artists interpreting art together
'Art needs to affect people and should have as wide an audience as possible'.
Lin, Young Person, The Laing Art Gallery
'One of the brilliant things about Visual Dialogues is that at school we copy artists’ work, whereas here we do something inspired by the artists and make our own interpretations of their work.'
Imran, Young Person, Birmingham Art Museum & Gallery
'We don't copy the objects we use, we try to transform them and we hope they go on transforming as you look at them. The idea of endless public dialogue... visual dialogue... is very important to us.'
Claes Oldenburg
A ground-breaking learning programme for young people aged 15-25 years delivered by Tate and six museums and galleries across England between 2004 and 2011. Young people worked with artists to find innovative ways to engage with artworks in the Tate Collection and regional collections. Visual Dialogues enabled young people to explore and produce new interpretations of works of art creating new ways to enjoy and understand museum displays and collections.
Tate’s partner galleries in the programme:
- Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
- The Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums
- Manchester Art Gallery
- Museums Sheffield
- Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service
- Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Exchange and debate, especially cross-cultural and interdisciplinary interaction, between young people and with professionals from different fields including filmmakers, musicians, fashion designers, poets as well as fine artists became part of the process of creating dialogues and meaning from artworks and between each other. This encouraged young people to question the status of works of art in relation to interpretation and where the creation of meanings reside; how they are located and disseminated. This led to the collaborative making of meaning between young people, artists and galleries through developing interpretative resources and displays.
The project generated significant changes for young people and galleries. For all participants, ‘dialogue’ signified interaction between people, art objects and their narratives. This resulted in innovative curatorial approaches, new programmes and new audiences, whose voices were previously unheard emerging from dialogue itself.
Download Evaluation Report 2008 - 2011 (PDF, 178K)
The project name Visual Dialogues is well chosen. It involves a series of exchanges between works of art and audiences. The paintings ‘speak’ to young participants in the project; they in turn produce a form of ‘interpretation’ to help other viewers ‘hear’ what those works might be saying.
Chris Stephens, Curator (Modern British Art) & Head of Displays, Tate Britain
'There was one student who wrote after a session: I've always disregarded sculpture before because it said nothing to me but now I understand sculpture has a voice.'
Teacher, Longley Park School, Sheffield
'Visual Dialogues gives the public another perspective of the museum they know and love, and the works they know and love – and always expect to see. When they encounter these young people’s interpretations, they question their assumptions and are offered another way to look at art.'
Andrew Moore, Senior Curator, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Tate Visual Dialogues from Young Tate on Vimeo.
Visit Visual Dialogues pages on the Young Tate website
