A new phase of the Tate Partnership Scheme, involving further collaborations with five museums and galleries around the country, has been awarded a £444,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. This follows on from the successful three-year scheme set up in 2000 to increase public access to the Tate Collection through a series of loans, exhibitions and a programme of training and development. The new programme will produce ten displays in two years, showing approximately 175 works from the Tate Collection and attracting projected audiences of 275,000 people.
The five partner galleries are:
- Abbot Hall, Kendal and Blackwell
- The Castle Museum, Norwich
- Sheffield Art Galleries and Museums Trust
- The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke on Trent
- The New Art Gallery, Walsall
Some highlights of the second phase of the Partnership Scheme:
- Abbot Hall, Kendal and Blackwell will take a number of sculptures by the twentieth-century British sculptor Eric Gill from July 2003
- The Castle Museum, Norwich will show a display of abstract art from Britain and America from March 2004
- The New Art Gallery, Walsall will show Jacob Epstein’s iconic sculpture The Rock Drill in the Garman Ryan Collection from April 2003
- The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent will create a display of JMW Turner watercolours from February 2004
- Sheffield Art Galleries & Museums Trust will display work by William Blake at the Graves Art Gallery from August 2003
The second phase sees three out of the five partner galleries with new exhibition spaces in which to show Tate Collection works: The Millennium Galleries in Sheffield; Blackwell, the new Arts & Crafts House on Lake Windermere, alongside Abbot Hall in Kendal; and the new galleries in the refurbished Castle Museum in Norwich.
The emphasis will be on education, interpretation and audience development, building on the work undertaken in Phase I of the scheme. Examples include an intensive interpretation project in Walsall which will ask groups of local people for creative responses to works of art; and the development of Family Art Back Packs in Norwich, launched alongside their earlier Tate Partnership exhibition The Body.
The new phase follows on from the successful three-year scheme set up in 2000 to increase public access to the Tate Collection through a series of loans, exhibitions and a programme of training and development. The first phase of the scheme included diverse displays, from monographic exhibitions of work by Francis Bacon, John Constable, John Ruskin and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to group or theme exhibitions entitled British Sculpture and Coming of Age, the latter drawn from works by women artists in the Tate Collection.
Anthea Case, Director of the Heritage Lottery Fund commented:
The Tate Partnership Scheme is an imaginative project which has, over the past three years, enabled Tate and five regional museums and galleries to work together sharing ideas and expertise. We are proud to continue supporting this innovative partnership which emphasises the development of new audiences, educational opportunities and training for staff. This is an excellent example of how lottery money can be used to help forge close ties between national and regional institutions.
Stephen Deuchar, Director of Tate Britain, said:
The Partnership Scheme is a vital part of Tate’s commitment to the creation of the widest possible access to its Collection. We are enormously grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for supporting the project for a further two years, and look forward to seeing more exciting exhibitions and other initiatives at the five partner galleries over that period.