#collectingnow
Let’s Talk: Roundtable on Art Museums and Contemporary Collecting Practices
Date: Thursday, 20 May 2021, 9:45 to 13:30 (BST)
Location: Online, Zoom (link will be shared to registered attendees closer to the date )
This round-table event aims to contribute to the discussion about contemporary collecting practices in public art museums.
We hope to shed light on this under-examined area by opening the debate to students, researchers, artists and museum professionals. Including these various perspectives will allow us to analyse the topic through different lenses.
By taking the format of a round-table, we want to have a collaborative conversation where different voices – from PhD students to museum professionals and artists – can contribute to the discussion.
Research on collecting practices has mostly focused on collecting activity from a historical perspective, paying particular attention to individual collectors or the art market. Few studies have considered public art museums and contemporary collecting practice and we aim to address this critical silence.
Contemporary collecting practices raises different issues, which we aim to address at the round-table:
- what, how and why museums collect art (either historical or contemporary) for their permanent collections?
- how decisions to acquire and collect specific artworks are made?
- how contemporary collecting practices can be used to make collections more inclusive and diverse?
- how contemporary collecting practices can be used to decolonise museums; changing and challenging the traditional Western European/North American art canon?
- how public museums handle financial issues and limited budgets in order to enrich their permanent collections?
- whether museums need to continually increase their permanent collections, when storage areas may be at full capacity and much of their collection is never displayed?
- how disposal and deaccessioning policies can contribute to contemporary collecting practices?
- whether contemporary art museums need a permanent collection? And if so, when are their collections no longer contemporary?
The event will have the following format:
Guest speakers will deliver a 20-min talk each, presenting different perspectives on the topic of collecting practices today. These talks will serve as food for thought, to instigate the conversation at the roundtable, which will take place after a comfort break. The roundtable will be moderated by Dr Isobel Whitelegg.
Guest speakers
Nikita Gill
Nikita Gill is a creative and curator in training with the International Institute of Visual Arts (INIVA) and Manchester Art Gallery. She received her MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of Manchester in 2019. Her previous work includes support of the production of Excavating the Reno (2017 – 2018), Portraits of Recovery with David Hoyle and Mark Prest (2017), Bodies of Colour (2018) and Joy Forever (2019) at the Whitworth art gallery. Her research focus is decolonial practice centred on care within the context of art gallery collections. Currently Nikita is working on Future Collect, supporting Jade Montserrat’s commission by INIVA (2020). Nikita Gill is also a member of the Black Curators Collective.
Dr Lucy Bayley
Lucy Bayley (PhD, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Middlesex University) is a writer, educator and researcher. She is currently Post-Doctoral Researcher at Tate on the Andrew W. Mellon funded project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in Museums. Lucy was previously Curator at Contemporary Art Society and has worked at London galleries, Matt’s Gallery, The Drawing Room and the Serpentine Gallery; she has curated projects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Lucy has taught at Middlesex University, Maastricht University, London Metropolitan and Sotheby’s Institute.
Eleni Ganiti
Eleni Ganiti was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She is a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) and a PhD researcher at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. She holds an MA in Gallery Studies from the University of Essex and her undergraduate degree is in History, Archaeology and Art History, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has been working with permanent collections, exhibitions, and editions. She currently engages with the museum’s art archive and research programs with an interest in the interdisciplinary research, study, and promotion of contemporary art. Her PhD research explores how museums of contemporary art ‘define’ contemporary art through their own specific and situated approaches to collecting.
Moderator
Dr Isobel Whitelegg
Isobel Whitelegg is an art historian, writer and curator, specialising in contemporary art and institutions in Latin America (especially Brazil) and their histories. She is Director of Postgraduate Research at the School of Museum Studies, and was formerly Head of Public Programmes, Nottingham Contemporary and LJMU Research Curator, Tate Liverpool. Exhibitions curated include Signals, if you like I shall grow (kurimanzutto at Thomas Dane, London) and a forthcoming mid-career retrospective of Cinthia Marcelle for MACBA, Barcelona.
Roundtable participants
Uthra Rajgopal
Uthra Rajgopal is an Independent Curator with a specialist interest in South Asian textiles. In 2019 Uthra won the prestigious Art Fund New Collecting Award to build a collection of contemporary textile artworks for the Whitworth in Manchester, specifically artworks made by women artists working in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and the UK (North West) diaspora. In 2021 Uthra was appointed as Project Lead on the Sculpture Terrace / South Asia Gallery at Manchester Museum, in partnership with the British Museum, due to open in Autumn 2022. Uthra is a firm advocate for making collections accessible and relevant for everyone.
Yang Chen
Yang Chen is currently a final-year PhD candidate in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research aims to understand the Japanisation of the Western museum model and its relationship with the Japanese artistic milieu since the 19th century. Her case studies include the collectionless Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and various alternative spaces used by post-war Japanese artists. Yang holds an MA in Curating and Collections from the Chelsea College of Arts and an MRes in Exhibition Studies from the Central Saint Martins. She had been awarded the research residency at the Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo in 2019.
Eloisa Rodrigues
Eloisa Rodrigues is a third-year PhD candidate at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, funded by AHRC Midlands4Cities DTP. Her research focuses on analysing acquisitions of Brazilian art by public museums in the UK. She is interested in acquisitions practices, history of collections, transnational history, and Latin American art. She was a co-Editor-in-Chief of issue 24 of the peer-reviewed journal Museological Review. She holds an MA in Museum Studies (University of Leicester), and a BA in History of Art (New University of Lisbon). She has worked in collection-based projects at the British Library, Royal London Hospital Archives and Museums, and LR Foundation.
Stacey Kennedy
Stacey Kennedy is an Anthropology and African Studies PhD student funded by AHRC through M4C doctoral training partnership. Having studied at the Centre of West African Studies and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, she returns to Birmingham University after a career in social research and the arts. Her PhD investigates the agency of women working in the African contemporary art world, specifically exploring Nigerian art networks, to reveal the ways in which women achieve success individually and collectively whilst negotiating and connecting global art spaces. She has also carried out research into women in the Danford Collection, an assemblage of art and artefact held by Birmingham University, to catalogue the biographies of female donors.
Federica Mirra is a PhD researcher at Birmingham City University (BCU) where she holds a Midlands3Cities AHRC Doctoral Studentship Award. Her research investigates contemporary artistic practices in response to the unprecedented urban transformations in China since 2001. Through the concept of urban imaginaries, she raises awareness of the impact of imagination and artistic practices on space-making. She has published in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and Journal of Visual Art Practice and presented at several international conferences, including Trinity College in Dublin and Tate Liverpool. She worked as a Curatorial Assistant for the first Thailand Biennale 2018–19, Krabi, and as a Research Assistant for both the Postgraduate Researchers’ Team at BCU and Fortress Contemporary Art Foundation, London.
There will be space for an open Q&A after the roundtable.
Please check the programme for more details.
The session will be recorded and we aim to turn the conversation into a podcast and make it available online. So it is essential that you agree with being recorded to attend the event.
Organisation Committee
Eloisa Rodrigues | @eloisarod
School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
Stacey Kennedy | @stakkkiii
University of Birmingham
Federica Mirra | @federicamirra93
School of Art, Birmingham City University
Special thanks to
Eleni Ganiti
Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece
School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
Aisling Barron
Art History student, University of Birmingham
Jenny Durrant | @Durrant_Jenny
School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
Roberta Minnucci | @MinnucciRoberta
School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies; Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, University of Nottingham
This event is funded by Midlands4Cities, with support from the School of Museum Studies (University of Leicester), and CríA, University of Birmingham, and Birmingham City University.
Art museums and contemporary collecting practices 