Contemporary Art Society / National Network

Free for Members
£5 student concession
£10 for Non-Members

Collections provide curators with wonderfully rich and varied layers of art history to work with, but collections also need visionary curators with brave ideas. Without these agents institutions are not able to serve their audiences as well as they could. But, where is the next generation of curators to come from and what should be their methods of engagement? Taking the Contemporary Art Society’s Starting Point Fellowship scheme as a case study, this seminar will focus on how we can work together as a sector to retain and develop curatorial expertise and attract curators to work with public collections in the future. We will hear from the institutions and curators involved in three different curatorial initiatives: Arts Council Collection’s select.ac, Contemporary Art Society’s Starting Point and The Henry Moore Institute’s Fellowship Scheme. There will also be the opportunity to see the current exhibitions at both Leeds Art Gallery and The Henry Moore Institute.

Itinerary:
11.00 – 11.30
Tea, Coffee & Registration

11.30 – 11.35
Welcome from Nigel Walsh, Curator: Contemporary Art, Leeds Art Gallery

11.35 – 11.40
Introduction from Robert Dingle, National Network and Strategic Projects Manager, Contemporary Art Society

11.40 – 12.00
Lizzie Simpson (Arts Council Collection) and Select.ac curator Helen Kaplinsky

Select.ac is a biannual curatorial competition, directed at post graduate students.MA and PhD students in the UK are invited to apply to curate an exhibition from the Arts Council Collection. The context for the new strand of activity proposed is the desire to extend access to the Arts Council Collection more widely, by creating imaginative new opportunities for its use. select.ac seeks to reach not only a new audience, but to encourage new approaches to exhibition making, and new understandings of collections.

British Modern Remade was an exhibition held within the refurbished show apartments at Park Hill in Sheffield during the summer of 2012. The works featured span the six decades since the founding of the collection in 1946, with the exhibition seeking to examine the anxieties and allure of British Modernism as typified by Park Hill itself with key artworks from the 1940s to the present day. The exhibition was curated by Helen Kaplinsky.

12.00 – 12.20
Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute) and Research Fellow Paul Becker

The Henry Moore Research Fellowships aim to encourage and support research projects in any area of sculpture studies, which offers a small number of short-term residential fellowships to enable established scholars to spend a period of time in Leeds at the Henry Moore Institute. The fellowships are intended to give individuals the time and space to develop a research project free from their usual work commitments, to introduce them to the Institute and its staff, and to make connections with our research programme.

Paul Becker’s fellowship research led to a written fabrication of the life of an imaginary artist, a contemporary of Henry Moore, as a method of examining accepted histories in an original way, refiguring those histories and perhaps offering a correlative, an antithetical or parallax view on a familiar subject: in this case the life and work of Henry Moore himself.

12.20 – 12.40
Robert Dingle (Contemporary Art Society) and Starting Point curatorial fellow Debra Lennard

Starting Point is an annual curatorial fellowship opportunity open to recent graduate curators to work with public collections of modern and contemporary art. Since 2010 fellowships have taken place at Southampton City Art Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery and the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow.

Contested Ground explores the revision of the landscape tradition in British art throughout the last century, and the meaning of that tradition for artists today. Drawing on Leeds Art Gallery’s rich collections, this exhibition presents key works by pioneers of Modernism in England, from Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson to Barbara Hepworth and Terry Frost, alongside more recent experiments with landscape by artists including Richard Long, Boyle Family, and Clare Woods. This exhibition is curated by Debra Lennard, the 2012 recipient of the Contemporary Art Society’s annual Starting Point Curatorial Fellowship.

12.40 – 13.00
Nigel Walsh

Glory of the Garden was a ten-year strategy designed to address the development of the arts in England. Its aim was to reverse neglect of the regions, and to ‘decentralise and disperse the … artistic life of this country’ through increased investment in the visual arts, dance, drama, music, education. The strategy encouraged regional museums and galleries in a number of ways to increase their activities around contemporary art. In 1984 Nigel Walsh took up one of the first UK exhibition traineeship schemes with the Scottish Arts Council. Now widely regarded as a prelude to curatorial fellowships, Nigel Walsh will discuss his personal experiences within a context of radical change for museums and those who work with their collections.

13.00 – 13.10
Questions

13.10 – 14.00
Lunch

14.00 – 14.55
Opportunity to view the current exhibitions and displays at Leeds Art Gallery; Drawing: Sculpture, Dawn Chorus, Contested Ground, and Polychromies: Surface, Light and Colour Self-directed

15.00 – 16.00
Meet with Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies, Henry Moore Institute and Pavel Pys, Exhibitions Curator, Henry Moore Institute

16.00
End

18.30 – 20.30
For those who are interested:
Opening exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield
To Hope, To Tremble, To Live:
Modern and Contemporary Works from the David Roberts Collection
&
Barbara Hepworth:
The Hospital Drawings

Exhibitions and Displays new for autumn 2012 at Leeds Art Gallery:

Drawing : Sculpture
The exhibition brings together a selection of artworks that explore interconnections between the languages of drawing and of sculpture. They move between these disciplines, using the medium of drawing to create works that might be defined as sculpture and the materials of sculpture to create three dimensional drawings.

The exhibition presents an international line up of contemporary artists working in some of the key cultural capitals: Anna Barriball and Alice Channer in London, Sara Barker in Glasgow, Aleana Egan in Dublin, Knut Henrik Henriksen and Bojan Šarčević in Berlin and Dan Shaw-Town in New York. Their work is seen here for the first time alongside key pieces from Leeds Art Gallery’s 20th Century collection.  Works by Martin Boyce, Alexander Calder, Lynn Chadwick, Barry Flanagan, Martin Naylor, Eva Rothschild, and Alison Wilding reiterate the historical relationship between drawing and sculpture, providing a context and a counterpoint for the more recent pieces on display.

The exhibition is a partnership between Drawing Room and Leeds Art Gallery. Drawing Room is dedicated to the investigation and presentation of international contemporary drawing. Leeds Art Gallery is home to one of the most significant collections of 20th century British sculpture.

Dawn Chorus
The display brings together new works acquired between 2011 and 2012 as part of the gallery’s new partnership with the Arts Council Collection.

Painting, sculpture and moving image by Tomma Abts, Becky Beasley, Varda Caivano, Ruth Claxton, Michael Fullerton, Graham Gussin, Georgie Hopton, Haroon Mirza, Elizabeth Price, Cullinan Richards, Ben Rivers, DJ Simpson, John Smith, Renee So, Jon Thompson, Bedwyr Williams and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye are seen together for the first time.

Contested Ground
On the occasion of the Leeds Art Fund Centenary this display draws on the gallery’s rich collections, exploring the revision of the landscape tradition in British art throughout the last century and the meaning of that tradition for artists today. Curated by Debra Lennard, the 2012 recipient of the Contemporary Art Society’s annual Starting Point Curatorial Fellowship for graduate curators.

Polychromies: Surface, Light and ColourIn newly refurbished sculpture galleries Polychromies looks at qualities of surface in bronze, marble and stone sculpture, highlighting embedded, applied and reflected colour in work that ranges from Antonio Canova to Rebecca Warren.

About the Exhibitions at Hepworth Wakefield:

Modern and Contemporary Works from the David Roberts Collection
Acquired from the mid-90s onwards, the David Roberts Collection, comprising 1800 works by 750 British and international artists, is one of the UK’s most significant private collections of modern and contemporary art.

Selections from the Collection have previously been on view to audiences at the David Roberts Art Foundation premises in central London. Now, for the first time, highlights of the Collection will be exhibited in a public art gallery.

David Roberts said: “The gallery spaces at The Hepworth Wakefield are world-class and I’m excited to see how this selection of works from the collection will be curated.  This exhibition presents a number of firsts for the David Roberts Art Foundation, to show the collection within a public art gallery and outside of London, firsts which I hope will help to inspire creativity and encourage debate and discussion among visitors of all ages.”

Work by Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Tony Cragg, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Mark Manders, Eduardo Paolozzi, Marc Quinn, Man Ray, John Stezaker, Andy Warhol and Rebecca Warren are among over 30 outstanding works selected by The Hepworth Wakefield.

This exhibition examines ways in which modern and contemporary artists represent the human body in various media to explore psychological and emotional life. The human head is a particular motif of the exhibition, which has resonance with The Hepworth Wakefield’s current collection display Post-War British Sculpture and Painting.