The regions are doing it for themselves
Followers of my twitter feed will have noticed that I've been dotting around the country rather a lot lately. One of the perks of academic life is travelling for conferences, and in the last 2 months I've been to Leeds, York, and Manchester, as well as Nottingham and Norwich for other reasons. Apologies to anyone who was particularly overcome by the live tweeting from Manchester! While in each place I have taken the time out to visit at least one of the regional art galleries and museums, and have been thoroughly impressed. So, as I've written twice already about regional contemporary galleries, I thought it was high time to discuss these more traditional spaces.
What high quality collections and imaginative curation these museums show! York Art Gallery has a small sequence of rooms dealing with 17th and 18th-century painting, which showcase still life, landscape and portrait painting using striking relationships with objects. Nottingham Castle Museum has a wonderful 'great room' hang, packed floor to ceiling with paintings, which is historically effective, and certainly a contrast with the Anish Kapoor show that I last saw in the space. Leeds Art Gallery has recently re-furbished and displayed its sculpture galleries, which now feature a visually stunning and thought-provoking display of works based around form and colour. Manchester Art Gallery has a particularly impressive room on the Pre-Raphaelites. My readers may remember from my trip to the Tate show that I am not a fan of this group of painters, but the Manchester curators have juxtaposed a series of well-known paintings with contemporary artefacts which at least made me appreciate the effect as a whole.
My particular admiration is for the social history museums, however: the Bridewell Museum in Norwich and the Leeds Story galleries at Leeds Museum. Both marshal an impressive range of artefacts that tell the story of their town in both a local and national context. There were parts that I recognised, a brilliant evocation of an 18th-century coffee-house at the Bridewell, and a section on the impact of the industrial revolution on living conditions in Leeds. But there were also fascinating parts that taught me things about the importance of shoe manufacture to Norwich, or the twentieth-century Leeds music industry. Both used an effective mixture of objects and interpretation telling the real stories of local people. Leeds had a particularly good room with talking heads of actors. I enjoyed watching other visitors to both museums point out objects with which they had grown up in the modern sections.
The success of these museums is partly in their strong narrative focus on regional history, and partly on a smaller space which encourages mixing of collections. Manchester Art Gallery is also currently hosting a fabulous special exhibition do it 2013 in which visitors follow instructions given by various artists. With yet another round of funding cuts upon us, the question is how long these brilliant museums can keep 'doing it' for themselves.