I recently came across an article by Dayla Alberge in The Guardian which I found super interesting. Alberge posits that The National Gallery, following Julian Spalding's comments, should scrap their 1990 agreement with the Tate to stop their collection in 1900, allowing for modern and contemporary art to be hung alongside old masters in the collection, ahead of their re-opening on Monday 17th May.
The NG is perhaps the UK’s greatest site to witness old masters, with over 2,300 works of art. Yet an undeniable issue the NG possesses is its representation within the collection. Currently 0.9% of art in the collection is by women artists, while the presence of minority ethnic artists is essentially non-existent. Of course, this is a tricky issue to tackle, due to historic structural issues (systemic racism, being a clear example), there is a fairly limited pool of old masters created by minority groups that the NG could enter into their collection. This fact clearly doesn’t help that only one in five visitors to London’s museums are from a Black or minority ethnic background, despite this group making up one third of London’s residents. With this in mind, I realised that by incorporating contemporary art in the NG, it will allow them to redress this issue, serving its intended visitors in the best possible way - the national public.
One can only imagine the exciting new curatorial practices which could be facilitated by the ushering in of contemporary arts to the NG. Imagine Dosso Dossi’s “A Man Embracing a Woman”, 1524, which deals with themes of sexual violence, paired with (for example), Tracy Emin’s “Rape”, 2018. These daring, unconventional curatorial juxtapositions would result in not only greater exposure for emerging or underrepresented artists, but could spark new conversations/insights into old masters, which audiences may no longer feel resonate with their own lives.
The article in essence made me think of contemporary art’s power to make a collection relevant today - offering a traditionally white, heteronormative space, exciting new curatorial possibilities, a greater range of artists from different backgrounds, and subsequently more diverse visitors, ultimately bringing egalitarianism to the NG.
#nationalgallery #curation #art #contemporaryart #renaissance #curator #modernart #gallery #museum
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2moIncredible news on Alicia Keys and a superb partnership with Pinterest and ELLE Magazine (Decor). The discipline needs more of this intentional culture-enriching strategy. Thank you, Marie-Joelle Parent, for sharing 💛