Gallery Vision
The Whitworth has been part of the cultural landscape of Manchester since 1889, when it was created as the first English gallery in a park as the Whitworth Institute. The Gallery would, as its founding mission set out:
'Secure a source of perpetual gratification to the people of Manchester & and cultivate taste and knowledge of the Fine Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.'
Early reports of the Gallery committee make much of the fact that the pleasure gardens were 'used by visitors and children of all social classes' to counteract the imagined and actual malaises of inner city industrial life. We still think this is a crucial part of our mission, and providing perpetual gratification for the people of Manchester seems no bad aim today.
The Whitworth was created to inspire the region's textile industry, give pleasure to Manchester citizens and to instruct students and artists about the visual arts. As a university art gallery, with research collections as well as a year round programme of public activities, we still do all these things. We look after historic and contemporary collections, with a little over 50,000 objects; our collections of works on paper, wallpapers and flat textiles are amongst the finest outside London. We are still a contemporary collecting institution, collecting works by emerging as well as internationally renowned artists that enhance our collection strengths in works on paper and textiles as well as responding to the cultural make up of our city and region today. We make and tour exhibitions based on our own collections and we loan and borrow works nationally and internationally.
When the gallery came into University stewardship in 1958 the Gallery benefited from a major capital modernisation programme. Edwardian spaces were transformed by architect John Bickerdicke into a Scandinavian modernist open plan spaces, seen as incredibly innovative and bold. The Gallery was nicknamed the Tate of the North in the national press and it became noted for its championing of British contemporary art, staging David Hockney's first British show in 1969.
Since that time an ambitious programme of temporary exhibitions of national and international significance, with a particular focus on works on paper, world textiles and wallpapers has been a key feature at the Whitworth. At the same time the Gallery has developed a national reputation for the quality of its work with children and young people. It has long been at the forefront of digital collection access - being the first gallery in the UK to make its collection available online; and it has an esteemed reputation for the quality of its collections care and access.
Most of all, however, the Whitworth has long been recognised as one of the North West's finest collections, with a range of works which are eclectic in the best sense, allowing for new and unusual juxtapositions of works across collections, with textiles and fine art, fine art and design and modern and historical works unified through a sense of lively intellectual inquiry about the collections, their history and their meaning today.
It is this intellectual inquiry and quirky spirit that will characterise the next ten years for the Whitworth. As part of the University of Manchester's vision to be a world class university, we aspire to be one of the world's best university art galleries. We are eager to redefine what it means to be a university art gallery. For us, this means seeing the Gallery as a creative laboratory, as well as a research library, where intellectual debates are presented in lively and accessible ways and where the interests and preferences of our local visitors shape and respond to our exhibitions. We face in two directions, towards the University on our North side and towards the communities of Rusholme, Moss Side and Hulme on our South. As a public gallery within a university we become a space for encounter with the ideas and collections that the University supports. At the same time, we look beyond our city and region towards national and international horizons, playing our part in international debates about art and culture.
We are committed to making sure our gallery and collections are accessible and relevant, interesting and provocative for the diverse communities of Manchester and beyond. The Whitworth stands as both end point and gateway to the Oxford Road - which needs to be a cultural gateway for the city as well as the locus for communities beyond university staff and students. It is an important part of the continuing regeneration of Manchester that our gallery and the park around it should be the anchor and welcome for the many communities that surround us - students, workers, hospital staff and local residents.
Over the next five years we have ambitious plans for redeveloping the gallery to allow us to be better connected to our local communities and to meet the increasing demand for research use of our collections. We want to emphasise the connection between our indoors and outdoors, creating a new entrance at the back South West corner of the building - a skirt that will extend naturally into the park. We want to have the green space directly around the gallery developed through a series of artists commissions as a play and relaxation space for workers, students, children and families. We want to create new study and display space for our prints and other works on paper and have larger study rooms for our textiles and wallpaper collections. The new development
will sit in harmony with the 19th and 20th century architectural moments of the building, but will meet a 21st century eco-agenda so the parkside development will showcase the very best sustainability principles and to minimise rather than extend the gallery's carbon footprint.
We'd like any visitor to be able to move from our back galleries out seamlessly into the park, through a beautiful green space. And we'd like the people of Manchester to be looking at our exhibitions, enjoying the collections and the intellectual ideas that make them exciting. With the gallery, firmly in the 21st century, but still for the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester.
Dr Maria Balshaw, Director
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