News & Notices

Job Opportunity – The National Gallery, London: Exhibitions Manager

Job Opportunity – The National Gallery, London

Exhibitions Manager 

Salary – £36,565 per annum

Fixed term contract until Feb 2022

The National Gallery, founded in 1824, houses a uniquely important collection of some 2,400 pictures of European art spanning seven centuries. At its heart is the commitment to engage the widest possible audience through both traditional and new ways of working.

The Exhibitions Department is responsible for the temporary exhibitions programme at Trafalgar Square, nationally and internationally, staging around twenty exhibitions each year in collaboration with a wide range of lenders, partners and venues. It works closely with other key departments across the Gallery in particular Curatorial, Collection Registrars, Art Handling, Creative, Communications, Learning and Development and with external stakeholders and partners across the UK, Europe, the US and Far East.

Role Summary

The Exhibitions Manager organises and delivers exhibitions within the Gallery’s exhibition programme, including overall project management and the management of loans, from the point at which a project goes live through to de-installation including any onward tour.

The Exhibition Manager is the key point of contact for specific projects, liaising with a wide range of internal and external colleagues, including curators, designers, transport agents, ACE, lenders and colleagues at other venues. They will effectively manage all contractual and loan negotiations, exhibition budgets and risks associated with each project; schedule and manage the (de)installation of exhibitions.

Person Specification

You will be someone who has demonstrable ability to organise complex loan exhibitions in a museum or gallery environment, including negotiation of loan agreements, the ability to project manage numerous and complex high-level loan exhibitions, covering all aspects from start to finish. You will be a considerate and collaborative team player with a ‘can-do’ attitude and with the ability to work well under pressure on multiple projects at the same time, using your own initiative

The National Gallery is an equal opportunities employer.

Closing date: 23:45 on 21 June 2021.

First interview: 29 June 2021.

Second interview: 6 July 2021.

Featured in: Uncategorized

ARTIST ROOMS Free Webinar series – Engaging Audiences with Contemporary Art

A free webinar series, Engaging Audiences with Contemporary Art, is brought to you through the ARTIST ROOMS professional development programme, with the generous support of Arts Council England, Art Fund and Creative Scotland.

As our museums and galleries reopen to the public across the UK, the focus of this series is on visitors and audiences. Each two-hour session will offer professional advice and practical tips on a different method of engagement – through co-production, learning programmes, evaluation, and digital marketing. The series offers a chance to share experiences and to reflect on cultural challenges and digital innovations that have emerged from the pandemic, and the potential for positive change.

The sessions in the series are – Please follow links to book and for more information: 

Painless Evaluation and Audience Surveys – Thursday 6 May 2pm – 4pm (a few places remaining) 

Digital Strategies with Limited Time and Resources –  Thursday 13 May 2pm – 4pm (a few places remaining) 

Changing Ways of Working with Young People and Contemporary Art – 10 June (fully booked) 

Engaging Communities through Co-Production – 17 June (fully booked) 

We hope to see you at a session soon.

ARTIST ROOMS

Featured in: Professional Development

TEG Receives Art Fund Grant to Extend its Professional Development Program to Digital Platforms

 

TEG is delighted to announce its successful application to the Art Fund for a professional network grant of £4,750. The grant will enable TEG to expand its professional development programme to digital platforms over the next 12 months in three strands:

1. Five webinars taking place every other month from October 2020 onwards. Webinar topics will be developed in consultation with the sector. Every other webinar will include a 2-Minute Share Session where sector colleagues can pitch exhibition and project proposals to potential partners.

2. 1-2-1 Power Hour mentoring sessions with TEG Trainers for sector colleagues seeking support and advice to adapt their exhibition programmes to reflect new ways of working. Mentoring sessions will be available from November 2020.

3. Three of TEG’s existing Professional Development Workshops will be adapted to create online Touring Fundamentals Workshops, which will be delivered from December 2020.
Thanks to Art Fund support, the programme will be free of charge to TEG members and UK sector professionals to help you upskill, supporting you in creating effective exhibitions for public benefit. Online delivery will help TEG increase its reach, particularly in situations where training and travel budgets restrict engagement, or when physical travel or in-person is not advisable.

The programme will support those of you who have been, or still are, isolated by the work-from-home policy and are keen to find out how others are addressing similar exhibition-related challenges to the ones you face. The three strands of activity will also promote partnerships at a time when capacity and resources are stretched and new ways of working need to be found, as well as facilitating more frequent networking than is possible when travel to an event/venue is required.

TEG members will have a one-week priority booking window for all events, before they are opened up to the wider sector. Further programme details will be shared via the TEG website as they are confirmed and as online events open for booking.

For further information, contact TEG’s Professional Development Manager

Booking open for TEG 2020 AGM and Professional Development Webinar and Share Session

Wednesday 21 October 2020

This year TEG’s AGM (Annual General Meeting) will take place online.  The AGM takes place 11:30 – 12:00 on Wednesday 21 October.  The agenda and papers will be sent to all members very shortly.

We have combined the AGM with a professional development webinar and Share Session. Because the AGM is members only, it requires separate registration and has a different Zoom link.

Professional Development Webinar

TEG’s first sector support webinar will explore What will exhibitions, touring and partnerships of the future look like? followed by the first ever online Share Session in which a selection of TEG members will share their exhibition and project proposals with potential partners via quick fire 2-minute presentations.

11:30 – 12:00   AGM

12:00 – 12:30   Share Session 

12:30 – 13:20   Lunch Break

13.20 – 14.00    Webinar Session: Case Studies + Questions

Case Study 1: Exploring the curiosity of a city: a case study about collaborative exhibition creation –

Carmela Pietrangelo, Content Developer at We The Curious in Bristol will share a case study about Project What If, the first major science centre exhibition in the UK about the curiosity of a city. Over the past three years, over 10,000 questions asked by people in every postcode in Bristol have been used to shape an exhibition that delves into the creative, collaborative and inspiring world of science. With the help of community partners, staff and volunteers, the questions were whittled down to just seven, covering themes such as happiness, the universe, invisibility, illness and time. Each question will be explored through a ‘constellation’ in the Project What If exhibition space when it opens this autumn.

https://www.wethecurious.org/projectwhatif

Case Study 2: Making touring exhibitions Covid safe –

How can we make exhibitions Covid safe for different audiences as they travel? Alice Lobb, Exhibitions Manager at Barbican Art Gallery will explain the alterations made to the Barbican’s exhibition Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer and how they are having to plan and adapt to changing circumstances. Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer is at Barbican Art Gallery from 7 October and will tour to V&A Dundee in 2021.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2020/event/michael-clark-cosmic-dancer

14:00 – 14:40 Webinar Session: In Conversation + Questions

Speaker 1: Emma Thorne-Christy, LA-based exhibition designer and activist artist who works with museums, libraries and cultural centers to design imaginative learning environments that challenge and inspire visitors. Her work focuses on telling stories in three dimensional spaces beyond the book on the wall.

http://www.emmatc.com/

https://www.museumnext.com/article/in-defense-of-the-physical-exhibition-a-plea-to-not-move-exhibitions-online/

https://www.freethemuseum.org/

Speaker 2: Pip Diment, Acting Head of Exhibitions at Amgueddfa Cymru|National Museum Wales

https://museum.wales/

Share Session

We’re really excited to be hosting our first online Share Session this year! This is always a popular part of the annual Marketplace, with slots often fully booked well in advance! Thanks to technology, we can now offer you more frequent opportunities to share your exhibition and project proposals with potential partners. We will have twelve 2-minute slots available at each online Share Session, available on a first-come-first-served basis.

Slots for the October Share Session are now full. To register your interest in a slot at the February 2020 Share Session, contact us by email

Featured in: News, Professional Development

Lockdown Experiences, Case Study, Fedora

My Lockdown Story
By Glyn Edwards, Director of Fedora

Lockdown-on Sea website

At the point lockdown was imposed our touring exhibitions on Punch & Judy were fortunately just back from their jaunts, leaving only one item still stranded at Aberdeen Maritime Museum. We were, however, in the final stage of a two-year HLF-supported project about seafront entertainment in the 1920s and ‘30s and had an ACE application in the pipeline to work with a number of coastal museums holding seaside collections. We’d never heard of Zoom.

Being, however, a small arts and heritage charity comprising a loose collective of practitioners (the name Fedora is a convenient contraction of Federation of Regional Artists) the ethos of ‘the show must go on’ is very present in our DNA. If there’s a challenge, then there’ll be a creative solution to be found.

Retrieving the final piece of the exhibition could wait until lockdown was over and HLF proved very supportive of our ideas on how best to amend the final phase of our heritage retro roadshow project. So what next? Out of the blue we were approached to do some skyped sessions on heritage skills to a class of university students on a puppetry course in the USA. This was very new to us but proved good fun.

After this we found ourselves involved with the transformation into a 24-hour online event of the annual Covent Garden May Fayre held in the churchyard of St. Paul’s (the Actors’ Church) and celebrating traditional entertainments. Our team members contributed some of the content and ran the May Fayre Online YouTube channel. A global relay of May Fayre Online page administrators ensured the event stayed live in all time zones. It clocked up 10,000 ‘engagements’ and opened our eyes to new possibilities.

Seaside Fedora Specials Postcard

Meanwhile ACE had announced that all applications were suspended while funds were diverted to a rescue plan, so we applied for a modest sum to cover loss of income from pre-booked schools visits; from activities linked to VE Day celebrations; and to keep our contacts alive with museums during lockdown. We were delighted to receive an award and set to work.

We soon discovered that with most museums closed and their staff furloughed this would not be a simple task. Zoom or no Zoom it was a fragmented landscape. So it occurred to us that creating a Lockdown-On-Sea website would be a way of retaining our profile and – hopefully – finding additional venues who might wish to engage now or in the future.

Not all our usual partner venues had any relevant online content, but we quickly realised that this didn’t really matter online. We could browse wherever we chose and ensure that Lockdown-On-Sea linked across to any external websites with material of interest. We could also create a dedicated YouTube channel and post our own short linked videos.

We wanted it to reflect a hint of the typical range of seaside attractions from piers and bandstands to museums and galleries. It wasn’t so much a meticulously thought-out project as an improvised response to being locked down. Something that found work for our suddenly idle hands. There was only so much time to be spent enjoying the glorious weather or binge watching Netflix.

We think of all this as creating a lockdown legacy. We’ve had some vertical learning curves whilst acquiring it but when we emerge into a ‘new normal’ we’ll still have our touring exhibitions, our project applications and a whole lot of new digital expertise to play with. And if anyone out there wants to join the fun we are always open to new initiatives.

Featured in: Lockdown Experiences

Lockdown Experiences, Case Study, Lumen Art Projects

My Lockdown Story – Bright Lights in Norway
By Carla Rapoport, Executive Director & Founder, Lumen Art Projects

Refik Anadol - Melting Memories

Refik Anadol – Melting Memories

As the world started to shut down and every exhibition, festival and commission we’d been working on was postponed, shuttered or cancelled, there was one bright light shining. It was the green ‘active now’ dot on our Skype link with Torill Haugen, digital curator of Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway. My colleague Jack Addis kept his Skype on too and throughout the days and weeks of uncertainty in March, Torill and Jack kept a conversation going.

Maybe the exhibition we were planning in late May, featuring two of our US-based artists, Sougwen Chung and Refik Anadol, could go ahead without any travel involved? Norway’s experience with COVID-19 was going reasonably well. A big Skype call in mid-April confirmed that a re-opening of Norway – and its museums – was likely by the end of the month – hooray! But would – or indeed, could – the artists adapt to the changing parameters? Happily, Lumen Art Projects specialises in art created with technology and neither work chosen for this exhibition was going to be physically sent to Norway. But both artists were scheduled to be at the opening and Sougwen Chung, was planning to perform with her robots live on the first night.

Happily, Sougwen had already been developing a telepresence version of her performance that could interact with a live audience as a way to cut down on her air miles before even COVID existed. Now, she had the perfect opportunity to develop this aspect of her practice. And Jack became adept at the remote management of the design and an installation of which involved a 5m x 5m LED screen for artist Refik Anadol’s work, Melting Memories.

The opening was scheduled for 18 June and as I chewed my nails at my home in Wales, Jack was on Zoom from his home in Trowbridge, UK, chatting live with Refik to the VIP attendees in Norway. The emails started to flow soon after – Torill was thrilled as was the audience. I poured myself a drink! Since then Sougwen has given two of her 5 scheduled telepresence performances, also live, beaming herself from her studio in NYC.

Having staged, installed and attended openings of our shows around the globe, it feels very odd not to have been able to attend this one. But Jack and I are thrilled that the show went on – and continues to attract visitors daily. Re.Memory remains on until early October and I really hope to visit it. But mainly, I’m just really proud of Sougwen, Jack and Torill for the flexibility, patience and ingenuity for bringing this off.

And looking ahead here in the UK, we’re excited to be talking with a range of new partners who want to know more about art that can arrive in their exhibition space without the need for couriers or on-site installation. Digital art, it seems, has come of age.

Featured in: Lockdown Experiences