Maria Balshaw: ‘Galleries that have collections like ours don’t usually reside in Moss Side’
Director of the Whitworth in Manchester on an exciting new chapter for the art gallery
Helen Pidd, northern editor
Monday 9 February 2015
The Whitworth in Manchester is one of the most important galleries in Britain, but until recently a would-be visitor would have been hard-pressed to notice it. Built from the same imposing red brick as the Royal Infirmary opposite , with a messy car park in front, it looks more like part of the Edwardian hospital estate than a globally significant cultural institution that started collecting Picassos long before the Tate caught on.
The gallery was founded in 1889 by a group of socially minded philanthropists, including the Manchester Guardian’s former owner John Edward Taylor, who bequeathed 266 watercolours and drawings from the likes of Turner, Blake and Cozens. Envisioned as a cultural palace for the people, free to enter, it was supposed to expand the minds of the city’s factory workers in their downtime.
But the imposing brickwork and gloomy galleries put off modern audiences, according to Maria Balshaw, who runs the gallery. “They were intimidated,” she says.
So, shortly after becoming director of the Whitworth in 2006, Balshaw began a £15m project to bring the gallery into the 21st century. After begging £8m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, plus millions more from Manchester University, which owns the site, she has overseen a significant revamp by architects MUMA.
Doubling the public space of the gallery, the redesign marries the Whitworth with its park setting, bringing light, air and fresh ideas into its expanded space. It includes a new cafe – a glass box which seems to levitate among the trees of Whitworth Park.
At the front of the building, where the car park once spoiled the view, a new sculpture garden has been created, described by landscape artist Sarah Price as “Japanese Zen meets English meadow”. At the back, low evergreens trimmed into cloud forms nestle among ribbons of English meadow, cutting through to lead you out towards the park.
So close to Rusholme’s Curry Mile that there is a whiff of garam masala if the wind is blowing the right way, the Whitworth is beside one of Manchester’s most deprived areas. “Galleries that have collections like ours don’t usually reside in Moss Side, which is really where we are,” says Balshaw.
She sees the setting as “a brilliant opportunity”, pointing out that the Whitworth’s textile collection has already attracted crowds from Manchester’s newest communities. “We’ve seen terrific spikes in our audience when we have done Islamic textile displays, because it has really strong resonance for Rusholme,” she says
The Whitworth serves two purposes, says Balshaw. “I think it has a dual function. It holds an internationally important collection of both historic and modern art and that’s very significant in terms of drawing visitors to the city from outside the city and country as well as people who live here,” she says. “But it’s also the university’s art gallery. It’s a place where you can take risks. It’s always shown contemporary art, always collected contemporary art. It’s place where you can do quite adventurous exhibitions, where the mindset is very open to show things you wouldn’t see anywhere else.”
The Whitworth will reopen on Valentine’s Day with a show from Cornelia Parker, who has taken over one of the gallery’s airy new exhibition halls to produce The War Room, a piece made from rolls of red paper used to make Remembrance poppies, offcuts from the production process with ghostly negatives of the flowers .
She has also collaborated with Kostya Novoselov, one of two Manchester University scientists awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of graphene – the world’s thinnest and strongest material. For Parker’s work, Novoselov took microscopic samples of graphite from drawings in the Whitworth’s collection, as well as a pencil-written letter by Sir Ernest Rutherford, who split the atom in Manchester. He then made graphene from the samples, one of which Parker is making into a work to mark the opening of the gallery and exhibition.It is these collaborations which make Manchester such an exciting place to be in 2015, says Balshaw: “Cornelia could work anywhere in the world but she chose to do the show here because she got to work with Kostya Novoselov.”
Over the past five years the number of visitors to the Whitworth have doubled to 170,000. It’s largely thanks to Balshaw, who is also in charge of Manchester Art Gallery in the city centre. She has long been tipped as the first woman director of Tate. It’s a suggestion she finds flattering (“Who wouldn’t, in the art sector, want that kind of job?”) but she insists she has unfinished business in Manchester. “I feel like I have three jobs as it is. So for at least a little while that will be enough,” she says.
As well as running the city’s two municipal galleries, she has been appointed cultural attache by Sir Howard Bernstein, the council chief executive. She spent part of last year having very discreet conversations with the treasury as she sought to persuade George Osborne to commit serious money to building the artistic headquarters of his northern powerhouse plan. Osborne came through in the autumn statement, pledging £78m for The Factory, a brand new cultural centre on the old Granada Studios site in the city’s Castlefield district.
Balshaw says she has never had a career plan and sees exciting opportunities all over the world. “But at the moment,” she said, “if you look across the UK there’s nowhere more exciting than Manchester.”
In April, the £25m Home will open its doors , giving Manchester the largest multidisciplinary artistic hub outside of London. In July, the biennial International Festival will take over the city, featuring Alice in Wonderland the Musical by Damon Albarn, as well as a contemporary ballet which brings together DJ Jamie XX, Mancunian choreographer Wayne McGregor and the artist, Olafur Eliasson. There will also be a CGI show about the night sky fronted by Manchester University’s own Professor Brian Cox.
Just before Christmas Greater Manchester also became the first city region to sign a £1bn devolution deal with the government, guaranteeing more autonomy in return for electing a mayor .
Manchester has two great strengths, believes Balshaw: Long-term, strong and stable leadership (the occasionally criticised one-party Labour state) and a culture of collaboration. “Manchester is small enough that all of the cultural leaders in the city can get together for a breakfast meeting and say: ‘what are we going to do to make things better here?’”
That wouldn’t be possible in London, she says, where size dictates that projects are either “done sector by sector or little area by little area”. But, she says: “I think the really liberating and fantastic thing about Manchester in the past five years is that it’s not about competition with London any more. It’s just about being the best that Manchester can be and should be, which is qualitatively different to London.”
