Taking Art On The Road: Tate Liverpool’s Collection In The Mobile Museum
By Sarah Knight
This week marks the half-way point of a ten-week tour, for a selection of works from Tate Liverpool’s collection, of regional communities surrounding the city – the ‘museum in a cargo lorry’. Tate has partnered with French non-profit Art Explora to bring its vision of taking art to its audiences to life in this ‘mobile museum’, which Director of Tate Liverpool, Helen Legg, has described as allowing the museum ‘to meet people on their own terms’. The lorry is home to twenty-one works of art – painting, sculpture and textiles, featuring celebrated artists including J.M.W. Turner, Barbara Hepworth, John Nash and Veronica Ryan. The audience is presented with an altered version of the Radical Landscapes exhibition, first shown in the summer of 2022 at Tate Liverpool. With the intentions of accessibility, dispersion of culture and active community engagement, the initiative acts as a pilot scheme, looking towards future participatory projects hoping to address attendance concerns at national galleries across the UK.
Art Explora: A mobile museum in France. Image: https://www.culturepool.org/offers/art-explora-mobile-museum/
Touring communities around Liverpool, this initiative engages with the reality of disparity in accessibility and funding of culture between London and the rest of the country. While this project is partially funded by Arts Council England, there is still an uneven distribution of funding as well as cuts and pressures affecting galleries. As an Art History student from North-East England, I have grown up forcibly aware of this disparity and the limitations it imposes. The reality is that it is more often those from less affluent areas that have to pay to travel to see artworks, actively having to seek out this type of cultural engagement. Legg acknowledges this problem in discussing arguments over the risks of transporting these works, urging that communities are trusted to respect their national collections. They do, after all, belong to all of us – we own them – so, the question is, why do so many of us never get to see them?
The initiative is aimed particularly at ‘school children, care home residents and community groups from diverse backgrounds’, offering not only the collection, but accompanying workshops to foster active engagement. Founder of Art Explora, Frédéric Jousset, highlighted the centrality of participation: ‘we don’t want to create a passive exhibition. We want children to become artists themselves’. Such engagement goes beyond solely accessibility, to encourage a lasting impact and nurture curiosity. The concept of the Mobile Museum in itself works towards this goal in its deference from the commonly assumed exclusivity of the traditional gallery, which Legg acknowledged as potentially intimidating in presenting perceptual barriers. The initiative aims to offer an accessible experience beyond the ordinary locale.
In our current social and cultural climate, following the devastation of the pandemic and the difficulties this presents to the arts sector, we are faced with the necessity to create more inventive methods of exhibiting art, encouraging attendance, and engaging audiences. With talk of this initiative going beyond the pilot study as Art Explora develops a partnership with the British Museum in London, it will be exciting to see the possibilities of cultural engagement when we do not have to seek out and travel for art, but instead it turns up at our door.
Bibliography
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Brown, Mark. ‘Fostering curiosity: the Tate brings great art to the people of Merseyside’. The Guardian. 22 February 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/22/the-tate-brings-great-art-to-the-people-of-merseyside
Dorries, Nadine. ‘Arts funding: my plan to end North-South divide so culture can drive levelling up agenda – Nadine Dorries’. The Yorkshire Post. 23 February 2023. https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/arts-my-plan-to-end-north-south-funding-divide-nadine-dorries-3581040
Seymour, Tom. ‘A museum in a cargo lorry: Tate takes art on the road in Liverpool’. The Art Newspaper. 23 February 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/02/23/a-museum-in-a-cargo-lorry-tate-takes-art-on-the-road-in-liverpool