Local Gallery with a Global Connection (Tarisson Nawa, Brazil, ITP 2024)

Written by Tarisson Nawa, Collaborating Curator and PhD student of National Museum Brazil (Brazil, ITP 2024)

Manchester has a pleasant atmosphere, heavily influenced by a vibrant university life, a product of the region being a significant academic and knowledge production hub in the UK. The hosts, always very lively and smiling, reflect the experience we are about to have in the coming days: a welcoming environment for knowledge exchange. It was in this city context that we arrived, me, Roqaya, Vinay, Heba, Mattie, and Yanoa.

Being gathered in a focus group provides an opportunity for more qualified exchanges, allowing us to get to know each other better. It’s a moment to strengthen relationships with those in the group we haven’t had much contact with and to enhance networking with partners, establishing connections beyond the ITP. I could not help but use the lens of what I advocate for when looking at this experience: the relationship with local communities. In Manchester, I noticed how local experiences can be linked to global connections.

The first two days of activities took place at the Whitworth Art Gallery, a gallery belonging to the University of Manchester, with free Jacobean-style architecture that enchants the eyes with its striking terracotta. With extremely spacious areas, the gallery is an example of an institution whose concern is not just centered on objects or collections but on people and the community. This was evident from the first immersion, with a visit to John Lyons’ exhibition called “Carnivalesque,” where the artist’s narrative seeks to integrate his diasporic journey from Trinidad and Tobago with the artistic and ethnic manifestation on display.

The Whitworth Gallery not only maintains a local dialogue with various audiences but also seeks to represent these audiences within the gallery, making it an extension of home. This engagement is part of an effort to bring the local community into the gallery through themes such as activism, social movements, gender and sexuality, climate change, diasporas, and refugees. 

The gallery has a well-established volunteer programme that helps address the nationalities and ethnicities present in the local community, and I would venture to say that this volunteering makes all the difference in making the experiences in the rooms as diverse and reflective of the city. The gallery engages 300 annual volunteers connected to the local and academic communities. The volunteer experience helps bring new faces and energies, making the space always feel novel. Volunteers are divided in to: garden cleaning and care, exhibition and display, shop and bookstore, and family volunteering. The latter is considered one of the few experiences that provide a complete experience impacting the child’s growth and relationship with parents, as the whole family participates, leaving their mark within the gallery.

I am delighted to see that understanding and identifying their audience leads to interactive resources in their approach. The gallery works to relate its spaces to the local school curriculum, resulting in educational engagement with 30 schools and around 10,000 students present in the space throughout the year. To make the experience more attractive to a young and child audience, the Whitworth practices integrating games into its collections to reinforce that the art space is not restricted to just one audience: it is global and caters to all age groups.

Finally, I would say that the Whitworth Art Gallery creates memory spaces beyond the institution’s walls. Experiences are created in the walls of the mind, linking us to the space from our childhood, with healthy moments of learning, engagement, exchanges, experience, comfort, community relations, and the environment. The gallery certainly taught me how it is possible to integrate so many worlds into one institution and how it is possible to coexist in the same space with so many diverse narratives.

We continue with these vibrant experiences with our dear Lillian Amwanda from the National Museums of Kenya, who will also talk about her experience during her trip with her UK partner institution. Stay tuned because we still have many stories to tell.