Interview: Tate director Dr Maria Balshaw CBE
Balshaw is also the Accounting Officer appointed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Chair of the National Museum Directors’ Council and is a Trustee of the Manchester International Festival Board. In 2015, she was awarded a CBE for services to the arts. Balshaw spoke exclusively to The Wick about her time at Tate to date, her book on the evolving role of museums in society, her favourite cultural spots in London, and why her garden tools are indispensable in keeping her balanced.
THE WICK: Your tenure as the first female Director of Tate has been transformative. What initiatives are you most proud of, and how have they reshaped the institution’s engagement with new audiences?
Maria Balshaw:
I would point to our Tate Collective young membership scheme. It allows 16-25-year-olds to become Tate members for free through digital sign-up, and they can then visit our ticketed exhibitions for £5 and bring three friends with them. A group of artists and creatives drawn from the group, Tate Collective Producers, create content aimed at their peers, organise brilliant evening events, and develop online content. It makes gallery visiting part of the social life of young adults and gives young creatives the opportunity to showcase their work in London’s coolest museum spaces. We hoped we might get 50,000 to sign up, and after 5 years, we have 250,000. It speaks to my vision for Tate: that the art we show should be for the widest possible audience, and it should be for life.
The other major project I am very proud of engaged an even younger audience, and their parents. Steve McQueen’s Year 3 created school class photographs of almost every Year 3 class in London—that’s 7- and 8-year-olds across all 47 London boroughs. Their photographs were installed in Tate Britain’s Duveen galleries as a portrait of our city and our nation’s future potential.
TW: In your recent book, Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter, you explore the evolving role of museums. What is the single biggest change or positive advance you have seen in the last decade?
MB: It’s hard to pick out a single thing. As I point out in my book, it’s a constellation of shifts that have made museums more attentive to the multiple histories they hold and care about how to make the public interested and feel welcomed, whether they are familiar with art or a first-time visitor. But as a single shift, the fact that art by women, people of colour, and Indigenous artists is now included as an equal part of the ever-evolving history of art is a long overdue thing.
TW: Your academic background is in African American visual and literary culture. How has this work influenced your approach, and what do you think is the next big place for discovery in culture?
MB:
My academic history certainly gave me a deeper understanding of the variety and diversity of 20th-century international art and the divergent and competing narratives of modernity that have always existed—what poet Amiri Baraka called ‘bang/clash modernism’. The approach of cultural studies writers like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy provide an extraordinarily rich and productive way of thinking about culture, the resistance to dominant narratives of control, and the dissidence that exists in and through cultural practices. For me, it is not that there is another big discovery to make; it’s more that we’re becoming more aware of all that we don’t yet know, and we are seeing, in our own time, a multiplying of different global perspectives that challenge us to think and see differently.
For example, this year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, included a large number of queer, non-binary, self-taught, and Indigenous artists. It was a learning experience for many of us, and sparked some strong reactions. But it’s in learning how to look and engage with an expanded field of art practice, and embracing multiple definitions of what “good” looks like, that we can change and challenge the status quo.
TW: What in the wider creative industries is inspiring you right now?
MB: Sadler’s Wells East has just opened with a dance piece that brought club life and participatory art to the space of the theatre. It reflects the incredibly vibrant contemporary dance scene in London, which coexists with a super lively South and East London music scene that I learn about through my daughter’s Spotify choices. The cosmopolitanism of London produces a dynamism that I don’t think you find elsewhere in Europe. I also think British fashion, from newly emerging graduates to established brilliant independents like Grace Wales Bonner, Duro Olowu, Erdem, or Roksanda, is so exciting. Fashion Week—this week—is always so stimulating and makes me very proud to be a Londoner.
“For me, it is not that there is another big discovery to make; it’s more that we’re becoming more aware of all that we don’t yet know, and we are seeing, in our own time, a multiplying of different global perspectives that challenge us to think and see differently.”
