Artists’ Legacies in the Museum

Still image from a film by Curator, Alinta Sara, produced at Iniva, London. Courtesy of filmmaker, Ada Cotton. The image shows a slide of ‘Psalms’, 1997, by Artist, Donald Rodney.

Artists’ Legacies in the Museum was a project delivered alongside colleagues, Mark Waugh and Alistair Small, and the International Curators Forum in London, Birmingham and Glasgow. The project connected independent curators and museum curatorial teams with the archives of Artists, Vanley Burke, and the Estates of Donald Rodney and Maud Sulter, with the aim of recalibrating how museums collect, share and preserve contemporary art and cultural heritage, with a focus on Black British Artists. The project was supported through Art Fund’s Reimagine Grants.

The project had several components:

• Research residences in the archives with curators Tosin Adeosun, Lauren Craig and Alinta Sara

• Study Days to share research led by curators for museum participants, New Art Gallery Walsall, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Touchstones Rochdale

• Strategic meetings with participating museum directors and Boards

• Workshops with project partners and event hosts including Iniva, Ikon Gallery and Tate Archive.

Learnings were shared through new documentary films by Ada Cotton and Alinta Sara on the Donald Rodney Archive, and by Jonathan Bartley on the legacy of Vanley Burke.

Another major outcome was the development of an interactive digital toolkit developed with the consultancy, There is an Alternative.

Go to Toolkit