How Art Fund is helping to take the Triumph of Art across the UK
An Art Fund grant has enabled four regional curators to work with artist Jeremy Deller on a major National Gallery commission.
A version of this article first appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
To mark its bicentenary, the National Gallery in London wanted to create a truly national project, and artist Jeremy Deller was a clear choice to work with on the commission. From his re-enactment of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ confrontation during the 1984 Miners’ Strike to his bouncy castle Stonehenge and documentary Everybody in the Place, exploring the legacy of rave culture, Deller has built his career on the communal events and passions that have forged British identity.
Inspired by paintings in the National Gallery’s collection depicting bacchanals and other uproarious processions, art, revelry and protest will be the theme of The Triumph of Art, Deller’s new project, based at four UK partner institutions, and culminating in final events at: The Playhouse, Derry-Londonderry (19 April); Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee (24 May); Mostyn, Llandudno (21 June) and the Box, Plymouth (5 July). The finale will take place at the National Gallery in London on 26 July.
Deller and National Gallery curator Emily Stone knew, however, that they couldn’t achieve such an ambitious project alone.
As Stone explains, ‘To realise large-scale events like this, you have to be embedded in a community and understand local stories. It was vital for this project to invest in curatorial talent outside London. It’s thanks to Art Fund’s support that four local assistant curators with exceptional understanding of their area and a strong track record of art in the public realm were appointed.’
To realise large-scale events like this, you have to be embedded in a community and understand local stories
Meet the Triumph of Art curators
Artist-filmmaker Joanna Wright grew up in Llandudno, where, she says, contemporary art space Mostyn provided her younger self with ‘a way to imagine working in the arts’.
She understands her North Wales home as ‘not just a rural idyll but home to a post-industrial landscape’. She and Deller have responded to North Wales’ many ancient stone circles and burial sites, and also its more recent history, such as Manod, the slate mine where the National Gallery hid its collection during the Second World War, as well as the quarries and beaches where outdoor parties are still staged.
At the time of writing (in January), the programme she has facilitated has included four new commissions by emerging artists, to show alongside Deller in the gallery’s summer exhibition, workshops for zines, pop-up books and printmaking, and ‘artist micro-residencies’ at three Welsh artist-run spaces.
Wright’s relationships with groups of young Welsh creatives have been crucial too. ‘We’re thinking about mythologies in works in the National Gallery collection, and Wales has its own mythologies,’ she says. ‘We want to ask: “How are those stories relevant, and what can they tell us about life today?”’
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Dundee-based assistant curator Laura McSorley’s background is in DIY artist-led schemes and spaces, such as the city’s GeneratorPROJECTS. ‘I’m not a traditional curator, but The Triumph of Art is well within my wheelhouse of interests,’ she says. ‘It’s really big but still by and for artists, as well as being public-spirited.’
McSorley’s work for the project has included installing a series of Deller’s text posters throughout the city. Designed to make people think twice, his A World Without Murdoch was displayed on the DC Thomson building, the pinnacle of the Scottish print trade – and Dundee’s defining industry.
Meanwhile, working from DJCAD, where McSorley studied fine art, she has been digging into its extraordinary history of annual revels. Staged every Christmas until the 1980s, these events were part of the curriculum, for which all the students would create costumes and set designs. Pink Floyd headlined the event in 1968.
McSorley says that this new commission offers another ‘special opportunity for students to bring the art school out of the building’.
Harnessing community spirit
Where the impulse that once fuelled ancient gatherings is now found is key to the project.
With its seaside culture of bandstands and sun-seekers, Plymouth’s programme of activities, organised by curator Rhys Morgan, has included a version of Deller’s early work Acid Brass, with a Cornish brass band playing dance-floor hits.
And in Derry-Londonderry, where, as in Wales, outdoor get-togethers go back to stone circles, the more recent rave scene is being explored by curator Wendy Blemings, with the party organisers and pioneers of local youth music projects Celtronic Studios.
What will resonate beyond this commission, though, is the chance it has afforded for each of the four curators to join forces while working in unique art eco-systems beyond the capital.
‘We can see commonalities and connections that we can build on in the future,’ says Wright. ‘Rather than satellites of London, it’s imagining those collaborations as a circle.’