New Collecting Awards will help curators expand UK’s collections

Today we announce almost £150,000 in funding to expand museums’ holdings, awarded to four ambitious UK curators through Art Fund’s New Collecting Awards. This year’s New Collecting Awards - the seventh round of grants in the scheme - will build the holdings of films at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, enable the Museum of the Home to broaden the stories told in their Rooms Through Time galleries, build a collection of works by trans and non-binary artists for the V&A and expand the British Library’s Arabic collection through the acquisition of contemporary graphic novels, zines and other objects.

The scheme has awarded 39 curators a share of over £1.8 million over the past seven years. A total of £149,725 was awarded in this round, providing each curator with a budget for acquisitions alongside funding for research, travel and training, as well as mentoring support.

Jenny Waldman, Art Fund director, said, “The New Collecting Awards are a key part of Art Fund’s commitment to the development of curatorial talent. We are delighted to support these brilliant projects that will allow the UK's world-class museums to tell more inclusive and diverse stories and help make their collections more relevant to their audiences and communities”.

The 2022 recipients are:

Louis Platman, Assistant Curator, Museum of the Home, London

Louis Platman aims to collect objects that will broaden the stories told in the Museum of the Home’s Rooms Through Time galleries to represent the diversity of London and tell stories of migration. These galleries recreate living spaces from the 1600s-1990s and are currently mostly representative of the white middle classes. Working with the local community, Louis will explore stories including those of West African migrants, who are now the largest ethnic minority in Hackney, and create new rooms including a multi-occupancy Jewish tenement flat from the 1930s.

Kari Adams, Curatorial Assistant, The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness

Kari Adams’ project aims to establish a new body of artists’ films building upon The Pier Arts Centre’s Collection, which currently includes works by pioneering Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, as well as films by Katy Dove, and a recent commission by Rosalind Nashashibi. The project will develop holdings of films that link to the Modernist concerns of the Collection by artist filmmakers.

Zorian Clayton, Assistant Curator, Prints, V&A, London

Aiming to improve the visibility of trans identities in the V&A’s collection, Zorian Clayton will research and build the collection of works by trans and non-binary artists, focusing on contemporary artists working in Europe and the Americas over the past century.

Daniel Lowe, Curator of Arabic Collections, British Library, London

Through network-building in the Middle East and North Africa, Daniel Lowe will build the collection of modern and contemporary Arab visual cultures by established and emerging artists in the region, as well as diaspora communities. The project will focus on book-objects and other printed matter including artists’ books, comics, graphic novels, zines, photo books and ephemera that will expand and diversify the British Library’s existing Arabic collection.

Previous New Collecting Awards have supported projects that have resulted in exhibitions like Counted: Scotland’s Census 2022, opening at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in March 2022, as well as the acquisition of works by world-renowned artists like Zanele Muholi (acquired by National Museums Liverpool) and fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (acquired by The Bowes Museum). The New Collecting Awards have also contributed to Yorkshire Museum’s recent acquisition of the Ryedale Hoard and Touchstones Rochdale’s acquisition of work by female artists including Sutapa Biswas, Rachel Kneebone, Anthea Hamilton, and Helen Cammock.

The New Collecting Awards are made possible by a number of generous individuals and trusts including the Wolfson Foundation.