Buying power

Cash for collecting is hard to come by, so a £3m grant scheme dedicated to acquisitions is as welcome to curators as a fat jolly bearded man emerging from the chimney is to children at Christmas.

Launched in 2007, the Heritage Lottery Fund's (HLF) Collecting Cultures programme aims to revitalise collecting and curatorial expertise.

It offers museums and galleries grants of up to £200,000, at least 50 per cent of which must be spent on buying objects for the collection and the rest on associated exhibitions, training, public engagement and education.

Applicants have to meet five criteria, including showing that the funds would improve the collection's quality and range, plus demonstrating a commitment to developing professional skills in the museum and to public participation and learning.

Money has gone to enhance wallpaper and trainer collections (separate ones), fund the acquisition of new bagpipes in Edinburgh and support a fossil hunt on the Jurassic Coast in south west England. In extreme cases, the money is helping to revive collections that have stagnated for decades.

The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge is spending its £200,000 on a major expansion of its collection of Inuit art, the largest in the country, which has not been added to since the early 1970s.

"We have no acquisition funding at all for this collection so this was a chance to bid for funds in a key area of growth," says Heather Lane, librarian and keeper of collections at the institute.

The institute plans to acquire some 100 key pieces from 1950 onwards, enabling it to examine Inuit life and culture in northern Canada and Greenland.

Objects it has acquired so far at auction, or through private donation or bought directly from dealers, include rare graphic prints from Canada's Cape Dorset and enigmatic soapstone carvings from across the North.

"We were aware that collecting here had stopped in the late 1960s and that a lot of work had gone on in northern Canada and Greenland that wasn't being represented," says Lane.

"We really wanted to fill the gaps and look at the things being done, such as the move from the very traditional form of sculpture to the influence of modern life in the Arctic and how that is reflected."

The refreshed Inuit collection will go on display in the institute's Polar Museum when it reopens after £1.7m refurbishment in summer 2010 and will then tour.

Re-entering the market for Inuit art has had the bonus of inspiring new donations to the collection as people learn of the institute's interest. Evaluation of the scheme indicates that other museums have found the same, says Fiona Talbott, head of museums, libraries and archives at the HLF.
 
"There has been a lot of local press interest in the projects, which has led to people donating objects," says Talbott. "It is one of the things I hoped would happen."

One acquisition that has attracted not only local, but international media coverage is the £20,000 that Dorset County Council has spent on a fossilised skull of a pilosaur.

A local collector found the 2.4-metre long skull and when the council bought it in October, the county's mu-seums adviser, David Tucker, had journalists demanding information about this colossal aquatic reptile.

"I doubt that many museums will get as much media coverage for an acquisition, unless they find the Holy Grail," says Tucker. "We have had three enquiries about documentaries, including one from Horizon."

Most museums have begun to develop new links, not only with the media, auction houses and local collectors, but with academic specialists as well, thus widening their partnership networks. Museums are also starting to engage audiences through the use of collections.

Northampton Museums and Art Gallery is promoting its £130,000 Collecting Cultures project, Trainers, Sneakers, Pumps and Daps, on the online network Facebook, uploading photos of all purchases and inviting people to suggest trainers that it should buy.

Of 95 applications to Collecting Cultures, 22 were successful. Some of those rejected had failed to put a focus on the collections at the heart of their bid while another stumbling block was a failure to show how their expanded collection would change the museum in the long term.

"In all of the projects, there should be some step-change in the museum in terms of their approach to collecting," Talbott says. "Some of the unsuccessful applications just didn't demonstrate that they had thought about how the project was going to make a difference to their collections management and development."

Others had not put sufficient emphasis on building up the curatorial skill and knowledge in museums and across the sector. This is a key long-term aim of the scheme, and the HLF is starting a professional development network for curators involved to enable them to share ideas over the five-year duration of the project.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) was among those awarded Collecting Cultures grants. It was given £157,500 to fill gaps in its collections exploring black British identity, but as a national museum with an international profile, surely it finds securing acquisitions funding easier than most. Is this fair?

"That's a reasonable point to make," Talbott acknowledges. "But whenever we have targeted programmes we always assess [an application] on the project itself. We wouldn't discount an organisation because they were bigger or had better funding because then we'd be putting artificial barriers in its way."

Curators looking to buy need the expertise to be able to identify objects that will enhance their collections but they also require the inside track on which dealers, auction houses and galleries to approach.

This was the problem for some of those awarded grants from Art Fund International (AFI), a £5m scheme started in 2007 to promote international contemporary art collecting among UK institutions.

In response, the Art Fund has launched a mentoring initiative to link the curators at the five AFI partnerships with top-level art-market advisers.

"We decided to instigate the mentoring scheme to ensure that the institutions had support to help them identify the best means of approach when purchasing work by living artists," says Andrew Macdonald, the Art Fund's acting director.

"We wanted to help ensure that they purchase the best and most suitable example of the artist's work available, and at the best price. Advice from their mentors will also assist them in making the most of their budgets, given a climate where there are opportunities in the contemporary art market that did not exist when we launched the scheme."

The mentors, who are working pro bono, are a mixture of well-connected and influential ex-directors, collectors and international consultants. These include Marianne Holtermann, director of Holtermann Fine Art, and Jeremy Lewison, a former director of collections at Tate.

The Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Glasgow has been given £1m to spend over five years under the AFI scheme to create an international context for major Glasgow artists such as Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland.

The grant has enabled it to purchase works by American photographer Peter Hujar, German conceptual artist Lothar Baumgarten and the video installation Everything I Need by US artist Matthew Buckingham.

Goma is working with the visual arts organisation the Common Guild in Glasgow, and its director Katrina Brown. Brown has been instrumental in securing new works says Ben Harman, curator of contemporary art at Goma.

"The acquisition process and dealing with galleries is highly complex and is really all about personal relationships," says Harman. "And, like other [UK regional galleries], we have no international profile. Berlin, New York and so on don't even know who we are because we have not been collecting or exhibiting their artists.

"Katrina has all the networking contacts and experience," Harman continues. "Phone numbers she has on her mobile would take me a month to find. She had relationships with the gallery in New York that sold the Baumgarten work, so she had a foot in the door. If I'd gone straight to them, they would not have known who I was and it would have taken longer.

"The works we were offered by him are probably much better than if I'd gone out of the blue," Harman adds. "And we probably secured a bigger discount."

The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima) is also part of AFI and the gallery's director, Kate Brindley, is another who is enthusiastic about the scheme. Mima's focus is on adding to its drawing collection and its partner is the Drawing Centre in New York.

"The AFI scheme is not just about purchases. It is opening up other doors for us," says Brindley. "The contact with artists and dealers is really important."

One artist that Mima has got close to is Ellsworth Kelly, the 86-year-old American who came to prominence in the 1950s with his minimalist abstraction.

Mima curator Gavin Delahunty was interested in purchasing some of his drawings and this has led to a Kelly exhibition at Mima that opens this month (11 December-21 February 2010) featuring drawings from 1954-62. The gallery is hoping to buy two of the works with AFI money.

So, what is the future of acquisitions for UK museums and galleries? The recession is driving down prices, and museums are also experiencing additional pressures on their finances during the downturn, so there is less money for many of their activities, including acquisitions.

Collecting Cultures is popular, but the HLF initially said it would not repeat it. But in a recent interview with Museums Journal (see link below), HLF chairwoman Jenny Abramsky said that she was keen to look at ways to support acquisitions.

The Art Fund has not committed to continuing AFI after it ends in 2012, but a spokeswoman for the organisation says: "We are currently considering ways in which we can build upon what has been achieved by the five partnerships when the five-year period comes to a close."

Hopefully schemes such as AFI and Collecting Cultures will continue as they are helping to reinvigorate collections and are making sure that today's curators have the confidence and skills to make effective acquisitions.

Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist.

Museums Journal October 2009, p45-47

As well as using dealers and auctions, museums are also buying from art fairs. Indeed, some grant schemes have been set up to specifically help museums purchase items from such events.

The Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund allows Tate to acquire works by emerging artists at the London event. At this year's Frieze (14-17 October), the fund gave Tate £120,000 to spend.

There is also a dedicated acquisition fund at Collect: The International Art Fair for Contemporary Objects. Its organiser, the Crafts Council, teamed up with the Art Fund in 2008 to offer five museums the chance to share £50,000 to buy works from the fair.

At this year's Collect at the Saatchi Gallery in London (15-17 May), the five winners of the cash pot, which was £75,000, were Aberdeen Art Gallery; Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales; Bilston Craft Gallery, Wolverhampton; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum.


Chepstow and Monmouth museums were awarded £149,000 under Collecting Cultures to spend on fine art linked to the Wye Tour - an 18th-century equivalent of the European Grand Tour - plus £51,000 to spend on a public programme.

So far, the museums have used the grant as match funding for acquisitions such as Views on the Wye, Looking Towards Chepstow by 19th-century watercolourist John Martin, bought for £35,000, and Brockweir Quay, a shipyard scene from 1792 by William Payne, for £4,000.

"Collecting Cultures enables us to buy pieces of artistic quality and merit as well as works that might tell us something that we don't know," says Anne Rainsbury, Chepstow Museum's curator.


A Titanic-era chamber pot - price £750 - is among items secured by Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at auction thanks to Collecting Cultures.

Its £174,500 grant is to fund further acquisitions for the museum's Titanic and White Star Line collections and to add contextual material exploring the culture that has grown up around the liner and how it has become embedded in the collective imagination - what the museum's curator and maritime expert Michael McCaughan terms "Titanicism".

Other items purchased include postcards and posters memorialising the disaster. The museum is working towards an exhibition that is to open in 2012, the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking. Before that it is developing its Titanic website and engaging communities with the Titanic collection.