Walsall has made the news and Stephen Snoddy is bursting to talk about it. He has barely sat down in the Museums Association's library on a crisp November afternoon before he launches in. The New Art Gallery Walsall has made the regional headlines, but it is not a good-news story.
About three weeks before we met, Snoddy was travelling to Walsall from Manchester when he got a call to say a man had jumped from the fourth floor of the gallery. It happened during the lunch period when Gallery Square was bustling. Snoddy is still shaken by it. The tragic episode has shocked him and his staff into urgently considering how to bring the fourth floor back into public use to prevent further incidents.
Snoddy started the director's job in September. He has major plans for the next phase of development of the gallery and aims to build its national and international profile. The first and second floors are the centrepiece of the £21m gallery, which opened in 2000.
They hold the Garman Ryan collection - 365 sculptures and paintings donated to the people of Walsall in 1972 by Kathleen Garman, who was married to the sculptor Jacob Epstein.
The third floor is a temporary exhibition space and the top floor has a conference room and the now defunct restaurant, which has scenic views and has been turned into a room for corporate hire. Snoddy is determined that the roof terrace does not become Walsall's suicide spot.
The incident seems particularly cruel because Snoddy has come to Walsall to help the gallery back on its feet after a difficult three years. It has been without a director (although it had an acting one), has struggled with visitor figures, the council has brought itself out of special measures, and the gallery was left out in the cold when the West Midlands Hub was being constructed. He says now is the chance for the gallery to be reborn.
It could also be Snoddy's rebirth after a couple of tumultuous years in the North East that he is eager to put behind him. He says the job is right for him for three reasons: he never shirks a challenge; the gallery has beautiful temporary exhibition spaces; and he is able to work with a collection. He can also commute from his Stockport home.
But is he right for the job? His record speaks for itself. Born in Belfast, the son of an art historian, he trained as an artist at the Belfast College of Art, leaving with an MA in fine art. His first job was
running a small community arts centre in Lisburn, south of Belfast.
In 1986, he picked up his girlfriend's (now his wife) copy of Cosmopolitan and read a feature called Gallery Girls, which profiled women who were making their way in the arts. The article mentioned the art gallery and museum studies diploma at Manchester University.
He applied and made it on to the course that year and graduated in 1987. He then moved to Bristol where he became an exhibition organiser at the Arnolfini Gallery.
There he worked on exhibitions featuring artists such as Richard Long and Rachel Whiteread, and was instrumental in exhibiting his favourite artist, the Irish painter Jack B Yeats, whose work is rarely seen in England.
'I think it's fantastic when galleries do things that they are not meant to do,' he says. 'Every now and then it's good to shake people's perceptions of what you're about.'
Then came the three big posts: the exhibitions director of the Cornerhouse arts centre in Manchester, the director of the Southampton City Art Gallery, and the founding director of the Milton Keynes Gallery (the first new-build public contemporary art gallery in England in 20 years when it opened in 1999). At Milton Keynes he won critical acclaim, not least for inviting Gilbert and George to create an exhibition of 33 new works.
Sheila McGregor, who works with the West Midlands Hub on a contemporary collecting programme, says that he is the right person for the job: 'I suspect he is highly organised,' she says. 'He is sufficiently technocratic for the job but he also has a vision for the programme.'
Snoddy's vision is straightforward. He wants to draw on the permanent collection and let it be a guide to what will happen elsewhere in the gallery. 'There should be a coordination of what's on in the building at any one time,' he explains.
Plans include temporary exhibitions of artists already showing in the Garman Ryan collection. These could be Jacob Epstein, Lucian Freud or William Blake.
Snoddy is particularly keen to attract well-known European artists to Walsall to work on solo projects that might go on to London. 'I feel there are opportunities for artists that have never been seen in Britain before.'
I wonder how he is going to entice artists to Walsall, a place that has none of the usual charm and attractions that internationalists expect. But Snoddy says that the beauty and practicality of an exhibition area is what interests artists: 'Artists fly in, come to the space, see the space and love it. What artists like to do is to work in great spaces.'
And Snoddy's track record of working with artists on solo shows outside of London is proven, and one he is especially proud of. He says he has a good rapport with artists and enjoys working with them. 'I'm not a curator who forces things on artists. I let artists basically do what they want.'
He says that is partly why it worked so well with Gilbert and George. There was amazement in the art world when it was announced that the artists would open the Milton Keynes Gallery. But, he says, though they have a reputation of being difficult to work with, he found the opposite and has maintained contact with them.
He says he wants to do quirky things in the Walsall building too. He is in talks to bring the latest Trafalgar Square addition, the sculpture of Alison Lapper pregnant, to enliven Gallery Square. He says this particular object resonates because there is a physical resemblance to Epstein's work.
He intends to make better use of the artists' studio, running three or four residencies a year to support artists recently out of college and mainly from the West Midlands (he dislikes the term local artist, saying it is disparaging to artists) to create work for the gallery and entrance area.
Snoddy is up front about the gallery needing to raise its game, particularly in the marketing arena. In 2005/06 he expects 120,000 visitors, but in future he wants 150,000. He is embarking on a survey of non-attenders and believes that a lot of people in Walsall have not visited the gallery.
He calls the current marketing budget, £74,000 a year, 'pathetic', and says it should be more like £100,000. He feels this is part of the gallery's problem and wants to correct layout difficulties by spending money on a more welcoming glass door, moving the front desk and putting up better signage.
Snoddy is convinced that the gallery has come through the worst of its difficulties. A new executive team has been appointed at Walsall Council and word has it that the officer in charge of culture understands the needs of the gallery and quickly moved to appoint a director to the gallery.
In turn, Snoddy wants to fill some of the other positions such as the audience development curator, which he says the gallery needs in order to bolster projects and events for young people.
The annual budget for the gallery is £1.9m - £935,000 from Walsall Council, £667,000 from the Arts Council West Midlands, and an extra £220,000 that Snoddy has already negotiated from the Arts Council West Midlands. The rest comes from fundraising and income.
In the six months before joining Walsall, he was working on freelance projects including project managing Contemporary Art Norwich, an arts event which took place during July and August 2005. Before that he was the director of the Baltic in Gateshead, which he calls 'the best place for contemporary art in Britain outside Tate Modern'.
Again it was a challenge, because the gallery was on a financial cliffhanger. He believes he was appointed because he immediately identified the key that would bring it back to solid ground.
He was appalled to find that the Baltic had no information desk, no customer service ethos and no fundraising strategy. In the 11 months he was in the job, he says he reordered the programme, introduced new staff posts, and created a formal fundraising strategy and three-year budgets. Within seven days of being in post, he had started discussions with the Arts Council North East.
But Snoddy's work there was overshadowed by his suspension by the Baltic trustees after his much publicised arrest by the police. No charge was ever made. But during the suspension Snoddy decided to resign.
He won't say much officially about this period but is visibly angry that a trustee questioned his commitment to the job because he didn't move to the North East.
Snoddy says he has no interest in working in London and anyway his hands are full at the moment with his mission to put Walsall on the map.
And what about the fourth floor, any ideas? A photography gallery he says, as if it has just come to him. The public love photography shows, he says, and it would be the first dedicated photographic gallery in the West Midlands. He comes clean and says he thought about it on the train coming down to London. 'It came to me in a flash,' he jokes.
About three weeks before we met, Snoddy was travelling to Walsall from Manchester when he got a call to say a man had jumped from the fourth floor of the gallery. It happened during the lunch period when Gallery Square was bustling. Snoddy is still shaken by it. The tragic episode has shocked him and his staff into urgently considering how to bring the fourth floor back into public use to prevent further incidents.
Snoddy started the director's job in September. He has major plans for the next phase of development of the gallery and aims to build its national and international profile. The first and second floors are the centrepiece of the £21m gallery, which opened in 2000.
They hold the Garman Ryan collection - 365 sculptures and paintings donated to the people of Walsall in 1972 by Kathleen Garman, who was married to the sculptor Jacob Epstein.
The third floor is a temporary exhibition space and the top floor has a conference room and the now defunct restaurant, which has scenic views and has been turned into a room for corporate hire. Snoddy is determined that the roof terrace does not become Walsall's suicide spot.
The incident seems particularly cruel because Snoddy has come to Walsall to help the gallery back on its feet after a difficult three years. It has been without a director (although it had an acting one), has struggled with visitor figures, the council has brought itself out of special measures, and the gallery was left out in the cold when the West Midlands Hub was being constructed. He says now is the chance for the gallery to be reborn.
It could also be Snoddy's rebirth after a couple of tumultuous years in the North East that he is eager to put behind him. He says the job is right for him for three reasons: he never shirks a challenge; the gallery has beautiful temporary exhibition spaces; and he is able to work with a collection. He can also commute from his Stockport home.
But is he right for the job? His record speaks for itself. Born in Belfast, the son of an art historian, he trained as an artist at the Belfast College of Art, leaving with an MA in fine art. His first job was
running a small community arts centre in Lisburn, south of Belfast.
In 1986, he picked up his girlfriend's (now his wife) copy of Cosmopolitan and read a feature called Gallery Girls, which profiled women who were making their way in the arts. The article mentioned the art gallery and museum studies diploma at Manchester University.
He applied and made it on to the course that year and graduated in 1987. He then moved to Bristol where he became an exhibition organiser at the Arnolfini Gallery.
There he worked on exhibitions featuring artists such as Richard Long and Rachel Whiteread, and was instrumental in exhibiting his favourite artist, the Irish painter Jack B Yeats, whose work is rarely seen in England.
'I think it's fantastic when galleries do things that they are not meant to do,' he says. 'Every now and then it's good to shake people's perceptions of what you're about.'
Then came the three big posts: the exhibitions director of the Cornerhouse arts centre in Manchester, the director of the Southampton City Art Gallery, and the founding director of the Milton Keynes Gallery (the first new-build public contemporary art gallery in England in 20 years when it opened in 1999). At Milton Keynes he won critical acclaim, not least for inviting Gilbert and George to create an exhibition of 33 new works.
Sheila McGregor, who works with the West Midlands Hub on a contemporary collecting programme, says that he is the right person for the job: 'I suspect he is highly organised,' she says. 'He is sufficiently technocratic for the job but he also has a vision for the programme.'
Snoddy's vision is straightforward. He wants to draw on the permanent collection and let it be a guide to what will happen elsewhere in the gallery. 'There should be a coordination of what's on in the building at any one time,' he explains.
Plans include temporary exhibitions of artists already showing in the Garman Ryan collection. These could be Jacob Epstein, Lucian Freud or William Blake.
Snoddy is particularly keen to attract well-known European artists to Walsall to work on solo projects that might go on to London. 'I feel there are opportunities for artists that have never been seen in Britain before.'
I wonder how he is going to entice artists to Walsall, a place that has none of the usual charm and attractions that internationalists expect. But Snoddy says that the beauty and practicality of an exhibition area is what interests artists: 'Artists fly in, come to the space, see the space and love it. What artists like to do is to work in great spaces.'
And Snoddy's track record of working with artists on solo shows outside of London is proven, and one he is especially proud of. He says he has a good rapport with artists and enjoys working with them. 'I'm not a curator who forces things on artists. I let artists basically do what they want.'
He says that is partly why it worked so well with Gilbert and George. There was amazement in the art world when it was announced that the artists would open the Milton Keynes Gallery. But, he says, though they have a reputation of being difficult to work with, he found the opposite and has maintained contact with them.
He says he wants to do quirky things in the Walsall building too. He is in talks to bring the latest Trafalgar Square addition, the sculpture of Alison Lapper pregnant, to enliven Gallery Square. He says this particular object resonates because there is a physical resemblance to Epstein's work.
He intends to make better use of the artists' studio, running three or four residencies a year to support artists recently out of college and mainly from the West Midlands (he dislikes the term local artist, saying it is disparaging to artists) to create work for the gallery and entrance area.
Snoddy is up front about the gallery needing to raise its game, particularly in the marketing arena. In 2005/06 he expects 120,000 visitors, but in future he wants 150,000. He is embarking on a survey of non-attenders and believes that a lot of people in Walsall have not visited the gallery.
He calls the current marketing budget, £74,000 a year, 'pathetic', and says it should be more like £100,000. He feels this is part of the gallery's problem and wants to correct layout difficulties by spending money on a more welcoming glass door, moving the front desk and putting up better signage.
Snoddy is convinced that the gallery has come through the worst of its difficulties. A new executive team has been appointed at Walsall Council and word has it that the officer in charge of culture understands the needs of the gallery and quickly moved to appoint a director to the gallery.
In turn, Snoddy wants to fill some of the other positions such as the audience development curator, which he says the gallery needs in order to bolster projects and events for young people.
The annual budget for the gallery is £1.9m - £935,000 from Walsall Council, £667,000 from the Arts Council West Midlands, and an extra £220,000 that Snoddy has already negotiated from the Arts Council West Midlands. The rest comes from fundraising and income.
In the six months before joining Walsall, he was working on freelance projects including project managing Contemporary Art Norwich, an arts event which took place during July and August 2005. Before that he was the director of the Baltic in Gateshead, which he calls 'the best place for contemporary art in Britain outside Tate Modern'.
Again it was a challenge, because the gallery was on a financial cliffhanger. He believes he was appointed because he immediately identified the key that would bring it back to solid ground.
He was appalled to find that the Baltic had no information desk, no customer service ethos and no fundraising strategy. In the 11 months he was in the job, he says he reordered the programme, introduced new staff posts, and created a formal fundraising strategy and three-year budgets. Within seven days of being in post, he had started discussions with the Arts Council North East.
But Snoddy's work there was overshadowed by his suspension by the Baltic trustees after his much publicised arrest by the police. No charge was ever made. But during the suspension Snoddy decided to resign.
He won't say much officially about this period but is visibly angry that a trustee questioned his commitment to the job because he didn't move to the North East.
Snoddy says he has no interest in working in London and anyway his hands are full at the moment with his mission to put Walsall on the map.
And what about the fourth floor, any ideas? A photography gallery he says, as if it has just come to him. The public love photography shows, he says, and it would be the first dedicated photographic gallery in the West Midlands. He comes clean and says he thought about it on the train coming down to London. 'It came to me in a flash,' he jokes.