The partnership approach

An acknowledged truth among museums is that innovative temporary exhibitions attract new visitors, but lack of resources can hamper programme development. So a single exhibition organiser with an ambitious idea is well advised to find a partner (or three).

Planning temporary exhibitions offers huge scope for collaboration between venues and, for a growing number of museums and arts bodies, joint ventures are proving an ideal way of sharing resources and expertise.

Over the past two years, a spate of new partnership schemes between the UK's national and regional museums has been mirrored by the development of new regional venue networks to produce exhibitions on themes or subjects reflecting common interests.

Responses to a survey undertaken last year by the Touring Exhibitions Group (TEG) indicated that making contacts and networking was a priority for most of the group's 230 members. In particular, respondents from regional venues wanted to collaborate on exhibitions related to their permanent collections or to expand their programmes by accessing a wider range of exhibition subject areas.

But some TEG members identified a need for practical, up-to-date guidance on developing exhibitions and touring programmes, and were wary of collaboration because of prior experiences.

Gripes ranged from the careless handling of loaned objects to disputes about which venue hosts the show's launch or retains the display gear at the end of its tour.

Recent collaborative projects by TEG members and associates range from blockbusters aimed at drawing a wider spectrum of visitors to successive tour venues, to a series of parallel exhibitions and events across an entire city or region.

An inspiring model of a regional consortium coordinating a programme of thematically linked exhibitions was Glasgow's Whistler Festival held in the second half of 2003. The festival started as a plan by the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Art Gallery, home of James McNeill Whistler's estate, to celebrate the centenary of the artist's death through a series of exhibitions, events and new, upgraded displays.

Imaginative ideas for collaborations turned the project into a city-wide festival, with about 100 events at more than a dozen sites attracting 300,000 visitors to Glasgow's arts venues and giving a £5.9m boost to the local economy.

Pamela Robertson, the senior curator at the Hunterian and the Whistler 2003 coordinator, says not many people knew the museum owned Whistler's estate. 'The centenary was an opportunity to draw attention to the great strengths of the holdings in Glasgow and to attract new and existing visitors to the Hunterian and raise its profile,' she says.

Ambitions grew as the project progressed. The Musée d'Orsay's agreement to lend the artist's famous portrait Whistler's Mother prompted plans for a biographical exhibition about Anna Matilda Whistler, with an actress reading extracts from her correspondence. Meanwhile, a series of open meetings at the Hunterian explored a range of ideas from organisations keen to be involved.

'Themes were not just historical but tried to bring contemporary angles into the celebration,' says Robertson. The Collins Gallery staged a multimedia contemporary art exhibition called Mothers and Sons, while the Hunterian's Copper into Gold exhibition, celebrating Whistler's achievements as a printmaker, was complemented by the Glasgow Print Studio's exhibition of contemporary prints inspired by the artist.

The one drawback was the tight timescale: 'We didn't have a confirmed budget far enough ahead to know what we could commit to,' says Robertson. In autumn 2002, the festival partners, led by the Hunterian, completed the European Regional Development Fund's (ERDF) complex application form for a marketing grant for event-led tourism.

A promotional budget of £100,000 was confirmed by February 2003, giving the steering team barely five months to coordinate programming and publicity.

Glasgow is now planning a Charles Rennie Mackintosh month during autumn 2006 to celebrate the city's architecture and design, and has made a further bid to the ERDF for marketing support. Robertson says: 'We intend to continue the successful pattern of non-competitive collaboration - it may be time-consuming but it delivers.'

Gallery networks in other parts of the country have also developed thematically linked exhibitions. The Crafts Council's Show5 initiative, a simultaneous series of exhibitions last year at a consortium of galleries in London, Leicester, Manchester, Birmingham and Stoke, placed five artists' work in the context of their locality and its economic history.

The project, which received £97,000 from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, drew attention to contemporary crafts against a backdrop of local industry. This consortium is now considering how the network can foster further new approaches to showing British crafts.

In another initiative based on locality, the Manchester Art Gallery and the Walker, Liverpool, have launched their new Partners in Art scheme by simultaneously showing Laurence Lane's aural artwork, LIV/MAN Part 1 + 2, which is the artist's view of the relationship between the two cities.

The Walker's exhibit has recordings of Mancunians airing their impressions of Liverpool, while in Manchester, visitors to the sound work can hear Liverpudlians' views of Manchester. A second strand of the Manchester-Liverpool partnership is the exchange programme of artworks from their collections.

Complementing permanent collections through exchanges and loans, enabling interpretation in different contexts, is a recognised benefit of temporary exhibitions. But in the past, regional museums have experienced difficulties in obtaining loans - particularly from national museums.

During the 1990s, instances of complex bureaucracy and punitive courier charges fuelled complaints by regional curators that the nationals lacked true commitment to making their objects available.

Happily, partnership schemes between national and regional museums are now more amicable. An example is the shared, annual exhibition chosen and planned jointly since 2002 by staff from London's National Gallery, Bristol Museums and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.

The exhibitions are grant-aided by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and while the majority of works come from the National Gallery, they also include loans from regional collections. The fourth exhibition in the series, The Stuff of Life, focusing on the depiction and meaning of objects in art, will be shown at each venue during 2005.

Alec Coles, the director of Tyne and Wear Museums, says that the collaborative exhibitions at the Laing are one of several partnership schemes with national museums being developed across the organisation's 11 sites. He says the growth of collaborations has been helped by Renaissance in the Regions, with regional hubs now forming a natural conduit for collaboration.

He also cites the impact of the DCMS/DfES Strategic Commissioning Programme 2003-04, which has shown how national-regional education partnerships can enhance museums' social value.

'The government has made it clear that it expects the nationals to show commitment outside London, and working with regional partners is a way for them to do this,' Coles says. 'Audience response has been fantastic - especially for those exhibitions including works from the national collections.'

Coles says that partnerships are very straightforward provided that parameters are set at the start and there is give and take, recognising that everyone has something to bring to the table.

And he is convinced that the view of the regional museum as a supplicant receiving crumbs from the nationals' table is obsolete: 'Our partnerships are very equal in terms of commitment and have proved hugely beneficial for staff development in regional and national museums.'

As well as the London-based nationals, significant collections in other areas are forming new links with regional museums. English Heritage's National Monuments Record (NMR), Swindon, which holds more than 8 million photographs documenting buildings, archaeological sites and landscapes from the 1840s onwards, is seeking partners to create exhibitions that enable NMR images to be seen in a wider context.

Meanwhile, Newcastle's new centre for children's books, Seven Stories, is the nucleus of another budding touring exhibitions consortium. Planned to open in a converted seven-storey Victorian mill in summer 2005, the centre will unite a significant collection of manuscripts and original artwork previously housed in venues throughout the north-east.

Gillian Strachan, the exhibitions officer at Seven Stories, says: 'The Harry Potter phenomenon has made children's books accessible to a much wider audience.

Our experience in curating and touring exhibitions about children's literature, collaborating with authors and running education programmes drew the interest of many other museums.'

Eight venues have now joined the consortium for developing touring exhibitions. Strachan says that ideas are flourishing and she believes that involving all participants from the outset in defining the group's nature will enhance its success: 'There can be problems if consortium members want different things, so it's best to build upon a single common aim,' she says.

An equally meticulous consultation process - including an agreed exhibition schedule extending to 2012 - underpins plans by four venues for the Wales Portrait Award biennale. The first exhibition will launch on 1 March 2006 at Bodelwyddan Castle, Denbighshire.

The competition, with a £50,000 prize fund, is open to all artists living or working in Wales, or of Welsh nationality, and any artist depicting a Welsh sitter. The partners - which also include the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; St David's Hall, Cardiff; and the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead - will take turns at hosting the launch and having a staff member on the judging panel.

As partnerships and consortia develop, it is likely that temporary exhibitions will increasingly result from collaborative projects, with each venue contributing to concept, content and administration to create fresh shows.

Provided approaches remain flexible, and consortia do not turn into cliques, this trend could have widespread benefits for regional museums and their communities.