Alistair Hudson has only been the director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima) for three years, but he’s made a big impact during this time.
“It’s challenging, because not only are you trying to reshape an institution but you’re also working in one that’s gone through a big change itself, going from council control to being part of Teesside University. That’s a massive cultural change.”
Hudson says that he is the equivalent of a dean at the university. Mima sits alone as a kind of school of the university, but has no formal teaching responsibilities.
“When I started, there was an idea that Mima would be this shiny glamorous institution that would help sell fine art,” Hudson says. “I said no, that’s not how it should work. The whole thing is a learning-teaching environment. The way we do the cafe, the garden, the atrium, the exhibitions, that’s your classroom, and that’s how a museum should work.”
His vision for Mima has heralded a new form of thinking about how a museum can be used. This has largely developed from Hudson’s art and art history education at Goldsmiths in London.
“My professor had a mischievous and irreverent approach to art history, which has definitely influenced me,” he says. “I specialised in romanticism, postmodernism, and the artist Richard Hamilton, which formed the theoretical background to a lot of stuff I’m working on with the team here now.”
Hudson has developed the concept of “the useful museum”, but what does that mean on a day-to-day basis at Mima?
“There’s a certain amount of rule breaking, which is deliberate – we don’t do things the way museums normally do things,” he says. “Obviously, you work within certain protocols in terms of conservation management and all those sorts of things. But why not have a regular community meal as part of your exhibition programme, why not make your public programmes more important than your exhibitions, and why not make sure that education doesn’t sit separately to curation?”
The museum offers a free communal lunch every Thursday as part of its community day, which also includes workshops for adults and children. It has been a very successful programme, and welcomes a diverse crowd from across Middlesbrough, including refugees, homeless people, and a range of ages.
Living your values
“Art is a tool, and we are trying to re-establish the use value within the concept of what we call art,” Hudson says. The idea of useful art goes back hundreds of years, he says, but it came to the fore in the 19th-century with the works of artist and writer John Ruskin.
Before joining Mima, Hudson was the deputy director at Grizedale Arts in Coniston (where Ruskin lived his later life) in the Lake District, which was where he was able to experiment with new ideas. During the 10 years he spent there he set up a programme of artist residencies to develop the idea of art being useful, rather than a set of objects to be revered and admired.
“With a normal artist residency, no matter how socially engaged or participatory it claims to be, the benefactor is ultimately the artist,” he says. “We said we have to turn this around and make projects that work in the interests of the community.”
Hudson says the culmination of this approach was a reciprocal residency with a remote community in Japan. “We took seven artists to live and work in a small mountain village in Japan with the brief that the artists had to help the villagers with an issue that they were facing,” Hudson says. “That area has the most beautiful, iconic rice farms in Japan, but ultimately they’d become a tourist destination – all very comparable to the Lake District if you think about it.”
Traditionally, the Japanese farmers sold rice direct to the government cooperative and they just got a standard payment, says Hudson. “But this rice was officially known as the finest rice in all of Japan. So what the residency artists did was set up a system to sell the rice direct to the public online, and we created the packaging and a website to sell the products. And then, as part of a performance festival in Tokyo, we ran a rice promotion exercise for the product.”
The following year the seven farmers did their part of the residency at Grizedale.
“The landscape, the flora and fauna in Coniston, is actually quite similar to that part of Japan,” Hudson says. “Bracken grows in both locations for instance, but in the Lake District it’s regarded as poisonous. In Japan it’s more expensive than asparagus, £50 a shot. So we set up the Coniston Institute in the village hall with the Japanese farmers. They ran projects and workshops, and created a bracken restaurant.”
Home from home
When he left Grizedale to become the director of Mima, Hudson wanted to bring the same activist approach with him. He noticed there had been feeling among local artists that Mima wasn’t for them, so the first thing he did was to put together an exhibition of local artists’ work, titled Localism.
“It was mobbed on the opening,” he says. “Even the local newspaper, which had been antagonistic towards Mima, totally got it.”
Another landmark show was 2016’s If All Relationships Were To Reach Equilibrium, Then This Building Would Dissolve, which was directed towards refugees and asylum seekers. “We ran conferences, a weekly communal meal, English language classes, workshops, all sorts of stuff to make it a centre that worked for them in a civic sense – to give them a place, a setting and a sense that they were wanted, valued and had a stake.”
Mima is a lively place – its next socially engaged show has just opened, titled the Idea Home Show (until 18 February 2018), for which Hudson has been working with British architect George Clarke (he presents the programme Amazing Spaces on Channel 4). The aim is to come up with and construct a well-designed, affordable, housing solution that will be presented as part of the exhibition. Hudson naturally hopes this will be the start of better housing options for the poorer areas in Middlesbrough.
“The city was in the national headlines as the image of disaster in Britain during the refugee crisis, with houses pictured with doors sloshed aggressively with red paint, indicating the residents as refugees,” he recalls. “At Mima we want to make positive change, glue that refugee community into the city, make the economy function, improve education, all those things. We want to build a society.”
Hudson originally hails from Manchester and will be returning there in the new year as the director of Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth, replacing Maria Balshaw who moved to lead Tate.
But before he takes on his new role he will be in the city for the Museums Association Conference where he is coordinating the Audiences theme.
Interestingly, Hudson says he doesn’t believe in the concept of audience. So what will his approach be? With a mischievous smile he says: “By subverting and flipping it into saying audiences are dead.”
The Museums Association Conference & Exhibition is in Manchester, 16-18 November.
“It’s challenging, because not only are you trying to reshape an institution but you’re also working in one that’s gone through a big change itself, going from council control to being part of Teesside University. That’s a massive cultural change.”
Hudson says that he is the equivalent of a dean at the university. Mima sits alone as a kind of school of the university, but has no formal teaching responsibilities.
“When I started, there was an idea that Mima would be this shiny glamorous institution that would help sell fine art,” Hudson says. “I said no, that’s not how it should work. The whole thing is a learning-teaching environment. The way we do the cafe, the garden, the atrium, the exhibitions, that’s your classroom, and that’s how a museum should work.”
His vision for Mima has heralded a new form of thinking about how a museum can be used. This has largely developed from Hudson’s art and art history education at Goldsmiths in London.
“My professor had a mischievous and irreverent approach to art history, which has definitely influenced me,” he says. “I specialised in romanticism, postmodernism, and the artist Richard Hamilton, which formed the theoretical background to a lot of stuff I’m working on with the team here now.”
Hudson has developed the concept of “the useful museum”, but what does that mean on a day-to-day basis at Mima?
“There’s a certain amount of rule breaking, which is deliberate – we don’t do things the way museums normally do things,” he says. “Obviously, you work within certain protocols in terms of conservation management and all those sorts of things. But why not have a regular community meal as part of your exhibition programme, why not make your public programmes more important than your exhibitions, and why not make sure that education doesn’t sit separately to curation?”
The museum offers a free communal lunch every Thursday as part of its community day, which also includes workshops for adults and children. It has been a very successful programme, and welcomes a diverse crowd from across Middlesbrough, including refugees, homeless people, and a range of ages.
Living your values
“Art is a tool, and we are trying to re-establish the use value within the concept of what we call art,” Hudson says. The idea of useful art goes back hundreds of years, he says, but it came to the fore in the 19th-century with the works of artist and writer John Ruskin.
Before joining Mima, Hudson was the deputy director at Grizedale Arts in Coniston (where Ruskin lived his later life) in the Lake District, which was where he was able to experiment with new ideas. During the 10 years he spent there he set up a programme of artist residencies to develop the idea of art being useful, rather than a set of objects to be revered and admired.
“With a normal artist residency, no matter how socially engaged or participatory it claims to be, the benefactor is ultimately the artist,” he says. “We said we have to turn this around and make projects that work in the interests of the community.”
Hudson says the culmination of this approach was a reciprocal residency with a remote community in Japan. “We took seven artists to live and work in a small mountain village in Japan with the brief that the artists had to help the villagers with an issue that they were facing,” Hudson says. “That area has the most beautiful, iconic rice farms in Japan, but ultimately they’d become a tourist destination – all very comparable to the Lake District if you think about it.”
Traditionally, the Japanese farmers sold rice direct to the government cooperative and they just got a standard payment, says Hudson. “But this rice was officially known as the finest rice in all of Japan. So what the residency artists did was set up a system to sell the rice direct to the public online, and we created the packaging and a website to sell the products. And then, as part of a performance festival in Tokyo, we ran a rice promotion exercise for the product.”
The following year the seven farmers did their part of the residency at Grizedale.
“The landscape, the flora and fauna in Coniston, is actually quite similar to that part of Japan,” Hudson says. “Bracken grows in both locations for instance, but in the Lake District it’s regarded as poisonous. In Japan it’s more expensive than asparagus, £50 a shot. So we set up the Coniston Institute in the village hall with the Japanese farmers. They ran projects and workshops, and created a bracken restaurant.”
Home from home
When he left Grizedale to become the director of Mima, Hudson wanted to bring the same activist approach with him. He noticed there had been feeling among local artists that Mima wasn’t for them, so the first thing he did was to put together an exhibition of local artists’ work, titled Localism.
“It was mobbed on the opening,” he says. “Even the local newspaper, which had been antagonistic towards Mima, totally got it.”
Another landmark show was 2016’s If All Relationships Were To Reach Equilibrium, Then This Building Would Dissolve, which was directed towards refugees and asylum seekers. “We ran conferences, a weekly communal meal, English language classes, workshops, all sorts of stuff to make it a centre that worked for them in a civic sense – to give them a place, a setting and a sense that they were wanted, valued and had a stake.”
Mima is a lively place – its next socially engaged show has just opened, titled the Idea Home Show (until 18 February 2018), for which Hudson has been working with British architect George Clarke (he presents the programme Amazing Spaces on Channel 4). The aim is to come up with and construct a well-designed, affordable, housing solution that will be presented as part of the exhibition. Hudson naturally hopes this will be the start of better housing options for the poorer areas in Middlesbrough.
“The city was in the national headlines as the image of disaster in Britain during the refugee crisis, with houses pictured with doors sloshed aggressively with red paint, indicating the residents as refugees,” he recalls. “At Mima we want to make positive change, glue that refugee community into the city, make the economy function, improve education, all those things. We want to build a society.”
Hudson originally hails from Manchester and will be returning there in the new year as the director of Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth, replacing Maria Balshaw who moved to lead Tate.
But before he takes on his new role he will be in the city for the Museums Association Conference where he is coordinating the Audiences theme.
Interestingly, Hudson says he doesn’t believe in the concept of audience. So what will his approach be? With a mischievous smile he says: “By subverting and flipping it into saying audiences are dead.”
The Museums Association Conference & Exhibition is in Manchester, 16-18 November.