Belfast arts venue shortlisted for two museum awards

Staff at the MAC are gearing up for results of two major museum awards that the Belfast arts centre has been shortlisted for.

The MAC is one of five venues in the running for the Art Fund Museum of Year, with the winner to be announced on 12 July. The venue has also been shortlisted for the Family Friendly Museum Award in the Best Medium Museum category. The winners of this award will be revealed in October.

The MAC, which offers a programme of visual art, theatre and dance, opened in 2012 and has attracted more than 2.5 million visitors since then. 

MAC creative director (visual arts) Hugh Mulholland said that the arts centre works hard to develop an exhibition programme that features international artists with broad appeal as well as those who are at the start of their careers, often based in Northern Ireland.

Last year the venue held an show (29 July-5 November) of work by Ron Mueck, which was popular with younger visitors. Currently on display at the MAC are exhibitions featuring work by Belfast born Louise Wallace and Sharon Kelly, who lives and works between her studio in Belfast and South Armagh.

“Our programme has always about having a balance of programming and people being able to experience something different each time they come,” he says. “We have always prided ourselves in bringing in new audiences.”

The MAC has been shortlisted for the Art Fund Museum of Year before, in 2015, but Mulholland said the organisation has grown in confidence since then, both in how it works with artists and local communities.

Its current exhibitions include At The Table (until 23 January), which focuses on socially and politically engaged practices. It is the first major exhibition developed with the venue’s five associate partners –- the Rainbow Project; Participation and the Practice of Rights; Alliance for Choice; Action Mental Health; and Extern.

“We challenged ourselves to make visible to our visitors the issues that our associated partners are interested in. It is about making a commitment to co-authorship of programming so that they feel a sense of inclusion and belonging. It is about recognising that the spaces are not ours but are for the people of Belfast and beyond.

“We recognise that this is a beautiful building that people want to be in," Mulholland continues. "People come in for a coffee and a scone but they are then led into the galleries to see the art.”

The MAC only has one artwork in its collection – The Permanent Present, a sculptural work by Irish artist Mark Garry commissioned by the MAC and the Thomas Devlin Fund, which was established in memory of 15-year-old school boy Thomas Devlin who was murdered in Belfast in 2005. The sculpture consists of 400 metal wires in the main foyer of venue. 

The other museums shortlisted for the Art Fund Museum of the Year are the Burrell Collection, Glasgow; Leighton House, London; Natural History Museum, London; and Scapa Flow Museum, Orkney.