By The Art Explora Mobile Museum / Fanny Trichet
Attracting new audiences is a primary concern for museum directors, as the less privileged social categories are turning away from cultural venues. With this in mind, the Tate Liverpool has decided to exhibit some of the works in its collection in a new kind of "mobile museum."
Attracting new audiences is a primary concern for museum directors, as the less privileged social categories are turning away from cultural venues. With this in mind, the Tate Liverpool has decided to exhibit some of the works in its collection in a new kind of "mobile museum."
This traveling exhibition space was created in collaboration with the French foundation Art Explora. It will travel through different areas of greater Liverpool during ten weeks in the spring with a selection of artworks from the exhibition "Radical Landscapes." This exhibition was held at the Tate Liverpool between May 5 and September 4, 2022. It traces the history of landscape painting in the United Kingdom, and is composed of 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos by artists such as Jeremy Deller, Ingrid Pollard, Tanoa Sasraku and Derek Jarman.
Due to a lack of space, the Tate Liverpool museum truck only displays a few of them. Among them are John Nash's "The Cornfield," the first painting made by the English painter on a subject other than war, and "Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp," a textile work by Thalia Campbell, according to The Art Newspaper.
Students from Netherton Moss Primary School in Bootle, a suburb of Liverpool, were able to visit the Tate's mobile museum on February 22. Frederic Jousset, founder of Art Explora, hopes others will follow suit. "We wanted to go to people's houses, go to where they live and knock on their doors. That's the essence of our work," he told The Art Newspaper.
Art Explora has previously partnered with the French Ministry of Culture and the Centre Pompidou to promote the idea of art reaching as many people as possible. They inaugurated the traveling museum, MuMo x Centre Pompidou, last June. This museum truck, containing works from the Parisian museum's modern and contemporary art collection, traveled across France for several weeks to welcome visitors in rural and suburban areas of several French cities.
Alongside the museum trucks, Art Explora is currently working on a "culture bus" with the British Museum to enable 100,000 pupils throughout the UK aged 7 to 11 to visit the museum over three years.
