After a refurbishment taking two years, The Whitechapel Gallery reopened to the public on 5th April 2009 with more space for exhibitions and an improved range of facilities. One of the most notable changes has been to its archive, which is now fully integrated with the Gallery and looks set to play an important role supporting diversity and regeneration within the community.
The Gallery, founded in 1901, has always endeavoured to bring great art to the people of East London, and its archive has supported this goal. It is hoped now that the improvements will further the archive’s use in informing exhibitions and nurturing wider artistic links, and lead to greater public awareness of archives and their role within society.
Visitor numbers expected to rise
“We expect to nearly double our visitors to the Gallery annually,” said Nayia Yiakoumaki, the Gallery’s dedicated Archive Curator, speaking about projections in line with an Ipsos Mori poll.
She was also pleased about the additional space created by the integration of Gallery’s former central library space, which closed in 2005 and was replaced by the Idea Store, saying: “What is really important is that the Gallery now has an archive gallery, a repository space and an archive reading room. All of which contribute to communicating how archives can be seen, used and curated.”
Community engagement
Also proving to be an important lesson in how to engage communities with archives is Archive Adventures, one of the education programmes currently run by the Gallery in local schools. An exhibition of children’s work created through the programme will be on display in the Gallery from the opening day.
It was inspired by a desire to know more about the children who had visited the Whitechapel Gallery over the past 100 years, asking questions such as, ‘how did they travel to the gallery?’ and ‘what were their impressions of the space and the art inside it?’
In order to find out more about the gallery goers of yesteryear, the Education department made facsimiles of relevant documents, then developed archival boxes to take to schools. As Nayia commented, “We brought the Gallery to the school, and they brought the school and their neighbourhood to the Gallery.”
The children then developed itineraries to trace their movements between school, home and the Gallery. Using archive material, they considered what they had encountered on their daily journeys, exploring their local area under a very different light in the process.
Findings used in new archive
With the help of artists, historians and teachers, the children’s findings were recorded and used to create a new archive – thereby giving them an understanding of the way people contribute to the creation of archives through their daily lives.
As the Archive Adventures website states, “Archive Adventures enables children in the London borough of Tower Hamlets to articulate and record their own experiences of life in East London, adding their voices to an exciting, evolving, online history.”
With the Gallery’s changes, it is predicted that there will now be more scope for similar archive programmes in the future.
For more detailed information on the Whitechapel Archive refurbishment please visit the case study section on the MLA research website.