“A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s”

This survey traces the curatorial work undertaken by Jill Morgan and her all-woman team—including Lubaina Himid, Sarah Edge, and Maud Sulter—to develop a radical program of exhibitions at Rochdale Art Gallery, a small, publicly funded venue in northwest England now known as Touchstones. In a letter from 1987, Morgan declared, “Our policy is to encourage new audiences for art . . . To change the domination of art by a white middle-class male audience and producer. A tall order!”

Morgan’s socially engaged, community-oriented program encouraged the involvement of women, Black communities, those with disabilities, and working-class individuals,  often while responding to major sociopolitical issues such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the AIDS crisis, the UK miners’ strike, antinuclear protests, racial tensions, and riots in British cities. With her staff, Morgan regularly mounted new displays of Rochdale’s permanent collection alongside contemporary works, a method echoed here in the juxtaposition of Joy Gregory with Vanessa Bell, Veronica Slater with Lancelot Myles Glasson, and Jai Chuhan with Frances Hodgkins. Ambitious in scope and scale, the show features more than eighty artists—Chila Kumari Burman, Terry Atkinson, Claudette Johnson, Rita Keegan, Patsy Mullan, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Slater, and Keith Piper, among others—across four themed galleries. New commissions by Lubna Chowdhary, Sarah-Joy Ford, and Jade Montserrat recall Morgan’s support for young artists, writers, and curators, as does the recorded reconstruction of Donald Rodney’s Cataract, 1991, a reference to his 1990 exhibition “Critical.”

Curators Alice Correia and Derek Horton have noted that Rochdale’s program was pioneering, though not an exception in the 1980s. It was part of a network of local authority venues—along with Oldham Art Gallery and the Harris in Preston—that were regarded as provincial only in geographical terms, as they implemented the kind of radical, progressive shows and events often assumed to be the preserve of their metropolitan neighbors to the south. A larger history remains to be told of the interconnections among the exhibition officers, artists, and curators who worked strategically and collaboratively to realize their aims, but in the meantime, “A Tall Order” more than suffices as an exciting, exemplary case study.