Staff Profile

Before joining Newcastle University I worked as an contemporary art curator for a quarter of a century in museums and galleries including the V&A and Science Museum, and Kettle's Yard and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, where I was director until 2021. I have organised over 100 exhibitions and worked with over 350 artists from over 25 countries. My work as a curator has been discussed in every UK broadsheet newspaper from the Morning Star to the Financial Times, on Radio 3 and 4, and in journals from Art Monthly to Visual Culture in Britain.

I have published about museums and galleries, about how artists relate to broader socio-political conditions, and monographs about individual artists. With Newcastle University colleagues Professor Rhiannon Mason and Dr Emma Coffield, I wrote an introduction to the subject of 'Museum Studies: The Basics' (Routledge, 2018), which has been translated in Korean.  

Art Monthly has described my curatorial work as "providing a valuable service by focusing on politically engaged subjects that no other gallery in the region does", and my strategies of interpretation as "not merely glossing the work on display but opening up a new line of thought altogether". One curatorial project of this type, 'Hints to Workmen', is the subject of a chapter in Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries by Chris Whitehead, which examines both the poetics of unreliable narration in curatorship, and the politics of giving voice to multiple ideological positions as well as demographic ones (Routledge 2012). The project 'Rank: Picturing the Social Order' similarly pursued a strategy of attempting to illuminate contemporary thought through comparisons to object made at a distance either in time or in space. It also exemplifies my interest in the relation between image, text and concept.

I am also concerned with rethinking collections of modern and contemporary art, as well as exhibition making .

In the 2000s, my curatorial research was to a large extent into how artists and curators can both imagine art politically, and make it public in new and different ways. In the 2010s, my focus has been upon the new directions and possibilities for European museums' collections of modern and contemporary art.  

In 2013-21 I undertook a PhD about the future of museums of modern and contemporary art in Western Europe, looking at curatorial experiments in three of the key institutions in the development of the concept of the museum of modern art. These are Museum Folkwang in Essen - a museum often understood to be the first modernist museum, and the direct predecessor of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London. In the 2010s, all three undertook a radical rethinking of their entire collections and redisplayed them wholesale. These were more merely 'rehangs' but ways to rethink the entire concept of art and its possible histories. The three institutions' unorthodox ways of accounting for twentieth- and twenty-first century art throw light on the possible directions that museums may take in the 2020s and beyond. I ask whether ultimately, the idea of a 'collection' is sufficient to account for the diversity of these new ideas - or if other, separate concepts fit them more accurately.

I am currently leading the module 'Working on a Project in Museums and Galleries', on the Art Museum and Gallery Studies MA. This involves students curating and organising a 'live' project in a gallery within the Newcastle University campus, currently focused on the Ex Libris Gallery. The module involves working with diverse artists to think about their work, but also to imagine and analyse the dynamics involved in the interaction between artists and curators in exhibition production. It

involves a close examination of how both exhibition curators and collections curators imagine understand artworks, and work with them - including what liberties they can take, and how far artists' rights as the prime or dominant interpreter of their own work should be upheld. The module provides an introduction to some of the 'live' themes in contemporary art practice across the last decade, and in curatorial practice over the same timeframe. Finally, the module also involves imaging what the future of collections and displays might themselves be. It invites speculation about what the gallery or museum of the future might yet be: what latent or as-yet-untapped 'potential' collection displays and exhibitions have, and which curators can be instrumental in realising.

I also teach on other modules across Museum, Gallery and Heritage studies, and contribute to the teaching across the Media, Culture and Heritage department as a whole. 

I welcome PhD applications examining in the following areas: curating contemporary art; museums of modern and contemporary art; 

• Authored Books

  • Mason R, Robinson A, Coffield E. Museum and Gallery Studies: The Basics. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
  • Mason R, Robinson A, Coffield E. Museum and Gallery Studies: The Basics. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.