Museum’s ‘big-thinking’ revival lands Art Fund’s £100k prize

A gallery which six years ago was placed in special funding measures because of concerns over its viability has been named winner of the world’s largest museum prize.

The turnaround for Firstsite in Colchester is remarkable. In 2015 it was in crisis mode after Arts Council England removed it from the national portfolio, instead offering a year-by-year funding deal.

Yesterday its director, Sally Shaw, was presented with the £100,000 prize as Art Fund museum of the year 2021. Jenny Waldman, director of the Art Fund and chair of the judges, said Firstsite was “an outstanding example of innovation and integrity”.

Firstsite opened in 2011, one of a number of new contemporary art galleries which also included the Hepworth in Wakefield and Turner Contemporary in Margate. It had a rocky start but survived the funding problems and returned to the national portfolio in 2018. Under Shaw’s leadership it has thrived.

Within days of the first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020 the gallery came up with the idea of creating artist-led activity packs for children and young people, a hipper version of the Big Book of Things to Do.

They included Mark Wallinger urging people to draw their hands to put in their window as a kind of nationwide wave. Michael Landy addressed the toilet roll buying frenzy by asking children to stack individual tissue leaves until the structure fell over. The packs went on to feature more than 50 artists and were downloaded by 92,000 households.

Other initiatives during the pandemic included becoming the operations base for a neighbouring charity, Community 360, to run a food bank; and launching The Great Big Art Exhibition, a nationwide project encouraging people to make and exhibit art.

In response to Black Lives Matter, the gallery commissioned Elsa James to make a downloadable work in solidarity. The gallery has also offered free meals to children during the school holidays.

Waldman said the core of Firstsite was “powerful, engaged contemporary art, housed in a gallery that gives space for everyone, from artists to NHS staff to local families and refugee groups. “They exceeded all our expectations. Here is a small organisation thinking big and caring for their local community.”

The other four shortlisted museums, each receiving £15,000, were the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry; Experience Barnsley; the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds; and Timespan in Helmsdale, a village on the east coast of the Scottish Highlands.

Previous winners include the huge (the British Museum in 2011 and the V&A London in 2016) and the comparatively tiny (the Lightbox in Woking in 2008 and the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London in 2013).