Culture&’s partnerships aim for excellence, inclusivity and relevance, working with UK arts and heritage organisations such as Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Collection Trust, National Trust, Southbank Centre, Art UK, Magnum Photos and Pitzhanger Manor. Culture& developed these dynamic relationships over many years through careful cultivation of contacts and by building trust, profile and a reputation for quality.
Culture& has curated themed public programmes comprising new and ambitious commissioned works, presented in collaboration with leading partner like Sotheby’s Institute of Art, the Southbank Centre, British Library, London Metropolitan Archives, Wellcome Collection and Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford. Working with the Museums Association co-produced an international webinar Black Lives Still Matter June 2021, a collaboration with the US Association of Art Museum Curators.
First, our flagship arts and heritage training programme, New Museum School Advanced Programme (NMS) builds on the very successful diploma programme that ran for seven years, producing 135 alumni all over the UK. The New Museum School Advanced Postgraduate Programme at University of Leicester School of Museum Studies is a unique collaboration with 15 leading UK museums. The main aim of this programme is to diversify the arts and heritage workforce.
Second, in collaboration with sector partners and New Museum School alumni, we work to diversify audiences through public programmes in collaboration with partners such as Southbank Centre, Wellcome Collection and Guildhall Art Gallery. Our dynamic model utilises the skills of the NMS alumni to curate innovative, disruptive, ambitious and stylish public programmes which demonstrate the impact of a diverse cycle of advanced training, resourced internships, networking and opportunities which in turn inform the curation of our public facing programmes.
Culture& is offering a whole new model of understanding ‘support’ for the sector. We are more than an audience development agency; our curatorial training, research and consultancy demonstrates the change we want to see. In this way, we go beyond a simple ‘toolkit’ or a form of management training as a discrete package; rather, we are the embodiment of how our sector should evolve.
Photo: ‘Mickey’ courtesy Maxim Northover and Le Gateau Chocolat – one of Culture&’s associate artists who performed in ‘Cyborgs’ (2019) curated with the Wellcome Collection