A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s

Sara Makari-Aghdam

Writer and curator Sara Makari-Aghdam discusses the exhibition project ‘A Tall Order! – Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s’ with its co-curators Dr Derek Horton and Dr Alice Correia in the following three-way interview. The show is named for a phrase of original curator Jill Morgan who established Rochdale Art Gallery’s exhibition programme back in the 80s with an all women team that included Maud Sulter, Sarah Edge and Lubaina Himid. In a letter, she wrote that their policy was to contest white middle-class male domination of the field, summarising this challenge as ‘A tall order!’ The show continues at Touchstones, Rochdale until 6 May 2023.

What would be the most underrated exhibition of 2023? In my opinion, having studied art critically and professionally since 2011, it would be ‘A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s’ – a British group show that demonstrates artistic experts and academics producing good and incisive work while still understanding how to relate to both their local communities and a wider audience. Touchstones Rochdale is a work of art in its own right, set in a remarkable and expansive Grade II Victorian stone building with stained glass windows, plenty of shiny marble in places, the result of booming retail trade in Greater Manchester around the cloth industry. Victorian wealth, however, was the result of rampant British colonialism, empire, and the slave trade from which the cotton industry profited. In ‘A Tall Order!’, ninety artists’ works in a myriad of cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender diversities grace the spaces of the four galleries. Spanning five decades of social change, from British industrialism, de-industrialisation during Thatcherism, migration into the area of an array of different people and cultures, the Black British arts movement, and the changing role of women and their visibility in the arts — we can really see just how we came to arrive here, in the now.

Sara Makari-Aghdam:  How did you and Alice arrive at the point of the brief for ‘A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s’, and why do you think the artistic history is relevant and the display timely?  

Derek Horton:  Our approach to the exhibition was to look at Rochdale’s exhibition programming between the first exhibition curated by Jill Morgan in 1980 and when she left the gallery in 1993. From this we identified key themes and approaches that seemed to characterise the curatorial approach the gallery took at that time, looking at the exhibitions and artists that seemed to be the most important in relation to those themes or the most representative of the priorities that informed them. The more we uncovered the history of Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s the more apparent it became that it was at the forefront of a political approach to exhibition-making, creating spaces for artists whose voices were marginalised in the mainstream art world, and making art accessible to diverse audiences that reflected the needs of the communities local to the gallery. In many ways the political concerns of the artists and exhibitions we have highlighted reflect issues and concerns that still affect society today.

SM-A:  There are so many artists, in fact the most I’ve seen in any exhibition, around 90 in total, some are artists that were involved in Rochdale in the period the exhibition examines and others contemporary artists. Why so many, why the mixture and what were the reasons for picking them? 

DH:  We’re looking at a time span of well over a decade, during which Rochdale often had several simultaneous exhibitions in its four gallery spaces, so of course it’s not so many – in the period 1980 to 1993 there were well over 150 separate exhibitions involving several hundred different artists. We’ve only included a fraction of those that Jill and her brilliant team curated. As for the mix, it was important to us that the exhibition looked forward as well as backwards, and there are increasingly many younger artists now making work that deals with similar social and political issues to those that concerned artists in the 1980s. So right from the outset, we always wanted to make explicit the inter-generational connections and to emphasise the echoes and resonances between then and now.

Alice Correia: Through the 1980s Jill and her team were placing contemporary art in conversation with displays of work from Rochdale’s permanent collection. Jill was keen to ‘rethink’ the collection in terms of Feminism and Post-colonial theory and several exhibitions that challenged expectations and accepted ways of looking at artworks that would have been very familiar to local audiences. So, it was also important that we include historic and modern works from the permanent collection. As Derek said, what we’ve selected for ‘A Tall Order!’ is only a small section of the work that was exhibited at Rochdale during the 1980s. Some of the artists who exhibited at Rochdale in the 1980s remain under appreciated, like Alison Marchant and Sarah Edge, so we were keen to include them; our research uncovered paintings that hadn’t been exhibited for over 30 years (by John Hyatt, Terry Atkinson, Lesley Sanderson, Veronica Slater). But we are conscious that a different iteration of the show could have been staged by a different curator, with a completely different set of artists, and it still would have been a rich, thought-provoking exhibition.

SM-A:  When I visited the exhibition myself, I saw some incredible responses from the general public in terms of engagement with the show. And I thought from a curatorial point of view, it was one of the most accessible exhibitions that I’ve seen. What were the approaches you both took to ensure this result and how did you work with the Rochdale team to do this?  

DH:  Touchstones Rochdale has a very evident commitment to its local community and is a welcoming space that makes visitors feel comfortable and included, and this was an important priority for the gallery throughout the 1980s – at the forefront then of developments in gallery education, outreach and inclusivity. I’m glad that you found our exhibition so accessible. The themes around which the exhibition is based (work and labour; our environment; the importance of the local; and identity and representation) are important and relevant to most people in their everyday lives. Also, they are mostly representational rather than abstract works, often with subject matter that people can immediately relate to their own lives or to imagery they see in the media.

AC: In terms of our text panels, we worked hard to avoid jargon, and tried to convey information in accessible ways. We tried to tell stories that audiences might not know about, and we were conscious that many people visiting the show might not remember the 1980s, so we couldn’t assume that they would know about particular events or situations.

Simultaneously, we were also conscious that visitors coming to an exhibition framed in terms of the ‘political 1980s’ might come with particular expectations about what they would see – both in terms of form and content. We didn’t want this to be an alienating, violent, or ‘edgy’ show, although some of the artworks might be described as such; the art that Jill and her colleagues engaged with went far beyond Punk and anti-Thatcherite sentiment. This is why the lyrical and reflective wall of flower and still life paintings by women artists from the 20th and 21st century in Gallery Two was so important to me. The works displayed could be read as feminist statements, but they are also, each in its own way, incredibly beautiful and meditative, to be enjoyed.    

I think the colour-coded gallery spaces – yellow, green, red and blue – have also helped make the exhibition dynamic and welcoming; these are exciting spaces to be in. Credit for the exhibition’s colour palette goes to the gallery’s designer, Alison Skinner. She selected the colours from those used in the 1980s posters on display in Gallery Three, a scheme that was in keeping with the graphic style of the period.

SM-A: There were also some new commissions in the exhibition, why do you think these artists’ works are important and, more widely, why is commissioning artists in public spaces important? 

DH:  The new commissions all directly connect with artists and works shown during the 1980s and, to some extent, the commissioned artists also have a relationship to Rochdale or the wider region. Lubna Chowdhary spent a significant period of her childhood in Rochdale and has used her memories and her local knowledge to make a large ceramic work based on iconic local buildings and landmarks, as well as direct references to her own heritage which she shares with a significant proportion of Rochdale’s population. Sarah-Joy Ford is a queer artist whose work celebrates lesbian histories and communities. Many of Rochdale’s exhibitions in the 1980s included textile artists, and Sarah-Joy has used embroidery to celebrate the paintings of an artist (based, like Sarah-Joy, in Manchester) Rachael Field, who had a solo exhibition at Rochdale in 1990 that was concerned very overtly with her lesbian sexuality and her feminist perspective. Jade Montserrat’s commission is a film that is an intimate reflection on her experience as a Black woman living in an isolated northern rural environment that directly references the visual art work and poetry of Maud Sulter who played an important role as an artist and curator in Rochdale in the late 1980s. As for your wider question, I think it is important wherever possible for public galleries to provide opportunities for young artists to make and show new work. Especially publicly funded municipal galleries, I think, have an obligation to support artists living and working in the communities they serve.

AC: We also commissioned a new iteration of an artwork first shown in 1991 by Donald Rodney. Rodney died in 1998; some his works were lost or destroyed during his lifetime, and of those that survive, many are extremely fragile and difficult to display. Cataract (1990) was a three-channel slide show which existed as a box of 33mm slides that no-one could see. We were delighted to work with the Estate of Donald Rodney to rearticulate his work as a digital film of the slide show. Jill Morgan and Lubaina Himid worked with Rodney for about three years in order to realise his solo exhibition in 1990, so it felt important to honour Rodney’s extraordinary artistic ability by making a version of Cataract (1990, 2023) available to new audiences.  

SM-A: You both worked with the previous staff and specifically the ex-curators of the Rochdale gallery, in particular Jill Morgan, can you tell us more about this experience?  

DH:  Actually, it’s only me that has that direct professional and personal connection to Jill, although Alice has several connections with the wider network of people who worked with and supported her. When Jill Morgan left Rochdale Art Gallery in 1993, she took up a job as the head of Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University, where I had also just started teaching a few months earlier. So, for more than ten years we worked quite closely together. We shared a commitment to making art education socially and politically relevant, to challenging existing orthodoxies, and to widening participation for students from diverse and marginalised backgrounds. Jill brought to her teaching all the energy and commitment, the courage, joy and humour, that had informed her work at Rochdale. I learned a great deal from her, and for a long time I have wanted to highlight the great work she and her team did at Rochdale which, as with much radical exhibition-making, especially outside London, has been under-appreciated and insufficiently acknowledged in art historical accounts of the time.

AC: My connection to Rochdale is not as direct as Derek’s, but undertaking this project has made me realise that conversations that took place in, and about, Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s have informed my art historical education. I studied Art History at the University of East Anglia, where I was taught by Jane Beckett, who had also taught Bev Bytheway, and who introduced me to Feminist Art History. Jane co-edited, with Maud Sulter, a special issue of the magazine Feminist Art News dedicated to photography. I went on to study at the University of Sussex with Deborah Cherry, who curated the show, Victorian Women Painters at Rochdale Art Gallery in 1987; Rochdale’s exhibition catalogues were on Deborah’s reading lists, so that by osmosis I knew of Rochdale’s importance to British art.

SM-A:  I saw that the favourite piece of the learning curator at Rochdale was Leslie Hakim-Dowek's: Chaque matin on se leve a un monde moins fertile (translating to English as: ‘Every morning I wake up to a less fertile world’), from 1988 (one of her early works as she's a photographer now). It's a beautiful painted floral box, which is alike to a cabinet of curiosities and quite whimsical. If you could pick a favourite work, what would it be?

DH:  I’m not sure I could (or should!) pick a favourite work, and there are so many that are very important to me in different ways. The fact that we were able to commission a reconstruction of the late Donald Rodney’s work Cataract is important to me, not just because it’s such a powerful work, at least as relevant now as when it was made in 1991, but also because we have helped conserve the work and make it more accessible to future audiences. Another work I like because of the way it is still so relevant to our own times, is John Hyatt’s painting, Unewsworthy, 1984. Pogus Caesar’s portrait photograph of Sonia Boyce is great, and I love the paintings we have by Veronica Slater and Lesley Sanderson – I could go on and on because there are so many great works!

AC: Likewise, there are so many works that are important to me, for different reasons. It has been wonderful reconnecting with artists who I’ve worked with in the past, such as Shezad Dawood and Bhajan Hunjan, and discovering their connections to Rochdale. But the artists and artworks that are ‘new’ to me are also special: Catherine McWilliams’, Woman (Pandora) with Peaceline and Cave Hill, 1983, is modest in size, but it is an incredibly resonant work about the resilience of women in the face of conflict. I didn’t know of Pete Clarke’s work before working on this exhibition, but I want to see more. And I’m excited to see what filmmaker Alina Akbar, who was born in Rochdale, does next.  

SM-A: Finally, what's next up for both of you? 

DH:  Good question – taking a break and having a rest! But seriously, it’s important to say that the work on A Tall Order! is not necessarily over. There is so much important work, Rochdale’s emphasis on different kinds of performance art in the 1980s for example, and much historically important archival material, that we weren’t able to include in the exhibition, that we really need to build on the legacy of the exhibition with a publication of some kind, so that will be a priority for both of us.

AC: Yes, a publication developing and building upon A Tall Order! is definitely something I want to pursue; there is a lot more to be done in terms of de-centering narratives of British art history away from London, and much more to say about the role Rochdale Art Gallery played in doing just that. Derek and I are currently working on how to fund a publication – whether on-line or printed.

DH: For me, my ongoing online magazine project, Soanyway, will continue to be something I want to devote time to, and there are artists whose work I have promised to write essays about that I might now have time to get around to. And I even have one or two ideas about exhibitions I would like to work on in collaboration with other curators – watch this space!

AC: I’m also mulling over a couple of exhibition ideas, but my priority in the coming months is to finish writing a book about women artists of South-Asian heritage who were active during the 1980s and 1990s. I’ve got a few chapters to write, and a lot of editing – wish me luck!