Queering Curatorial Learning Practice: Enhancing Access for Young and Diverse Audiences within the Art Museum

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Tate's Director Maria Balshaw aims to make Tate the 'most artistically adventurous and culturally inclusive gallery in the world' In bringing these two ambitions together in one statement, Balshaw sends a powerful message about the relationship between artistic excellence and inclusivity, which hints at how Tate's strategic vision may change and develop in order to achieve this goal.This proposal considers the ways in which this vision could be realised specifically through engaging young and diverse audiences in the process of transforming the art museum into an 'artistically adventurous and culturally inclusive' civic space. As the demographic of our audiences change - London's White British population is no longer the city's most dominant and young people are increasingly identifying as something other than heterosexual and cisgendered (to identify with the gender one is assigned at birth) - how can we draw on this to inform this new vision? Using three interlocking elements - learning programmes, artworks in the Tate Collection and queer theory - this proposal will explore how cultural institutions remain relevant, radical and sustainable. Using works from the Tate Collection and Archive, the researcher would over three years of the studentship test ways in which the relationship between these three elements can be "queered" through hosting experimental research events devised with audience, artists and Tate Collective, creating a research tool kit in the form of online archive (ideally this will be hosted by the Tate Learning Research Centre, talks with the Tate Digital team on how this can work will begin on confirmation of the project) and producing a written thesis detailing their findings.Queer Studies have been well researched theoretically and this proposal seeks ways to translate this learning into (arts learning) practice. How can terms like 'queer', 'intersectional' and 'interdisciplinary' be used as methods or lenses through which to think and practice critically? For example, thinking about a queer methodology as a 'point of departure, [a] working concept' (Boellstorff, 2016) or intersectionality as 'pos[ing] more as a nodal point than as a closed system - a gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and conflicting' (Cho, Crenshaw, McCall, 2013). In essence, terms like these are fluid, complex and unfixed and herein lies their possible academic and methodological value to the art museum. As Mark Miller, Convenor of Tate's Young People's Programme remarks, 'opening up' and 'demystify[ing] the gallery' through programmes like Circuit have 'produced alternative interpretations of art, mediation between audience and critical questioning of the role of galleries in society' (Miller, 2017). In other words, anun-fixing of the art museum as a static repository for art, in favour of a gathering place of diverse and complex dialogue between art, artists and audience. Miller argues that the audiences are central to this, and that in order for an audience to produce this effect on the institution they must have agency and trust within it. This proposal asks how this 'demystifying' might work (and not simply through an assimilation of young people into already established systems).