Curating collections in the Old College campus
This blog post describes my presentation at the Boundary Crossing: The Transnational Travels of Social Reproduction seminar on 3 May 2024. In response to the call by co-organisers Dr Hemangini Gupta and Dr Tatiana Sanchez Parra for contributions that would explore the seminars social reproduction themes through “registers that go beyond the written format”, I spoke about approaches offered by curatorial practice in the context of my role as Art Collections Curator at the University of Edinburgh. In particular, I discussed a recently installed display of artworks at the Old College, a nineteenth-century neoclassical building that was formerly the main campus of the University. The focus of my presentation was on the ways that institutional power dynamics are articulated within campus displays and the challenges of ‘intervening’ in heritage sites, like the Old College, with contemporary art.
As a quick background - the University stared collecting art around 350 years ago and now owns almost 8,000 works. These include paintings, sculpture, photography, prints, textiles, drawings, installation, film, video and performance art. Led by Curator Julie-Ann Delaney and supported by Assistant Curator Olivia Laumenech, the primary focus of the collection today is on commissioning and acquiring works by contemporary artists for use in teaching and research. The main point of access to the collection is through the Centre for Research Collections at the Main Library, where artworks are incorporated in seminars taught there and made available by appointment for viewings in the reading room. Film and video works can be accessed through the University’s internal platform, Media Hopper. Additionally, around 2,000 works are displayed across the campuses in classrooms, offices, corridors, reception areas and outdoor spaces.
Old College Main Stairway. Photos: Chris Close, 2024
By far the largest and most prominent displays of the art collection on campus are at the Old College, where approximately 100 portraits of figures connected to the University in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are on show. The new display I reference here was developed in response to a brief from the governing board of the Old College Heritage and Values Project. This is an ongoing project (which since July 2024, I have been working on directly as the Project Curator) dedicated to reviewing and rethinking these historic displays in ways that acknowledge both the lack of diversity represented in the portraiture, which almost exclusively depicts white men, as well as the colonial and imperial histories embodied in the campus.[i] The brief specified using works from the collection to install a new display in the lower level of the Old College main stairway that would signal the beginning of the Project and showcase the potential for changes to the historic displays.
Interestingly for the Boundary Crossing seminar, social reproduction perspectives have been gradually embedded into the thinking behind and uses of the art collection since the establishment of the Contemporary Art Research Collection in 2015. The CARC is one of many subcollections, or groupings of works, that make up the art collection. Many of these subcollections exist by nature of how they entered the collection - like the Torrie Collection, donated in 1837 or the Edinburgh College of Art Collection which became part of the University following a merger in 2012. While others, like the CARC, have been developed as means of creating thematic links between works in the collection or as aspirational tools for developing it in new ways. Established in 2015 in partnership with academics at School of History of Art, including Dr Kirsten Lloyd, Senior Lecturer in History of Art[ii], the CARC is developed around themes of globalisation, intersectional feminist thought, and social reproduction perspectives. It currently includes around 50 works by artists including Petra Bauer and Southall Black Sisters, Kate Davis, Tessa Lynch, Martha Rosler and Alberta Whittle. While the new display at Old College was not exclusively selected from this subcollection, CARC works featured prominently in the curation.
Photo 1 and 2: Old College Main Stairway, during and after install. Photos: Claire Walsh, 2024.
Photo 3: Old College Main Stairway after installation of new display. Photo: Chris Close, 2024
The Old College building with its neoclassical design and historic rooms filled with portraits of former professors, principals and famed thinkers, like David Hume, Walter Scott and Adam Ferguson, acts as a kind of monument to the Scottish Enlightenment.[iii] One of my main considerations for this site was the relationship between this highly visible and well known version of the University’s past, the many other lesser-known histories of the site and the experiences of those accessing the space today.[iv] Below I describe the three curatorial strategies behind the new hang which were attempts to deal with this separation of tenses (past from present) and to avoid reductive old vs new dynamics.
Firstly, I avoided a like-for-like swap with the four oil portraits that previously hung below the stairs (as seen in the ‘before’ image above). Instead of installing four contemporary works in their place, I designed a ’salon-style’ or constellation display with a newly painted backdrop (co-designed with Heather Davies from the Estates department) which allowed us to show multiple works and to expand further into the space. My hope with this was that the individual contemporary works wouldn’t be simply read as responses or juxtapositions to the historic works above the stairs, but seen on their own accord.
Secondly, in the accompanying text panel, I framed the presence of the contemporary artworks in the space as a continuity of rather than a break with the tradition of celebrating the institution’s contemporary communities. While historically, this meant portraits of chancellors, professors, patrons and other political figures representing prestige and the values of the University, the new display showcases the work of contemporary artists who are either graduates or faculty of the University, or who have other connections to it through the Heritage Collections or the Talbot Rice Gallery.
Tessa Lynch, Wise Women (2021) linocut prints, 31.4 x 39.9cm (each). Purchased 2021
Finally, a number of the selected artworks make reference to the ongoing reverberations and material implications of pasts that cannot be neatly sealed away in collections and archives. Two examples of this are the works by Tessa Lynch and Alberta Whittle, which are also part of the Contemporary Art Research Collection. Lynch’s series of seven colourful prints, titled Wise Women, are influenced by Christine de Pizan’s novel, ‘The Book of the City of the Ladies’, written in 1405 and Silvia Federici’s more contemporary writings on witches. Produced in the artist’s home during 2021, these linocut prints draw on lineages with historic gender roles and characters, to reflect the ways that the recent Covid-19 lockdowns disproportionately affected women’s labour.
In Alberta Whittle’s prints, titled Secreting Myths, colonial imagery produced by European artists in the 16th centuries is used to draw attention to the continued reverberations and structuring effects of colonialism in the present. The central imagery is based on 16th Century engravings by the European artists whose works illustrated the arrival of Columbus, Vespucci and others in the Americas and subsequent violent suppression of indigenous peoples. Whittle’s interventions to the source imagery, including ’snail trails’ in gold ink, work to obscure and undermine the myths of ‘discovery’ implied by the work’s title.
These and other artworks in the display - such as Larry Achiampong's blackboard work from his Detention (Series) which involved senior figures from the University writing lines inspired by the Black Lives Matter protest movements – speak to the themes of social reproduction and transnational perspectives in different ways – with references to climate change, colonial histories, racism, feminist thought, housing and digital technologies.
Since it opened in April 2024, the display has been used as a site of teaching for courses at the University that explore institutional histories through its material heritage. I am now formally working as part of the Old College Project as Curator, reporting to the governing board and developing a review of the spaces and proposal for changes to displays and interpretation that will be presented to the board in June 2026. The display has become a useful site for considering the many questions this wider project throws up around the politics of visibility, access to the spaces and appetite for wider institutional change.
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[i] For example, recent research by Dr Simon Buck as part of the Decolonised Transformations project has revealed how a public fundraising campaign for the building of Old College in the 1790s actively sought out funds from the British colonies, including from colonial alumni involved with the plantation economy and enslavement in the Caribbean.
In addition to this, many of the individuals depicted in portraits at the Old College were involved in colonial and imperial activities that were entangled with the University’s operations and influenced its teachings at the time. These include East India Company officials, such as former Principal, Sir William Muir (1819–1905) and figures who were actively involved in settler-colonial dispossession such as John Locke (1632–1704), who was the secretary to an English company that settled the Province of Carolina in North America and Sir Arthur Balfour (1848-1930) who was the University Chancellor when he signed the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
[ii] Kirsten presented on this at the Boundary Crossing seminar
[iii] See, Fraser, Andrew G. The Building of Old College: Adam, Playfair & the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989. Print.
[iv] While this part of the campus formerly housed the central library for staff and students, Old College is now the location of the offices and meeting rooms of senior leadership and professional services staff as well as a venue for event hire, and student exams. It is accessible to students and external visitors only by invitation or appointment.
On imperial temporalities, see Azoulay, A. A., Lowe, L., Caspari, M., & Daly, R. (2023). Against Imperial Knowledges: Lisa Lowe and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in Conversation. Parallax, 29(2), 154–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2023.2271731