Whitworth Art Gallery Director wins Breakthrough Fund award

Maria Balshaw, Director of The Whitworth Art Gallery at The University of Manchester, has been awarded £260,000 as one of five recipients of the 2010 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund.

The Breakthrough Fund was launched by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Arts programme with the aim of supporting exceptional ‘cultural entrepreneurs’. Cultural entrepreneurs may appear in a range of roles but they each possess a pressing and persuasive vision, a drive and a strong track record of making things happen. The Breakthrough Fund aims to support these individuals in their determination to make a difference to the cultural landscape in which they work.

Maria Balshaw joined The Whitworth Art Gallery at The University of Manchester in May 2006. An inaugural Clore Leadership Programme Fellow in 2004/05, her professional background spans Arts Council England West Midlands, Creative Partnerships Birmingham and academic posts at the University of Birmingham and University College Northampton.

The grant will, over three years, enable her to conduct research and development as well as provide seed-corn funding for new programming strands that will emerge from the R&D carried out. This will include a part-time sabbatical for Maria over a six-month period, research trips, a new curator-collaborator post for 30 months and a programming fund to explore ways of working differently with the collections, artists and audiences. All of this will take place alongside the major capital redevelopment she is leading at the Gallery, infusing new thinking into a ‘new’ Whitworth.

Maria says: “Finding time to develop big ideas and retain the creative side of my director’s role at the Whitworth is my perennial challenge. The Breakthrough funding will buy me thinking time at a critical time for me and for the organisation. As we steer through a major capital expansion of the Gallery, I will be able to research and develop some completely new ways of working with our wonderful collection, with artists, our audiences and our new and old spaces. It is so unusual to have the trust of a funder at the beginning of the creation process, so I feel extraordinarily honoured to receive this grant.”

The Whitworth Art Gallery welcomes over 150,000 visitors per year, from local families to international tourists. An exhibitions programme that competes with the best in Europe has helped to put Manchester on the map as a cultural destination. Now the gallery is in the planning stages of a major capital expansion aiming to connect it more fully with Whitworth Park, the southern gateway to the University campus and one of Manchester’s most central urban green spaces.

The Breakthrough Fund was devised as a three-year commitment with grant-making rounds in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Over the three years of the Fund, PHF has made 15 grants totalling more than £3.75m, in support of 19 individuals. Existing funding approaches require applicants to have fully formed proposals that can detail activities, outcomes, costings, confirmed income and delivery plans. Funders are rarely willing to commit at the stage where a vision exists but is not yet clear in terms of deliverable activities, resourcing and risk – however compelling it may be. Through the Breakthrough Fund, PHF has been able to commit earlier in the cycle of making important things happen in the arts. The Breakthrough Fund exemplifies PHF’s willingness to take a new kind of risk, based on a judgement that the selected individual, and the structures through which they work, will prove to have what it takes to succeed.

The Whitworth Art Gallery is part of The University of Manchester. It is home to internationally renowned collections of modern art, textiles, watercolours, prints, drawings and sculpture. Created in 1908 as the first English gallery in a park, the Whitworth is today developing a new vision for the role of a university gallery, and is forging stronger connections between park, community and landscape through a Heritage Lottery Fund application for a park-facing second entrance and extension.