British Art Network

The British Art Network (BAN) was established in 2012 by Tate, originally as a means of building scholarly capacity in the UK museum sector and celebrating a shared national collection. In 2018, the Paul Mellon Centre became a partner host of BAN along with Tate, leading to a significant expansion of activity and a programme aimed at better reflecting the range and variety of curatorial work in British art today.

BAN’s 2020–21 programme saw these ambitions and commitments deepen and significantly develop. BAN supported ten Research Groups covering topics including new groups on Working Class British Art; British South-Asian Visual Art Post-Cool Britannia; and Race, Empire and the PreRaphaelites; as well as existing groups on Queer British Art; Black British Art; and British Landscapes, alongside seminar series, ‘Itinerant Imaginaries’ and ‘Irish Modernisms’. We supported the continuing activities of the Early Career Curators Group from 2019–20, and welcomed curators following a revised programme of activities under the new title of Emerging Curators Group (ECG). The 2020–21 ECG group reflects BAN’s commitment to expanding definitions of the curatorial, with a membership that includes freelance researchers, writers, artists and programmers as well as curators in museum or gallery settings. BAN additionally partnered with the Understanding British Portraits and European Paintings Pre-1900 networks to deliver the three-part conference Museum Collections on Prescription: Health, Wellbeing and Inclusivity, and supported a collaboration between the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute and the Black British Art research group resulting in the ‘Curating Nation’ seminar series. Across activities there has been an emphatic focus on intersectional, global and decolonial themes, including collaborations aimed at actively connecting work in their respective areas. The continuation of activity in online form created opportunities to make events more widely accessible, both live and through legacy recordings, and BAN has demonstrated a practical commitment to access and inclusion with additional bursary support and funding for research leads and ECG members. In line with these programmatic developments, BAN’s membership continued to grow and diversify, with more than 1,000 members by June 2021, including new members from the US, Europe, India and Australia.

In March 2021, we were able to welcome four new members to the Steering Group, ensuring that the range of professional experience and engagement, academic expertise and backgrounds represented should better reflect the current field of British art curating. BAN’s governance principles and mission statements were reworked to reflect our expanded understanding of the curatorial field, and a web developer was appointed to develop a new BAN website to give the programme and membership greater visibility. In 2021, BAN’s quarterly newsletter took on an expanded form, featuring critical essays and interviews, helping further demonstrate the network’s commitment to expanding definitions of British art, acknowledging complex historical truths and their present-day resonances, and communicating the continuing public value of British art collections and curatorial expertise.