Sir Nicholas Serota, director for nearly 30 years of Tate, is one of the most towering figures in the UK and international cultural world: the man who opened Tate Modern and turned contemporary art in Britain from a minority sport undertaken by eccentrics into a part of everyday culture, embraced by legions of visitors not just to that venue but the many new galleries that have sprung up around Britain over the past decade.
This giant figure’s successor as director is likely to be – assuming her appointment is approved by the prime minister, Theresa May – Maria Balshaw, currently director of both the Whitworth, Manchester University’s art gallery and Manchester City Galleries. Only the brave would attempt to follow Serota, and Balshaw – who becomes one of only a handful of women in very senior leadership roles in the arts in Britain – is certainly that. Her irrepressible enthusiasm, easy charm and skilful negotiation of the political and financial labyrinths of the cultural world have helped her forge a highly successful career. Recently, she has undertaken a wholesale renovation (and extension) of the Whitworth, compelling critics and visitors to take notice of it almost by sheer force of will. (Staging popular exhibitions by, among others, Marina Abramović, Cornelia Parker and Elizabeth Price has helped.)
Perhaps most significantly, though, Balshaw has been a crucial part of Manchester’s forceful self-reinvention, working with the retiring council chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, to write the arts into the city’s “northern powerhouse” script. As part of that role, she negotiated with the Treasury for a £78m government grant to transform the former Granada TV studios into the Factory, a new arts space that, the council hopes, will combine the scale and capabilities of Tate Modern’s turbine hall and the Royal Opera House.
Balshaw’s name had been widely circulated as a potential successor to Serota, so in many ways her appointment is no surprise – not least as she herself, refreshingly, has made no particular secret of her ambitions. She always wanted Tate, and she has got it – precluding disasters at No 10. Doubts from inside the art world about her suitability for the role have centred not on her capability as a leader or skill as a political operator (both of which are absolutely necessary for running Tate) but her deep knowledge of art.
That’s partly down to her background: she has worked her way up not through curatorial jobs, like many museum or gallery directors. Rather, she started out as a junior academic in Birmingham before working for Arts Council England in the West Midlands. From there, in 2004, she became one of the first cohort of Clore fellows, mid-career arts professionals selected for their leadership potential and put through a year of intense training and study. (Her peers on the scheme included the man she later married, Nick Merriman, who is director of Manchester Museum; between them they have four children. In her private hours she is a keen yogi, making regular trips to India – and is known, too, for her love of a dashing outfit.)
In this career path she is unlike Serota, the ultimate player-manager, who could curate as good a Cy Twombly exhibition as anyone in the world and, despite his heavy institutional responsibilities, seem completely up to date on the work of young artists. At the same time, each of the galleries in Tate’s flotilla has an expert, highly knowledgable chief, and arguably the most important task for the overall director of the organisation is to forge a set of new strategic ambitions, now that Tate Modern’s Switch House extension has opened and that the long-delayed Tate St Ives’s renovation is under way.
One of the great challenges will be, in a financially unstable environment, to balance the claims of each of the galleries – St Ives, Liverpool, the two in London – when Tate Modern outpaces the rest of them so heavily in income, visitors, reputation and glamour. Balshaw is a formidable fundraiser and she will need to redouble her efforts if she is to keep Tate on an even keel. She will need to find ways to cajole, persuade and charm the government into taking culture seriously – presumably through making arguments about its potential to help economic growth in a post-Brexit world. Gutsy and confident, Balshaw will tackle all this head-on, with her trademark zest. If comparisons between her and Serota are, at the moment, inevitable, she will soon forge her own path.
