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Frances Morris - Permant collections curator, Tate Modern, London, England - Brief Article
ArtForum, April, 2000 by Michael Archer
Since joining the staff in 1997, Frances Morris's main responsibility has been to develop a scheme for the hanging of the permanent collection. A harrying task? Surprisingly, Morris describes the early stages of this process as a luxury. It was a year in which she was able to talk over plans and proposals at length with colleagues, especially head of exhibitions and displays Iwona Blazwick and education program officer Caro Howell, before inviting outside historians and critics to join in the debate.
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"The thing we don't want," says Morris, "is for Tate Modern to become a museum of the twentieth century in the twenty-first. There's no point in getting rid of one fixed idea of art history, only to replace it with another." Instead, Morris plans for a presentation in which artistic chronology is in dialogue with documentary evidence of wider historical contexts. The outcome is the structure of four suites of galleries, each devoted to a broadly interpreted genre and related concerns: landscape, matter, environment; still life, object, real life; nude, action, body; and history, memory, society.
Morris came to the Tate from Bristol's Arnolfini, where she had been working as exhibitions organizer, in 1987. During the '90s she curated the major loan exhibitions "Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55" (1993), and, with Stuart Morgan, "Rites of Passage, Art for the End of the Century" (1995). Since the opening of the Tate's Art Now gallery in 1995, Morris has organized several shows for that space, including those by Miroslaw Balka, Sophie Calle, and Michal Rovner, as well as a display of the results of Mark Dion's extensive Tate Thames Dig.
Morris acknowledges that Tate Modern needs to offer as wide a range of viewing possibilities as it can. As to how the new venue will play, she suggests that, while the suites of galleries are a series of "cooler, white spaces," the building's central hail is much more a "people space" and should help attract audiences to the work itself. She is keen to see the gallery give some thought to developing the building's various subterranean spaces over the next decade. Beyond the completion of her own work on the opening displays, and following her 1998 Luciano Fabro exhibition in the Tate's Duveen Galleries, she is collaborating with Richard Flood of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on major arte povera show scheduled for summer 2001.
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