Working with contemporary art in historic spaces with Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village

Watts was one of the most, if not the most, famous Victorian painter-sculptor of his day. And this gallery was founded in 1904, three months before his death. And so it's really special because it's a single artist gallery, but started by the artists themselves. And that's why this display, Faces of Fame, is really exciting, because it's the largest, most sort of major kind of intervention, so to speak, into the space that we've had, where we show the work by another artist, Simon Frederick's photographs. We wanted to display a main series done by Watts called the Watts Hall of Fame. It started in 1847, with him just starting to take portraits of famous Victorian contemporaries. And it went up until 1901. So it's a project that lasted most of Watts's career. And it was depicting famous Victorians, essentially, his friends, but also sort of important people he felt should be depicted. And it's an enormous series of about 40 portraits. And we thought it might be quite interesting to show these works alongside the work of a contemporary artist. And so I was looking in the National Portrait Gallery collection, because this display is all alone in the National Portrait Gallery. And I found the work by Simon Frederick, Black as New Black. It's a series of also 40 photographic portraits of leading black Britons. So it's essentially a contemporary Hall of Fame. And in that way, it spoke really well to GF Watts's project, that these two artists, over 100 years apart, had had the same idea, the same concept for their work of art. You find out there's a writer and there's a politician, and then we have another person here. I spoke to the Portrait Gallery about how many I thought would work on the wall, how we wanted to put them in pairs, which ones they'd be. Spoke to Simon and said, look, rather than having a whole wall of the Black as New Black portraits and the Watts portraits in a chunk separately, what do you think about mixing them up? And he said he loved the idea of combining the two works in a kind of rhythm across the wall, forcing the contrast. So people do have to walk through and take each face at a time and have thoughts and responses to that. We also really hope that the broader themes of the show will chime with people. The idea of how history reflects the actions of people and how, you know, fame is fickle, there's a rise and fall. Simon's sitters are all contemporary and they're all still living and their lives are still playing out. GF Watts' sitters, many of them were very famous in their day and now, with the kind of hindsight, we can say that some people we wouldn't celebrate today for the things they did or the things they said. And I think it's important to show and talk about and research works like this and not hide them under the carpet, but actually bring them out and say, the Victorians, you know, did things differently then. Let's look into that and look at what we do today and how we can go on in the future. And so the Hall of Fame as a broader concept, I think, should be universal. The partnership with the Portrait Gallery has been a really new and refreshing way of working. It not only gave us access to these really important loans so that we could show the work of GF Watts and also the amazing work of Simon Frederick and bring it to our audiences here in Surrey. I've learned a lot about working with contemporary artists, about working with a national partner. I think from the Watts Gallery, we're really keen now. Now we've done it in this space to do more displays showing contemporary art in the Historic Galleries. Our volunteers, our staff and our audiences have really enjoyed it. We've had so many interesting conversations and there are so many interesting contemporary artists who look to historic art. And I think it could really help us at Watts Gallery in sharing our collections with a wider audience.