Trustees continue to be very proud of the broad range of activities undertaken by Tate to engage a wide audience with our programmes at the galleries, at other venues, online and in print. At the heart of this endeavour is an ambition to communicate serious ideas accessibly, a goal which was given a tremendous boost by the award of academic analogue status by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This gives Tate, along with universities and other analogues, an opportunity to compete for government research funding. Trustees are keen to ensure that Tate do all it can to increase the extent, depth and standing of its research programme to provide a foundation for all of the galleries’ public programmes.
During the period 2004–6, each gallery conceived and implemented exhibitions of extraordinary popular and critical success. At Tate Britain, visitor figures reached 1.7 million in 2005, in part due to the success of Turner Whistler Monet, but also because of the sustained effort in building the awareness of the Collection displays there. At Tate Liverpool, Summer of Love signalled the gallery’s growing ambition and its determination to rise to the challenge of playing a central part in Liverpool’s year as Capital of Culture in 2008. In St Ives, an exhibition devoted to the work of Turner in the south-west of England proved a popular complement to the programme, while at Tate Modern, the Unilever Series for the Turbine Hall continued to go from strength to strength with presentations of the work of Bruce Nauman and Rachel Whiteread.
A number of landmark partnership projects pointed to the seriousness of Tate’s ambition to improve the diversity of its offer and build new audiences. An extraordinary collaboration with Kids Company, Shrinking Childhoods, drew audiences throughout the winter of 2005 and a new programme at Tate Britain targeting pre-school children and their families won a Sure Start National award for Enabling Children’s Learning. i-Map, Tate’s website for the visually impaired, was updated with six new works and won a JODI award for web accessibility. Trustees were pleased to contribute to two major pieces of policy development – a Tate-wide Interpretation and Education Strategy and a Diversity Strategy – and hope that these will provide a framework within which future projects can be developed.
