We continue to work closely with the Victoria and Albert Museum and 21 sculptures from the Tate Collection were lent on a three-year loan to their British Galleries. These include key works such as Frederic Leighton's An Athlete Wrestling with a Python 1877 and works by Frank Dobson, Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill.
As well as refreshing our existing partnerships, we forged a number of significant new collaborations this year. Tate Britain has entered into a partnership with the Museo de Arte de Ponce (MAP), Puerto Rico, which holds a major collection of British art. This arrangement aims to develop long-term relationships between the curatorial departments at both institutions in order to encourage a broader international understanding of the rich collections of nineteenth-century British art at both MAP and Tate Britain.
In March this year we announced that in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami, we had received two major and complex works of art from the Miamibased collectors, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz: No Ghost Just a Shell 1999–2002 by French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, and the installation Zero Hero 2003–5, by the German artist John Bock. This follows successful precedents, including the joint purchase in 2004 with the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Kunstmuseum, Basel of Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio II 2001.
In partnership with others, Tate Britain has continued to work on two dynamic projects aimed at encouraging young people, nationally and internationally, to engage with art. This year was the second phase of Visual Dialogues, a project funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Children, Schools and Families and run in a consortium of five galleries: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Manchester Art Gallery; Sheffield Galleries and Museum Trust; and Tate Britain. The project sees groups of young people work with artists, graphic designers and staff in the galleries to develop and produce interpretation resources and events programmes for other visitors around works of art from the Tate Collection.
The second project, Nahnou-Together, is a partnership programme between Tate Britain and the British Council aiming to develop links between young people in London, Damascus and Amman, as well as the artists and educators working with them. The programme explores each other’s cultures through art. In May 2006 we displayed works created on this programme at Tate Britain and staff from the gallery ran a training programme for arts professionals in Syria and Jordan.
