Tate Modern team visits National Art Gallery

hardly five months after the National Gallery of Zimbabwe curator Raphael Chikukwa’s visit to London in October 2010 for the first Curating in Africa Symposium at the Tate Modern.
This occasion did not only provide our own curator with an opportunity to speak there but was a catalyst for networking with international museums.
From Tate Modern came curator Kerryn Greenberg and conservator Rachel Barker.
Their visit provided an opportunity for museum professionals, curators, art students, archaeologists and conservators to learn more about new conservation methods and curatorship at a two-day workshop held at the National Gallery.
It was informatively emphasised that a gallery and a museum are one and the same only varying that one hosts fine arts and the other accommodates ethnographic and historical artifacts for preservation.
However, they cited that a gallery is commercially driven, engaging with it a market, whereas a museum keeps works for future collections.
The Tate Modern is one of the most prestigious contemporary art museums in the world housing a wide ranging collection of paintings that spans five centuries and is viewed by more or less 7,5 million people a year.
The Tate has the responsibility for the national collections of British Painting and Twentieth Century Art. Furthermore, major painters of the British School in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe are included in the collections of both the Tate and the National Gallery in Britain.
The Modern works consist of paintings, sculptures and other work by artists born in or after 1880 and of foreign painting and sculpture dating from about 1875.
The Tate Liverpool, at the Albert Dock in Liverpool presents a series of displays drawn from the collection, lasting for a period of a few months to three years, providing a substantial exhibition programme which draws on the Collection and loans from other institutions.
The Tate St Ives, in Cornwall shows changing groups of twentieth century art.
The Tate Modern Conservation Department alone has a staff of 50 members that include researchers, conservators, conservation scientists and managers.
The department also does technical examination and analysis, collection care, research, exhibitions, displays and loans of works and last year it loaned 1 200 works to international galleries.
In the paintings conservation some works of art are made with materials and techniques that include oil paint, canvas, panel, hardboard, egg temper, beeswax, gold leaf amongst others.
Tate Modern team also visited the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo.
This new partnership also provided an opportunity for the two institutions, National Gallery of Zimbabwe and Tate Modern to learn from each other and how they can collaborate in future projects in both Conservation and Curatorship.
After this visit, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Conservation officer Lillian Chaonwa traveled to London where she will be exposed to the Tate Modern collection, Tate Britain, the British Museum and see the world’s most largest collection. She will see their cataloguing system and how they conserve their collections.
The National Gallery of Zimbabwe will be recognised as a learning institute through this great network. The new relationship with the Tate Modern is a giant step and it will benefit both our institutions and our contemporary art communities.