Gavin Wade Photo by Gavin Wade

Gavin Wade

Senior Research Fellow

Accepting PhD Students

Calculated based on number of publications stored in Pure and citations from SciVal
20202020

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research and Innovation interests

Gavin Wade is an award winning artist-curator, influential public gallery director and curator of world-class public art, exhibition making, writing, and publishing over the last three decades. Wade is the founding director and artist-curator of the leading artist-run space in the UK, now co-leading the organisation and vision of Eastside Projects and ensuring that it connects to national and international research made by a diverse range of outstanding individuals and groups located in Birmingham and around the world. As an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation in partnership with Birmingham City University Wade has secured funding over £5.4 million since 2008 including the £360,000 awarded to him by Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award for exceptional cultural entrepreneurs.  His major curated exhibition (co-curated with Nigel Prince) ‘In the Midst of Things’, set in Bournville Village in 1999, was heralded as ‘perhaps the most intriguing example of a site-specific project I’ve seen in Britain’ by Alex Farquharson in Frieze magazine.  A selection of Wade’s writings was published as ‘Upcycle This Book’ by Book Works and Stroom den Haag in 2017 and he has curated, edited, and published over 60 publications beginning with his seminal book ‘Curating in the 21st Century’, 2000. Since 1996 Wade has curated well over 100 exhibition projects in sites ranging from museums to Naval Frigates, Cathedrals, Greenham Common and Dudley Zoo, across the UK, USA, Germany, Norway, Austria, Holland, Italy, United Arab Emirates and China. He is seen as a world leading artist-curator and cited within Paul O’Neill’s 2012 MIT publication, ‘The Curating of Culture and the Culture of Curating’, 2012, and Alison Green’s ‘When Artists Curate: Contemporary Art and the Exhibition as Medium’, Reaktion Books, London, 2018.

 

Wade has been honoured with four Post-Doctoral Fellowships and been part of three successful university research submissions. Wade artist-curator practice pioneers new ways for the processes and production of art, supported by research into new art sites, art as support structure, new models for public galleries, the uses of art within urban regeneration contexts, collaborative practices, exploration of architectural and display systems, and performative re-enactment processes.

 

His (co)curated exhibitions include ‘Sahjan Kooner: dankEconogy­_01ALIENVillage’ (2023), Eastside Projects / Kunsthal Gent; ‘Sonia Boyce: In the Castle of My Skin’ (2020), Eastside Projects / MIMA; ‘This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things X’ (2018) Eastside Projects, and ‘Display Show’ (2015–16), Temple Bar Gallery/Eastside Projects/Stroom den Haag.

Wade is currently part of the collaborative team with David Kohn Architects and Eastside Projects co-designing the future Smithfield Market, Birmingham (2027) and working on public art projects ranging from being the commissioning agent for Birmingham Big Art Project, the £2million permanent commission for HS2 Curzon Station, with Susan Philipsz’s ‘Station Clock’; creating the art strategy for HS2 Interchange Station in Solihull to curating Digbeth Art Works – 3 permanent commissions along Digbeth High Street (2024) .

A prolific collaborator, his ongoing collaboration with artist-poet Paul Conneally has produced a new book ‘Is this the way the universe works? (555 Verses / 77 Verses)’ (2023) for Into Nature, Drenthe, Netherlands and published by Set Margins’, Amsterdam as part of his work within Into Nature Biennale, Drenthe (2023). This performative public art practice crosses disciplines of visual art, public art making, performance, spoken word and poetry, and connects to his ongoing series of albums Songs of the Modern World: Vol 1 (2020) Vol 2 (2021) Vol 3 (2024) with New Reality Records, Loughborough. His albums and songs including ‘It’s not Dying, It’s flowering’ (2023) are available on most music platforms.

 

I have been honoured with four Post-Doctoral Fellowships and have been part of three successful university research submissions. I pioneer new ways for the production of art, supported by research into new art sites, art as support structure, new models for public galleries, the uses of art within urban regeneration contexts, collaborative practices, exploration of architectural and display systems, and performative re-enactment processes.

 

Teaching Interests

Gavin supervises PHD students and has run live projects for BA Fine Art and Art and Design students across Digbeth, the Bullring Markets and other locations around Birmingham. He provides key lectures on artist-curator practice and exhibtion making.

Keywords

  • N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
  • curating
  • artist-curating
  • reenactment
  • socially engaged art
  • NB Sculpture
  • display units
  • display structure
  • support structure
  • curatorial artwork
  • NX Arts in general
  • support structure
  • cumulative process
  • NA Architecture
  • public art
  • artist-engineering
  • M Music
  • Rap
  • spoken word
  • electro
  • folk
  • pop
  • PR English literature
  • Poetry
  • Renga
  • Haiku
  • tanrenga

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