# Norwich Gallery

Norwich Gallery was a contemporary art gallery located inside Norwich University of the Arts in the county of Norfolk, UK. Known initially as the Norwich School of Art Gallery, it opened in the art school's Gunton Building in 1973 where it remained until its closure in 2007. The gallery's first curator, David Jolley, was appointed from the Whitworth Art Gallery at the University of Manchester and remained in post until 1979. In 1980 Lynda Morris was appointed curator and changed the name to simply Norwich Gallery.
Under the direction of Jolley the gallery programme hosted occasional exhibitions by contemporary artists, folk artists and designers from the region. When Morris became curator she initiated a monthly programme of exhibitions that was national and international in scope. The first decade under Morris spans a range of British and European modernist art, from interwar English figurative painting to regional expanded cinema, performance and conceptual art. Beginning in 1991, the open-submission exhibition EASTinternational occurred in Norwich Gallery and the surrounding art school buildings.
Operated by the art school, Norwich Gallery was primarily funded by the regional arts board and the Arts Council. As the flagship venue for contemporary art in East Anglia, it developed an international reputation for informed, critical exhibitions, projects and commissions. Morris developed touring exhibitions in-house that travelled to partner institutions such as Arnolfini, Bristol, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Publishing was particularly important to Morris: as well as exhibition catalogues, beginning in 1994 a "dispatch" publication – typically a simple fold-down pamphlet that could be posted out to the gallery mailing list – was produced to accompany each exhibition.

## Lynda Morris

The Norwich Gallery programme was characterised by Morris' enduring interests in figurative painting, emigre and diasporic arts, political art and conceptual art. It was the latter which became central to the programme throughout the nineties as a new generation of contemporary artists looked back to the first generation conceptualism.

## Curating Traineeship

Under Lynda Morris, beginning in 1985, Norwich Gallery hosted two-year curator traineeships funded by the Arts Council. Previous trainees include Rebecca Weaver (1985), Trevor Burgess (1989), Josephine Lanyon (1992), Anthony Lumley (1995) and Kirsty Ogg (1996). After Ogg's traineeship, trainees became known as "assistant curators". These include: Catherine Moseley (1998), Michelle Cotton (2001), Andrew Hunt (2003), Dan Tombs (2005) and Kaavous Clayton (2007).

## Notable Exhibitions and Shows

The Norwich School of Art Gallery opened in the Gunton Building in October 1973 with a posthumous survey of tutor Leslie ‘Dav’ Davenport, who died the same year. Notable exhibitions include George Skipper: Architect Exuberant (1975), Colin Self: Scottish Watercolours (1975), Recent Work: Alexander Rodchenko (1976) and Paintings and Drawings by Robert Colquhon 1914–1962 (1978).
Lynda Morris curated or assisted on 142 solo and group exhibitions at Norwich Gallery from 1980–2007. Opening on 19 April 1980, the first exhibition of her programme was Dick James: Paintings on Paper. The last, opening on 26 April 2007, was Nedko Solakov A Life (Black & White), a performance which saw two painters, one with white paint and one with black, overpainting one another's work in a clockwise motion around the gallery.
In 2004, Lynda Morris assisted Norwich Gallery invigilators and graduates of Norwich University of the Arts to write an Arts Council application to establish the artist-led gallery OUTPOST. OUTPOST continues to present an exhibition programme of emerging contemporary artists in the city of Norwich.

## dispatch

Beginning in 1994, marking the opening of the exhibition Norwich Contemporaries selected by Jane Becket and David Tremlett, Morris initiated the "dispatch" publication. A simple fold-down pamphlet that could be posted out to the gallery mailing list, it functioned as an invitation, programme and could be unfolded as a poster. Throughout the years the design varied according to exhibition but always maintained its A4 size. Designed by the student Mark Farnham, it was based on the "bulletins" of “art & project” space in Slootdorp, Netherlands which were sent out to the mailing list from 1968–1989. When Norwich Gallery closed in 2007, Morris produced a "dispatch of dispatches" publication that gathered an inventory of all "dispatches".