In 2023, Sue Clive was awarded a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her achievements as part of that year’s Marsh Awards. Engage commissioned a piece about Sue’s contribution to gallery education from Dr Emily Pringle. A full list of the tributes we have collated in her memory have been published as an article.
You can read more about Sue’s influence in the pioneering of gallery education here.
Tribute to Sue Clive – Emily Pringle
[Gallery education] … aims to work with a full range of existing and potential audiences in interpreting art. Working from within, it draws the gallery’s attention to the experience and knowledge of the visitor. It builds on the visitor’s own knowledge to enable them to engage with, and gain understanding and possibly enjoyment of, particular works of art. While respecting the practice of art and the individual work of art, it encourages a critical response from the viewer.
Extract from ‘Art with People’, by Sue Clive and Felicity Allen, the Artist’s Handbook, 1995.
This quotation comes from a 1995 text co-authored by Sue Clive and Felicity Allen that was published in the Artist’s Handbook publication ‘Art with People’. Reading it in 2024 it is noticeable how accurately it describes the principles of the practice they refer to as ‘gallery education’ and how enduring those principles are. Gallery education, as Sue Clive and Felicity Allen rightly observe in their opening paragraphs, was in 1995 a ‘new profession’, although specialist research and education provision for schools had been more or less a core activity in art museums since their foundation in the 19th century in the UK. However, gallery education as described here, with its focus on engaging potential audiences, with its criticality and its association with art practice was distinct from existing museum education. It was and remains a rich and innovative practice and one that Sue Clive was instrumental in creating.
Sue began working in education in galleries in the 1980s. She came to this work having studied stage design at Central School of Art in the 1950s. She subsequently completed a four-year Bachelor of Education and then an MA in Art Education at Manchester Polytechnic. During this period Sue also taught in various schools in Gloucester before becoming Head of Art in a boys’ grammar school near Manchester. Her interest in exploring how contemporary arts education could benefit young people was already evident. As Sue herself said, ‘in my teaching I used images to stimulate creative writing and realised how much students got out of looking at art, and so in art courses I started taking them to museums and galleries, which was quite unusual at the time.’ Likewise, Sue’s commitment to researching and theorising the practice was also apparent in her choice of MA dissertation subject; How children come into contact with contemporary art/artists.
Sue brought this extraordinary wealth of expertise to the work she went on to do in the early 1980s, initially touring and running workshops in galleries with the Arts Council England Big Prints exhibition and then in various freelance roles working with schools and other groups and galleries. In the mid-1980s she was appointed as the first Education Officer at Cornerhouse, Manchester with a brief to set up and run the education programme, as well as continuing to do freelance work in other venues all over the country. Sue’s other notable achievements include running a one-year pilot education project at the Hayward Gallery in 1988, being instrumental in the establishment of NAGE (subsequently Engage) — the National Association for Gallery Education, acting as a Trustee of the Arnolfini and art organisation Magic Me, whilst informally supporting and mentoring many younger colleagues well into her supposed ‘retirement’.
This very short summary of Sue’s career does not do justice to the quality of her work or the breadth of her influence on gallery education as a profession. But in many ways, Sue’s trajectory illuminates how and why gallery education has taken shape in the way it has, with its roots in a specific cultural moment in the 1970s and early 1980s. By the 1970s there was growing disquiet amongst artists and policymaker regarding museums and galleries’ apparent exclusivity and lack of engagement with the wider public. At the same time, the growing community arts movement was drawing attention to the importance of enabling creativity and cultural development beyond the bastions of high art. There were, therefore, two powerful agendas at work: one being the drive to widen accessibility to art (i.e. to democratise culture); the other to support more diverse forms of culture and creativity to be acknowledged and valued (i.e. cultural democracy).
The Arts Council of England responded by creating its first Education Officer in 1979, and in 1984 began funding new gallery education posts in municipal galleries. At the same time, museums and galleries were independently creating their own education departments and programmes that embodied the principles outlined in the quote at the start of this essay. Consequently, gallery education as developed and practised by Sue and others at that time sought to both democratise culture and enable cultural democracy. It involved work both inside galleries and outreach projects, often in collaboration with community organisations. Whilst on a micro-level, projects aimed to support visitors to make connections with and develop understandings of the art on display, through processes of artist-led collaborative teaching and learning that built on the learners’ own experiences and knowledge.
The focus on practising artists as workshop leaders has remained one of the defining characteristics of gallery education, and it is an aspect of the practice that Sue championed. Whilst she was Head of Art in the boys school near Manchester, she hosted the first two artists-in-schools in the north west, and she went on to work with contemporary artists throughout her career in and with galleries. Artists working in gallery education then and now occupy multiple roles including teacher, learner, role model, entertainer and craftsperson. At the same time artistic practice, with its hands-on, immersive yet open-ended, experimental, critical and reflexive qualities, offers up a pedagogic model that allows space for visitors to learn. With her experience as a teacher and training in and passion for art, Sue was exceptionally well placed to recognise and utilise these beneficial elements. She worked not just with visual art and artists in the gallery but was also pioneering in the use of drama and movement in gallery workshops.
As with others whose influence is deep and long-lasting, it is perhaps easy to forget how groundbreaking Sue’s work was at the time. Nonetheless, it is a testament not only to Sue’s creativity, thoughtfulness and hard work that the principles of gallery education that she was instrumental in formalising remain at the heart of gallery education practice today. Equally important was Sue’s rigour combined with deep empathy and generosity, all of which are equally important and enduring gallery education values. Sue recognised that if gallery education was to be taken seriously as a profession, those practising it needed to maintain the highest intellectual and creative standards. She herself embodied those standards and provided an exceptional role model for gallery educators to follow. The profession of gallery education and the wider cultural and education sectors owe her a great debt.