Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
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Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or mima, is a contemporary art gallery based in the centre of Middlesbrough, England. The gallery was formally launched on Sunday 27 January 2007. It is currently run in a partnership with Teesside University.
The gallery's opening marked the completion of an accumulative journey for the art collection of post-industrial Middlesbrough. The early artistic heritage of a town as young as Middlesbrough rested largely on the success of the Linthorpe Art Pottery (1879–1889), co-launched by Christopher Dresser out of the Sun Brickworks that also built the suburb of Linthorpe. A School of Art opened alongside the Mechanics' Institute in the old town's Durham Street, in 1870, and by the 1950s that, too, had relocated to Linthorpe. The region's cultural profile was further amply boosted by the Cleveland International Drawing Biennale, up until that competition's extinction in the 1990s.
A spot for the town's first art gallery was granted by father of the Mayor, Sir Arthur Dorman, as early as 1904. This was on Linthorpe Road opposite, and conceived in the same spate of events as, what was to become the Dorman Museum outside Albert Park. Funding shortfalls amid the onset of war, however, ensured that only a rest garden was eventually sited there. In the meantime, from 1927, the Carnegie library and Grange Road Methodist Church housed the collection of paintings. Any permanent provision for the pieces did not materialise, however, until 1957, with the purchase by the Council of a former doctor's surgery on Linthorpe Road. It was not until 2003 that this building was vacated.
The former Cleveland Crafts Centre, on Gilkes Street, catered for a collection of twentieth-century British studio ceramics, and artist-made jewellery dating from the 1970s onwards. The Cleveland Crafts Centre was closed as an exhibition venue in January 2003, and thereafter operated as the mima offices whilst the new gallery was being constructed. Its sister institution that lasted until 1999, the Cleveland Gallery, resided nearby in the unused school buildings on Victoria Road. They are today home to the University of Teesside's graduate incubation studios in aid of new business start-ups.
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