Walsall Art Gallery
| The New Art Gallery Walsall | |
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| General information | |
| Town or city | Walsall |
| Country | England52°35′8.40″N 1°59′9.27″W / 52.5856667°N 1.9859083°WCoordinates: 52°35′8.40″N 1°59′9.27″W / 52.5856667°N 1.9859083°W |
| Construction started | 1995 |
| Completed | 2000 |
| Cost | £21 million |
| Client | Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Caruso St John |
| Structural engineer | Arup |
| Website | |
| www |
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The New Art Gallery Walsall is a modern and contemporary art gallery sited in the centre of the West Midlands town of Walsall, England. It was built with £21 million of public funding, including £15.75 million from the UK National Lottery and additional money from the European Regional Development Fund and City Challenge.
The Gallery is funded by Walsall Council and Arts Council England; this funding is further supplemented by its own income generation. Admission is free. Its first Director was Peter Jenkinson. In May 2005, former BALTIC director Stephen Snoddy was appointed as Director.
Designed by the architects Caruso St John after winning an international design competition, it opened in January 2000, replacing the town's old gallery and an arts centre that had been closed by the Council almost a decade earlier. It was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 5 May 2000, during her visit to the West Midlands. The New Art Gallery's stark building won several architectural awards and attracted over 237,000 visitors in its opening year. In 2000, the gallery was shortlisted for the prestigious Sterling Architecture Prize.
The five-story building is clad in pale terracotta and has a floor area of 5,000 square metres (53,820 sq ft). The interior of the Gallery features a heavy use of concrete and 75mm thick douglas fir wooden cladding. The public square surrounding the building was designed by Richard Wentworth and Catherine Yass.
The Gallery has been seen as an attempt to encourage regeneration in the local area. The architecture has been both praised and criticised, described as "almost flawless" by the RIBA and "extraordinarily good" by Hugh Pearman but also castigated by John Stewart-Young as an "architectural indulgence", an impressive building that lacks consideration of how the wider public will use it. The essayist Theodore Dalrymple described the interior as resembling both "a fascist foreign ministry" and "a sauna of gigantic proportions", and the exterior as "a hybrid of grain silo and secret police headquarters".
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