August 19, 2006
Iwona Blazwick's plans for the expanded Whitechapel
In the course of a long profile in The Guardian, Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick describes some of the initiatives the gallery will undertake during its yearlong renovation and what kinds of rooms the gallery will have upon its reopening:
She intends for the huge central reading room in the library to be given over to a single artist and a single piece of work for a year at a time. "Among all the hurly-burly of the East End and the hyperactive London art world, I always wanted to create a quiet counterpoint and place you can come back to time after time. This is perfect for it."[ . . . ]
While the gallery spaces will be closed for the whole of 2007, there will be a series of newly commissioned work displayed around the ongoing development of Spitalfields market. And during the redevelopment, all the community and education programmes will continue, as will late-night poetry in the café and events in the auditorium. "And when we reopen we'll be using a newly discovered 'secret gallery'; we'll be able to show work from private collections and from artists' own collections—there has always been a fascinating exchange economy between artists - as well as having space for an archive gallery, which will draw on the extraordinary history of this place. The East End art boom of the past 20 years has been a remarkable thing to behold. But the spiritual home is not White Cube, it is the Whitechapel, and we will be reasserting ourselves."