A radical vision for art will counter a reduced cultural infrastructure

In 2018, a new team of curators joined Barking & Dagenham Council, having worked in learning and civic curatorial teams at public institutions such as Tate and Whitechapel Gallery. With the help of London Borough of Culture funding from the mayor of London, they developed a new curatorial programme in the heart of social care services for adults and children, called New Town Culture.

This embedded way of working led to collaborative relationships between social workers, youth justice workers, artists, and community-based and national arts organisations. Five years later, the programme is rooted in policy for Children’s Care and Support Services, and a vision for a Creative Social Work practice is shared with staff via an MA module created with Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Key milestones in New Town Culture’s development include the Turner Prize-nominated project Rafts by Rory Pilgrim in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery, and the initiation of a public-facing curatorial framework for a new cultural space in Barking town centre, the Women’s Museum, which opened this year on International Women’s Day.

In 2021, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Domestic Abuse Commission highlighted the need for safe spaces in the area, platforming the voices of women, girls, trans and non-binary communities. In a borough where female healthy life expectancy is below the London average, and domestic abuse incidents are the highest in the capital, the Women’s Museum is vitally urgent infrastructure.

Like New Town Culture, the museum will build networks and agency, using art as a central scaffolding for the work. Through an annual programme of exhibitions, events and residencies, New Town Culture will support a dynamic artistic programme informed by the experiences and voices of people living in east London.

This year, the programme reflects on the early female-led communities in Barking Abbey, which was established in 666CE, and imagines parallel communities of women, girls, trans and non-binary communities in 21st-century Barking and Dagenham.  In 2025, a year-long artist commission will invite local communities to define the space for coming together and organising. 

Along the way, local community-based projects and individuals will hold keys to the space, again creating their own iterations of the museum, so that it shifts in meaning and function.

This year, New Town Culture will direct its curatorial focus on youth justice and services for adolescents. Together with young people, workers and artists, this enquiry will create traces in the Women’s Museum – supporting young men as well as young women to be creative in the context 
of the museum.

Why would such a museum happen now, of all times, when local government is so limited in resources? Because coming together creatively against a growing trend of reduced cultural infrastructure and increasingly transactional, pared-back public services is vital. A radical vision for art and alliances across communities and services is exactly what is needed right now.

Marijke Steedman is the senior curator for culture programmes