Our Impact

During 2023-24, Arts Centre Washington delivered a varied programme of community art classes and groups, exhibitions, live performance and film screenings, welcoming more than 168,000 visitors.

Our gallery programme included Another Place: Another Space – artist Ken Ellison Lockwood’s collaboration with the Lighthouse View Artist Collective – and Peter McAdam’s multi-media exhibition Trout Memo. Our community exhibition programme presented Sangini’s Amra-shobai- aikhaney (We-are-here), Sunderland Indie’s Gaslit and Washington Open 2023: Spotlight (see p.15).

Arts Centre Washington continued to bang the drum for theatre in the city with a wide variety of performances that reflect the age and diversity of its communities. Highlights included Journal Culture Award Winner Penguin, a piece of autobiographical theatre performed by disabled artist and Syrian refugee Hamzeh Al Husseim and produced by Curious Monkey Theatre Company. A welcome return by Red Ladder Theatre Company with the musical We’re Not Going Back reflecting women’s lives during the 1984 miners’ strike and old favourites Wrongsemble who kept our younger audiences delighted with The Not So Grimm Twins and A Town Called Christmas.

Through a partnership with Film Hub North we have been able to grow our film programme. As well as being a host venue for the 2023 Sunderland Shorts Film Festival, the centre presented a new look programme including Heritage Reels – archive and documentary films accompanied by talks, Film and Fun – family friendly movies with an art activity, Picture House – dementia friendly screenings, and Sunderland Film Club – independent documentary films and matinee screenings. The new programme enabled us to increase our screenings five-fold from January to March 2024.

The centre continues to grow its engagement programme to cater for a variety of needs and interests with new groups including Music on Mind – songwriting and music production for adults, Washington Writers group and drawing courses.

In July, our Creative Age group for people with dementia, their carers and those with long term health conditions, presented their own exhibition (see p14) and sold items at our Christmas Craft Fair, raising vital funds which were reinvested into the group. The exhibition was extremely popular, resulting in another regular group being established.

For young people, Creative You offered a variety of regular group events and workshops for those aged 11+ in Washington. During the summer, young people helped to organise a takeover of Washington Old Hall for the Creative You Summer Festival, featuring a programme of free workshops and live music from Right Track, Sunderland Music Hub and Art Centre Washington’s young musicians project, alongside other young musicians from across the city, all celebrating the talented young people who take part in Creative You. We were delighted and proud to see our brilliant Washington Young Film Makers group awarded a Tyne and Wear High Sheriff Award for services to the community.

In February we hosted our biggest Bright Lights Youth Arts Festival to date (see p.15). This year, for the first time, a Bright Lights Fringe Festival was held at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, which saw hundreds of people visit the exhibition, 94 young people take part in workshops and 236 people attending performances.

In 2023, National Glass Centre celebrated the opening of Confluence, an exhibition that explored the relationship between the mediums of ceramics and glass. Co-curated by Julia Stephenson, Andrew Livingston and Greg Parsons and featuring the extraordinary Dutch artist Bouke de Vries, NGC European Glass Prize second prize winner Andrea Walsh and University of Sunderland’s Professor Andrew Livingstone, the exhibition showcased the commonalities and differences between these two mediums as well as their confluence – the point at which the two materials intersect.

Supported by the expertise and specialist equipment at the Glass and Ceramics department based in National Glass Centre, the three artists were invited to extend their creative practices into glass, presenting works developed during a ten-day residency. National Glass Centre has acquired one piece of work, commissioned for the exhibition by each artist, for its permanent collection.

Works from the National Glass Centre’s permanent collection were proudly presented in the exhibition Glass World in October. In recent years, National Glass Centre has developed a permanent collection of international Studio Glass that includes work by artists from or based in thirty different countries, from Sweden to New Zealand and the United States to Japan. Glass World presented a wide selection of works from this collection and created a unique opportunity to celebrate the international reach of National Glass Centre.

A selection of works from the Bernard Lloyd Collection were displayed at National Glass Centre for the first time in 2023. The collection, which consists of over 300 works, includes works by leading national and international artists working in glass including Colin Reid, Rachel Woodman, Tessa Clegg, Dale Chihuly, Pino Signoretto and Harvey Littleton.

National Glass Centre’s Learning and Engagement Team continued to develop a creative programme of activities for all ages and budgets featuring action-packed family workshops and free family trails. A new series of evening workshops were introduced, including informal Drink & Draw still life classes and six-week ceramics courses, both of which proved extremely popular.

The school and education programme saw increased engagement with the addition of a new sculpture workshop and the successful establishment of a new audience from the home educated community – bringing new learners and children to the building.

A collaborative project funded by the Local Cultural Education Partnership, InspirED, saw the Learning Team undertake an action research project with Usworth Colliery Primary School. The project explored the connection between science and art, working with the school’s science and art leads, pupils, artists and scientists, aiming to bridge the relationship between art and science through a series of play and exploration workshops. The project will culminate in a new school STEAM workshop, set to launch in 2024.

May 2023 saw the first survey exhibition of renowned British artist Fiona Crisp, Weighting Time, which presented 30 years of Crisp’s large-scale photography and film installations exploring connection to spaces and ideas beyond our own lived experience.

The exhibition was held in partnership with Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, presenting a major exhibition across both NGCA’s Main Gallery and the Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery. Additionally, a striking new 4x5m public artwork banner, specially commissioned for the exhibition, was displayed in Mowbray Park.

With shared audiences across the two venues, Weighting Time attracted new visitors, both local and national, to experience Fiona Crisp’s artwork. A wide range of learning and engagement opportunities accompanied the exhibition including artist talks, tours, in-venue audio guides, trails and family and school workshops. Also as part of the exhibition, nine students and staff from the University of Sunderland’s Fine Art and Photography departments were invited to present their own artwork exploring the exhibition themes, which were displayed on a digital screen and two illuminated lightboxes. Throughout the programme 3,000 printed in-venue activity sheets and 2,000 exhibition guides were used by visitors in dedicated activity spaces throughout the NGCA gallery, National Glass Centre and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens.

In the Collection Space, NGCA presented a new digital work by leading American artist and pioneer in the field of new media art, Cory Arcangel, which explored the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies.

During 2023-24, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens hosted a varied and exciting exhibition programme featuring national treasures and world- class photography.

A series of partnerships and alliances allowed us to explore a range of themes relating to and highlighting the venue’s own collections. As part of a partnership with the British Museum, from February – June 2023 the Museum proudly hosted the Gathering light: a Bronze Age golden sun exhibition which featured the Shropshire sun pendant, one of the most significant Bronze Age objects ever discovered. Alongside this and other treasures from the British Museum, the exhibition was a fantastic opportunity to showcase some of the Museum’s own Bronze Age collection.

To accompany the exhibition, community groups from Friends of the Drop In, International Community Organisation of Sunderland, the African and Caribbean Community Association North-East and Young Asian Voices, took part in a Sun Cultures community project exploring the role of the sun in different cultures through artist-led workshops.

In April, the Museum joined forces with Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art to present Weighting Time, the first survey exhibition by renowned British artist Fiona Crisp. Exhibited across both venues, the show featured 30 years of Crisp’s large-scale photography and installations.

Another highlight was Elmer and Friends: the Colourful World of David McKee, devised by Seven Stories in Newcastle. Popular with children and adults alike, the exhibition featured original watercolour illustrations by the well-known children’s author alongside interactive games and puzzles, cosy reading areas and dressing-up clothes.

Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens partnered with the Natural History Museum to bring Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the most prestigious photography exhibition of its kind, to Sunderland in February 2024. The free exhibition was incredibly well received and had over 85,000 visitors in four months. Many of the themes in the images provided a fantastic launch pad for exploring climate change and other global issues and enabled links with the Museum’s own natural science collections.

To accompany the exhibition, over February half term the Learning Team hosted a series of fringe events as part of Arts Centre Washington’s Bright Lights Youth Arts Festival including an exhibition of young people’s own wildlife and landscape photographs on display in the Museum’s Art Lounge.

From fused glass to creative writing, filmmaking to pottery; the range of creative activities for people to enjoy across the Sunderland Culture programmes last year was astounding, and it is thrilling that over 20,000 people got involved.

There were so many highlights in programmes that spanned over 3000 years of history and travelled across 6 continents: from an exquisite Bronze Age sun pendant in the British Museum’s Gathering Light exhibition at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, to the exceptional international artistry displayed in Glass World at National Glass Centre.

We were delighted to welcome almost 600,000 people to see the exhibitions, performances and events across the venues. Equally, we were proud to see so many activities taking place in surprising spaces across the city, for example Chad McCail’s fantastic mural at Millfield Metro Station developed with Nexus, Young Asian Voices and Pallion Action Group.

As ever, we were very lucky to work with inspiring cultural and community organisations from Sunderland and beyond. This year, in particular, it was wonderful to work again with Arts Council Collection to bring Mike Nelson’s Taylor to NGCA, as well as being part of the National Theatre’s epically ambitious retelling of The Odyssey, which saw performers from Sunderland joining a cast of hundreds from across the Nation in two unforgettable performances at the National Theatre in August.

And while National Glass Centre sadly suffered significant storm damage in October which resulted in the ongoing closure of the front of the building, it was heartening to see Sunderland’s proud glass pedigree celebrated so prominently in the centre of London through the Glass Heart exhibition at Two Temple Place.

Closer to home, I am really proud that this year Sunderland Culture, joined other city partners and became an accredited Real Living Wage Employer to champion fairer pay within the city.

As always, all of this is made possible by the commitment and dedication of our Board, the hard work of our wonderful teams and the generous support of our partners and funders. And this year, I wanted to say an extra special thank you to the 224 individuals and businesses who generously supported our Big Give campaign.