On Valentine’s Day Eve 2015, Sir Kostya Novoselov, the Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of graphene, blew on a microscopic sample of graphite taken from a drawing by William Blake, to set off a firework display which returned fragments of a 50,000-year-old iron meteorite to the skies above Whitworth Park. This was Cornelia Parker’s brilliant and spectacularly madcap way of marking the reopening of the Whitworth following a stunning £15 million capital re-development. Audiences were asked to fall in love, and that weekend, nearly 20,000 people swooned through the gallery in the park. Another 440,000 would visit that year as it deservedly basked in widespread acclaim and scooped up the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award along the way.

Almost a decade on, the Whitworth welcomes its new Director, Sook-Kyung Lee. Most recently, she was Senior Curator of International Art at Tate Modern where, alongside work on exhibitions and collection building, she spearheaded the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. That project expanded the Tate’s collections and programmes beyond Western Europe and North America to explore global art history and practice from across the world. Seemingly an ideal fit for a university gallery.

Since that Valentine’s weekend in 2015, the city’s cultural landscape has changed, and the Whitworth might not always be the first thing mentioned when Manchester makes its regular appearances in the cities-you-must-visit-this-year lists. HOME, which opened that same summer, has welcomed over four million visitors, and has won over even the most die-hard of Cornerhouse loyalists. Last year, Manchester Museum reopened after its own stunning refurb, as did The Factory. Just a concept when Novoselov breathed new life into the Whitworth, The Factory is now one of the largest investments in the history of UK culture, flexing its blockbuster muscle last summer with the endlessly Instagrammable Yayoi Kusama retrospective.

Can the Whitworth wrestle back those headlines? “Oh yeah,” says Sook-Kyung without missing a beat. “It’s good news. It’s not about the Whitworth being ‘the best’. Manchester has history, passionate people, and a distinctive culture. I want to see Manchester become even more of a destination for contemporary art, and with all those other things happening, it’s the perfect environment.”

“There’s huge potential, and the city can do even better. We should think about national and international visitors and why they would spend time in our cultural and artistic institutions. Together, as a network, we can make anyone’s visit richer and more worthwhile.”

Sook-Kyung speaks passionately about the city, its potential and some exciting collaborations we won’t reveal here. She knows what an international destination for contemporary art looks like. In addition to her 14 years at Tate curating high-profile exhibitions, she was Commissioner and Curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, and, last year, Artistic Director of the Fourteenth Gwangju Biennale.

With this experience and desire to work with partners across the city to push the cultural offer to new heights, it feels like Manchester’s international ambition has another ace up its sleeve. Sook-Kyung is no stranger to the North either. She talks glowingly about her time at Tate Liverpool and is well aware of the complexity of British culture’s stark geographical differences and sees connecting them through art as a personal and professional passion.

One of the reasons Sook-Kyung says she joined the Whitworth was her familiarity with the great work the gallery has been doing in its own backyard. “I’m a big fan of how the Whitworth is such a community-based and community-centred institution. It’s not elitist, and the education and civic engagement here is truly based in the community in a way that can be superficial in other cities. The university framework is also a unique strength that allows for very innovative and challenging work, that remains rooted in the local community.”

Sook-Kyung recognises the make-up of the wider Oxford Road Corridor community too, identifying its student population as one to engage. “We have a great potential to be the real heart of university life as well as attracting students to the city.”

Photo courtesy the Gwangju Biennale Foundation

She’s not wrong about the gallery’s strong sense of community which is evident throughout its programming. From Afrocats x Whitworth which launched in 2022 to ensure the gallery is a space of sanctuary for refugees and asylum seekers, to the award-winning Still Parents project which created a platform for people to share personal stories and break the wall of silence that continues to surround baby loss. During the Whitworth’s closure in 2014, they even wrote a book on making access easier for older men (‘A Handbook for Cultural Engagement with Older Men’). The gallery also has its own Cultural Park Keeper who curates events and community activities in Whitworth Park, which ensures that none of this good work gets trapped inside the gallery’s stunning floor-to-ceiling windows. If you have ever been to events at the Whitworth, the civic pride is evident in the diverse army of volunteers who give their time and make visitors’ experiences so special.

Beyond the gallery’s backyard, Sook-Kyung is also keen to work closer with the city’s wider artist community. “I would love to explore this more because stories about Manchester should have the perspectives of all its residents.” Indeed, Sook-Kyung wants to put Manchester at the centre of everything the gallery does, but in a challenging way that digs deep into the city’s history.

“I’m interested in putting Manchester on the map in the way that it deserves,” she says, explaining that we cannot ignore how the city benefited from its colonial legacy, but stressing the importance of capturing the radical response from its working class. “The sense of resistance from the ground up and how the people of Manchester actually rejected the ideas of slavery and the exploitation of its own citizens.”

There is a fascinating story here. In 1863, President Lincoln wrote to the ‘working men of Manchester’ thanking them for their anti-slavery stance, saying “I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.” You can find these words inscribed on his statue in Lincoln Square.

“The exploitation of the people of Manchester has a huge resonance with other victims of the colonial past,” says Sook-Kyung. “I’d like to complicate this story so it is more than the empire versus its victims, but also how individuals can make a difference in this larger historical framework. I’d love to put this history through our collection and get the response of contemporary artists from across the world, with a sense of solidarity and understanding. Very individualised narratives that come from artists and artistic practice.”

“It will be Manchester stories. At the centre of things will be Manchester and its people, on a global platform.”

We won’t see the Director’s impact on the exhibition programme until 2025, but the Whitworth has announced an exciting programme for 2024 which includes the first major retrospective exhibition of Caribbean British artist and poet John Lyons. In the autumn, their programme will lead with the first-ever survey exhibition and new commission by Turner Prize nominee Barbara Walker. There will also be a new moving image acquisition by Ayo Akingbade and a collection display of post-war textiles by Shirley Craven.

Where we will start to see a more immediate difference is the approach to how the Whitworth uses its collection. And what a collection it is. Made up of more than 60,000 works of art, including renowned textiles and wallpaper collections, it is home to group works from Degas, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Gauguin, Picasso, Hepworth, and Moore. They hold major works by Bacon, Freud, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, and Steve McQueen. These are just some of the household names from the modern and contemporary collections. If you go further back, there are major works by Thomas Gainsborough, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, William Blake, and one of the most important collections of watercolours outside London by J.M.W. Turner.

The scope of this vast collection was another major factor in attracting Sook-Kyung to the gallery and she’s keen to explore it with her curators and “re-interpret the collection so that certain underrepresented works can surface alongside the very famous and well-loved.”

Collaboration, re-invention of its collection, international ambition, and Manchester at the centre of it all—the future of the gallery in the park sounds exciting under Sook-Kyung, even without the meteor-infused fireworks.