BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
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The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art is an arts centre located on the South Bank of the River Tyne close to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, in Gateshead in the north-east of England.
Dominic Williams of Ellis Williams Architects won an architectural competition in the mid 1990's to convert the redundant 1950's flour mill into an arts centre at a cost of £46 million. BALTIC, which opened in 2002, is now recognised as a major new centre for international contemporary art.
BALTIC has attracted frequent controversy and criticism for its management since before its opening. The project was awarded £32 million from the Arts Council of England's Lottery programme with a variation to the then rules of the award programme that a portion of this would be used for running costs though at the time the Arts Council was insisting publically that new lottery funded capital projects such as BALTIC would not require an increased demand from the taxpayer for revenue funding and would pay their own way. In 1996 the Swede Sune Nordgren was appointed as Director even though he had no prior experience of managing a new building project of this scale. Nordgren's first action was to dismiss most of the team that had been responsible for securing the main funding awards to make BALTIC possible. Prior to the opening of the building Nordgren launched a costly pre-programme of publications and events - most controversially a launch for BALTIC in Venice reputed to cost £150,000. A Deputy Director was appointed in 2001 to attempt to place better financial controls but left after less than a year. In June 2002 BALTIC opened almost a year later than scheduled but with many parts of the building poorly finished.
In February 2003 a critical memo from the Arts Council of England to the board of the BALTIC has leaked to the press. The items included poor management of exhibition budgets, exhorbitant management costs and expenses claims and concern over the low level of income generation from the trading elements of the building. In May 2003 the Head Curator resigned and in late 2003 Nordgren also announced he was leaving for a job in Norway. His replacement Stephen Snoddy on taking over the post publically admitted that work needed to be done to stabalise the organisation. In August 2004 Snoddy was suspended from his post following charges concerning an indecent assault in London and subsequently resigned. [1]