Hockney highlight as gallery’s curator says farewell
HOSTING THE Turner Prize and the largest nude installation in the UK have been among the highlights of Kirsten Simister’s 17 years in Hull.
The curator of the Ferens Art Gallery is leaving at the end of the year to return to her native Scotland.
The event that really fired the public’s imagination was Sea of Hull, when on a chilly morning in July 2016 3,200 people stripped off and daubed themselves in blue paint in the name of art.
A year later during Hull’s year as City of Culture the Ferens hosted the Turner Prize – won by Lubaina Himid, the oldest winner and first black woman to pick up the art award.
But it was an exhibition from a world- famous artist from much closer to home that stands out for her the most.
In 2011, the Ferens displayed David Hockney’s huge 52- part local landscape painting, Bigger Trees near Warter.
“Hockney drove us to his mother’s house in Bridlington where he then lived, and showed us wide- screen films he’d been making from a barrage of cameras attached to the top of his Land Rover,” she recalled.
“As a workaholic, up with the lark but often tired by the afternoons, we never took it for granted that he would manage the Ferens preview but we’d prepared very carefully, accommodating his preferences for chain- smoking Camel cigarettes and drinking of nonalcoholic lager.” The exhibition proved a “huge hit and catalyst, beginning a step- change for us, growing Ferens audiences and profile locally and beyond, and paving the way for other national partnerships”, she said.
Hull Council leader Steve Brady said she had been an integral part the city’s “remarkable cultural journey”.
Coun Brady added: “I want to thank her for her incredible efforts over the past 17 years, wish her all the best for the future and let her know that Hull will always welcome her back with open arms.”