Today the University of Dundee’s art and design collections number over 9000 works. Yet that has been built up under significant pressures. Throughout the past 30 years the University has only ever employed one member of staff to manage the entire service and we have an annual acquisition budget of £0. That makes what we’ve been able to achieve with the collections over the course of those 30 years all the more impressive.

Although the University’s museum service began in 1994, we had been acquiring artworks and artefacts since we first opened as University College Dundee in 1883. At the opening ceremony, a portrait of the College’s principal benefactor, Mary Ann Baxter, was presented, becoming the first artwork to enter the collection. This etching by local artist CGL Phillips shows the original College buildings, later demolished to make way for the University Tower.

Only a handful of works were acquired prior to the 1950s, when a former student, James Nicoll, gave a substantial collection of pictures, mostly 19th century Scottish and English works. Nicoll had worked as a doctor in London and during the 1920s and 30s he bought numerous works from Christie’s and other sales.

Nicoll’s bequest was followed in 1960 by the donation of £1000 from another former student, James Lamb, to set up a Fine Art Purchasing Fund. When the Tower Building was opened in 1961, a gallery space was created on a mezzanine floor overlooking the foyer to display highlights from this growing collection. This was named the Lamb Gallery and is still our main exhibition space today.

Lamb’s gift enabled the University to build up an outstanding collection of significant works of Scottish art over the next 15 years (at which point the money ran out!). However, nothing was done towards formalising any of this activity as part of a public museum service until the late 1980s, when the Scottish Museums Council commissioned Laura Drysdale to undertake a survey of all University collections in Scotland. Her report, A World of Learning, was published in 1990. Encouraged by its findings, the University commissioned its own report in 1992 from Dr Frank Atkinson to investigate the state of the various collections held by the University and make recommendations as to their care and display.

The result of these reports was a system of honorary departmental curators under the guidance of a full time Curatorial Officer. Ruth Neave took up this position in 1994, thanks initially to funding from the Scottish Museums Council. The post was later renewed by the University as Curator of Museum Collections.

None of this would have happened had we not been fortunate at that time in having, in Michael Hamlin, a Principal who really cared about the collections and realised their importance. Michael’s wife Augusta was also an art lover and did a lot to promote the art collections and exhibitions around the campus.

During her seven years in the role, Ruth faced the challenging task of tracking down the various collections (which included not just art but scientific instruments, zoological and botanical specimens, medical equipment, furniture and textiles) and organising their storage, conservation, documentation and ultimately exhibition. At that time the art collection only numbered about 200 pieces, including this gorgeous early work by the Dundee Celtic Revival painter John Duncan, believed to have been gifted by the University’s first Professor of Botany, Patrick Geddes, who worked with Duncan on several projects in the 1890s.

Much of the expansion of the collection has been thanks to the city’s art college, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD for short), which became part of the University in 1994. The College had been founded back in 1888 but had expanded rapidly since the 1950s and by the time of the merger, it was not only the largest art college in Scotland, but was also formally recognised as the best for its innovative practice-based research. The College had been acquiring student work (mostly in Drawing & Painting) from its annual exhibitions since the 1950s, giving Ruth an additional one thousand or so works to catalogue.

In 2000, another Art College lecturer, the influential and much-loved Alan Woods, tragically died at the age of just 43, and left his art collection to the University. This comprised nearly 300 artworks, including pieces by his students, fellow staff (such as Jim Pattison, seen here), artist friends and those he had published on, such as David Armitage and Ralph Rumney.

The College’s own collection, meanwhile, was continuing to grow. But after decades of simply helping themselves to student work at the end-of-year shows, the decision was taken in 2000 to start paying students for their work, which we’ve done so at Degree Shows ever since. Since the budget that DJCAD has to do this has always been extremely small, this inevitably led to a considerable reduction in the amount of artworks received each year, but it did at least prevent the acquisition of further enormously large paintings, which the College had managed to get an awful lot of in the 1990s!

DJCAD was behind another significant initiative at this time that would give rise to two important collections. In 1999 the Visual Research Centre was established at the new Dundee Contemporary Arts centre, providing facilities for the College’s growing number of researchers. As part of this, a Centre for Artists’ Books was launched, with book artist Alec Finlay employed as Curator. It was the first combined collection and exhibition space in Scotland dedicated to artists’ books, though the exhibition programme only lasted a few years before funding ran out. But the collection (now comprising almost 1500 works) became part of the Museum Collections in 2009 and is now recognised as one of the leading artist book collections in Scotland.

The VRC also boasted a printmaking facility for researchers, run by Paul Harrison, who retained a copy of almost every print made there over the 19 years before the VRC closed in 2018. This has developed into a collection of over 300 prints including work by Fiona Banner, Martin Boyce, Richard Demarco, Jim Pattison and Elaine Shemilt as well as group projects such as the prints for the Great Book of Gaelic in 2002.

Accompanying this steady growth of the collections was a significant increase in its public display. At the time that I took over from Ruth as Curator in 2001, the Lamb Gallery was being run by the Exhibitions Dept at DJCAD who only allowed us one or two slots a year for collections-based shows. A new gallery wall added to the Tower Foyer later that year gave us for the first time a dedicated exhibition venue that we had full control over. This popular favourite was included in the opening show.

As well as trying to raise the profile of our own exhibition spaces in the University, one of my priorities was to get the collections seen outwith Dundee, starting in 2003 with a show at Perth Museum & Art Gallery, An Atmosphere of Culture. This Sandy Guy painting was the main poster image. This show was later followed by exhibitions in various other galleries around Scotland, including the Scottish Fisheries Museum, St Andrews Museum and Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery.

As research is – or should be – an important part of any University museum, I was also keen to shine a light on significant Dundee artists that were then overlooked, through both exhibitions and publications. These started with a major retrospective of David Foggie in 2004 and have since taken in many other artists including Stewart Carmichael, Joseph Lee, Moira Macgregor, Alec Muir, Marion Stewart and Robert Leishman.

One particularly important focus for us has been on the city’s comics heritage. In 2007 (by which time we had taken over control of the Lamb Gallery), we began staging comics exhibitions and started building a collection of original comics art with the support of Chris Murray, the University’s Professor of Comics. This collection is the only one of its kind in any museum in Scotland and currently numbers almost 500 pieces. Since comics art is not currently included on Art UK, here’s a comics-inspired painting from our collection by Alan Robb.

Another important area of collecting took off in 2011 thanks to the award of an Art Fund RENEW grant, one of only six awarded to museums in the UK to build capsule collections on a chosen theme. In 2010 we had celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of our first Professor of Biology, D’Arcy Thompson, with (among other things) an exhibition showcasing his significant influence in modern and contemporary art. This became the theme for our RENEW project enabling us to acquire works by artists such as Henry Moore, Richard Hamilton, Wilhelmina Barns Graham and Peter Randall-Page, among many others. This collection has since been widely exhibited, including at Edinburgh City Art Centre and the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.

As our public profile has grown, so too has the number of offers of donations and bequests. In 2017 we received a significant collection of work by Dundee-born artist and designer Moira Macgregor, best known for her fashion illustrations for Biba and others in the 1960s. In 2019, DJCAD received the entire archive and collection of the internationally renowned performance artist and Dundee graduate Alastair MacLennan. And in 2023 we were gifted a large collection of drawings and designs by Nell Baxter, the Dundee-born artist who worked with John Duncan on his various Celtic revival projects for Patrick Geddes and was later a key member of the Dundee arts and crafts scene at the turn of the century.

Lastly, it’s important to mention that since 2020 we have, like many other museums, been taking steps to diversify our collections and exhibitions, aiming to redress past inequalities through, for example, acquisitions of work by important Black artists; holding a variety of events based on the collections for LGBT+ History Month; and staging co-curated exhibitions on themes of equality and diversity.

We’ve achieved a lot in the last 30 years, despite a steadily dwindling budget and an ever-increasing workload. What will the next 30 years bring? Keep visiting the University of Dundee to find out!