30 years of partnership
was the longest serving academician who hung the show. Tere was no planning, or show strategy. ‘I had never understood why the summer show
didn’t have the same professionalism as the loan shows. Te Royal Academy had fallen off a lot of artists’ radars.’ When the RA’s Summer Show team retired, more or less en bloc in 1997, Devaney was appointed Head of Summer Exhibitions. By then, submissions had fallen to about 5,000 works; this was at a time when commercial galleries showing contemporary art were taking off. ‘So the question was: do we reform ourselves? Tis was a great weight of responsibility. I didn’t want to go down in history as the woman who brought the whole thing down,’ explains Devaney. Te key, she thought, was not simply to get a better send-in of art to exhibit, but to radically improve the way the shows were mounted. Tis, she reasoned, would encourage influxes of work by better artists – and tempt more academicians to exhibit. She appointed a database manager to list and process
offered works, and set up a new operation involving a show coordinator and two exhibition managers. Te coordinator ‘shapes’ the 13-room exhibitions; her first, Peter Blake, ‘made the real difference. We also began to invite artists to hang particular rooms. Frank Stella did an installation, and we’ve had another by Jeff Koons in the courtyard.’ Te involvement of Allen Jones, Michael Craig-Martin and Norman Foster have been among her personal highlights. Her team’s workload is considerable – she herself was in Bilbao to install the academy’s travelling Hockney exhibition when preparation for this year’s Summer Show was underway. ‘What we have done over the last 10 years is evolve the summer exhibition so that it becomes more relevant, culturally,’ she says. ‘We try to be all things, with a >>
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