Cooper Gallery

Cooper Gallery is a distinctive platform in Scotland for challenging practices and critical discourse in contemporary art, design and culture.

Cooper Gallery

Designed in 1953 by architect James Wallace, this is a unique space for exhibitions and events with its dark polished hardwood floor and the curved corners of the gallery walls.

Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee is internationally recognised as a distinctive platform in Scotland for its radical curatorial research, international approach and focus on critical discourse in contemporary art and culture.

Cooper Gallery’s experimental and transdisciplinary approach to programming utilises exhibition-making as a collaborative process of knowledge exchange and production. At the heart of this dialogue is a sustained critical engagement, between multiple contexts, practices and discourses, which navigates the efficacy and necessity of equality, diversity and inclusion. This is exemplified in the gallery’s highly regarded public programme of 12 Hour symposia: 12 Hour Jamming Symposium (2014), 12 Hour Action Group (2016) and 12 Hour Non-State Parade (2019).

Inherently transdisciplinary Cooper Gallery operates an integrated programme that transforms exhibitions into models of creative and critical enquiry supportive of artistic production and audience engagement. Encompassing new commissions, exhibitions, off-site projects, public engagement events, artists’ and writers’ residencies and publishing, Cooper Gallery’s curatorial approach grounded in discursive, experimental and participatory strategies, sustains an environment for significant and emerging artists to conceive and produce risk-taking ambitious projects. This had included amongst others:

Through expanding exhibitions into a discursive public realm, Cooper Gallery explores the full breadth of the creative, social and educational impacts of contemporary arts practice.

Plus Tate member

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Cooper Gallery is a member of Plus Tate, a network of leading visual art organisations across the UK that exchange ideas, knowledge, skills and resources and collaborate on joint programmes, facilitated by Tate.

Learn more about Plus Tate

Image credits

  • Background image: Paul Noble, Tent, 2011. Courtesy the artist.
  • About box: Paul Noble, Politics of Small Places, 2018. Installation at Cooper Gallery. Photo by Tom Nolan.