Curator Samantha Manton creates new display at the Whitworth through the CAS’s Starting Point Fellowship

Graduate curator Samantha Manton has curated a new display at the Whitworth in Manchester through the Contemporary Art Society’s Starting Point Fellowship, which was set up to support young arts professionals working in public collections.

Starting Point offers one curator each year the opportunity to work with a major UK museum, selecting a group of objects that will be displayed as part of the institution’s public programme.

The Gardener Digs in Another Time, which is on show till 9 October 2016, reflects upon the use of the garden in visual culture as a vehicle for utopian thought and an emblem for an ideal society. It covers the politically charged work of socialists William Morris and Walter Crane in the late 19th century through to modern and contemporary artists, who use the subject of the garden as a conceptual means to express their political ideologies in opposition of capitalist pursuits, and to envision a utopian world.

Read Samantha Manton's essay that accompanies the exhibition