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Maria Balshaw, head of Tate galleries: ‘Our audience hasn’t changed enough – not for me’
The woman who runs four of Britain’s major galleries talks about wanting ‘different’ visitors and surviving a Covid-induced financial crisis
14 May 2021 • 5:00am This is a public institution. It’s paid for by everyone : Maria Balshaw, director of Tate
Credit: Rii Schroer for DT
Inside a double-height gallery at Tate Modern, a cascade of red felt is tumbling to the floor. What is this crimson downpour of knotted woollen cords? It makes me think of my eldest daughter’s difficult birth. “It should,” says Tate’s director, Maria Balshaw, 51, who has taken me to see this dramatic, newly acquired installation by the Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña. “It’s a work about the female body. The colour evokes blood and wounds and birth.” As she describes the material’s nubby texture, the intensity of its dye, her words flow passionately, like the strands of Vicuna