© Tom Miller
27 November 2006
As the National Portrait Gallery celebrated its 150th Anniversary year, Sandy Nairne, its Director, looked back at the Gallery's History as well as speculating on the future for portraiture and how the Gallery will develop over the next 150 years.
Sandy Nairne is currently Director of the National Portrait Gallery. He was Director: Programmes at Tate for eight years working alongside Nicholas Serota in the building of Tate Modern and the Centenary Development at Tate Britain. He was also directly responsible for the development of international and digital programmes, the Tate Partnership Scheme and the co-ordination of Tate public programmes as a whole.
He has worked previously as Assistant Director, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Director of Exhibitions at the ICA and Director of Visual Arts for the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1993 he was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Sandy Nairne has worked as a curator and writer and is well known for his innovative television series and book State of the Art (1987), and co-edited anthology Thinking about Exhibitions (1996). He has curated and co-curated exhibitions which include Objects and Sculpture; Leon Golub; British Sculpture in the 20th Century; Jeff Wall; The Impossible Self; American Realities and the first retrospective for Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs.
Sandy Nairne is a member of the Fabric Advisory Committee of St Paul's Cathedral, a member of the Councils of the Royal College of Art and the British School at Rome and a Trustee of Artangel. He has lectured widely and chaired numerous conferences and seminars in Britain and abroad.
