The New Art Gallery Walsall

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The New Art Gallery Walsall is perhaps the most successful of the many art-oriented projects funded by the Millennium Fund. A rundown post-industrial town in England's Midlands is the site of a quite fantastic building: a massive terracotta and steel clad structure, enigmatic and subtle, within which is a complex series of galleries and rooms, ranging in scale from the domestic to the stately, part of which houses a remarkable art collection, the work of Jacob Epstein's wife and an American sculptor friend.The gallery itself is the result of a long and arduous campaign orchestrated by its director, Peter Jenkinson, raising funds and motivating a large team of people to realise this extraordinary project. The architectural competition to design the building was won by a young practice, Caruso St John, whose previous work had all been at a much smaller scale. During the building process an ambitious programme of public art projects was put in place, involving the people of the town throughout. The finished building has been lavishly praised, and occasionally damned -- strong reactions are universal.

This book documents in great detail the building, its context in the town and the politics of the place, all illuminated by Helene Binet's remarkable photography.