Profile Rehayn King

Rehayn King
A week in the life
Sunday Times July 27

Tall ships in the docks, ex-Beatles on stage and scores of other cultural highs. Liverpool is halfway through its party year as European Capital of Culture and making it all work is surely challenging for those behind the scenes.

For Rehayn King it’s an especially busy time. She became director of art galleries at the National Museums Liverpool just over a year ago. King, 43, who manages the flagship Walker Art Gallery together with Sudley House and the Lady Lever Gallery, is also overseeing judging for the 25th John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize this September and helping steer the Liverpool Biennial.

“I suspect this year’s John Moores’ may prove quite controversial” she says. It’s had a record entry but the jurors – including the art provocateurs Jake and Dinos Chapman – have selected fewer works for the shortlist.

King took up her £50,000 a year post after a decade curating in Birmingham with previous experience in Coventry and Boston. Born in Edinburgh, she lived in Tanzania and Surrey before studying art history at Oxford.

“Gallery going wasn’t in my family background, but I was dropped off for a morning at the National Gallery of Scotland when I was 16 and thought – ‘this is a whole new world’. It made a big impact. I wanted to share the pleasure I get from art.”

Merseyside seems to mirror her passion. “Liverpool is very special. It has a very strong creative culture. It is a city that grabs you by the throat - a very emotional place. It makes you want to do something for the city. I found myself very quickly a proponent of how wonderful Liverpool is and how strong it is for the visual arts. “

Now she has bolder visions for the Walker that occupy much of her time away from management work.

In the last week she had meetings with the head of Liverpool’s library that should result in an expansion of the Walkers’ exhibition space. She prepared and delivered a paper on “The Value of Art” for the annual conference of art librarians.

And she attended a fund raising dinner at which the new chairman of National Museums Liverpool, the high profile TV Producer Phil Redmond, was guest of honour.

Much of the week was about developing her vision for the Walker. She wants it to embrace a wider range of art, to increase visual literacy among the young and to increase visitor levels. “It used to get 600,000 a year in the 19th century. Last year we had 300,000.”

“Outside Liverpool it is thought of primarily as about Victorian art, but it is about so much more. I would like to get to the point where it is seen as the best place to see any European painting, from the Renaissance to the modern day, north of Oxford and south of Edinburgh.”