Courtesy Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

New director Godfrey Worsdale wants to make the Baltic Centre one of the world’s greatest art institutions.

Photo by Colin Davison, courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

Yoshitomo Nara + graf's "A–Z Project" is on view at the Baltic through October 26.

Damien Hirst Pablo Picasso Francis Bacon Edmund de Waal Beryl Cook Nan Goldin Chantal Joffe Yoshitomo Nara

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NEWCASTLE, England—Anyone starting a new job has the right to be nervous, especially if the job involves taking responsibility for an entire institution. And taking the helm at the Baltic Centre in the north of England, with its controversial, tumultuous history of mismanagement, must be even more nerve-wracking. But Godfrey Worsdale, speaking to ARTINFO after the announcement yesterday that he is to head up the contemporary art space starting in mid-November, sounded confident and determined, declaring, “I want to make Baltic one of the world’s greatest art institutions, and I think it has every potential to be so.”

He is stepping into a muddied history. The first director, the Swedish Sune Nordgren, was critically lauded for the direction he took with the £46 million ($92 million) arts project after its inception in 1997, but while his programming was well received, he failed to attend to the financial realities of running a major public space. The oft-cited example of his not bothering to install the usually ubiquitous donation boxes in the museum was finally hammered home to trustees in a report, leaked from the Arts Council England, that criticized the Baltic for its “serious inadequacies in financial procedures.” Nordgren left in October 2003, taking up the directorship at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo and making way for Stephen Snoddy, the former chief at the Milton Keynes Gallery in Buckinghamshire, to come aboard in March of the following year. He brought with him a relative calm, but that ended abruptly after only a few months when police showed up at the gallery and arrested him in connection with an alleged sexual assault. Snoddy was promptly suspended, was later reinstated after being cleared of guilt in November, and resigned just two weeks later, citing family reasons.

Peter Doroshenko, an American curator who’d served at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), in Ghent, Belgium, and the Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee, took Snoddy’s place in April 2005, promising blockbuster exhibitions and a visitor focus. These came, as did staff unrest culminating in a union vote of no confidence citing Doroshenko as being “intolerable.” Police once again made an appearance after that fiasco, this time threatening to prosecute the gallery under child pornography laws for an exhibition of works by photographer Nan Goldin. Not liking the adverse publicity, the lender of the works, pop star Elton John, pulled out. Doroshenko left a few months later, in November 2007, leaving director of corporate resources Andrew Lovett as acting director. At the time, museum chair Ian Wrigglesworth said he anticipated no problems attracting applicants for the position, but in the end it was the board who approached Worsdale, 40, not the other way around.

Worsdale is understandably not keen to dwell on his predecessors. “I’m going there with a clean slate,” he told ARTINFO. “Rather than comparing my time at the Baltic with what’s happened before, it makes more sense to compare it with my time at mima.” Mima is the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, also in the north of England, where Worsdale has served as founding director since its inception two years ago. He started his curatorial career in the early 1990s in the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum, moving in 1995 to the Southampton City Art Gallery, where he was appointed director within three years. Under his direction, mima, which has an annual budget of £14.2 million, has staged an impressive number of big-name but critically sound exhibitions, including shows pairing Francis Bacon with Damien Hirst and Chantel Joffe with Picasso, as well as on the Bauhaus and Edmund de Waal. It's an impressive pedigree, particularly in comparison with Doroshenko’s recent efforts, such as the Baltic’s critically panned exhibition of popular artist Beryl Cook last July.

Pressed for an example of the type of show he wants to bring to the Baltic, Worsdale declined to give specifics, saying, “It is very much the curatorial team’s job to deliver those kind of things.” He did reveal plans to depart from his predecessor’s approach on at least one point, however: While Doroshenko sought to engage the community with exhibitions such as 2006’s “Spank the Monkey,” a show of “urban art” heavily marketed to local youth, Worsdale has set his sights further afield. Though quick to insist that locals are important to the success of the space, he says, “What I would enhance at the Baltic are some strong international partnerships. There are many galleries around the world that are very suited to working with the Baltic and collaborating on projects” — something Doroshenko largely avoided.