Professor Maurice Howard in one of the British Galleries rooms that he curated at the Victoria and Albert Museum

A 20-year creative collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and art historians at the University of Sussex has been celebrated at a reception at the Museum in London.

During the reception, guests heard from Christopher Breward, Head of Research for the V&A and from University of Sussex Professor of Art History Maurice Howard, who has been actively involved in the Exchange.

The Sussex Art History-V&A Exchange enables curators and academics to exchange skills and knowledge. A V&A curator comes to Sussex each year for part of the week to teach while a member of the Art History Faculty goes to the Museum to curate an exhibition or permanent gallery display, write for museum publications, or use their expertise to devise a new online resource.

The exchange programme means that students can take courses based on collections and the curatorial expertise of one of the world’s most important museums. In recent years, students have studied contemporary photography, Indian art and 1960s fashion with V&A curators. More than a dozen Sussex graduates have gone on to work with the V&A, while others are now working at the National Portrait Gallery, London and at the Bloomsbury Set’s Sussex base, Charleston.

Christopher Breward, for the V&A, said: “The Exchange programme is really a very simple idea, allowing the intellectual exchange of ideas for the price of a train ticket. V&A curators travelling to Sussex have used their time there to explore Asian art, sculpture and fashion and culture. And there is no more testing an audience of new ideas than a group of Sussex final-year students. At the V&A, the British Galleries and Medieval and Renaissance and Modernist galleries have all benefited from Sussex expertise.”

Speaking about his personal experience of the Exchange scheme, Professor Howard said: “My time with the V&A has really taken my work forward in new and exciting ways.”

He added: “The Exchange scheme has also attracted attention from around the world, with museums in Los Angeles and Australia among those who want to find out how we do it.”

University of Sussex art historians who have conducted original research based on the Museum’s valuable collections include:

• Professor Maurice Howard, who has had close involvement with two major projects in recent years. He assisted on the preparation of the Gallery of European Ornament and co-authored a book on the subject. Later, he worked for four years as Senior Subject Specialist for the Tudor and Stuart sections of the £30 million British Galleries, which opened to great acclaim in 2001. The British Galleries, spread across two floors of the Museum, explore British design and applied arts from 1500 to 1900. This major project involved curatorship, writing text to support the museum's publications and educational provision, including organising a major conference on the Tudor and Stuart interior. 
• Professor Liz James, an expert in Byzantine art and who is currently conducting Leverhulme Trust-funded research into Byzantine mosaics, curated the exhibition 'Images of Byzantium' in 1997-8. This explored a little-known resource at the Museum of 18th- and 19th-century prints, drawings and watercolours of Istanbul and its environs. 
• Dr Meaghan Clarke, a 19th-century specialist, devised the online catalogue of the Victorian portrait photographer Frederick Hollyer in 2003-4; this was the second of a series of projects (following one on Julia Margaret Cameron) to bring the Museum's photographic archive to a wider public. 
• Professor David Alan Mellor, an authority on post-war British art and an experienced curator (he contributed an essay to the recent Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain) has curated several V&A photographic exhibitions, the last in 2002-3. Professor Mellor's long-established connections with the Museum date from as early as 1990, when he co-authored the book 'Recording Britain' at the time of the exhibition there of the great project to record the country's buildings, landscapes and rituals in the face of war during the 1940s. Co-author and curator Gill Saunders, from the V&A, later came on the Sussex Exchange.

Recent Exchange Fellows at Sussex from the V&A include Gregory Irvine, Senior Curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Zoe Whitley, Curator of Contemporary Programmes. Dr Flora Dennis came to join Art History at Sussex in 2007 following a spell at the V&A co-curating the exhibition 'The Renaissance at Home'. She is now back at the V&A on the Exchange, planning new ventures.

Guests were invited to visit one of the V&A’s current exhibitions – Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence. The Baroque exhibition highlights another link between the University and the Museum, as it was co-curated with Michael Snodin by former University of Sussex art historian Professor Nigel Llewellyn, assisted by University of Sussex art history research students Jane Eade and Elaine Tierney. Both students studied the V&A’s Baroque exhibits for their AHRC-funded collaborative research doctorates.

 Notes for Editors

The University of Sussex department of Art History was ranked among the top three in the country for the quality of its research output and achieved the highest scores in the University in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). A sizeable part of this success resulted from publications and exhibitions in collaboration with the V&A. Universities from Los Angeles to Melbourne have consulted Sussex over the years to help set up similar schemes between higher education and the museum sector. Art History at Sussex covers a broad range of subject areas, from Byzantium to Renaissance Italy to contemporary America. 

• The Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington, London, is the world's greatest museum of art and design, with collections unrivalled in their scope and diversity. It comprises 3000 years' worth of artefacts from many of the world's richest cultures, including ceramics, furniture, fashion, glass, jewellery, metalwork, photographs, sculpture, textiles and paintings. 
• The British Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum are a permanent display, which opened to the public in 2001. Located on two floors of the Museum, they feature the very best of historic British furniture, textiles, dress, ceramics, glass, jewellery, silver, prints, paintings and sculpture, covering British art and design from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Queen Victoria. The Galleries are the first major space within the V&A to have been designed with the learning needs of a wide variety of audiences in mind. 

For further information, images etc, contact the University of Sussex Press office