Recent acquisitions in WM of works by Donald Rodney and Luke Fowler

Two of the region’s best-loved galleries have been working hard to acquire and commission artworks from some of the most significant and influential contemporary British artists. The story of how Donald Rodney’s The Land of Milk and Honey II (1997) and Luke Fowler’s The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (2012) entered West Midlands collections is really two stories about how public collections are built — one through patient acquisition with an artist’s estate, the other through a consortium commission.

Together they show the mechanisms by which the region’s museums secure work that matters, and why those mechanisms are worth understanding whether you are an artist, a curator, a student or a collector. For a broader sense of the venues building these collections, see our guide to west midlands art galleries.

Key Takeaways

• Birmingham Museums Trust acquired Donald Rodney’s The Land of Milk and Honey II (1997) with the help of the artist’s estate and the Contemporary Art Society; it had been shown at the Waterhall Gallery in STATIC: Still Life Reconsidered.
• Wolverhampton Art Gallery co-commissioned and co-acquired Luke Fowler’s 2012 film with The Hepworth Wakefield and Film and Video Umbrella, funded through the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums: commission to collect.
• Both works entered public collections through partnership — estate liaison, consortium commissioning and a national award scheme — rather than a single gallery buying alone.
• Rodney (1961–1998), born in Birmingham to a family who emigrated from Jamaica, was a founding member of the BLK Art Group; his work is inseparable from his experiences of race and of sickle cell anaemia.
• Fowler’s film explores the historian E.P. Thompson and his teaching through the Workers’ Education Association, and the artist was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012.

Two routes into a public collection

The Rodney and Fowler acquisitions are usefully read as a pair, because they represent the two most common ways significant contemporary work reaches a regional museum.

• Acquisition by purchase or gift. The Land of Milk and Honey II was made in 1997 and acquired later by Birmingham Museums Trust, with the artist’s estate and the Contemporary Art Society involved in making it happen. This is the classic model: a work already exists, and a museum assembles the funding, the relationships and the permissions to bring it into the permanent collection.
• Commission to collect. Fowler’s film was commissioned in order to be acquired. Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield and Film and Video Umbrella jointly commissioned the work and then co-acquired it, so the piece was destined for public collections from the outset.

The distinction matters practically. A purchase depends on a work being available and on a museum being able to raise the money and secure the seller’s agreement. A commission-to-collect depends on a funder, a consortium and an artist agreeing to make something new — with all the risk and reward that entails.

Donald Rodney: The Land of Milk and Honey II

The Land of Milk and Honey II (1997) was shown at Birmingham Museums’ Waterhall Gallery at the end of last year as part of STATIC: Still Life Reconsidered, and has since been acquired by the Birmingham Museums Trust with the help of the artist’s estate and the Contemporary Art Society.

The sculpture was originally made for Nine Night in Eldorado, Rodney’s last exhibition, held at the South London Gallery in 1997. It takes the form of a glass vitrine containing copper coins suspended in milk — one and two pence pieces — measuring roughly 168 x 61 x 31cm.

Rodney (1961–1998) was born in Birmingham to a family who had emigrated from Jamaica. Issues of race remained significant throughout his life and work. He lived on Marshall Street in Smethwick, whose residents eventually successfully lobbied the council to ban black families from living in the road. He recounted stories of his family being made to feel unwelcome in church, so much so that his and other black families began to hire out their own halls for worship.

Rodney suffered with sickle cell anaemia his whole life and spent much time in hospital as a child, trying to understand his experiences and grapple with his identity through hours spent reading comics and drawing. He later studied art in Bournville in Birmingham and in Nottingham, and became one of the founding members of the seminal BLK Art Group. The group, made up of British African-Caribbean artists based in the Midlands, sought to challenge dominant views on race, gender, community and identity through their work during the 1980s in particular.

Reading the materials

The sculpture is rooted in Rodney’s personal experiences of illness and race. The title refers to the view of Britain in the 1950s as a place of hope and opportunity to families emigrating from the Caribbean and elsewhere — the “land of milk and honey” of the postwar invitation to come and help rebuild the country. The work was made in tribute to Rodney’s late father, and it has taken on renewed significance since Rodney himself passed away in 1998 at the age of 36.

What makes the piece more than a static object is its chemistry. The glass vitrine lets the viewer watch the reactions between the copper coins and the milk, producing extraordinary textural and colour variations over time. This is a work that is never quite the same twice, and that fact has real consequences for anyone responsible for it.

What it takes to care for a work like this

For conservators and registrars, The Land of Milk and Honey II is a genuinely demanding object, and it is worth understanding why:

• Perishable materials. Milk is organic and will degrade; copper will corrode and discolour. The “original” state is inherently unstable.
• Documentation is everything. Because the work changes, the artist’s instructions, photographs and condition records become the reference point for what the work is.
• Display and storage decisions. A museum must decide how often to show it, whether to replace the milk, and how to record each iteration.
• Interpretation. The instability is not a flaw to be fixed — it is part of the meaning, and labels and interpretation need to convey that.

This is the kind of judgement call that separates a thoughtful collection from a passive one. Acquiring a Rodney is not simply buying an object; it is accepting an ongoing responsibility.

Luke Fowler: The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott

Wolverhampton Art Gallery, meanwhile, has been working alongside The Hepworth Wakefield and Film and Video Umbrella to commission and co-acquire new work by Luke Fowler. The group were awarded the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums: commission to collect. The resulting film, The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (2012), now resides jointly in the permanent collections of the two galleries.

Shown most recently at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the film explores the life of the historian, activist and critic E.P. Thompson in the post-war period and his influence in the cultural arena during this time. Fowler’s work combines archival footage with newly shot film to uncover the ways that Thompson gave miners, factory workers and unemployed people in Yorkshire classes in history and literature through the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) — a subject with contemporary resonance given changes to the cost of and access to higher education in Britain today.

Fowler, who lives and works in Glasgow, has a particular interest in biography and documentary-making. He explores personal and political subjects by adopting the roles of artist, historian, curator, archivist and film-maker simultaneously to produce works that are critically acclaimed.

Fowler describes his films as modes of enquiry, as means to answer questions that engage him. The resulting films, the artist notes, are partially self-portraits — ways of trying to understand both himself and the world around him.

Notably, Fowler was one of the four artists shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2012, alongside Elizabeth Price, Spartacus Chetwynd and Paul Noble. A short clip of Fowler’s film can be seen on Film and Video Umbrella’s website.

Why the title matters

The film’s title is itself a piece of history. “The Poor Stockinger,” “the Luddite Cropper” and “the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott” are phrases drawn from the language of the period — labels applied to working people who organised, protested or followed dissenting religious movements. By gathering them into a single title, Fowler signals that his subject is not just one man but a whole culture of self-education and resistance. Joanna Southcott was a real and influential figure, a self-styled religious prophet whose followers were numerous in the early nineteenth century; the Luddites and the stockingers belong to the same world of early industrial unrest that Thompson wrote about.

The consortium model, explained

The Fowler acquisition is a textbook example of how regional galleries now compete for ambitious work. Understanding the model is useful for anyone hoping to place work in a public collection.

• A national award provides the catalyst. The Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums: commission to collect is designed specifically to help museums commission new work and then keep it.
• Galleries pool resources and risk. Wolverhampton and The Hepworth Wakefield shared the commission and the acquisition, so neither bore the full cost or uncertainty alone.
• A commissioning body brings expertise. Film and Video Umbrella specialises in moving image, and its involvement supports an artist working in film.
• The work is co-owned. It now resides jointly in the permanent collections of the two galleries, meaning it can be shown in either region.

For an artist, this is a meaningful route into public collections — one that rewards a strong proposal and a track record. For a museum, it is a way to acquire work that would otherwise be out of reach.

How to judge a significant acquisition

If you are a student, curator or collector trying to assess why a particular acquisition matters, these are the criteria worth weighing. They apply equally to the Rodney and the Fowler.

Criterion	What to ask	Rodney	Fowler
Art-historical significance	Does the artist occupy a pivotal position?	Founding member of the BLK Art Group	Turner Prize shortlist, 2012
Rarity and availability	Is work by this artist hard to obtain?	Posthumous; estate-controlled	Commissioned specifically to be collected
Condition and care	Can the museum sustain the work?	Perishable materials demand active conservation	Moving image requires format migration and rights management
Local resonance	Does it connect to the region?	Born in Birmingham; Smethwick childhood	Yorkshire subject; co-owned by a West Midlands gallery
Partnership	Who else is involved?	Artist’s estate, Contemporary Art Society	Hepworth Wakefield, Film and Video Umbrella, CAS award
Public benefit	Will audiences see and learn from it?	Shown at the Waterhall; now in the permanent collection	Co-owned, so displayable in either region

The pattern is clear: the strongest acquisitions combine significance, feasibility and a story that connects to place.

Practical guidance for artists and collectors

The Rodney and Fowler cases offer concrete lessons for anyone navigating the contemporary art world in the West Midlands.

For artists seeking public collections:

• Build a documented body of work. Museums acquire artists whose practice is legible and recorded; archives, catalogues and consistent documentation all help.
• Think about the consortium route. Commission-to-collect awards are often the most realistic path for ambitious, large-scale or moving-image work.
• Engage with the estate and rights early. For posthumous or film work, clarity on ownership and reproduction rights is essential.
• Consider the region’s infrastructure. Bodies such as the Contemporary Art Society and specialist commissioners like Film and Video Umbrella exist to connect artists with museums.

For collectors and audiences:

• Follow the acquisition trail. What a museum acquires tells you what it values, and often points to artists worth watching.
• Use the region’s exhibitions. The Waterhall Gallery at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery has hosted both the SALON selling exhibition and shows such as STATIC: Still Life Reconsidered.
• Look at the graduates. The New Art West Midlands annual exhibition, held at venues across the region between February and May, is where much future talent first appears.

The wider context: why regional collecting matters

It is easy to assume that the most important acquisitions happen in London. The Rodney and Fowler stories show the opposite. A Birmingham-born artist of national significance has returned to a Birmingham collection; a Turner Prize-shortlisted film-maker’s work is now co-owned by a Wolverhampton gallery. That is regional collecting doing exactly what it should.

The Contemporary Art Society, founded in 1910, has been central to this for over a century, helping museums across the UK acquire contemporary work they could not otherwise afford. Its award schemes, including the Annual Award for Museums: commission to collect, are a direct expression of that mission. Alongside it, organisations such as Film and Video Umbrella support artists working in moving image, and galleries like The Hepworth Wakefield and Wolverhampton Art Gallery build partnerships that spread both cost and expertise.

For the West Midlands specifically, this matters because the region has a deep and often under-acknowledged art history — from the BLK Art Group to the present day. Acquisitions like these keep that history visible and connect it to living artists. They also give local audiences access to work of international standing without leaving the region.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who acquired Donald Rodney’s The Land of Milk and Honey II?

The sculpture was acquired by the Birmingham Museums Trust, with the help of the artist’s estate and the Contemporary Art Society. It had previously been shown at Birmingham Museums’ Waterhall Gallery as part of STATIC: Still Life Reconsidered. The work was originally made for Nine Night in Eldorado, Rodney’s last exhibition, held at the South London Gallery in 1997.

What is the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums: commission to collect?

It is an award scheme run by the Contemporary Art Society that enables museums to commission new work by contemporary artists and then acquire it for their permanent collections. Luke Fowler’s 2012 film was commissioned and co-acquired through this award by Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield and Film and Video Umbrella. The scheme is designed to help regional museums secure ambitious work they could not fund alone.

Who was Donald Rodney?

Donald Rodney (1961–1998) was a British artist born in Birmingham to a family who had emigrated from Jamaica. He was a founding member of the BLK Art Group, a collective of British African-Caribbean artists based in the Midlands who challenged dominant views on race, gender, community and identity in the 1980s. He lived with sickle cell anaemia throughout his life and died in 1998 at the age of 36.

What is Luke Fowler’s film about?

The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (2012) explores the life of the historian, activist and critic E.P. Thompson in the post-war period. It focuses on the classes in history and literature he gave to miners, factory workers and unemployed people in Yorkshire through the Workers’ Education Association. The film combines archival footage with newly shot material and speaks to contemporary debates about access to education.

Why does the title of Fowler’s film reference Joanna Southcott?

The title gathers together phrases from the language of early industrial and dissenting England — labels applied to working people who organised, protested or followed religious movements. Joanna Southcott was a self-styled prophet with a substantial following in the early nineteenth century. By using these terms, Fowler signals that his subject is a whole culture of self-education and resistance, not just one individual.

Where can I see work by these artists in the West Midlands?

Rodney’s The Land of Milk and Honey II is now in the Birmingham Museums Trust collection, and Fowler’s film is co-owned by Wolverhampton Art Gallery and The Hepworth Wakefield, so it can be shown in either region. The Waterhall Gallery at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery hosts the SALON selling exhibition, and the New Art West Midlands annual exhibition showcases graduates across the region between February and May each year.

Further reading

• Donald Rodney — Wikipedia
• Luke Fowler — Wikipedia
• South London Gallery — Wikipedia
• E. P. Thompson — Wikipedia
• Turner Prize — Wikipedia