Initiated in 1995 by Michael and Sandy Aldrich, the Aldrich Collection comprises about 300 works of contemporary visual art. The vast majority of these have been produced by students and tutors working at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton, as well as its distinguished institutional precursors in art and design education which go back over 140 years.

The Aldrich Collection has been established with the express intention of reinforcing and further developing public recognition of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture as a quality provider of art and design education in Britain and a recognised national Centre for creativity, innovation and research in the visual and performing arts.

The Aldrich family decided to collect and commission artworks to be donated to the University’s registered charity, the Foundation fund. It is envisaged that the Aldrich Collection will evolve and develop through purchase, commission and donation, actions that will be overseen by a Selection Committee. In February 2000, as a means of further enhancing the initiative, the University decided to donate some of its own collected works to the Aldrich Collection. In its expanded form the latter will also serve as the founding collection for the new centre for Contemporary Visual Arts.

A visual analysis of the Aldrich Collection reveals that creative endeavours at Brighton is – and has always been- about much more than mere economics. It is concerned with the worlds of imagination and invention, the exploration of the personal and idiosyncratic as well as the corporate, the experience of emotional shifts engendered by joyful exuberance, agonising pain and sophisticated refinement, as well as the redefining of aesthetic possibilities and cultural boundaries across the spectrum of artistic activity.

To date, representation in the Aldrich Collection is dominated by the work of recent graduates. In ceramics these have been drawn from the late 1990’s, although for much of the 20th century there have been a number of distinguished designers associated with Brighton.

Whilst it is clearly impossible in this brief introduction to mention all dimensions of creative work at Brighton, over recent years editorial photography has emerged as a potent force with a number of significant practitioners.

A number of key areas of artistic endeavour are yet to be represented in the Aldrich Collection. At the beginning of the millennium, in the context of radically changing practices in collecting and exhibiting the visual arts, it is intended that as the Aldrich Collection further shapes and refines its strategy for acquisition and display this will reflect the broad dimensions of artist practise at Brighton.

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Disclaimer
The University of Brighton has made all reasonable efforts to ensure that works of art on this website are reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders. However, the copyright status of some works of art in the Collection remains unclear and we would welcome any information regarding the identity of the relevant copyright holders for the artists listed.
Whilst every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this website, the University of Brighton assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained within the site.