Big Data; Networked Narratives: Decentring Collection Histories with Data from the John Moores Painting Prize

 

An exhibition curated by Hana Leaper and Sophie Hatchwell with Geneva Beckford, Emily Fuggle, Em Langridge, Ella Nixon and Rebecca Savage

14 September – 6 November 2026

Exhibition Research Lab, John Lennon Art and Design Building L3 5RD (map)

Free and open to all

This exhibition uses archival data from John Moores Painting Prize exhibitions 1957-1987 to reconsider how post-war British art has been collected, narrated and remembered. Big Data; Networked Narratives is both an exhibition and a methodological experiment that asks how collaborative research can make collection histories more open, plural and accountable.  

Founded in Liverpool in 1957, the John Moores Painting Prize has long occupied a major place in the story of contemporary painting in Britain. Yet this exhibition asks what becomes visible when that story is approached not through a familiar sequence of winners, styles and canonical names, but through the wider patterns held in exhibition catalogues: where artists lived and worked, their biographies, career stages, gender, institutional connections, prize money, acquisitions and omissions. 

The project began with the Post-War Painting in Regional Collections Research Group, established in 2019 to connect curators, academics, artists and educators working with post-1945 civic collections. During lockdown, members of the group undertook a collaborative audit of early John Moores Painting Prize catalogues, building datasets that could be shared, expanded and reinterpreted. What began as a practical act of collective research has developed into a broader enquiry into the structures that support, exclude, recognise and forget artists. 

Rather than treating Liverpool as a peripheral outpost in a London-centred account of post-war British art, Big Data; Networked Narratives positions the city as a nexus-point within a distributed, mobile and networked cultural landscape. The exhibition shows how regional exhibitions and civic collections did not simply reflect or perpetuate artistic reputations formed elsewhere; they actively shaped careers, enabled acquisitions, and helped define what counted as British art. 

Through a series of focused curatorial interventions, the exhibition moves between data and lived experience, revealing the limits as well as the possibilities of archival records. It asks what datasets can show, what they obscure, and how researchers and visitors might read them critically.