About Us

Views of Glasgow: A Window into Communities
5 December 2025–26 April 2026
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
Free entry

The Hunterian and members of the Woodlands community are delighted to present a new collaborative exhibition which explores the evolving story of Glasgow through the lens of community, creativity and change.

The free exhibition, Views of Glasgow: A Window into Communities, opens at the Hunterian Art Gallery on Friday, 5 December 2025 and offers a fresh and critical take on Glasgow’s history and identity.

Views of Glasgow is co-curated by four community curators from the Woodlands community: Fouzia Zafar, Josie KO, Vicki Fleck and Sapna Agarwal, whose lived experiences and local knowledge shape a powerful narrative of Glasgow’s past and its possibilities for a more just future.

Through artworks, objects, multimedia, archival materials and personal reflections, the exhibition explores themes of urban transformation, inequality, empire and collective resilience.

Highlights from The Hunterian collection include paintings by Joan Eardley, Tom MacDonald, Danny Ferguson and John Quinton Pringle, alongside works by Fouzia Zafar, Annabel Wright, Blair Cunningham and Mitch Miller. Views of Glasgow also features ceramics, textiles, video, a soundscape installation, oral histories, graffiti, collage and photographs.

Together with contributions from the wider Woodlands community, visitors are invited to share their own perspectives on what community means to them and take part in a creative activity by helping to yarn-bomb a bench featured as part of the exhibition.

This unique collaboration presents a fascinating dialogue between local perspectives and institutional collections, exploring the meaning of community in the city and how it is built, challenged and renewed.

Ernest Burnett Hood’s The Grove Street Institute (1969) and archival photographs trace the impact of Glasgow’s urban transformation, from the construction of the M8 motorway to waves of gentrification, revealing how displacement and renewal have shaped the city’s social fabric. This dramatic redevelopment is highlighted through Fouzia Zafar’s short film HOME (2013) and film footage on loan from the National Library of Scotland including excerpts from documentaries including Mungo’s Medals (1961), Glasgow 1980 (1971), and Places…or People (1975).

Paintings such as Belhaven Terrace (1966) by James Morrison and St Rollox (c.1900) by Muirhead Bone reflect Glasgow’s east–west divide. Meanwhile, Mitch Miller’s Dialectogram of the Claypits (2021), commissioned graffiti Human Nature by artists Conzo & Glöbel from The Grateful Gallery, and Joan Eardley’s A Child (c.1950) — on public display for the first time — illustrate how individuals claim and shape their environments.

The Nelson Monument Struck by Lightning (c.1817–21) by John Knox, illustrations by Annabel Wright and the children’s book What Starts Here Stops Here – A Tale of Glasgow and the World, created by the Hope Street Collective, challenge viewers to reckon with the city’s imperial legacy and consider how its history continues to shape global inequalities today.

Environmental regeneration is celebrated through Blair Cunningham’s Glasgow’s Community Gardens (2015), while collective creativity can be seen in examples of community-made works including a quilt produced as part of Woodlands Community’s People of Colour Wellbeing Programme and reproductions of two banners by Keeping Glasgow in Stitches.

Through everyday encounters and sweeping changes to the cityscape, Views of Glasgow invites visitors to consider: What does community mean to you — today, and in the future?

Views of Glasgow is part of Power in our Communities, a wider initiative supporting co-production and collaboration at The Hunterian. It reflects a commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices and creating space for dialogue, reflection and change. Power in our Communities is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Museums Galleries Scotland.

---

Further Information
For further information or images, contact Harriet Gaston, Communications Manager, The Hunterian.

Notes to Editors

The Hunterian
The oldest public museum in Scotland, with collections spanning arts, sciences and humanities, The Hunterian is at the forefront of university museums around the world. Since it opened at the University of Glasgow in 1807, The Hunterian has been an invaluable academic and community resource and in years to come, The Hunterian is committed to becoming a more meaningful place for more diverse audiences.

As a university gallery and museum, The Hunterian creates space for intellectual inquiry and a process of learning and experimentation. The Hunterian collection’s Enlightenment history made a repository of knowledge that materialises the problematic history of Western modernity and its fundamentally colonial and capitalist underpinnings. The founding collection came through the bequest of Dr William Hunter (1718–83) and since The Hunterian opened at the University of Glasgow in 1807, the collections have been developed in ways that reflect our city’s deep relationship with empire, transatlantic slavery, colonialism and migration. 

The Hunterian cares for some Scotland’s finest collections that cover subjects as diverse as the history of medicine, zoology and art. The whole collection is ‘Recognised’ as nationally significant in Scotland and includes outstanding Roman artefacts from the Antonine Wall; vast natural and life science collections; scientific instruments used by James Watt, Joseph Lister and Lord Kelvin; one of the world’s greatest collections of coins and medals and objects and belongings brought to Glasgow from around the world during hundreds of years of trade, empire, exploitation and migration. 

The Hunterian is also home to one of the most distinguished public art collections in Scotland and features works by James McNeill Whistler, the Glasgow Boys and Scottish Colourists, the largest single holding of the work of artists Margaret MacDonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, along with The Mackintosh House, the reassembled interiors from their Glasgow home. The Hunterian has also developed an important collection of works by leading contemporary artists including Christine Borland, Lucy Skaer and Adam Pendleton.

glasgow.ac.uk/hunterian

Threads @hunterian
Facebook @HunterianGlasgow
Instagram @hunterianglasgow

First published: 20 November 2025