Photographer Tish Murtha to get big Baltic exhibition
Baltic programme announced for 2026
A major exhibition of photos by the late Tish Murtha (born Patricia but always known as Tish) is to be a summer highlight of Baltic’s programme for 2026.
It’s been a long time coming, you might think, and represents further significant endorsement of a photographer whose career grew – quite literally – from the rubble of Newcastle’s West End, when Elswick streets were being razed and she found a battered old camera in a condemned house.
She died in 2013, aged 56, and her reputation has grown steadily since, largely due to the efforts of her daughter Ella, who has protected her archive, but also because the art world has come to recognise her importance as a naturally gifted documentary photographer.
Her story was told in Paul Sng’s film Tish, released in 2023 and a hit at the Tyneside Cinema and elsewhere, and musician Sam Fender recently paid homage, using Tish’s photography on the sleeve of his Mercury Prize-winning album, People Watching.
The exhibition, Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz, on Baltic’s Level 3 will run from July 4 next year until April 4, 2027, and feature Tish’s photographs along with a newly commissioned body of work by Newcastle-based Kuba Ryniewicz.
Calling it a “landmark exhibition”, the Baltic announcement goes on to say: “Born in South Shields in 1956, Murtha returned to Newcastle from university to document life in her Elswick community, capturing the social impact of industrial decline with honesty, empathy and urgency.
“Developed in close collaboration with her daughter, Ella Murtha, the exhibition honours Tish’s vision and the continued stewardship of her archive.
“Her images remain a vital record of working-class experience and a powerful call to acknowledge the inequalities that persist today.
“Baltic will present, for the first time together, works from the series Elswick Kids, Elswick Revisited, Save Scotswood Works and Youth Unemployment...”
The exhibition follows others by notable photographers including Phyllis Christopher in 2021 and Chris Killip in 2023.
The announcement comes shortly after the death of renowned documentary photographer Martin Parr who had a big exhibition at Baltic in 2009.
Kuba Ryniewicz is also a major talent, an artist and photographer whose work has appeared in many publications and who has been commissioned by fashion labels including Gucci, Loewe, Levi’s and Stella McCartney.
Baltic allude to his “distinctive and unconventional approach to portraiture” and say he will bring a contemporary perspective to this exhibition.
The 2026 Baltic exhibition programme begins on March 28 with a North East introduction to the work of the late Milly Thompson, a member of the influential artist group known as BANK.
The exhibition, called My Body Temperature Is Feeling Good, has been organised by Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and Baltic with the estate of Milly Thompson represented by the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery.
Thompson, a Londoner who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, died of a brain tumour on Christmas Day, 2022, aged 58.
Her former gallery say that after BANK in the 1990s, of which she was a key member for several years, she established a solo practice as a painter, sculptor, video artist and writer.
They add: “Her playful, languid and often subversive visual language was informed by sources as diverse as Japanese woodcuts and ikebana, the artist Francis Picabia, the novelist Jean Ryhs, the comedic character Shirley Valentine and contemporary emojis.”
The exhibition will run until August 30.
Running simultaneously will be Starting Lines by Foundation Press, comprising North East artists Adam Phillips and Deborah Bower who devise initiatives and sources that support diverse communities to explore creativity and storytelling.
The exhibition will feature material from the Foundation Press archive including posters, banners, wallpapers and collaborative publications created over the last 10 years.
Also opening in the summer will be Journey to the Great Below, the first major UK solo exhibition in a public institution of the work of Chitra Ganesh, an American artist born to immigrants from Calcutta.
“During her 20-year career,” state Baltic, “Ganesh has developed an expansive body of work encompassing drawing, prints, painting, collage, animation, video, installation and sculpture.
“Through her distinctive multi-disciplinary approach, she challenges patriarchal norms and empowers her female and queer subjects by constructing alternative visual narratives.”
Her Baltic exhibition will run from July 4, 2026, to January 17, 2027.
Find details of all exhibition and activities, past and present, on the Baltic website.