Future programming: Gallery learnings through pandemic times

What began as a seemingly simple agenda of keeping the university galleries open in order to keep our community alive and engaged, and to ensure artists and postgraduate candidates had a context to show their work, became a slow dawning of possible new futures. As directors of ECU Galleries, we responded directly to such opportunities in a disrupted manner, with the intention of creating new and diverse spaces where the digital and the physical collided. This was not to create a seamless space, rather a site for human connection, as the business-as-usual approach became increasingly untenable as we moved through the pandemic lockdowns. In striving to create embodied experiences for audiences and artists alike, old technologies became outmoded. This paper sets out the strategies employed to engage what was then a locked-down public and that have now become our modus operandi. What did we learn and how can we develop those pedagogic learnings for the publics that galleries serve? We analyse a case study to demonstrate how ECU Galleries remained available and relevant to a public and an industry (arts) in crisis and what this might mean for future gallery programming.