Since joining the staff in 1997 Frances Morris's main responsibility has been to unravel a scheme for the hanging of the permanent collection.

Since joining the staff in 1997 Frances Morris's main responsibility has been to unravel a scheme for the hanging of the permanent collection. A harrying task? Surprisingly, Morris describes the early stages of this proces as a epicurism It was a year in which she was able to talk through plans and proposals at fulness with colleagues, especially head of exhibitions and displays Iwona Blazwick and education program officer Caro Howell, before inviting outside historians and critics to join in the debate.

"The thing we don't want," says Morris, "is for Tate present to become a museum of the twentieth hundred years in the twenty-first. There's no point in getting rid of single fixed idea of art history, alone to replace it with another." Instead, Morris plans for a presentation in which artistic chronology is in dialogue with documentary evidence of wider historical connections The outcome is the erection of four suites of galleries, each devot to a broadly interpreted genre and related concerns: landscape, matter, environment; still life, butt; goal real life; nude, action, body; and history, memory, society.

Morris came to the Tate from Bristol's Arnolfini, where she had been working as exhibitions organizer, in 1987 During the '90 she curated the major loan exhibitions "Paris support War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55" (1993) and, with Stuart Morgan, "Rites of Passage, Art for the close of the Century" (1995). Since the opening of the Tate's Art Now gallery in 1995 Morris has organized several exhibit tos for that space, including those by means of Miroslaw Balka, Sophie Calle, and Michal Rovner as well as a display of the eventuates of Mark Dion's extensive Tate Thames Dig.

Morris acknowledges that Tate new needs to offer as wide a range of viewing possibilities as it can. As to in what way the new venue will play, she give an inkling ofs that, while the suites of galleries are a series of "cooler white spaces," the building's central hail is often more a "people space" and should help attract audiences to the work itself. She is earnest to see the gallery give a thought to developing the building's various subterranean spaces through the whole extent of the next decade. Beyond the completion of her have a title to work on the opening displays, and following her 1998 Luciano Fabro exhibition in the Tate's Duveen Galleries, she is collaborating with Richard rush of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in succession major arte povera show scheduled for summer 2001

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