Works by Picasso, Hockney and many others feature in Mima’s new shows, as David Whetstone reports

THEY are quietly looking forward to a fifth anniversary at Mima, the flagship art gallery in Middlesbrough which still looks as shiny and new as the day it opened in January 2007.

There’s an air of confidence about the place, too, as you would expect when so many people have taken it to their hearts.

Even the day before the winter exhibitions opened last weekend, the shop and cafe were doing brisk business.

Despite a grim economic prognosis for the UK in the coming months, there’s a sense that Mima is very much part of the solution in this neck of the woods rather than part of the problem.

In the most recent Mima Report, director Kate Brindley says: “We have taken a fresh look at our vision for the next five years and look positively towards a future which sees us building on our successes and growing a sustainable and resilient organisation fitting and relevant for modern times.”

The report is also full of public praise and appreciation, as in local resident Graham Williamson’s “Please never, ever close”, American visitor Dr J Washington’s “A fantastic example of modern art and an excellent cultural investment” and The Guardian’s “Mima has consistently punched well above its weight”.

Unlike Baltic, now run by Mima’s founding director Godfrey Worsdale, Mima’s roots are sunk deep in the cultural aspirations of the local community, as you will see.

One of the new exhibitions, featuring a lot of newspaper cuttings and letters quaintly typed or hand written, tells the story of the Friends of Middlesbrough Art Gallery. This band of Teesside culture vultures campaigned long and hard for an art gallery for Middlesbrough.

At their head was Nancy Dugdale, 1st Lady Crathorne, a tireless and persuasive patron of the arts who used her name and headed notepaper to win local business people over to the cause.

A painting done by Lady Crathorne when she was plain Nancy Tennant hangs in the exhibition. The letters and newspaper cuttings were donated to Mima by her son, Lord Crathorne.

The Friends established their art gallery in a large house on Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough. Lady Crathorne died in 1969 but lived to see it open. She would have been thrilled to see Mima, its successor, and the way in which the now pretty valuable art collection built up by the Friends is being used.

Mima’s main winter exhibition is called Between Dimensions. It’s all about the artistic convention of the still life and features works borrowed from Tate, with which Mima has a special relationship, and items from Mima’s own collection.

Mima curator James Beighton showed me round, explaining how he had selected pictures to show how the still life had been adapted by successive schools of artists over the decades.

The story begins with Studio Still Life 1914 by William Nicholson, “one of the great academic painters”.

It’s a rather formal arrangement of objects, including a top hat and gloves, but with a deftly applied splash of gold on the bust in the centre of the painting making it sing.