A major new art gallery for Belfast, the Museum of Creative Arts, is one of the proposals in the Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland vision statement, launched yesterday at the Ulster Museum by Loyd Grossman, chairman of the Campaign for Museums, writes Aidan Dunne.
Mr Michael Houlihan, MAGNI's chief executive, said that the new gallery "should be an architectural landmark, so that when people see it they immediately identify it with Belfast". He believes that it could be up and running by 2008, when Belfast is aiming to be European cultural capital.
The new gallery will contain the various collections of art and applied art, including an excellent collection of contemporary art, currently housed in the over-crowded Ulster Museum. The existing museum building will become an exclusively historical museum, devoted to an ambitious and potentially controversial project, "The Making of Ireland", which will, Mr Houlihan says, "tell the story of Ireland from pre-history right up to the present day".