New Centre Stage exhibition brings remarkable portraits to The McManus
A legendary Dundee busker, one of Scotland’s leading advocates and a cast of intriguing characters are taking over the walls of The McManus in a new exhibition opening this weekend.
Centre Stage: Portraits from a Modern World opens on Saturday 3 October, bringing together portraits of performers, artists and other notable figures from Dundee, Scotland and beyond.
It draws heavily on Dundee’s own nationally significant art collection, alongside major loans and a newly commissioned portrait of Claire Mitchell KC.
But Centre Stage isn’t simply a collection of interesting faces.
Running through the exhibition is the idea of performance – not necessarily the sort that happens under stage lights, but the quieter performance that takes place whenever someone sits for a portrait.
More than simply sitting for a picture
The exhibition has been created as a companion to Curtain Call: Costumes from Stage and Screen, which is already on display at The McManus.
There’s an obvious connection between the two, but they approach performance from very different directions.
Curtain Call is about the clothes that help actors become characters. Centre Stage looks instead at what happens when a real person becomes the subject.
A portrait might appear to capture a single moment, but plenty of decisions have already been made before the artist gets anywhere near the finished work.
What does the sitter wear? Where do they look? How do they hold themselves? What gets included in the background – and what gets left out?
Sometimes those choices are deliberately theatrical. At other times they’re barely noticeable.
Either way, they influence what we think we know about the person looking back at us.
A familiar face from Dundee’s streets
For many Dundonians, one portrait in particular may bring back memories.
John Johnstone’s colourful portrait of Lord Mustard captures one of the city’s best-known street performers, a character who became a familiar sight to generations of people in Dundee.
He’s an obvious fit for an exhibition about performance, but some of the most interesting contrasts come from the quieter works around him.
Stewart Carmichael’s The Housekeeper, for example, relies on expression, posture and atmosphere rather than spectacle.
Then there’s Alexander Muir’s The Visitor, a painting that gives very little away. It catches a moment but leaves the story around it unresolved. Who is the visitor? Why are they there? What happens next?
Gerald Brockhurst’s The Fan and Herman Richir’s Jeunesse take another approach, showing how clothing, gesture and style can influence the way we read a person.
Lex Braes’ huge portrait of Syd Scroggie is harder to miss. Its scale alone gives Scroggie an imposing presence and makes it one of the exhibition’s standout works.
Bringing the story up to date
Centre Stage isn’t only looking backwards.
Among its highlights is a new portrait of Claire Mitchell KC, the Scottish advocate and co-founder of the Witches of Scotland campaign.
Mitchell has become widely known for her work seeking recognition for people accused and convicted under Scotland’s historic witchcraft laws.
Her portrait, commissioned especially for the exhibition, was created by Scottish artist Calum Stevenson.
Placed among works from different periods, it brings the exhibition firmly into the present and shows that the urge to record influential people through portraiture hasn’t disappeared.
The faces change. So do the clothes, settings and artistic styles. But the basic question remains much the same: how should this person be seen?
Who decides how we’re remembered?
It’s a question that feels particularly familiar now.
Anna Day, Head of Culture & Libraries at Leisure & Culture Dundee, said many of the portraits pre-date the digital world but still have something to say about the way people present themselves today.
“While many of these works were created long before the digital age, they raise questions that feel remarkably relevant today, at a time when social media allows us to present carefully curated versions of ourselves to the world,” she said.
The technology may have changed dramatically, but perhaps people haven’t changed quite as much.
Long before anyone worried about profile pictures, Instagram feeds or getting the right angle for a selfie, people were making choices about how they wanted others to see them.
The artist and canvas did some of the work that a phone camera does now.
And that’s what gives Centre Stage a contemporary edge despite the age of some of the works on display. These aren’t simply portraits of people from another time. They’re records of how those people were presented – and, in some cases, how they wanted to be remembered.
From the unmistakable Lord Mustard to figures whose stories are much less obvious, the exhibition gives visitors the chance to look at those faces again – and perhaps wonder what’s happening just beyond the frame.
Centre Stage: Portraits from a Modern World opens at The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum on Saturday 3 October 2026. Admission is free.
