AI Profile Stephen Snoddy, director, New Art Gallery, Walsall

There were lots of reasons why the New Art Gallery, Walsall, should have flopped: it was the wrong place or a £16m temple to contemporary art; its revenue funding was inadequate; it was hooked on an existing collection of little appeal to modern audiences; national critics would never trek to this corner of the West Midlands to review exhibitions; artists wouldn’t want to be seen in a town like this, alive or dead.

Only one of those proved true, in that critics from London still balk at going to Walsall. It’s their loss, because there has been a string of important exhibitions at the New Art Gallery. There have been major solo shows for Gordon Cheung, Vidya Gastaldon, Christopher Le Brun, Conrad Shawcross, Hew Locke, Neal Rock, Gavin Turk and Joanna Vasconcelos, and the current free show, Party!, devised as a kind of birthday cake, has work by a small nation of artists, alive and dead, including Peter Blake, Michael Andrews, Renoir, Spencer Tunick, Marc Chagall, Gilbert & George, Chris Ofili, Goya, Nan Goldin, Sam Taylor Wood and Gillian Wearing.

But it was a risky undertaking, one that Stephen Snoddy’s predecessor, Peter Wilkinson, had nursed for over a decade in a gloomy local public library to get the important Garman-Ryan Collection of art, essentially the work of Jacob Epstein, into a proper, purpose-built gallery. And he did it, in a building designed by the award-winning Caruso St John which didn’t stint. “It looks fantastic” he said last week. “The stairs, the floors - the quality was absolutely right to go for, and it’s something people in Walsall are as proud of as ever”.

But there were problems that had nothing to do with the running of the gallery. The major sponsor, alongside the Arts Council, was the local authority the party colour of which seemed to change every four years, with a differing shade of opinion on the gallery each time. When Jenkinson left a year after the opening to set up Creative Partnerships with ACE, an interim director was put it in, and then for two years it was run from a civic office, to the growing exasperation of the Arts Council who said they wouldn’t consider reviewing their grant upwards until there was a professional director in post.

While all this was going on, the permanent staff and in particular the head of exhibitions, Deborah Robinson, continued to devise imaginative exploitations of the Garman Ryan Collection and temporary exhibitions.

A new assistant director of culture and leisure at Walsall Council saw the importance of a professional head of the gallery and Stephen Snoddy was appointed in 2005, to the great satisfaction of the Arts Council.

Snoddy had a long track record. He was at the Arnolfini in Bristol as exhibitions head just as the BritArt phenomenon was exploding, and though he modestly protests that the could hardly ignore it the exhibitions of the work of the likes of Rachel Whiteread meant his eye for contemporary work was quickly acknowledged. At the Cornerhouse in Manchester he mounted the first John Baldessari UK retrospective at a time when no-one in this country rated him – when Tate Modern announced the big Baldessari which has just finished Snoddy had to call Nick Serota and contradict the publicity which said it was the “first” retrospective, and that he’d been there almost 20 years before.