NUFC: The Road to Wembley was an exhibition that took place from Friday 22nd of August to Monday 25th at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with Newcastle United Football Club (NUFC). The main focus of this exhibition was to display the Carabao Cup to visitors and fans, with events and special appearances from NUFC players. The exhibition consisted of floor-to-ceiling wallpaper panels, information and images of Newcastle United around the level one space. These included images and artwork from acclaimed local artists Jimmy Turrell and Ewen Spencer, who are known for their mixed media works that combine football, music and street culture. The exhibition had an immersive feel, and at the same time felt simple and explicitly curated for Newcastle United fans, with the wallpaper filled with quotes of special moments of the club and video works and audio installations documenting the club’s journey to winning the trophy. The exhibition was accompanied by photos from legacy and current players. The Carabao Cup was set on the centre of the room with three medium-sized walls around it, specifically set for the fans to be able to take pictures of themselves with the trophy. On the Friday, the exhibition was also embellished by the presence of the victory parade bus, parked at Baltic Square .
With set events for the exhibition dates, Newcastle United players were joined by art director Will Knight, club photographer Serena Taylor, and NUFC Head of Brand and Marketing Natalie Raine. NUFC: The Road to Wembley was to me a striking case study. I believe it created visible intersections between two powerful cultural languages, football and contemporary art. For me this was not just an art display, but a gesture of mutual recognition between two forms of civic pride.
The Newcastle United-Baltic collaboration was kicked off by Natalie Raine. Raine has stated that the idea for the exhibition started from a marketing campaign that was strongly connected to identity. And that identity was ‘We Don’t Do Quiet’ – a phrase that is linked with the city’s reputation for being passionate and loud. Ewen Spencer and Jimmy Turrell were tasked with taking photos of fans and players at matches, creating designs and art that would capture the right aesthetic. Weaving together the marketing strategy and the raw emotion of fans, they turned the campaign into an exhibition. Natalie, having worked with Baltic previously, said that ‘Baltic was the obvious place […] to host the exhibition, due to its status as a prominent local landmark and a fitting venue to offer the experience to fans for free’. With Baltic being a major cultural space in the North East, having four large gallery spaces and free entry, I believe this exhibition created a visible, successful intersection between these two powerful cultural languages. As the exhibition pulled in crowds, I began to wonder: had the exhibition happened in another venue, how much would the entry fee have been? And how accessible would it have been?
Like sports, and specifically football, art can also be physical, populist and mainstream. After visiting and being in the space, I saw that an art gallery can be both an arena of choreography, storytelling, and devotion just like St. James Park on match day. But with this, I could also understand that access is never neutral.
While Baltic surged with crowds, Side Gallery, a cornerstone of working-class visual culture since 1977, quietly reopened after two years of closure due to funding precarity. It opened with a group show called MySide: Showing Us Your Side of Life, on the same weekend as NUFC: The Road to Wembley. This felt like a different kind of crowd. Smaller, quieter and what you would usually see in an art gallery. The ground floor and entrance had a display called 50×50: Fundraising Print Sale. There were 50 prints by 50 different photographers, costing £50 per print. Artists included celebrity photographers like Rankin, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Daniel Meadows. This project is still ongoing, with print sales continuing online and every sale directly supporting the AmberSide Trust.
The first-floor display was called Our Side: A Documentary Toolkit. Our Side invited visitors to explore how documentary photography can help us understand the place we live in, and the lives of those who came before. The exhibition had photography highlights from the AmberSide collection with featured photographers such as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Richard Grassick. Alongside the photographs, the visitors were encouraged to participate with the documentary toolkit, through simple prompts and questions placed on the wall around the display, asking the visitors: What feels familiar? What has changed? What would you add? Following these questions, we were provided with a piece of paper with these prompts written on it and a pen. This way, the visitors could write down their opinions and thoughts on the exhibition, creating a data base that could be used for future exhibitions and workshops.
The second-floor display was titled MySide: Group Show. This brought together photography from Side Gallery’s international community, with the work on display responding to two themes: ‘Documenting the Self’ and ‘Places That Made Us’. Photographers here were sharing something personal. The exhibition reflected how photographers see themselves, the spaces, streets and memories that have shaped their lives. The photographs were intimate and honest, offering a glimpse into daily routines, quiet moments of family life and landscapes.
I had a feeling that this was meant to be a moment of attention and triumph. But in the shadow of Baltic’s NUFC: The Road to Wembley, the weekend passed largely unnoticed by the wider public. Side Gallery was once a space dedicated to photography and film that chronicled labour, migration, and northern life. Their work preserved the very histories football clubs often claim to celebrate. There’s a poignant irony in this. Side Gallery pre-dates Baltic by three decades, yet now must rely on partnerships, volunteer efforts, and fundraising just to keep its archive accessible. It doesn’t boast a vast atrium or institutional PR engine like other larger organisations.
For me, these two exhibitions revealed a problem with politics of access. In my view, the idea of cultural memory without visibility is vulnerable. Engagement metrics dominate funding decisions. Institutions that can deliver queues and headlines thrive; those that work in the margins struggle. Both football and art require space, memory, and community, both depend on rituals of spectatorship. But when access is instrumentalised, when “community” becomes a metric rather than a redistribution of power, this supposed connection between large and small institutions widens. What happened that weekend in Newcastle isn’t just a story about attendance figures. From visiting Baltic that weekend I understood that the gallery, like the stadium, is a space of potential. We are not just watching. We are in it. And after visiting Side, I viewed a resilient but silent struggle of a smaller gallery.
So where do we go next? How can we find a connection between these two things? We might begin with these ideas: both require space, memory, and community. Both depend on rituals of spectatorship. Both produce affective bonds that are hard to put into words but deeply felt. And both can be utilised by institutions in the name of “access” and “community” while failing to redistribute power or funding equitably.
Kel Pereira is an emerging curator and writer based in the North East of England.
This review is supported by The Collective Studio, an artist development programme at The NewBridge Project.
Published 02.02.2026 by Lesley Guy in Explorations
1,267 words
