Pull into Sheffield station, head up the slope towards the centre, and the city's flagship art institution sits waving a friendly welcome. Millennium Gallery is the cultural gateway to Sheffield, with exhibitions showcasing everything from excellent international exhibitions to timelines of local creativity, and a well-trodden avenue that leads straight into the beautiful Winter Garden beyond.
Millennium Gallery is the younger sibling to the Graves Gallery, just round the corner. The former leans more to the modern side of art than the latter, but the two siblings get on very well – and you can quite handily hop from one to the other for a lesson in a few hundred centuries' worth of art history.
Millennium Gallery's large-scale shows have, in recent years, included everything from international haute couture to a private postmodern collection featuring the likes of Do Ho Suh, Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin. It has just as frequently taken curatorial inspiration from the city itself, with a sonic installation mapping Sheffield from its very edges to its centre, a showcase of extraordinary objects from this city of makers, and an exploration into how its current crop of artists use movement in their work.
