Taking the gallery out into the street and pulling the street into the gallery was the mantra that underpinned all of the recent alterations at Modern Art Oxford. An area previously used only for storing work during exhibition changeovers has been transformed into a courtyard, complete with café and art installation that links MAO to the heart of the city, writes Gill Oliver.

Judging by the number of intrigued passers-by who can be spotted wandering in to The Yard through the eye-catching new entrance in St Ebbes Street, it is definitely a job well done.

Certainly MAO’s director and driving force behind the change, Michael Stanley thinks so.

“It looks fantastic,” he said. “It is such a great facility. Not just for the gallery but for the city centre as a whole.

“We have had a barrage of really wonderful Tweets coming through commenting on how unique a space it is. Most people are saying it feels like New York.

“That was very much what we wanted. Our aim was to do something very different, very contemporary but at the same time urban and metropolitan, rather than chintzy.”

He realised the potential of the ground-level storage area almost as soon as he took up his post 18 months ago.

“To have this square footage and not use it was pretty decadent. I wanted to reinvent that space and offer a bit of flexibility in how we use the space.

“I always felt that having the entrance tucked away in Pembroke Street was awkward. When I came here, I spent time looking at the building, thinking about how visitors use it and what was called for within the city itself.

“I did have ideas about how it wasn’t functioning as well as it could be. Also, it is a relatively large building and I thought we could turn more of it over to artists.”

Michael, in his late 30s and married with young children, is not a newcomer to the dreaming spires. He spent three years at Ruskin before graduating with a first class honours degree in 1995.

A spell as curator of art at Compton Verney was followed by a successful period at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Immediately before taking up the post with MAO, he was director of Milton Keynes Gallery, where he was responsible for two Turner-nominated exhibitions.

“Once you have lived in Oxford, you keep a close relationship to the city. Coming back is a joy,” he added.

One of the major changes is the relocation of the café from the basement to the newly-designed Yard.

“The idea was to bring together the social function of a café, where visitors can enjoy eating and drinking and talking, with art and performance art,” he explained.

“It seemed right to move the coffee facility upstairs and give it much more public and social emphasis,” he added. Moving the café has freed up the basement space so that it can be a venue for events such as film screenings and live performances.

“I am sure there will be a few raised eyebrows about what we have done but that’s what we are here for,” Michael said.

“An organisation like ours needs to rethink its offer pretty much constantly. We are here in the historic heart of Oxford which is a curious city. It has a massive, international profile but is quite insular in terms of looking in at itself.”

He has indeed encountered some opposition from a small number of customers unconvinced it was a good idea to move the coffee shop from the basement.

“Old habits die hard. The coffee shop in the basement had quite a loyal clientele,” he said ruefully.

Also integral to the overall plan was extending MAO’s opening hours. Now, the galleries stay open until 7pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings and the café and bar in The Yard until 10pm.

“We hadn’t made it easy for audiences to engage with us outside nine-to-five but the way people consume and engage with culture these days has shifted dramatically, so we needed to address that,” Michael pointed out.

“Now, the place has the feel of an arts centre about it. If you say ‘arts centre’ people think of some kind of crusty old 1970s wreck but it is not, and I think that what we have now is what Oxford needed desperately.

“This is part of what we need to do to be the home for contemporary culture and key to embracing the breadth of the art world so that MAO is not just perceived as being about the galleries in the upper spaces.

“That is not to devalue those galleries at all. They will always be in the very heart of what we do. But I think we have to recognise that artists today, from all over the world, are very actively crossing boundaries between different disciplines and complementing their visual art practice with word, text, writings and various kinds of performances and that is very important for us to recognise.”

Accordingly, MAO has lined up an eclectic schedule of talks and tours, film screenings, music and family events, showcasing new talents and embracing a diverse programme of culture.

Another objective that underpinned what Michael wanted to achieve with the building was what he describes as “minimum cost, maximum impact”

The revamp cost around £300,000 in total, small potatoes for such a high profile project, as Michael pointed out.

“It is such a relatively modest cost in relation to what we have achieved. I hope this can, and will, act as a bit of a catalyst in relation to the further developments that are planned around the Westgate area.

“What we have done here is proof that it does not necessarily take tens or hundreds of millions of pounds to effect real change.”