Qualla: Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carola Ceballos, CC BY-SA 3.0. The traffic cone is the point. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art on Royal Exchange Square, a Victorian equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington has carried a striped orange cone on his head, on and off, for decades. Authorities have removed it. Glaswegians have replaced it. The council once estimated the back-and-forth cost ten thousand pounds a year and proposed raising the plinth to make it harder to climb. The proposal was scrapped after a public outcry, with thousands signing a petition to keep the cone. The cone has been painted gold for Olympic gold medals, replaced with an EU flag on Brexit Day, and crowned with a saltire during the Independence Referendum. It is, by most accounts, the most photographed object in Scotland.

Image: Carola Ceballos | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow: A House Built on Tobacco

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The grand neoclassical building behind the statue did not start out as a gallery. It was built in 1778 as a townhouse for William Cunninghame of Lainshaw, one of the Glasgow Tobacco Lords whose enormous fortunes came from a transatlantic trade powered by the labour of enslaved pe...

Image: Public domain

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow: From Library to Gallery

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raymond McCrae from Glasgow, UK, CC BY 2.0. Glasgow District Libraries purchased the building in 1949 for £105,000, and in 1954 moved Stirling's Library into the great hall, a room one survey of the period described as 'magnificent: 110 feet by 60 feet, divided into three parts by a double row of monolithic Corinthian colu...

Image: Raymond McCrae from Glasgow, UK | CC BY 2.0

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow: The Duke and His Cone

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The equestrian statue of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was sculpted by the Italian artist Carlo Marochetti in 1844. He sits, bronzed and dignified, on a stone plinth in front of the gallery. The first traffic cone is said to have appeared on his head sometime in the 1...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow: What the Joke Means

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is tempting to read the cone as just a recurring student prank, but anyone who has spent time in Glasgow knows it is more than that. The cone is a public refusal to take a war monument too seriously. It is also, quietly, an argument: that the city's monuments belong to the cit...

Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 4.0