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THE SHOW WINDOWS
L-R: Ella Lewis Williams; TrishWillets; Charlie Levine & Cara Pickering in front of Ben Javens ‘Coz as Oz’ artwork installation Chances are you’ve already seen bright flashes of Emerald Green around Coventry’s streets over the last few weeks but have you stopped for a moment to take a proper look? We hope so! The Show Windows is an art project in Coventry City Centre for Coventry City of Culture 2021 and features the bespoke artworks of local and international artists being displayed within the shop windows of Coventry. Designed as ‘portals to another world’ the project has been designed to bring art out of the gallery and on to the streets, inviting audiences to rediscover and reengage with their city centres and, perhaps, start seeing them in a whole new light. Dluxe magazine’s Rebecca Rhodes caught up with The Show Windows Curator Charlie Levine and Ella Lewis-Williams the project’s Digital Content Manager, to find out more. What are your roles within the project? Charlie: I’m an independent curator. Born and bred in Birmingham, I’m thrilled to be back in Coventry, in the West Midlands, to realise a project called The Show Windows. It was about this time last year that I was invited to see how we could realise a public art project in the city centre using shop windows as exhibition spaces and now I am the curator of what has to be said is a dream 20 dluxe-magazine.co.uk
project, putting artwork or creative pieces made by architects, designers, makers and creatives into shop windows around the city for the City of Culture. Ella: I am the digital content manager for The Show Windows Project. I am an art critic and editor and I’ve worked with Charlie before on other public art projects. My role within this project is to discover, uncover and untangle all the secret hidden stories that exist within the artworks themselves, but also the places in which they are installed and the stories of the shops and their owners and to celebrate those. Tell me about The Show Windows project. Charlie: This is about us bringing art out of the museum or the gallery and putting it directly on to the high streets. There’s something about people being reintroduced to their public spaces and taking ownership back over their high streets through art which is exciting. Especially as many people don’t feel that these traditional cultural institutions are for them, they don’t feel confident in those kinds of spaces.. And that idea of being out and about feeling confident, also feeling excited and inspired and hopeful is part of our agenda. It’s also about helping audiences develop a creative taste; not everyone’s
going to like everything and that’s OK as well. I think thats a really key part of engaging with art is knowing what you like and what you don’t like. So for me, it’s breaking down some of those barriers about accessing the creative industries. One of the inspirations for the project was the L Frank Baum book, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors, which was published the same year as the first famous The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book, 1900. The link to Baum encapsulates the idea that these windows can be portals to other worlds, to inspire imagination, adventure and hope. That idea really shaped the project which is why we decided to rethink Coventry and its skyline as the Emerald City, the place in The Wizard of Oz that’s about magic, culture, creativity and the unexpected which is exactly what Coventry is. So, the brief was about picking up on that L Frank Baum theme but making it specific to Coventry. Charlie: Something BID was really keen to do was give that kind of excitement and hope back to the shopkeepers themselves and those people that work in retail and service industries. They’ve been closed for so long and now they’re open, it is amazing that we can help celebrate them and their
