Exhibitions & Events May – August 2010
Welcome
Hiroyuki Shindo, Shindigo Space 07, 2007. Photo: Joel Chester Fildes
Summer sees a seasonal upswing in activities inside and outside the Gallery. Our extraordinary wallpaper show, Walls Are Talking, continues to the end of August and our summer activities for children, teenagers and for adults take wallpaper as their inspiration. When the weather is good, Arty Picnics will move outside and when the rain sets in we’ll be a hive of activity indoors. This period sees two major new additions to the Whitworth’s collection making their presence felt in the Gallery. Intuition shows works from the collection of Victor Musgrave and Monika Kinley: drawings, paintings, textiles and
sculpture, produced by so-called ‘outsider’ artists, like Madge Gill, Henry Darger, Scottie Wilson and George Hipkiss, whose artistic approach has been developed outside the norms of formal art training. Spanning our three upstairs gallery spaces, the exhibition asks us to think about the nature of creativity and the startling power of the imagination. Downstairs we see Admire/Desire showing a beautiful selection of Victorian watercolours from the collection of Arthur and Helen Grogan. Both gifts to the Gallery continue the vital tradition of art collectors and artists giving works to the Whitworth’s now 55,000
strong collection, for the pleasure of all our our visitors. We are profoundly grateful to Monika, Arthur and Helen. Our plans to expand the Gallery continue apace. As the new development will reconnect us more powerfully to the Park, we’ll be asking visitors for their views on how we can take our art and events outside and what they’d like to see. We look forward to hearing from you, especially as the sun shines.
Maria Balshaw
Shindigo Space 07 To 6 June 2010 A new acquisition commissioned specially to complement the soaring height and red brick walls of the Whitworth’s Mezzanine Court. Hiroyuki Shindo, a master dyer and one of Japan’s leading textile artists, created the banners and Shindigo balls from cotton, hemp and indigo using shibori and other traditional resist-dyeing techniques.
Cover Image... Walls Are Talking: wallpaper, art and culture Exhibition pages 02 – 03
Gallery Café
Gallery Support
Enjoy seasonal and locally sourced food served up by owner and chef Peter Booth and his team in the Gallery Café. The 2009 Good Food Guide’s Best Family Restaurant in the UK, the Café offers great coffee, delicious cakes, a seasonal lunch menu and healthy choices for kids’ all of which led Stylist magazine to name it one of the six best gallery restaurants in the UK.
There has never been a better time to support the Whitworth! Over the next three years we will be transforming the Gallery, making it an even better space for art and for visitors. The Gallery raises funds from a number of sources and you can help. For a discussion about corporate sponsorship, individual giving or leaving a legacy to the Whitworth please contact Jo Beggs, Head of Development & Resources on 0161 275 7474 or email jo.beggs@manchester.ac.uk
Opening hours, Mon to Sat: 10am – 4.30pm, Sun: 12 – 3.30pm
Gallery Shop ‘Always a delight to visit’ Take a bit of the Whitworth home! Our shop has an excellent range of postcards, greetings cards and gifts to help you remember your visit and a wide selection of books and magazines. Buying from our shop directly supports the work of the Gallery. University of Manchester staff, students and Friends of the Whitworth get a 10% discount.
24 Hour Access The Gallery is open 24 hours a day at www.manchester.ac.uk/ whitworth. There’s more information on exhibitions, including labels and text panels, as well as the thousands of items that are in our stores, complete with images and background information. More objects are being added to the website day-by-day, helping visitors with their research interests. Keep in touch with us via our email newsletter – go to www.manchester.ac.uk/whitworth and register.
Learning more about our collections Less than 5% of our collection is on display, there’s much more behind the scenes. If you want to learn more about items in our collection, you can use our study rooms by booking an appointment with a curator.
Friends of the Whitworth Join the Friends of the Whitworth and get more involved with the Gallery and its work. From financial support towards activities and new acquisitions through to volunteering, the Friends make a valuable contribution to the Whitworth. Annual membership is available for £20 single, £35 double. For more information on the Friends of the Whitworth please telephone 0161 275 7496 or visit www.friendsofthewhitworth.org.uk
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Erwan Venn, Destroy Wallpaper, 2002. Walls Are Talking, 2010. Photo: www.WeAreTAPE.com
Main Exhibition
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Walls Are Talking wallpaper, art and culture To 30 August 2010 Wallpaper is out of the closet. No longer a joke with connotations of kitsch, it has become a legitimate medium for contemporary artists. Walls Are Talking, the first exhibition of its kind in the UK, features wallpapers by more than 30 internationally known artists, including Sonia Boyce, Thomas Demand, Robert Gober, Damien Hirst, Abigail Lane, Francesco Simeti, and Niki de St. Phalle. It shows how they have used historic wallpaper motifs, styles, and methods and how familiar patterns have been subverted. Located across several of the Whitworth’s galleries, the exhibition includes commercial representations of gender-related themes, features specially commissioned work from artists, Michael Craig-Martin and Catherine Bertola, and explores the interface between wallpapers as artists’ works and products made for the domestic market. A collaboration with the V&A, Walls Are Talking surprises, excites and challenges. It shows that wallpaper is rarely a quiet background – it can be very noisy indeed.
For details of all Walls Are Talking tours that accompany this exhibition, please see page 09. A Walls Are Talking book accompanies this exhibition and is available from the Gallery Shop.
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Events mintsource Tuesday Talks 4 May, 11am – 12.30pm, Free Charlie Hooker is a professor at the University of Brighton, his sculptural work combines mechanical and electrical power with natural elements.
Can Altay, Protoype for the Trainer Monument, 2009. In collaboration with Static Gallery, Liverpool
11 May, 11am – 12.30pm, Free Bruce McLean’s practice of over forty years includes sculpture, painting, pottery, printmaking and performance art. Bruce will introduce and discuss a new film work.
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mintsource is the Whitworth Art Gallery’s programme of activities for young people.
Wall-to-wall Saturday 29 May 12noon – 3pm, Free Join us in the Gallery for an exciting drop-in wallpaper-themed event.
18 May, 11am – 12.30pm, Free Can Altay lives and works in Ankara, Turkey, his work explores the way architectural spaces are used and reinvented in daily life.
Off the Wall
The series is programmed by Professor Pavel Büchler and supported by Manchester Metropolitan University.
Lesbian and Gay Youth Manchester take over the Gallery Café for Manchester Pride 2010.
Serious about art 1 May, 5 June & 3 July Serious textiles, 11am – 1pm, £5 Serious life drawing, 2 – 4pm, £5 On the first Saturday of every month there will be a textiles class and life drawing class for adults wishing to learn new skills, sharpen up old ones and meet new like-minded people. Classes will last 2 hours and cost £5, materials and refreshments will be included unless otherwise stated. To book telephone 0161 275 7450
Coming soon…
14 August – 17 October 2010
Watch us on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/mintsource Join us on Facebook: search ‘groups’ for ‘mintsource’ Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/_mintsource_ Talk to us: mintsource@manchester.ac.uk
‘I hadn’t been to the gallery before, but I’m much more interested in art now’ Dave, 20
Bringing art, people and ideas together, a new programme of events for adults – coming soon! To find out more about this lively, distinctive and decidedly social programme, visit www.manchester.ac.uk/whitworth
Garfield Weston Foundation
Exhibitions
Intuition The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection arrives at the Whitworth
26 June 2010 – Summer 2011 Get ‘plugged into the mains electricity of the imagination’* with Henry Darger, Madge Gill, Chris Hipkiss, Scottie Wilson, and many others whose art developed outside formal training. This is your first opportunity to see this extraordinary work on display since its arrival at the Whitworth earlier this year. Victor Musgrave and Monika Kinley chose to collect artwork that they felt was genuinely original, intuitive and made by artists outside the mainstream system of art education and galleries. The result is a collection of almost 800 drawings, paintings and sculptures that has become the first of its kind to join the permanent collection of a public museum in the UK. Trustees of the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection generously presented the entire collection to the Whitworth Art Gallery in March 2010. The gift was facilitated by the Contemporary Art Society. *Sir Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate
Madge Gill, Untitled, 1939 Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection
For guided tour details see page 09.
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Lionel Percy Smythe, Boulogne Shrimpers, 1882
Admire/Desire A new gift of watercolours from Arthur and Helen Grogan
1May – 15 August 2010 Victorian watercolour artists captured a rural landscape that was fast disappearing, using glowing colour and microscopic detail. For over four decades Arthur and Helen Grogan collected such works to display in their home in Richmond, and also for the Arts and Crafts house, Standen, in Sussex. This display brings together a group of these new acquisitions by artists including William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton and John William Waterhouse, which were presented to the Whitworth through the Art Fund last year.
The Manchester Indian
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Paper proof of a block print, Thomas Wardle & Co, 1880
Thomas Wardle and India To 6 June 2010 The impact that India had on the work of textile entrepreneur Sir Thomas Wardle (1831-1909), forms the focus of this exhibition. Still perhaps best known for his collaboration with William Morris, Wardle’s efforts to reinvigorate the silk industry in India are highlighted here. Spectacular saris, turbans, tailored garments and sample lengths collected by Wardle on a visit to India in 1885-6 are featured, together with fabrics printed and dyed by Wardle’s company in Leek, Staffordshire, revealing the influence of Indian design on British textiles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This exhibition has been co-curated by Dr Brenda King, author of Silk and Empire and lecturer at the University of Salford.
To 30 August 2010
Stories of the World To Spring 2011 Four models were brought to the North West in the 1830s by a textile trader who owned a cotton plantation in Brazil. Principally made of cotton, one of them carries a box of varied fabrics for sale. They tell an amazing story about the journeys of cotton and people across the globe to Manchester. Stories of the World is one of the major projects at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Supported by Renaissance North West and the Friends of the Whitworth.
Model of an enslaved person, Brazil, c.1834
With Jane and Louise Wilson’s Monument (Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee) at its heart, this exhibition shows the straight lines and order of the modern world being interrupted and softened by the effects of children playing, dense woodland, rushing streams and dark caves. To mark 100 years of the Contemporary Art Society, the exhibition also describes the kinds of people and organizations that help the Whitworth to grow its collection.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Monument, 2003.
Sweet Dis/order
The Complete Roberta Breitmore Lynn Hershman Leeson To 6 June 2010 In San Francisco in the mid-seventies, Lynn Hershman Leeson created Roberta Breitmore and performed this persona as a work of art over a four year period, documenting it through artifacts, photography, film and sound. This extraordinary body of work, which raises questions about the complexities of identity and the nature of the work of art, has been purchased by the Whitworth in its final edition and is shown here for the first time in its entirety. Roberta Breitmore ended when ‘she’ went through a ritual exorcism in 1978, but her spirit survives in this documentation and the artist’s later work. The purchase of Roberta Breitmore has been supported by the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the Whitworth. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta Hand to Face, 1975
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Walls are Talking, 2010. Photo: www.WeAreTAPE.com
Families Free Artist Led Workshops For Under 5s and their grown-ups
Toddlertastic Booking is essential for all Toddlertastic workshops To book please telephone 0161 275 7450
Drama Adventures On Mondays 3 May, 7 June, 5 July, 2 August 10.30 – 11.30am & 11.30am – 12.30pm Bring the artworks to life through exciting and fun storytelling, role-play and drama techniques.
Art Adventures On Mondays 10 & 31 May, 14 June, 12 July, 9 & 30 August 10.30 – 11.30am & 11.30am – 12.30pm Come and enjoy a story adventure while creating your own mini masterpiece!
Music Adventures On Mondays 17 May, 21 June, 19 July, 16 August 10.30 – 11.30am & 11.30am – 12.30pm Explore the artworks through music and movement. Enjoy singing songs and musical games.
Dance Adventures On Mondays 24 May, 28 June, 26 July, 23 August 10.30 – 11.30am & 11.30am – 12.30pm Join us and dance like a sculpture, boogie like a textile and wiggle like a painting.
Drop in workshops for children of all ages, their families and carers
Arty Picnics On Tuesdays 1 June, 20 & 27 July, 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 August 11am – 12.30pm & On Thursdays 3 June, 22 & 29 July, 5, 12, 19, 26 August 11am – 12.30pm Bring your family and some food (if you fancy lunch), and meet an artist for fun creative activities. Don’t worry if it is a terrible Tuesday or Thursday and raining outside, we’ll have a picnic in the Gallery surrounded by sunny landscapes!
Colourful Sundays Every Sunday – all year round! 1.30 – 3.30pm Join friends, family and artists for our popular Colourful Sunday drop-in creative workshops and create exciting things from forming your own forest to mask making!
Poets & Players Family Day Saturday 15 May 10.45 – 11.45am, for children 7-11yrs & their families 12noon – 1pm, for children 12-16yrs & their families Poetry workshops with David Horner. Please book for this event. Telephone 0161 275 7450 Saturday 15 May 2.30pm, for children of all ages A performance of poetry and music with David Horner and musicians. No need to book.
For children aged 6 & over and their grown-ups
Artist Skills… Wednesday 2 June & Friday 4 June 1.30 – 3.30pm Bring your family and join an artist to learn a range of skills from printing to felt-making and create your own artwork to take home. With these new skills you can create your own family artwork back at home too.
Autonomous Art On Wednesday 21 & 28 July, 4, 11, 18 & 25 August & On Friday 23 & 30 July, 6, 13, 20 & 27 August 1.30 – 3.30pm Bring your family, excite your senses, and explore a range of activities led by the interests of your child such as art, drama, materials and imagination.
‘Family, friends, fun, art, food and monster masks. What more could we ask for?’ Devere family
www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/families/freeevents 08
Calendar
All events are FREE unless otherwise stated, and it is advisable to book on 0161 275 7450 to avoid disappointment.
Want to learn more about our Gallery? Every Tues, Wed & Thurs from 2 – 2.30pm Join our general tours looking at the past, present and future of the Whitworth.
Family Friendly Art Workshops See page 08 FF
May
Throughout May Sat 1
11am – 1pm
Serious about art: Serious textiles, £5. See page 04 W
Sat 1
11am – 1pm
Serious about art: Serious life drawing, £5. See page 04 W
Sun 2
12.30 – 1.15pm
Performance by RNCM students C
Tues 4
11am – 12.30pm
Tuesday Talks: Charlie Hooker, Artist. See page 04 TK
Sun 16
12.30 – 1.15pm
Performance by RNCM students C
Tues 11
11am – 12.30pm
Tuesday Talks: Bruce McLean, Artist. See page 04 TK
Tues 11
1.15pm
Admire / Desire Tour: Heather Birchall, Curator (Historic Fine Art) T
Tues 18
11am – 12.30pm
Tuesday Talks: Can Altay, Artist. See page 04 TK
Tues 18
1.15pm
Walls Are Talking Tour: Christine Woods, Curator (Wallpapers) T
Sat 22
2pm
Walls Are Talking Tour: Christine Woods, Curator (Wallpapers) T
Sat 29
12 noon – 3pm
mintsource: Wall-to-wall, drop-in event for young people E Family Friendly Art Workshops See page 08 FF
June
Throughout June Sat 5
11am – 1pm
Serious about art: Serious textiles, £5. See page 04 W
Sat 5
11am – 1pm
Serious about art: Serious life drawing, £5. See page 04 W
Sun 13
12.30 – 1.15pm
Performance by RNCM students C
Tues 22
2pm
Walls Are Talking Tour: Christine Woods, Curator (Wallpapers) T
Sat 26
2pm
Intuition Tour: Bryony Bond, Temporary Exhibitions Curator T
Sun 27
12.30 – 1.15pm
Performance by RNCM students C
Family Friendly Art Workshops See page 08 FF
August
July
Throughout July Sat 3
11am – 1pm
Serious about art: Serious textiles, £5. See page 04 W
Sat 3
11am – 1pm
Serious about art: Serious life drawing, £5. See page 04 W
Tues 13
1.15pm
Intuition Tour: David Morris, Head of Collections T
Sun 25
12.30 – 1.15pm
Performance by RNCM students C
Throughout August
Family Friendly Art Workshops See page 08 FF
Sat 14
2pm
Walls Are Talking Tour: Christine Woods, Curator (Wallpapers) T
Sun 15
12.30 – 1.15pm
Performance by RNCM students C
T = Tour
C = Concert
TK = Talk
E = Event
FF = Family Friendly
W = Creative workshop
Concerts: Supported by the Friends of the Whitworth Gina Miller Bequest.
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Opening Times
Staying in Manchester
Monday to Saturday 10am – 5pm, Sunday 12 – 4pm
Situated near Piccadilly Station, City Inn Manchester is a leading contemporary hotel that boasts state of the art facilities, stylish destination bars and al fresco restaurant.
The Gallery is open as usual on all Bank Holiday Mondays. Entry to the Gallery is free.
City Inn is the Whitworth’s official hotel sponsor.
Access We aim to be accessible to visitors with disabilities. Wheelchairs and a rollator are available on request. There is a toilet for disabled visitors. The lecture theatre is fitted with an induction loop. Large print information is available. If you require assistance during your visit, please email whitworth@manchester.ac.uk telephone 0161 275 7450 or ask at the Welcome Desk.
Learning and Interpretation For more information about visits for schools and colleges, please telephone 0161 275 7453. To make the most of your visit, book in with our Learning and Interpretation team.
www.cityinn.com
Paints by Little Greene Created in association with English Heritage, Little Greene’s range of environmentally-friendly paints and wallpapers brings timeless elegance and enduring appeal to your home. Little Greene is the Whitworth’s official paint sponsor. www.thelittlegreene.com
Manchester Museum The Museum is 10 minutes walk from the Gallery with collections and activities for families and adults. Telephone 0161 275 2648 or visit www.manchester.ac.uk/museum
How to find us The Gallery is in Whitworth Park, opposite Manchester Royal Infirmary. It is about 1.5 miles south of Manchester city centre, at the south of the University of Manchester campus. By train: The Gallery is about 1 mile from Oxford Road station. By bus: There is a frequent service along Oxford Road to and from Piccadilly Gardens. The 147 from Piccadilly Station passes the Gallery, stopping at Nelson Street (Mon to Fri).
By car: There are three designated spaces for visitors with disabilities and two short-stay spaces (max 20 mins). Parking is available in the University Car Parks at Cecil Street (daytime and evenings) and Dilworth Street (evenings only). See map.
Whitworth Art Gallery The University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER T: 0161-275 7450 F: 0161-275 7451 E: whitworth@manchester.ac.uk TM
www.twitter.com/whitworthart
www.manchester.ac.uk/whitworth
Designed by Epigram: 0161 237 9660
Travel information line: To check bus and train details telephone 0161 228 7811