Appointments
The Powell-Cotton Trust (PCT), operator of the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent, has announced the appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer. Sarah Corn will bring almost 20 years of industry experience to the role, most recently as the current Director of The Old Operating Theatre in London.
Two Associate Directors and a Head of Access, Diversity & Inclusion will begin their roles at Wellcome Collection this Spring. Daniel Martin, Rachael Minott and Sumitra Upham will provide “strategic direction to the organisation”, it said.
The Barbican has announced Devyani Saltzman has been appointed its new Director for Arts and Participation. Saltzman is a Canadian writer and curator who was most recently Director of Public Programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, North America’s fourth largest museum.
Openings/Closures
The Museum of Homelessness (MoH) has announced that it will open its first physical location to the public in May with a new immersive experience. To mark the opening of its new site and ten-year anniversary, the museum has shared plans for ‘How to Survive the Apocalypse’.
Museum of Homelessness opening to ‘break from typical museum experience’
Exhibitions
A new photography gallery at London Transport Museum is to open tomorrow, showcasing a new exhibition, ‘Echoes of the Blitz: Underground Shelters in Ukraine and London’. In partnership with n-ost, a Berlin based journalistic network, a display of 70 images will explore how Underground stations and metro systems have provided shelter to citizens during periods of war – now and in the past. The gallery features images from the Museum’s collection and current works of six renowned documentary photographers working in Ukraine. Opens Friday 1 March 2024.
The Design Museum has announced new details of the over 250 objects to be displayed in its upcoming Barbie exhibition. Among the more than 180 dolls on display at Barbie: The Exhibition will be a rare first edition Barbie from 1959, and a one-of-a-kind Talking Barbie prototype. Runs 5 July 2024 – 23 February 2025.
A copy of Karl Marx’s work Das Kapital is returning to Down House in Kent, home of Charles Darwin, following specialist conservation work by Cambridge University Library. As the charity that cares for Down House, English Heritage is putting the book on public display for the first time in more than five years. The book, which was personally inscribed and sent to Darwin as a gift in June 1873 by Marx, is on loan from Cambridge University Library.
A new exhibition at V&A Dundee, co-curated by V&A Dundee and V&A South Kensington uses the V&A’s vast photography collections to explore the ways photography and cities have influenced each other. ‘Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World’ will display 150 photographs, films and installations, and marks 10 years of Dundee’s designation as the only UNESCO City of Design. On display is a new portrait of Dundee commissioned for the exhibition, made up of thousands of collaged photographs taken in the summer of 2023. Another major new commission is a collaborative videogame called Gimbal City designed by former University of Dundee graduates. Runs 29 March – 27 October 2024.
The National Galleries of Scotland will display Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces at The National in Edinburgh, for the first time in eleven years. Jointly owned with the V&A, the marble sculpture rotates between the two locations every seven years. Its return was delayed by the opening of the new Scottish galleries at the National.
The ‘Heart of the Nation’ exhibition opens at the Migration Museum in Lewisham next month, marking the final leg of a national tour during the NHS’s 75th anniversary year, after showings in Leicester and Leeds. It features personal stories contributed by people who have come from all over the world to work for the NHS, from the 1940s to the present day. Their stories are told through photography, film, newly commissioned artwork, and artefacts. Runs 7 March – 27 July 2024.
In March two large-scale tapestries by Grayson Perry will be on display for the first time in Hampshire. Perry’s Essex House Tapestries – The Life of Julie Cope (2015) opens at The Arc. Alongside the tapestries will be a specially commissioned audio read by Perry himself. The Ballad of Julie Cope is a 3,000-word narrative that “illuminates Julie’s hopes and fears as she journeys through life”. Runs on 15 March – 12 June 2024.
Image:
Part of the Heart of the Nation exhibition (Photo: Hamish Irvine Photographer)
