Appointments
The Wales Committee of the National Lottery Heritage Fund has announced Denise Lewis Poulton as its new Chair. Poulton has advised the Welsh Government and Senedd Cymru and a number of Welsh cultural, media and public sector organisations as a corporate affairs and strategic communications specialist. She is a non-executive member of the S4C Board, and was previously Vice President of The Hay Literary Festival, a board of trustees member at The Wallace Collection, and a non-executive director of the Welsh National Opera.
Michael Terwey has been re-elected to the Museums Association board, which he joined in 2020. He is director of public engagement and research at the National Trust for Scotland and the chair of the MA’s Ethics Committee.
Openings
The Gilbert & George Centre, a new gallery celebrating the work of collaborative art duo, is to open in London this April. Set in a Spitalfields courtyard in London, it is expected to host one to two exhibitions a year showcasing both historical and new pictures by the artists.
Young V&A, the former V&A Museum of Childhood, has revealed it will open its doors on Saturday 1 July 2023, alongside new details of what visitors can expect from its first exhibition. The inaugural ‘Japan: Myths to Manga’ exhibition begins on 14th October 2023, three months after the £13m capital project is revealed to the public.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Modern Two building will reopen on 29 April 2023, with a new exhibition, ‘Decades: The Art of Change 1900-1980’, a free exhibition through 80 years of art, from 1900 to the 1970s, drawn from the Gallery’s collection of modern art.
Exhibitions
S new exhibition at Kingston Museum by Creative Youth in partnership with The Community Brain and Kingston Museum will explore the life of David Bowie alter-ego Ziggy Stardust. ‘Bowie And Beyond: Ziggy Stardust & Kingston’s Music Heritage’ will explore the moment that Ziggy Stardust was launched in Tolworth and the wider music and pop culture scene in the borough. Runs 31 March – 16 September 2023.
Ceramic artist Julian Stair OBE displays a group of new works in a new exhibition at The Sainsbury Centre. Created in response to the global pandemic, and taking inspiration from archaic pots and grave goods in the Sainsbury Centre Collection, the new ceramics will be presented alongside objects from the collection selected by the artist. Runs 18 March – 17 September 2023.
A special one-room display at the Wallace Collection, ‘The Queen and her Corgis’ will celebrate through photographs the unique connection The Queen had with her dogs. Running 8 March – 25 June 2023, the exhibition will represent each decade of her life with a single image that captures the late monarch’s love of the breed. The display will coincide with the Collection’s major exhibition, Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney, which runs 29 March – 15 October 2023, which will feature paintings, sculptures, drawings, works of art and taxidermy on the subject of man’s best friend.
The Historic Dockyard Chatham is to exhibit a sea monster-themed immersive exhibition from next month (pictured above). Originally opened at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth, and curated with the National Oceanography Centre’s Discovery Collections, ‘Monsters of the Deep’ will explore the beings in the depths of the ocean, and the myths created on the ocean. Runs 1st April – 19 November 2023.
This year’s winner of Sky Arts’ Landscape Artist of the Year has been announced as Finn Campbell-Notman, a British artist who mostly works in oil and charcoal. The 2023 Landscape Artist of the Year prize was a commission from Royal Museums Greenwich to create ‘a contemporary seascape inspired by the Van de Veldes’ to sit alongside the new exhibition, The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea. The prize commission and the exhibition will open on 2 March 2023.
The cause of the ‘pea soup’ fog in London which inspired Charles Dickens to describe it in more than one of his novels is the focus of a new exhibition at The Charles Dickens Museum. Items on display are a first edition of Dickens’s ‘foggiest’ novel, Bleak House, an original pen and wash illustration by Frederick Barnard, who was employed by Dickens’s publisher, Chapman & Hall, to illustrate the ‘Household Edition’ of nine of Dickens’s works , and Dickens’s own fire poker, used to tend his dining room fire while he lived at Gad’s Hill. ‘A Great and Dirty City: Dickens and the London Fog’ Runs 29 March 2023 – 22 October 2023.
Funding
The National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Churches Trust are partnering on a new funding programme, targeting three areas of the UK. The three-year ‘Cherish’ programme will deliver support to places of worship in Scotland, Wales and the north west of England in Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria. From May The National Churches Trust will distribute £1.9m funding on behalf of the Heritage Fund in an effort to safeguard places of worship.
