CHARTIST NEWPORT

Announcing:

CHARTIST NEWPORT














website | blog | flickr

A Newport Museum and Art Gallery project to document the heritage of Chartism and public art in Newport and South Wales. | Produced by Roger Cucksey, Keeper of Art, Newport Museum and Art Gallery & John Wilson, Guest Curator.

Commencing with documentation of the the Newport Chartist Mural, we move on to explore the wider context of public art in Newport in which the popular celebration of Chartism is to the fore, and then further afield to look at the wider landscape of Chartism and its commemorative landmarks in Monmouthshire and South Wales as a whole, and finally a consideration of the historical interpretation of Chartism. | Read more: Project outline

The project was seeded with funding support from Modus and Public Art Wales in order to commence the Newport Chartist Mural Documentation exercise.

We are seeking new project partners to continue to build our online resources.

mural | public art | landmarks | history | resources


John Wilson, Guest Curator, Chartist Newport | 13 Oct 2007


CHARTIST LANDMARKS

We commence our online resources with an exercise in Mapping Chartist Newport:


















Some selected Chartist landmarks - highlighting the geography of Chartism in Newport, the industrial valleys and iron-districts of Monmouthsire and the "Hills", plus some wider South Wales connections. [Work in progress]


[1] A geography of Chartism: From Westgate Square to the Chartist Caves
( v_0.1 | 10 Oct 2007)

Visualization:

* chartistprism
* flickr map
* postcard
* desktop
* tags



[2] The signs on the street: Chartist prism

Defamiliarizing the landmark

* chartistprism

Walking the street - we tend to pass by everyday familiar landmarks; despite their size they dissolve from our very sight. Public statues and other forms of public art are no exception - the noble becomes a traffic island, we do not enquire into his past deeds.


















Chartism - the signs on the street of a memorialized past - in public statues, memorials, plaques and other forms of public art. The signs on the street. Fragmented signs and space; or, heroic narrative and place of Chartism? Sites of memory and forgetting, sedition and freedom, power and struggle.



















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NEWS | Art: Review to consider digital plan

Caption | SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME? Guest curator John Wilson and Keeper of art Roger Cucksey, look at Newport Museum and Art Gallery's first on-line exhibition, Documenting the City, in April this year


Art: Review to consider digital plan | South Wales Argus, 3 Oct 2007


Excerpt:

Newport has a wealth of art treasures, including work by LS Lowry, Sir Stanley Spencer, Dame Laura Knight and Hans Feibusch.

But with space at a premium, just five per cent of the gems are on public display.

Now public watchdogs are to look at how to increase public access to the collection, which could include virtual viewing.

Cllr Davies suggested the authority's culture and recreation scrutiny forum should examine the issue. (...)

Earlier this year, we reported how Newport's Keeper of Art, Roger Cucksey, and Guest curator, John Wilson, launched the gallery's first ever on-line exhibition, Documenting the City.

Mr Cucksey told the Argus he hoped the council would be able to offer the financial support to continue online archiving.

This in-depth review is likely to consider whether parts of the collection could be digitised and made available on-line.

A final report is not expected to go to cabinet member Councillor Ron Jones until next April. (...)

Read the full text here | Argus online version here

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ART IN NEWPORT | Projects archive

Work is in progress for the Art in Newport projects archive here, to record projects produced by John Wilson as Guest Curator for the Newport Museum and Art Gallery.
























LIST OF PROJECTS

EXPLORATIONS

THE EXPLORATIONS SERIES

Exploring the Newport Museum and Art Gallery collections - themes

[2] The Art of Collecting (2007)
[1] The Poetics of Place: Industrial South Wales (2004-07)

ART AND SOCIETY IN NEWPORT

THE ART AND SOCIETY IN NEWPORT SERIES

Exploring art and society in Newport - surveys

[3] Documenting the City: Art and Society in Newport (2007)
[2] Documenting the Twentieth Century (2000)
[1] James Flewitt Mullock and the Victorian Achievement (1993)

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ART IN NEWPORT | Video archive

Announcing the art_newport video archive:

THE ART OF COLLECTING | Video of Exhibition Opening

THE ART OF COLLECTING | An exhibition of paintings from the permanent collections of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery | Curated by Roger Cucksey and John Wilson | July 2007


> View | Listen > THE ART OF COLLECTING exhibition opening

The exhibition THE ART OF COLLECTING opened on 20 July 2007 - the same evening as the opening of a travelling exhibition at Newport Museum and Art Gallery - and will be on display for several months.

"A museum is like a living organism: it requires continual and tender care; it must grow, or it will perish" | Sir William Flower, Essays on Museums (London, 1898)

"The Art Fund’s research exposes a real crisis (...) diverting museums from the central task of building their collections. | Lack of advocacy and support for collecting in both central and local government means there is a danger that the collecting habit is being lost, along with the skills and expertise necessary for it." | The Art Fund | The Collecting Challenge 2006

• THE ART OF COLLECTING provides a public airing of works by some of the better known artists in the Newport Museum and Art Gallery's collection.

• Over a hundred years in the making, Newport has quietly built up a public art collection of which it can be proud. The exhibition highlights the way in which the Newport Museum and Art Gallery's permanent collections have been formed through a fortuitous mix of private benefactions, public educational principles and curatorial nurturing over the decades.

• The exhibition features a diverse range of mostly twentieth century works by notable British and Welsh artists including Sir Frank Brangwyn R.A., Christopher Wood, Alexander Stanhope Forbes R.A., Terrick Williams R.A., Sir William Russell Flint R.A., Dorothea Sharp, Merlyn Evans, Sir Alfred Munnings R.A., Patricia Preece, Edward Wadsworth A.R.A., Ceri Richards, Sir Kyffin Williams R.A., Sir Stanley Spencer R.A., John Elwyn, L.S. Lowry, Jeffrey Steele, and William Scott R.A..
  

Further | The Art of Collecting website.


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THE ART OF COLLECTING | Exhibition from 20 July 2007

THE ART OF COLLECTING | An exhibition of paintings from the permanent collections of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery | Roger Cucksey, Keeper of Art and John Wilson, Guest Curator | July 2007

The exhibition is open from 20th July 2007.

“A museum is like a living organism: it requires continual and tender care; it must grow, or it will perish.” William Henry Flower (1831-1899).

• See introduction to the exhibition on the Art of Collecting website
  
• For further information contact: Newport Museum & Art Gallery

THE ART OF COLLECTING | Curatorial reflection

Curatorial relfection by John Wilson, in preparation for the exhibition THE ART OF COLLECTING:

THE ART OF COLLECTING An exhibition of paintings from the permanent collections of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery | Roger Cucksey, Keeper of Art, Newport Museum and Art Gallery and John Wilson, Guest Curator | July 2007




Newport's art collections - in painting, drawing, print and sculpture - have benefitted from their fair share of good fortune, sheer luck, and judicious collecting judgment over a hundred years and more of collecting. And whilst the art market is notoriously turbulent and hard to play, the Newport Museum and Art Gallery has quietly built up a collection of which it can be proud.




The exhibition The Art of Collecting affords us an opportunity for enjoyment, reflection and further conversation:

• we may indulge in a public airing of works by some the the better known artists in the Newport Museum and Art Gallery's collection.

• and reflect upon over one hundred years of collecting, highlighting the unique historical value of a public art collection.
  

• which leads us on to current concerns for the future of collecting in a changing world of art.

Whilst all collectors secretly dream of acquiring the best available artists to boost or round-off their collections, any art collection is really an unending quest for perfection. Collecting is an art in itself. And public art collections have been subject to changing fortunes and patterns of taste over the decades.

When we travel abroad we naturally wish to learn more of the history and the culture of the place we visit, and museums and art galleries are an obvious attraction for us. Maybe we need to adopt more of this tourist attitude at home, to begin to view our own habitat afresh and perhaps come to a new valuing of our own location and identity.





In the Connoisseurship or Modern Art collecting stakes -- no one would claim that Newport has ever really been up there. But where it has won out is in building a unique archive of works of historical interest, related to Newport, its region, and indeed the wider Wales context. Perhaps in the final assessment, we may one day appreciate Newport's collection of local topographical works as a unique archive; or else its collection of art works connected to the Newport College of Art as a likewise unique archive for a provincial British art college.


Further | Project web-page The Art of Collecting

THE ART OF COLLECTING | An exhibition of paintings from the permanent collections of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery | Roger Cucksey, Keeper of Art, Newport Museum and Art Gallery and John Wilson, Guest Curator | July 2007

DOCUMENTING THE CITY | Closing curatorial reflections

Some closing curatorial reflections by John Wilson on the exhibition DOCUMENTING THE CITY:

"As virtual museum's develop, the role of actual museums will shift; they will increasingly be seen as places for going back to the originals" (William J. Mitchell, City of Bits, 1995)

DOCUMENTING THE CITY: ART AND SOCIETY IN NEWPORT |

John Wilson, Guest Curator | Newport Museum and Art Gallery, 2007



Documenting the City: Art and Society in Newport | A project to celebrate Newport's coming of age as a City, showcasing art works from the permanent collection of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery.














Documenting the City has now entered its last week as a temporary exhibition at the Newport Museum and Art Gallery. We now look forward to further work in building our online resources:

• Online gallery and archive | art_newport on flickr
  

• Project web-pages | Documenting the City
  

DOCUMENTING THE CITY | VIDEO OF EXHIBITION OPENING

View the video of the Documenting the City exhibition opening below, or here in Google Video

"What we're re seeing here is a declaration of our self confidence as a new city and our pride in the robust, gritty history of how its come to be what it is now" ~ Paul Flynn, MP, Opening Speech.

EXHIBITION

















We have been overwhelmed with the positive public response during the two months of the exhibition hanging. The Gallery Talks showed that there was a strong appetite for this theme.

Local people took pleasure in new perspectives upon their everyday environment and pride in Newport's coming of age as a City following the bestowing of city status in 2002. Whilst visitors from further afield expressed surprise at such a wealth of imagery drawn from the Newport Museum and Art Gallery's own collections.

One visitor suggested that the whole exhibition be re-hung in the Celtic Manor Resort for the 2010 Ryder Cup.


ONLINE

"As virtual museum's develop, the role of actual museums will shift; they will increasingly be seen as places for going back to the originals" (William J. Mitchell, City of Bits, 1995)

Our online resources have been commented upon positively by visitors and the press, with wide acceptance of migrating art works to the Internet as an obvious move to make. And so the public art gallery collection enters the Web2.0 world. Moreover people have discovered the website from as far afield as Australia, and our online resources have led to a number of professional enquiries.

The enthusiasm of visitors to the gallery for the Documenting the City exhibition - a large-scale exhibition of 120 works filling the gallery - confirmed the sense that an online archive works well as a first point of enquiry whilst the art work itself nevertheless remains a primary source for engagement, bringing to mind the words of William J. Mitchell ( City of Bits, 1995): "As virtual museum's develop, the role of actual museums will shift; they will increasingly be seen as places for going back to the originals." We were also pleased that the Gallery Talks led to new art works coming to light and being acquired by the gallery.

Our online resources even raised a chuckle, as the pen of a local cartoonist mused upon the contrast of the traditional art gallery and the virtual gallery on the PC at home:




RECEPTION

• "What we're re seeing here is a declaration of our self confidence as a new city and our pride in the robust, gritty history of how its come to be what it is now" | Paul Flynn, MP, Opening Speech ~ View video of the Documenting the City exhibition opening.
  

• "Painstakingly, scouring not only Newport Museum and Art Gallery's own collection but also council offices, committee rooms and annexes, Roger Cucksey and friend and colleague John Wilson have amassed an actual and virtual art collection telling Newport's story from its rustic beginnings, through its flowering as an industrial Hercules in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the re-invention of itself as a city for the 21st century". | South Wales Argus, 31 May 2007

• The exhibition also celebrates the city's desire to carry itself steadily forward into the future. This unique collection will not only be museum-bound as people can access and admire the anthology from their very own homes - an online gallery and archive has been set up to further enhance Newport's reputation as an extremely forward moving and thought provoking metropolis. | Buzz Magazine, June 2007

Whilst one press report (x) mischievously dubbed the exhibition a coup for Newport's collections over neighbouring Cardiff, the exhibition has begged the question of whether a similar art historical job could be done for other centres such as Cardiff or Swansea.

"The exhibition offers a historical tour de force" enthused Metro Magazine. "An online gallery and archive has been set up to further enhance Newport's reputation as an extremely forward moving and thought provoking metropolis", said Buzz Magazine. | See the News archive here.

In the final assessment, Documenting the City has succedded in kickstarting debate upon the future shape of the art world in Newport as the city engages its current phase of regeneration and transformation. We have also opened a more enlivened dialogue with the Newport College of Art, and hope to collaborate together on future projects documenting the city of Newport through the changes ahead.


PROSPECTS

As a postscript to the above we may note recent debate upon the issue of a National Centre for Contemporary Art in Wales, with Newport touted as a keen contender: see POSTSCRIPT | May - June 2007 | Newport - Towards a new National Centre for Contemporary Art in Wales?

DOCUMENTING THE CITY: ART AND SOCIETY IN NEWPORT | John Wilson, Guest Curator | Newport Museum and Art Gallery | 2007 | Project web-pages: Documenting the City | Online gallery and archive: art_newport on flickr