Event category: Exhibition

With words like ‘twerk’ and ‘selfie’ making entries for the Oxford English Dictionary it is clear that textspeak has moved beyond the confinement of a computer screen. In a series of etchings and floral tributes, Adam Hogarth considers the impact on the English language.

An exhibition in the Discovery Lounge and Tea Room.

William Morris and Russian artist El Lissitzky both wanted to change people’s lives through their art. While Morris saw beauty in the past, Lissitzky sought a new visual language for the future.

In this work, British artist David Mabb celebrates the utopian ideas of these two men through their seminal book designs: Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer and Lissitzky’s For the Voice, a revolutionary book of poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky considered one of the finest achievements in Russian avant-garde bookmaking.

Comprising 30 canvasses, Announcer takes over the gallery space, interweaving and contrasting the two designs so that Morris and Lissitzky’s graphics are never able to fully merge or separate.

Want to know more? See our Tumblr for images, quotes and short articles relating to Announcer.

Announcer is a touring exhibition from Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.

Enraged by the Government’s downgrading of art in schools, the artist decided to fight back. In this exhibition we follow his campaigns, from his furious painting, Letter to Michael Gove, to the launch of the Art Party and his attempt to be elected to parliament in 2015.

Combining film, placards, sculpture, banners and even his slogan-covered campaigning van, this exhibition makes the case for creativity. All schools should be art schools. Music makes children powerful.

The show includes a new film Art is Your Human Right: why can’t politics be more fun? and presents the artist’s hopes and fears for the future.

Young artists aged 16 – 22 exhibit original art work exploring art that sends a message, inspired by artist activists William Morris and Bob and Roberta Smith.

Furniture and household objects have been transformed into beautiful works of art alongside more traditional pieces in this diverse exhibition. As the title suggests, the exhibition references the daily lives and experiences of young people living in London.

The work was developed at the gallery in August 2015 by nine young people, Grace, Elly, Sherazade, Joe, Christina, Ray, Esin, Theo and Tina, taking part in a week-long creative project led by artist Della Rees.

Image: Eat Your Cereal, Ray 2015.

Social Fabric explores how the printed and factory-woven textiles of eastern and southern Africa mirror the changing times, fashions and tastes of the region.

Bringing together kanga from Kenya and Tanzania, and shweshwe from southern Africa, the exhibition reveals how these fabrics express the social, political, religious, emotional and even sexual concerns of the people who wear them.

The varied patterns and inscriptions are thought provoking and sometimes humorous. They convey an unspoken language, expressing thoughts and feelings which cannot always be spoken out loud. Worn in both secular and sacred contexts, the fabric plays a central role in all major rite-of-passage ceremonies in women’s and, in some cases, men’s lives.

The exhibition will reveal how these types of wearable cloth mirror the convergence of African tastes and patronage with strong historical and contemporary trading ties from across the globe. It will also explore how the cloth is used to celebrate influential people and great occasions, such as Josina Machel, Nelson Mandela or the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

The exhibition also features contemporary art and fashion inspired by the textiles in the show. South African artist Lawrence Lemaoana uses kanga to explore the notion of power in post-Apartheid South Africa. Kapwani Kiwanga’s sculptural work draws our attention to how African fabric is not only a decorative object but also a medium for expressing the main concerns of society. The bold graphic print on the designs of London based fashion label CHiCHia was inspired by chief designer Christine Mhando’s favourite proverbs and sayings sourced from Tanzanian kanga.

A British Museum touring exhibition. Supported by The British Museum and The Dorset Foundation.

Image: Nelson Mandela, South Africa, 2008 (c) Trustees of the British Museum.

As a young man, Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) travelled extensively through southern Europe and to the North African coast, recording the landscapes he encountered. He also journeyed to South Africa, painting the old towns and farms around Cape Town.

This small display combines oils and watercolours from the gallery’s collection with important loans from private collectors, depicting scenes in North and South Africa, Italy and Spain. They were painted in the 1890s when Brangwyn was in his twenties and making a name for himself in the salons of Europe.

Following a visit to the William Morris Gallery and Lloyd Park, students at Chelsea College of Art created a wallpaper sample book, on display in the Discovery Lounge.

The Fruity Birds design shown above is by Le Xi.

Ceramicist Clare Twomey transforms the gallery into a live studio, where members of the public will work as apprentices on a William Morris-inspired tile panel; an ambitious installation that will bring his ideas to life.

Twomey is planning to create a vast tile panel embellished with Chrysanthemum, one of William Morris’s most compelling and intricate designs. Over 68 days, 68 volunteer apprentices will work on the piece. Every day, a new apprentice will work alongside a skilled master painter, slowly transforming the tiles from one state of beauty to another. Visitors will be able to watch this process slowly unfold.

The exhibition is a response to William Morris’s approach to making. Like the would-be apprentices, Morris learned his skills through practice and concentration. Skills need to be constantly passed on and shared, from one person to another, to retain their vitality. Twomey’s installation will explore how practising a skill can connect us through time and space to other people. As Morris observed, ‘The past is not dead, but living in us.’ You can view a film in which the artist explains the idea behind the exhibition in more detail at the gallery or online.

This exhibition is funded through Art Happens, the Art Fund’s crowd-funding platform, and we would like to thank all funders for their support.

A World to Win: Posters of Protest and Revolution shows a spotlight on how political activists around the world have used posters to mobilise, educate and organise.

The exhibition will present around 70 posters drawn from the national poster collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Showcasing the work of diverse artists, graphic designers and print collectives it will include new acquisitions gathered from recent outbursts of protest in the UK, Russia and the Middle East.

Making or displaying a poster is in itself a means of taking political action, while for many social and political movements, posters have represented an important form of cultural output. The show will feature posters made by the Atelier Populaire during the student protests in Paris in 1968, as well as examples from the Russian, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions.

The exhibition will also host artist Ruth Ewan’s A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, an ongoing collection of over 2000 idealistic or political songs collated by Ewan and disseminated via a CD jukebox.

Exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

NowhereSomewhere is a two-screen film installation inspired by William Morris’s utopian novel News From Nowhere. Fowler explores the resonance between Morris’s vision and Organiclea, a food growing co-operative based in Waltham Forest where she herself is a gardener. The footage, shot over the autumn and winter season is combined with fragments of gardeners reading from News From Nowhere.

On a second screen, as the new growing season arrives and seeds are planted for the coming year, community members reflect on their own dreams for an imaginary future London.

This visually engaging piece of work includes 16mm film, hand-processed by Fowler at Organiclea using an ecological formula. She worked on site in a temporary film lab, and experimented with natural dye to create the film.

The installation is accompanied by Fowler’s seed packet project, in which she invited gardeners and others around the Borough to share their visions for the city of the future on empty seed packets.

The final film was created in collaboration with sound artist Andrej Bako.

Rosalind Fowler is an artist and filmmaker with a background in visual art and anthropology. Her work explores the politics and poetics of place and belonging in the contemporary English landscape through the prisms of folk culture, alternative communities, science fiction, pre-history and dreams.

Her work has been shown widely, including at the ICA, William Morris Gallery, BFI, Plymouth Arts Centre, Milton Keynes Gallery, Pumphouse Gallery, BBC Birmingham, and  Fundação Manuel António da Mota in Porto.  She was the 2015-16 artist in residency at the William Morris Gallery.

Supported by Arts Council England.