Exhibition Programme 2008 - 2009
The Archives regularly displays selections from our art and archival collections as a series of temporary exhibitions in the Margaret Street building.
Nightlife by Underground
13-24 October 2008
This exhibition featured Underground posters advertising the range of entertainment available in the West End that were commissioned by London Transport in the 1930s. that feature the theatrical and cinema performances, dancing and fine dining that could be enjoyed in the capital during the 1930s. During this period, London Transport has a well-founded reputation for the quality of its advertising and publicity. Their publicity manager, Frank Pick, commissioned fine artists as well as illustrators to design posters for the Underground Group. Among them were a number of Europeans fleeing persecution in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany who contributed to the emerging modern art movement in England.
Theatre of Industry
19-30 January 2009
This exhibition featured black and white fine art prints of working class life produced by students from the Birmingham School of Art. Most of them dated from the 1930s and 1940s, and were executed in a gritty realist style. There is a long tradition of the teaching of the various types of printing at Birmingham School of Art. In the 1930s and 1940s, instruction was provided in dry point, etching, wood and metal engraving, aquatint, mezzotint, colour wood block cutting and lithography. A variety of these processes were illustrated in the works exhibited. The exhibition was curated by the School of Art’s digital media and print lecturer, Mona Casey.
Hidden City
Unrealised, lost and past works from the archive of the Public Art Commissions Agency 27 April – 8 May 2009
This exhibition highlighted those artists’ proposals for public works of art in Birmingham that date from 1987-1999 but were never commissioned, seeking to explore the kind of city these largely unknown alternative works would have created had they been realised. It also looked at what impact lost, stolen or destroyed works may have had on the city by changing people’s understanding about the spaces in which they were located or, by means of their demise, creating a sense of their absence among those who knew the original work.
The exhibition was curated by Lorna Hards, a second year PhD student based at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design who had been working in collaboration with Birmingham City Council Arts Team on the development of public art strategy since 1985, funded through an Arts and Humanities Research Board Collaborative Doctoral Award.