MOOT
Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery: A Stranger's Window & Now for Tomorrow
20 March — 13 June 2010
Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery Castle Place, Nottingham NG1 6EL
For the centenary, the two exhibitions, A Stranger’s Window and Now for Tomorrow bring together many of the artworks that the Contemporary Art Society has given to Nottingham Castle and looks at some of the stories behind these acquisitions
Nottingham Castle, with the Contemporary Art Society have invited the artist-led gallery MOOT to investigate the museum’s vast and diverse collection. For A Stranger's Window MOOT will be working with a number of different spaces within Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery to give visitors a taste of the discoveries they have made as they have researched the collection.
MOOT discovered an interesting aspect of the works on paper collection is that in general it is organised by accession number – in other words, the number given to a work when it enters the collection; this includes the year of entry. Therefore a museum storage box will contain, say, everything collected between 1970 and 1976 rather than keeping an artist’s works all together regardless of when they were acquired. This means that a box might include anything from eighteenth century portrait sketches to modern screenprints by Patrick Caulfield.
Responding to this method of cataloging and storing over 4000 works, covering a vast time period, range of subjects and artists, MOOT have selected 13 works that they feel reflect the scope and diversity of the collection. This includes the popular watercolour of Nottingham by JMW Turner, as well as less well-known drawings and prints, some of which may never have been displayed in the gallery before. MOOT then invited 15 artists and collaborators such as Josephine Flynn, Ruth Proctor, S Mark Gubb and Simon and Tom Bloor to devise new and inventive methods for displaying them. They also instigated conservation and mounting of the selected works.
MOOT in conversation at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery: Wednesday 9 June at 6.30pm
For further information on MOOT go to:
http://mootgallery.org/
For further information on the Contemporary Art Society's Centenary Programme email nationalprogrammes@contemporaryartsociety.org
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