More Days Out News
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Historic Wedgwood Institute busts return to public view
Posted on Fri 20 Mar
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The Potteries Museum to reopen key spaces this spring
Posted on Thu 05 Mar
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Wolverhampton Art Gallery presents a major exhibition of works by Andy Warhol
Posted on Mon 02 Mar
The Midlands has a wealth of art galleries and museums hosting a range of fantastic exhibitions - both permanent and temporary. Here's a selection of what's showing across the region.
WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR EXHIBITION
“We are facing urgent biodiversity and climate crises, and photography is a powerful catalyst for change.”
So says Dr Doug Gurr, director of the Natural History Museum, which has developed and produced this prestigious competition.
Now in its 61st year, the show features a host of awe-inspiring images capturing fascinating animal behaviour and breathtaking landscapes.
Image credit: Parham Pourahmad
Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, Saturday 25 April - Saturday 20 June
GENEVIEVE ROBERTSON
Working at the intersection of visual art and environmental studies, Canadian artist Genevieve Robertson produces work which is powerfully informed by a personal and intergenerational history of forestry labour in remote locations across British Columbia.
Genevieve’s practice is grounded in drawing and painting but also extends to video, installation and various forms of collective work and collaboration. Her exhibition in Birmingham will explore the interconnection between natural and industrial histories, vegetal intelligence and ecological trauma.
The display examines two forested sites separated by 310 million years and 7,000 kilometres: the ancient swamps of the Black Country and a recently fire- and logging-affected slope in British Columbia.
Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham, Saturday 25 April - Sunday 5 July
THE CHURCHILL SCREEN
This fascinating exhibition, exploring The Churchill Screen, opens just a handful of months after the unveiling of one of the artwork’s conserved original panels.
Produced by artist Edward Bainbridge-Copnall for Dudley’s Churchill Shopping Precinct, the Screen was a 40-foot-long appliqué glass mosaic weighing five and a half tonnes and consisting of 17 panels.
The new exhibition explores its complex history - from Bainbridge-Copnall’s creation of it in 1969, through to the impact of vandalism in the 1980s and its removal from public view in the 1990s.
Archival photographs, conservation documentation, surviving fragments of the destroyed portrait, and public responses all feature in the exhibition.
Stourbridge Glass Museum, opens Saturday 25 April
ANDI
Coventry-based artist ANDI is spending 12 weeks in the New Art Gallery’s purpose-built artists’ studio, developing new paintings and working at a larger scale for the first time. The residency, which comes as a direct result of winning the venue’s coveted Clive Beardsmore Artist Award, will see the up-and-coming creative make oil paintings that document and reflect on queer and trans experiences.
New Art Gallery, Walsall, until Sunday 5 April
SABA KHAN: RIVERLESS WATER
London-based Pakistani artist Saba Khan here continues her critical inquiry into how environmental disruption shapes identity and migration. At the exhibition’s heart is the subject of South Asian water histories, with paintings, interviews and an installation being used to examine the impact of the Mangla Dam’s construction in the 1960s - an event which led to the mass migration of people from Mirpur in Pakistan to Birmingham.
Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham, until Monday 6 April
GRAYSON PERRY: THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE VIRGIN DEAL
Grayson Perry’s acclaimed artwork The Annunciation Of The Virgin Deal is part of the Turner Prize-winning artist’s The Vanity Of Small Differences series.
A flamboyant and funny creation, the artwork is a four-metre-long tapestry that tells the story of Tim Rakewell, a fictional 21st-century software developer who climbs the social and economic ladder from his working-class roots.
The work will be shown in Wolverhampton alongside another of Grayson’s creations: Hold Your Beliefs Lightly.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, until Sunday 12 April
STUDIO PRINTS: CELEBRATING THE BALAKJIAN COLLECTION
The archive of London-based Studio Prints is the source of the artwork featured in this new exhibition, which includes prints by Lucian Freud and other 20th-century British greats.
Studio Prints was established by the artist Dorothea Wight and her husband, Marc Balakjian, in the late 1960s, going on to produce prints for world-renowned British artists for the following 40 years. Commenting on the exhibition, the New Art Gallery’s director, Stephen Snoddy, said: “It’s wonderful to continue to promote the legacy of Studio Prints to new generations.
“These fantastic examples of world-class printmaking amplify our collection of modern British art, and are closely attuned to our Garman Ryan Collection.”
Image: Marc Balakjian - In the silence of passing years, 1980
New Art Gallery, Walsall, until Sunday 12 April
JOY LABINJO: A PLACE OF OUR OWN
British Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo is clear about her purpose with new exhibition A Place Of Our Own; she is reclaiming the nude, and celebrating identity, belonging, and Black womanhood through the presentation of bold, intimate portraits. Marked by muted tones and simplified backgrounds, the paintings are explorations of the complexities of sexuality, reflecting on how Black women’s bodies are often hypersexualised in mainstream media.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, until Monday 4 May
SATURDAY TOWN
Saturday Town is an award-winning photographic project celebrating youth style, fashion and self-expression. The exhibition showcases the work of Casey Orr, who has travelled the length and breadth of the UK to photograph young people in towns and cities on Saturday afternoons.
Herbert Museum & Art Gallery, until Monday 4 May
SPACE VAULT EXHIBITION
Immersive visuals and unique artefacts tell 12 stories of human space exploration in this illuminating exhibition.
Highlights of the display include the mission checklists that saved the crew of Apollo 13 when its oxygen tank exploded, lunar dust from the Hadley Rille landing site of Apollo 15, a rare Soviet pressure suit, and part of the nose cone of the first starship to reach space.
Image Credit: NASA. CDR Dave Scott, Apollo 15. Communications umbilical in image is on display in the Space Vault Exhibition.
Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum, Millennium Point, until Sunday 17 May
I PHOTOGRAPH COMEDIANS!
If you love a laugh, you should get along to Andy Hollingworth’s new exhibition.
As its title makes clear in a refreshingly straightforward manner, Andy photographs comedians - and it’s a selection of his images of some of the UK’s best-loved comics that forms the basis of this Gas Hall-located display.
Photographs of Ken Dodd, Sarah Millican, Victoria Wood, Rik Mayall and Rhod Gilbert all feature, as do pics of such Midlands masters and mistresses of mirth as Jasper Carrott, Stewart Lee, Lenny Henry, Joe Lycett, Jo Enright and Shazia Mirza. The images of the latter four in that list are brand new and have never before been exhibited.
The display also features numerous items connected to particular comedians, including a jacket worn by Lenny Henry during his 1984 tour, a signed pair of Rik Mayall’s underpants, and Joe Lycett’s teddy suit, as worn in the advertisement for series two of Late Night Lycett.
“This retrospective of my work over the last 30 years reflects the changing faces of comedy in the UK and my interaction with them,” says Andy. “I’m delighted that it’s being displayed in Birmingham, a city that’s produced and been associated with many notable comedians over the years and a vibrant comedy scene which includes the UK’s second longest running comedy festival.”
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, until Sunday 31 May
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
An Ikon gallery exhibition which is being presented at the Library of Birmingham, What Are The Odds? explores the role of art in supporting health and care systems. The exhibition’s graphic identity has been designed by Birmingham-based artist Foka Wolf. Playing on a 1970s ‘game of life’ TV show aesthetic, the presentation simulates a journey through the different institutions that define a life course, along the way reflecting a range of lived experience, from diversity in infant feeding to ageing and dying well.
Library of Birmingham, until Saturday 27 June
BRUEGEL TO REMBRANDT: DRAWING LIFE, SKETCHING WONDER
More than 60 works on loan from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium sit at the heart of this historically informative exhibition.
Showcasing artists from across the 16th and 17th centuries - and artworks created using charcoal, ink and chalk - the show explores the magic of drawing, both as an artistic tool and as a means of storytelling during what was a period of significant social, political and religious change.
The exhibition includes Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Prudence (1559/60) - a rare work from his celebrated Seven Virtues series - as well as pieces by Rembrandt, Rubens and Jordaens.
Complementary loans of paintings, prints and drawings from numerous UK-located collections, including London’s National Gallery, also feature.
Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until Sunday 28 June
BREAK THE MOULD
The final chapter in a trilogy of exhibitions exploring craft, art-school pedagogies and contemporary art practice, Break The Mould focuses the spotlight on ceramics.
Bringing together a dynamic cohort of ceramicists for a series of residencies, the exhibition also explores the ways in which the craft and medium of clay can ‘speak to the future’.
Ikon, Birmingham, until Sunday 6 September
DIPPY IN COVENTRY: THE NATION'S FAVOURITE DINOSAUR
The Natural History Museum’s iconic Diplodocus cast - life-size, made of plaster-of-paris, and affectionately referred to as Dippy - has taken up residence in Coventry for an initial period of three years.
Diplodocus carnegii, to give it its official name, lived during the Late Jurassic period, somewhere between 155 and 145 million years ago. Huge, plant-eating dinosaurs with long, whip-like tails, they grew to about 25 metres in length and are believed to have weighed around 15 tonnes, making them three tonnes heavier than a London double-decker bus.
Dippy first arrived in London in 1905 and recently visited Birmingham as part of an eight-city tour that attracted a record-breaking two million visitors.
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, until February 2027