Grayson Perry's back at the British Museum
plus: a Brexit museum is coming, and the Director of the Garden Museum is going to great lengths to save his museum
hello again. hope your week was fab.
i took my first visit to Tate Modern since it reopened last weekend, and it was great to be back. there might have been a queue to get in, but it was joyful to see such an appetite to visit.
this week has also been hugely exciting for me as we turned up the dial on the British Museum’s reopening press campaign (for those that don’t know, i am in the press office at the BM). you can see some of the fruits of our labour (and some very early starts) below.
i’ll end my intro by saying that we are SO CLOSE to hitting 500 subscribers to this newsletter. my love of round numbers means i will sleep much more soundly if we get to that milestone so please tell someone you know why they should sign up. email them now. or slack them. or shout to someone in the next room, even if that might be your neighbours. if we all did it, we’d be pushing 1000….
let’s dive in!
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latest news
dusting off. the British Museum’s been having a major spring clean ahead of it’s reopening next week. i’m biased, but the photos in this article are STUNNING. Mail Online
he’s back! Grayson Perry unveiled a new edition of his Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum yesterday, 9 years after it was first displayed. the new setting alongside a 2,400 year-old monument is incredible. Irish News
Peake’s parachute. London’s Science Museum also had a spruce-up, with Major Tim Peake’s Soyuz descent module parachute one of the items getting a clean before this week’s opening day. Evening Standard
leavers will remain. the Museum of Brexit is coming. yes really. plans are being stepped up to display blockbuster objects including *checks notes* Wetherspoons beer mats and, er, Nigel Farage’s old suit! don’t all rush at once. The Mail on Sunday
“dialling down.” a leaked copy of the National Trust’s new strategy suggests it will move away from culture and exhibitions to focus on the outdoors. i feel like the weak finances lie behind most of this. the Times
Grayson Perry unveiling the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum. photo: @maxwellmuseums
buried treasure. a 23-year old on his first dig found London’s largest collection of buried Bronze Age treasures. they’re going on display at the Museum of London Docklands next month. Evening Standard
art of Dyson. the UK is getting a new modern art gallery, and it’s being created by billionaire James Dyson on his estate. dezeen
DREAM TOGETHER. covid-inspired new artwork by Yoko Ono will be adorn the facade of the Met Museum in New York when it reopens this month. it’s been described as “urgent” and “poetic”. ARTnews
the next Tate Modern? Helsinki power plant to become vast new arts hub under city masterplan. the Art Newspaper
listen here. the delightful Museum of Curiosity is coming back to BBC Radio 4, with My Dad Wrote A Porno’s Alice Levine as the next curator. Chortle
interview
emergency fundraising campaigns for museums are everywhere right now due to the devastating financial effect of lockdown. to try to claw back lost cash, many museums are getting creative, and none more so than London’s Garden Museum. to help fill a £270,000 black hole in their budget, their director Christopher Woodward is going to don his wetsuit and swim 50 miles from Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly, on a route never attempted before. desperate times calls for heroic efforts. i caught up with Christopher, to see how the training - and sponsorship - was going.
firstly, how is the training going?
It’s started. When the Lidos re-opened last month, I was at the front of the queue. Until then I was swimming wherever I could: in the sea, in the docks in east London, in rivers. I have been chased by a gamekeeper, a boat, and in the Thames was attached by a swan. Having a swan on top of you, wings and neck at full stretch, is an experience. You have to do 6 kilometres a day to have the strength to swim fifty miles.
and how is fundraising?
Fundraising is good. It’s primarily in the form of pledges. There will be points over the four days of the swim where you feel sick, tired and miserable and then I will be counting the pounds per mile. The swim is, in large part, to pay for the salaries of a team of staff whose work I admire. We are a new Museum, and had to create from an empty, cold building a programme, a collection, and an audience.
this isn't your first sponsored swim for the museum. how did the idea of this unusual way to fundraise come about?
For museologists, sponsored events for Museums began when Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Director, and Wilf Weeks, Chair, of Dulwich Picture Gallery did a sponsored walk from Litchfield to London. At the time, that was unheard of: Museum curators don’t do this sort of thing. Then when I was Director of the Holburne the Chair and I walked from London to Bath to raise money for our education building. And swims? In 2010 a Patron said ‘I’ll give you £10,000 to swim the Hellespont’. I’ve since done The Strait of Gibraltar (fast), Thames from Oxford to London (long) and Arctic Circle (cold). Each is inspired by a narrative in the collection.
Christopher Woodward, the director of the Garden Museum, swimming in the Arctic Circle in 2017
you're doing this to help plug a £270,000 hole in the museum's finances caused by the lockdown closure. how worried are you for the future of the museum?
When lockdown began, the challenge was beyond conceptualisation. The hard decision was to say: the Museum is at risk. But it is. Our income reduced by over £100,000 a month; we have no public funding, no Endowment. Doing a swim is partly a visceral reaction when you feel impotent and depressed at events beyond your control.
the Garden Museum was one of the very first London museums to reopen. how has it gone - are visitor numbers what you expected?
We were the first Museum in London to re-open, at the stroke of 10.30am on Saturday 4 July. Visitor numbers are higher than expected. We went ahead with building our Derek Jarman exhibition during lockdown, and people are coming to see that. And sit in our garden. We are only able to re-open because the team has been determined to come to work: one has moved house, three bought scooters, others make long journeys each day.
finally, what other cultural highlights have you enjoyed since lockdown's been eased?
This is embarrassing. Blank. I can repeat Joe Wickes routines off by heart: my highlight of the day became an exercise he calls ‘shutting the van door’. I did find some time to get back to work on a book due in at the publisher in January. It’s a history of nostalgia. Why we idealise the past. In good ways and bad.
sponsor Christopher and help save the Garden Museum here
what’s on
3 of the best new shows from around the globe.
Driverless: Who is in control? at the Science Museum, London. a unique glimpse into AI-driven tech. just reopened.
Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. an immersive 360-degree film installation of Tokyo discotheque Killer Joe’s. opens 27 August.
Save the Love! International Posters Against AIDS at Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany. 300 public awareness posters from across the world showing how AIDS has been approached in different cultures. opens 21 August.
and finally
Paris Hilton is an artist now.
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