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Cultural Programming
Revisioning the Collections of Cartwright Hall Art Gallery
An Alchemy and Bradford Museums, Galleries and Heritage partnership.
“The collections at Cartwright Hall are world-class and reflect some of the best artistic expressions from Britain , the United States and South Asia . Connect illustrates how connections in art can be both local and international”
Connect has been awarded Stage One funding by the Heritage Lottery Fund in order to further develop the project. The estimated cost of the project is just under £2 million. Additional funding has also been secured from Bradford Council, Renaissance Museums Hub and Arts Council, Yorkshire.
Connect is a capital project based on a concept devised by Alchemy involving a major redevelopment of the first floor permanent gallery space at Cartwright Hall.
Cartwright Hall would like its permanent collections, in the way they are displayed, interpreted and acquired to better reflect the changing needs and interests of the 21st century.
Cartwright Hall has a rich collection of paintings, prints and sculpture as well as ceramics, textiles and jewellery.
People, Place, Imagination are the subject areas that provide the framework for the exploration of the Collections of Cartwright Hall. All three subject areas have a local and universal appeal and are a rich source of themes. Themes enable us to collectively explore different aspects of the Collections based upon issues that echo contemporary interests and concerns. They allow us to reveal stories that cut across different cultures and time frames. They help us highlight approaches that thinkers, historians, activists and artists have taken over the years to these enduring subjects. Two themes have been identified within each subject area and have formed the basis of the current displays:
Subject Areas Themes
People Icons: Sacred and Secular
Stories
Place Near and Far
The Earth and Us
Imagination Beauty and Form
Visual Languages
The following are examples of the approach being taken
PEOPLE
Icons: Sacred and Secular
This display captures the different meanings, both sacred and secular, associated with icons in the 21st century. Icons have a religious origin and in the past referred exclusively to devotional objects that were the focus of veneration. Now icons also refer to figures who define a particular age, movement or fashion as well as being part of everyday computer language.
Andy Warhol’s Marilyn is widely recognised as a modern icon. Radically different to this image is a 1940’s ‘mochi’ embroidered silk from Gujarat in Western India . It depicts the “Feet of the Lord” in a symbolic Hindu allusion to the divine. These two images - a Hollywood actress who arguably characterised vibrant sexuality in the 50s and a symbol of devotion so profound that it portrays not the form but the feet of the Lord demonstrate our complex relationships with both divinity and celebrity and the evolving nature of language and meaning.
PLACE
Near and Far
Near and Far explores proximity and distance as both geographic and mental states of being. This theme is particularly relevant to Bradford with its myriad cultures. What does a sense of place mean in today’s world? How do people retain or recreate a sense of place if they have moved across countries and continents? Can the “far” be the “near” in emotional terms and vice versa? Do established communities of people feel their sense of place threatened when new communities move in?
Edward Wadsworth’s Bradford : View of a Town 1912 reduces the chimneys and rooftops to an abstract pattern of dramatic jagged shapes. Stripped of excess detail, he captures the essence of an entrepreneurial northern industrial city. Salima Hashmi’s Zones of Dreams 1996 is a pictographic map of the sub-continent, original home to a significant section of Bradford ’s South Asian population. In its referencing of history, architecture and archaeology it captures a mythic reality. Both works embody the enigma of the Near and Far.
IMAGINATION
Beauty and Form
What constitutes beauty is a subject of ongoing debate. People have always delighted in the interplay between light and shade, form and texture and colour and line as ends in themselves. Increasingly, modernist art movements, over the last 100 years, have tested and extended our assumptions and definitions about beauty and form. This has often created tensions between artists and sections of the public. A number of artists do not approach beauty as just a visual delight but as something that can appeal to other senses, emotions, values and faculties as well. The concept behind a work of art can appeal to the mind or to one’s sense of ethics for instance. In a collection as culturally diverse as that of Cartwright Hall there is also the opportunity to explore notions of beauty and form within different cultures.
Lynn Chadwick’s The Politician recalls Herbert Read’s phrase about “the geometry of fear”. The beauty of this primitive geometric abstraction is the manner in which it captures the mood of 1950s cold war Britain. Kalim Afzal’s Glass Fountain, on the other hand, appears to comply with received ideas about beauty and form. However, it also embodies internal cultural journeys that had tormented Afzal and eventual reconciliations.
Connect will be launched in 2007/08