An Exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Matt Smith new work at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery,
4th November 2010 till 30 January 2011
In Association with the ShOUT Festival
In a bold new project, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, in conjunction with ShOUT! Festival, has allowed artist and curator Matt Smith access to their collections and galleries to tell the stories that museums and society often omit.
Museums are expected to reflect society and culture. They make active choices about what is kept for posterity and how it is described and displayed. Turning the traditional on its head, a queer eye has been cast over the museum.
Objects have been rearranged and brought out of store and new artworks have been specifically commissioned to uncover, draw out – and on occasion wilfully invent – the hidden stories in the Museum’s collections.
Visitors will be able to follow a trail that takes through galleries and collections on display within the museum. Birmingham has an estimated population of 60,000 LGBT people and this exhibition is delivered as part of BMAG’s Audience Development Strategy and is one of a series of on-going projects and exhibitions that target under-represented communities within the city.
“Subtly transforming the language of the everyday and the decorative, Matt’s work seeks to reinvent the conventions of traditional domesticity , the home, family and normative sexualties from within. Ingeniously producing objects that are both reassuringly familiar and strangely new.” Oliver Winchester, V&A
This exhibition is funded by Arts Council England.
The ShOUT Festival is a city wide cultural LGBT festival that is supported financially by Arts Council England, Birmingham City Council and BeBirmingham.
Matt’s work has shown at V&A, Hove Museum and the Aspex Gallery and featured on Radio 4’s You and Yours and in the Sunday Times, Observer Magazine, Ceramic Review and Artists Newsletter.