Public Art Galleries Research Articles

‘The feeling of exclusion’: Young peoples’ perceptions of art galleries

This article first looks at the relationship between museums and art galleries and their potential audiences and, in particular, the under-represented sector of young visitors. It examines the main findings from the limited research available on young visitors, and goes on to discuss theories delineating the differences between the cultures, identities and values of culture consumers and culture providers. The second part of the article looks at what specific museums have done towards being more inclusive in their appeal, and then reports the findings of a survey of young people in relation to New Zealand's Auckland Art Gallery. The survey found that young people's ideas of what constitutes modern, relevant art do not match standard art criteria, and that most exhibitions and marketing methods do not mesh with their worldview. The article concludes by using data from the survey to suggest ways of engaging more young people with public art galleries.

The art museum and the public library under a single roof

When in 1883 James Bain became the first chief librarian of the Toronto Public Library he was a fervent subscriber to the growing international enthusiasm for the integration of public libraries, art galleries and museums under one roof. It was said that these institutions belonged to all citizens and not just to an elite, and that they shared cultural aims that could be accomplished if their inter-dependency were recognized. While various obstacles – not the least was funding – prevented Bain from achieving this ideal in Toronto, under his leadership the Toronto Public Library became a major player in the art life of the city as a venue for exhibitions by individual artists and artists’ societies, and by acquiring thousands of works of art through donation and purchase. In the early 1900s all over Ontario, art lovers encouraged their fellow citizens to take advantage of art exhibitions and purchase opportunities in the public libraries, and to become involved in the creation and growth of library art collections.

Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The "Sportsman's Paradise" in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Painting

This essay deals with a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape paintings that were painted for members of club movement, who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. In Canada, as elsewhere, removal of Native rights to animal world, through introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing technologies and access, went hand in hand with aesthetic appropriation of environment as For this reason it can be argued that in picturing Atlantic Canada as recreational landscape of these elite tourists-a sportsman's paradise-paintings of region are also products of history of Native exclusion from Atlantic salmon fishery. Thus they provide a point of access to complex history of Native-settler interaction for public art galleries in Canada currently involved in incorporation of Native North American material into existing public narrative of Canadian art. Le present article porte sur un groupe de peintures paysagistes du dernier quart du XIXe siecle qui ont ete realisees par des membres du mouvement des clubs de sportifs qui louaient des rivieres a saumon dans le Canada atlantique pour faire de la peche recreative. Au Canada, comme ailleurs, la suppression resultante des droits autochtones au monde animal-par l'introduction de politiques et lois restreignant les technologies et l'acces a la chasse et a la peche-est allee de pair avec l'affectation esthetique de l'environnement comme paysage. Pour cette raison, on peut avancer qu'en montrant le Canada atlantique comme le paysage recreatif de ces touristes d'elite (un paradis des sportifs), les peintures de cette region sont egalement un produit de l'histoire de l'exclusion autochtone des peches au saumon atlantique. Ces peintures fournissent donc un point d'acces a l'histoire complexe des interactions entre les Autochtones et les colons pour les galeries d'art publiques au Canada qui essaient presentement d'incorporer du materiel autochtone nord-americain dans le recit public actuel de l'art canadien. Landscape as a cultural medium ... has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a social and cultural construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site. Thus, landscape (whether urban or rural, artificial or natural) always greets us as a space, as environment, as that within which (figured as the figures in landscape) find-or lose-ourselves. An account of landscape understood in this way therefore ... has to trace process by which landscape effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself and must understand that process in relation to what might be called the natural histories of its own beholders. [It is a question of] what we have done and are doing to our environment, what environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to each other, and how these doings are enacted in media of representation we call landscape. W.J.T. Mitchell (1994, 2) This essay focusses on a significant body of landscape paintings from last quarter of nineteenth century that depict, or were painted for, recreational fishermen from central Canada and northeastern United States who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. The pictures, which deal with common subject matter, were painted for art patrons and collectors who were active participants in sportsmen's club that swept northeastern North America in mid-1870s. Each reproduces motivating ideas of movement, giving visual expression to contemporary notions of wilderness as a therapeutic environment, an antidote to debilitating effects of urban-industrial civilization. It was in pursuit of this wilderness experience that movement organized elite tourists into private clubs for pursuit of sport, which was conceptualized as a form of personal involvement in rhythms of nature and for preservation of game, which they saw as threatened by same urban-industrial capitalism that compelled their periodic retreat to wilderness. …

Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The “Sportsman’s Paradise” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Painting

This essay deals with a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape paintings that were painted for members of the sportsmen’s club movement, who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. In Canada, as elsewhere, the removal of Native rights to the animal world, through the introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing technologies and access, went hand in hand with the aesthetic appropriation of the environment as landscape. For this reason it can be argued that in picturing Atlantic Canada as the recreational landscape of these elite tourists—“a sportsman’s paradise”— paintings of the region are also products of the history of Native exclusion from the Atlantic salmon fishery. Thus they provide a point of access to the complex history of Native-settler interaction for public art galleries in Canada currently involved in the incorporation of Native North American material into the existing public narrative of Canadian art.

Testing the Waters

wooden panels on which were displayed actual human veins, arteries and nerves. Donated to the young Royal Society in 1667, the panels were seen as works of art as much as tools for learning and teaching. Even in 1702 Evelyn was still stressing their literal, static qualities. The conflict between rationalism and empiricism is illu minated through an account of the personal war between Dr John Woodward and Dr Richard Mead, the former drawing on the accumulated wisdom and reputation rep resented by his collection of ancient texts, the latter relying on observation and practical efficacy, although at the risk of straying into quackery. In spite of his attitude to medicine, Mead was a prodigious antiquary who at his death owned 180 works by 90 artists and was responsible, with Hans Sloane and others (notably William Hogarth), for establishing London's Foundling Hospital (the first public art gallery in Britain). It was Sloane's collection of plants, animals, coins and other antiquities that formed the first core of the British Museum (1753) and, later, the Natu ral History Museum, just as John Radcliffe's library formed the core of Oxford University's Radcliffe Camera. Thankfully, the concentrated and demand ing text?liberally sprinkled with arcane language?is lightened by 10 excellent colour plates, including several of Evelyn's panels, and 62 black and white figures, just a few of which suffer from either their unsuitability for photography or a lack of con trast in printing. With 70 pages of notes, plus references, The English virtuoso informs rather than entertains but it richly rewards the effort that has to be put into its reading.

The Development of Marketing in the Canadian Museum Community, 1840-1989

Since the late 1960s, marketers have increasingly been interested in the application of marketing theories and practices to nonprofit and public organizations, including museums and art galleries. Although there has been some attempt on the part of marketing academics to understand the nature of museums and conduct research within museum environments, much of this work has failed to recognize the political context of museums and has tended to adopt an American or European focus. Canadian museums differ from their counterparts in the United States and Britain in the emphasis they place on the marketing of an idea: the sovereign nation. This article takes a chronological approach, detailing the social, economic, and political influences that have effected the development of marketing strategies from the beginning of the museum community in Canada in the early 1800s through the end of the 1980s.

Lyric Pronouncements, the Cachet of the Offended Reader, and the Limits of “The Public Good”

ON JUNE 26 2002, EYELEVELGALLERY IN HALIFAX installed a video art piece by Toronto artist Lyla Rye, titled Byte? video features Rye playing a game with her baby daughter: Rye sings into the baby's mouth and in response, her daughter bites Rye's lip. Tae game on the tape runs for eight minutes and includes over 40 manipulations of the same twelve-second clip. This clip is presented repeatedly with a variety of masks and effects applied to it, designed to draw the viewer's attention to different aspects of the interaction by concealing others. This video ran in the front window of the gallery, situated on Barrington Street, one of Halifax's busiest downtown strips. Two weeks after the show had been installed, on July lo, the Vice Squad of the Halifax Regional Municipal Police force swooped in and removed the video tapes from she gallery. A woman had seen she video as she was walking down the street and complained to the police she considered the representation to be pornographic, Within days, the police bad received six complaints in total: three formal complaints and three verbal complaints. Never mind the show had presumably already passed the litmus test of countless viewers who had passed by eyelevel's Barrington Street window as young woman had done. Never mind Rye's video was also on display at Ontario's Grimsby Public Art Gallery where no other viewers complained. And never mind on July 5, five days before the ultimate confiscation, a police officer had visited eyelevelgallery and pronounced the video harmless (at least according to the harm-based provisions of Canadian pornography law (1)). In spite of all this, the confiscated tapes remained in police possession and eventually, when the Crown determined it could make no case under the pornography law, Rye's video was assessed under the corruption of public morals section of the Criminal Code. this section, article 163.2, states everyone commits an offence who knowingly, without lawful justification or excuse, sells, exposes to public view, or has in his possession for such a purpose any obscene written matter, picture, model, phonograph record or other thing whatever? In moving from the law on child pornography to the law on public morals, the Crown seemed to be looking for a loophole, some gap between pornography and obscenity. Still, no charges were laid. Yet, Rye's work and eyelevelgallery were not vindicated. Instead, the police used the public morals section of the Criminal Code to curtail public circulation of the image by issuing a threat. Rye and eyelevelgallery were put on alert: the police were not going to press charges, but when they returned the tapes, they warned that may change if the gallery persisted in showing the work. (2) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The police could not find any fault with the video according to the provisions of the pornography law: it did not constitute a harm. And yet, presumably, six readers felt enough harm was being or had been done to warrant a complaint. But harm to what or to whom? If the video did not contravene the pornography law in the first instance, what could possibly make it obscene enough to offend public morals in the second? The answer is probably nothing. Not being charged under one law does not, of course, exempt one from being charged under another. However, if the obscenity in question were sexual in nature and the image were not sexually obscene under the pornography law, it seems unlikely it would be obscene in any other sense. But did not stop the police from threatening to apply the public morals law to eyelevelgallery. [he effect was unofficial censorship. The police openly threatened to lay charges against the gallery provided the viewing context and, more insidiously, Rye herself. (3) What they wanted was for the gallery to stop showing the tapes. Publicity itself was the problem. It may well be the case the police should not have insisted upon testing Rye's video against the public morals section of the Criminal Code. …

The Financial Value of Cultural, Heritage and Scientific Collections: A Public Management Necessity

The Australian community devotes substantial resources to building and maintaining public collections, such as its public museums and galleries. There has been comment in this journal and elsewhere on the case for placing a financial value on cultural, heritage and scientific collections. In this paper the framework proposed by Carnegie and Wolnizer (1995) is extended to show that the valuation of the service flows that come from public collections is not only feasible; it is also desirable from a public management perspective. The paper presents the case for valuing public collections and analyses alternative valuation procedures. It concludes that the valuation of public collections is an essential component of any sound system of management of the resources applied to the running of activities such as public museums and art galleries.

The Struggle for a Los Angeles Art Museum, 1890-1940

The first known attempt to raise money to build an art museum in city came from members of Ruskin Art Club. The Ruskin Art Club (also first woman's club in Los Angeles) derived its name from famous English art critic, John Ruskin, and was founded in 1888. members, finding themselves in a city claiming only a score of artists, mostly amateurs, no full-time commercial art galleries, one small, recently organized art school and no public art gallery, realized they'd have to revert to their own resources to learn about art. Initiating a program of self study, they took art history systematically, first studying various media: prints, oils, watercolors, architecture, sculpture; and then studied art history chronologically from prehistoric times to present. Most importantly, within two years of its organization, club began to organize exhibitions. The first of famous Old Master etchings the finest prints ever seen west of Philadelphia was hung in a room in Potomac Block at 223 Broadway. By arranging exhibitions, club members were acting perfectly within traditional women's roles. Nineteenth-century attitudes reserved such things as charitable, moral, and cultural aspects of a community to sex whose temperaments most naturally prepared them for such works. In 1892 club took a further step and attempted to raise funds to purchase a collection of art as a nucleus for a local art museum. Its members envisioned erection of a multipurpose building housing not only art gallery but public

Public art galleries in Britain and Germany: An acquisitions policy for the 1990s: Edited transcription of the proceedings: Welcome

Public art galleries in Britain and Germany: An acquisitions policy for the 1990s: Edited transcription of the proceedings: Welcome

Old traditions and new ways in the acquisitions policies of German public art galleries

Old traditions and new ways in the acquisitions policies of German public art galleries

Old traditions and new ways in the acquisitions policies of German public art galleries

Old traditions and new ways in the acquisitions policies of German public art galleries

Lost & Found: 140. Silvester, Norman Langton (1894-1969)

The following entry from who's who 1963 (p. 2789) provides basic biographical information Silvester, Norman Langton, M. S., F. R. Met. S. F. R. S. A: F. M. A. : Curator Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, 1932-53, retd., b. 28 Sept. 1894; s. of Samuel Joseph Silvester: m. 1922. Dora Ellwood, three d. Educ: King's College, London. Graduated with 1st Class Honours London University, B.Sc. 1920, M. Sc. 1922 Lieut. R. N. V. R. attached to R. N. A. S. European War, 1914-18: formerly Curator Public Art Gallery and Museum, Doncaster: Pioneer of idea of Borrowing Pictures from Public Art Galleries for the Home, inaugurated Bournemouth, 1933; Vice-President, Medical Art Society:...

Rehousing the North Carolina Museum of Art

In 1947, to the considerable surprise of many, the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina appropriated the sum of one million dollars for the purchase of Old Master paintings, and in doing so it became the first state of the United States of America to decide that its people needed a public art gallery and to set aside substantial funds for the purpose.’ Efforts had been made as far back as 1924 to found such a gallery, with the formation of the North Carolina State Art Society, and this body was the recipient, in 1928, of the bequest of Robert F. Phifer (1849-1928). This bequest included a collection of some 75 paintings and, more important, a large legacy subject to certain life interests. Since then these funds have enabled the Society to support the Museum in a number of significant purchases, but during the 1930s the Society also organized a series of exhibitions in a temporary gallery housed in the Agricultural Building in Raleigh. These activities kept alive during the Depression and the early years of the Second World War the ideal of founding a permanent museum of art, and in 1943 a Citizens’ Committee for a State Art Gallery was appointed by Governor J. Melville Broughton, with the intention that the proposed North Carolina State Art Gallery in Raleigh should be a memorial to the North Carolinians who had served in the two world wars. However, the Committee did not succeed in raising the $50 000 in private donations needed and the project was abandoned.

Joseph Symes and the Australasian Secular Association

On 24 February 1884 Joseph Symes, a fervent vice-president and lecturer of the National Secular Society, made a triumphal landing at Melbourne. He had come as the personal choice of Charles Bradlaugh to head the eighteen month old Australasian Secular Association. The Association, a product of the intense debate about religion in the prosperous, serious, provincial Melbourne of the 1880s, had guaranteed his expenses. It already could show that it had made a discernible impact on the community for in the previous year it had won a great deal of publicity as it joined in the fight to open the Public Library and Art Gallery on Sundays, and had attracted up to 3,000 supporters to its meetings.1 To an evangelist like Symes the prospects seemed glorious. He believed he was come to a fresh, unformed community where religion was without its age-old roots in the fabric of society; a community in which the truths of secularism could be inculcated to make it the first exemplar of a society uplifted by its adherence to a morality based on reason and love rather than superstition and fear. He was soon duly elected president of the Victorian Branch of the Australasian Secular Association. The local members were flattered to have among them a leader of the cause in the Old Coun try, one who was a personal friend of Bradlaugh, who was then in the midst of his famous struggle to gain admission to the House of Commons. Symes proclaimed the need for a colonial paper similar to The National Reformer. The A.S.A. members enthusiastically subscribed to debentures and a steam press was purchased, the receipt for which was issued to the president. In June 1884 he produced the first issue of the Liberator.2 It contained an autobiographical sketch of the author. He was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne on 29 January 1841, an auspicious date, for it was Tom Paine's birthday. Symes' parents were strict Methodists who brought him up to believe that God was 'as real as (his) own father ... a Being that kept His stern eye fixed upon everybody in the world without blinking'. He had been 'a weak delicate child, of a melancholic turn of mind, sensitive beyond expression and so shy and timid that a look completely cowed (him) At the age of seven teen he underwent conversion and in 1863 he offered himself, upon the wish of his mother, for the Wesleyan ministry. Initially he was rejected, apparently because of his poor health, but in the following year he was accepted by the Wesleyan College at Richmond in Surrey. In September 1867 he joined his first circuit. Symes declared that his belief in Providence was first shaken by the Franco-Prussian War. I had thought [he explained] . . . that the foremost nations of the earth were growing too wise recklessly to plunge into war . . . The blind folly of the led and the criminality of the leaders drove me almost to mad ness . . . Before the great war I had a firm and child like faith in divine providence . . .3

The Iroquois: A Study in Cultural Evolution. Frank G. Speck. (Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bulletin No. 23, 94 pages, illustrations, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1945, $1.00.) - The Celestial Bear Comes Down to Earth: The Bear Sacrifice Ceremony of the Munsee-Mahican in Canada as Related by Nekatcit. Frank G. Speck in collaboration with Jessie Moses. (Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery,

The Iroquois: A Study in Cultural Evolution. Frank G. Speck. (Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bulletin No. 23, 94 pages, illustrations, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1945, $1.00.) - The Celestial Bear Comes Down to Earth: The Bear Sacrifice Ceremony of the Munsee-Mahican in Canada as Related by Nekatcit. Frank G. Speck in collaboration with Jessie Moses. (Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Scientific Publications, Number 7, 91 pages, 4 plates, 9 figs., Reading, Pennsylvania, 1945.) - Volume 12 Issue 1

A Life History Sketch of the Allegheny Woodrat

A Life History Sketch of the Allegheny Woodrat Get access Earl L. Poole Earl L. Poole The Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Reading, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Mammalogy, Volume 21, Issue 3, 14 August 1940, Pages 249–270, https://doi.org/10.2307/1374753 Published: 14 August 1940

Miss Marian Frost

THE death on December 27 of Miss Marian Frost, chief librarian and curator of the Public Library, Art Gallery and Museum at Worthing, at fifty-nine years of age, means that a delightful personality will be greatly missed by a large number of her friends and admirers of both sexes.

I.—On a Reconstructed Skeleton of Diprotodon in the British Museum (Natural History)

For many years palæontologists have anxiously awaited the reconstruction of the complete skeleton of Diprotodon by Dr. E. C. Stirling, Mr. Zietz, and their colleagues in the South Australian Museum. In 1893, when it was announced that numerous nearly complete skeletons of this gigantic extinct marsupial had been discovered in the arid interior of South Australia, it was hoped that all details of its osteology would soon be known; but the difficulties of excavating and transporting the fragile bones, and the skill and patience needed in preparing them after they reached the Museum in Adelaide, were so considerable as to necessitate long delay in obtaining satisfactory results. At last, however, a mounted reproduction of a skeleton has been completed in plaster, and Dr. Stirling has published three excellent photographs of the specimen in the “Report of the Board of Governors of the Public Library, Museum, and Art Gallery of South Australia for 1905–6,” lately received. The Governors of the South Australian Museum have given a copy of this restoration to the University of Cambridge, where it is now mounted in the Museum of Zoology. They have also generously presented to the British Museum a set of actual limb-bones and caudal vertebræ, with sufficient plaster casts to complete the reconstructed skeleton which is shown in Plate XV. As this restoration differs in some respects from that in Adelaide, it appears to need a brief explanation.