Thinking ahead….
Wed 11 th June free 11-1pm “Soapbox” at Tate Britain for 60 years young and better. Phone Tate to book.
Thurs 12 th June £3 1pm. Hackney Picturehouse screening ” The Servant” (1963). Reminiscence Screenings.
Fri 13th June free 6-9pm 260 Globe Road E2 .Anthony Stevens private viewing of “Making Soup”. Punky creative collages.(Thanks to Jan of Spitalfields for sharing this).
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Thurs 29th May free 6pm The Mill. Come and meet the artists portraying works in a new exhibition hosted at The Mill in Coppermill Lane Walthamstow.
free private view 7pm of WE an exhibition from artists about E17’s Warner Estates at the old Warner rent office.
Fri 30th May free. Time to submit images of your art work to Rosetta Arts West Ham for a major exhibition of community artists’ work.
free 8.30-10am. AM! Creatives meet for breakfast. International House, St Katherine’s Shadwell. Book at Creative Mornings London.
Sat 31st May free mostly. E17 Art Trail launches. Huge programme detailing installations, shows, workshops, shop exhibitions and more in all Council outlets.
If you looked through windows in the many artists’ quarters in E17 today you would have spied artists finishing off oiled canvases and installations ready for the E17 Art Trail.
It was community breakfast at The Mill E17 today with home-made bread munchers mulling over observations of life in the fast lane. By another table, the art director was busy dismantling the “Face Value” pictures and portraits clearing the walls for another forthcoming art exhibition. All go. It costs a fiver to display your art work after it’s been approved. You can sell as well and believe me, the customers are there.
Rosetta Arts in West Ham calls out for submissions for their exhibitions. Free too and any sold work commands a commission fee for Rosetta Arts. Good business.
Lots of flyers about for The E17 Art Trail which starts 31st May. I’ll be posting them up on local Tesco notice-boards.
Thurs 22nd May free 6-8pm Waltham Forest College E17 Community Kitchen making mince and spuds.
free 4.30-5.30 and 6-7pm
Stratford Library. Nusho Charity. Learn to use Skype and get healthy with walks and menus. Every Thursday. You have to be 65 and better.
Fri 23rd May free Last chance to enjoy “Face Value” exhibition at The Mill E 17
Sat 24th May 2-5pm
£3 Children free. Family Tea Dance. Old Town Hall Stratford.
Sun 25th May free 11.30 am Community Breakfast at The Mill E17.
Wed 28th May free. 6-9pm “East London In Flux. What is The Legacy for us? Birkbeck Uni. Stratford E15. Book at Eventbrite.
Today was ace. I saw a mouse on Warren Street underground platform.
Oh yes and I joined the community group workshop at Tate Britain for today’s session about expectations in portraits and what Henry Moore did. I shut my mouth and listened. Didn’t need no community engagement, no social interaction, no artspeke just a couple of hours to listen to seniors’ wisdom and time to soak up Moore, shapes, spaces and quiet empty galleries.
The Tates are luring in punters under headings like “Meet Art Today” or owt and some research must have shown that the people in the street are intimidated by art museums so community engagers devise programmes to share gigantic buildings and exhibitions with the nation. Claremonters were the nation’s body today, hardly representative of multi- ethnic London elders.
This was a workshop so that implied hands on activities. Experts guided nine learners in looking at 3D work as a practical exercise. By the end of the two hour session people were ready for more. “Soapbox” was duly promoted. (Go to Tate Britain site and tap in “Soapbox”.)
The British Museum does community group freebies where booked groups can go see exhibition previews, add-ons and get the punters in any which way into interest forums.
If that every borough had a centre for older people to hang out. What with celebs pushing for dementia awareness through dementia friends, chances are that every borough will remind itself to prioritise seniors and their cultural needs/ preferences/ favourites from a nucleus hub. Never happened pre London 2012 and the Claremont Project Islington grows into the one to model on.
Claremonters went along to the British Museum’s dead and alive or rather “Ancient Lives” all about scanning dead gyptians and probing their tummy contents through the mummification rags courtesy of Samsung technology. Beautiful moving images and some interactive buttons. Lots of pathology about rotten teeth and abcessi. I do believe I watched an anthropology programme on Sky last week all about one young Egyptian and her abcess.
Well that was worth the 75 minutes bus journey each way.
Next!
Art in someone’s community. Today I attended a community engagement through drawing session. Easy to do if you’re floating on a Cocodemol tablet. I was in a class with a woman who wears a bag on her head.
Then I stupidly took the 276 bus to get to Strattie forgetting it skirts by Hackney Wick. Hackney Wick. What happened? Are the sinkholes on strike? Splashed grafitti; I mean truly thrown on the walls. Hang on. Was that art? Then the drag through Bow. My journey was made interesting when two old old white English proper east enders got on. Love their old English. See, unless I put on Time Team, I rarely hear the old home language . They spoke like Steptoe, like “The Rag Trade”, like old nan in Catherine Tait. They speak differently to the old tribeswomen in Islington. Then two white youths got on the bus with their mum and her trolley and her dropped aitches. Might have to start recording a disappearing dialect: After all we’re all spending digi-time photographing and archiving mostly ignored buildings.
Book at Soapbox website or at Tate ticketing on 02078878888.Free event discussing everything from ole Lady Wantage’s visage to teenagers unable to sew on a button. And then Tate art which you don’t see everyday.
All sessions in the Manton Studio 11-1pm. Choccie biccies!
11 June
9 July
10 Sept
8 Oct
12 Nov
So what does it mean to curate an art exhibition? At Claremont in White Lion Street Islington to curate means to negotiate stone steps up to the second floor, to frame lovingly amateur oil paintings and typed-up poems with unmatching fonts and to position photographs so that the sun doesn’t spear them. The launch of Ephemeral today was well attended and artists and friends were welcomed with wine and pricked sausages. In another room line dancing was in full swing.
In pride of place in the members’ lounge above tatty armchairs hangs “Image in the Dying Sun” my oil painting of a majestic lion, one of a set of three studies of Ra Ra.
I’d travelled on the 38 Routemaster to the Angel on my return journey from another mind-sharpening Soapbox session for seniors at good ole Tate Britain. At last I feel that faraway Tate Britain is part of me: Before it was a grand building done a couple of times after a long boring tube journey. Not so now. The desert that is Pimlico is now on my internalised SatNav and having marched through the galleries and appreciated previously ignored paintings I now see TBritain as friendly.
We seniors examined our worth as perceived by others. We checked out paintings where wrinklies had insisted on looking unlined and contrasted those with portraits of gentlefolk sporting warts and all. One of our group suggested we saw ourselves in a miserable light never mind what the generations downwards reckoned. It was on the verge of boring to discuss how we are the new generation because seniors are so in fashion with regard to engaging the community. There are TV shows and documentaries about the forgotten oldies, the disrespected greys and the invisible ones. All is highlighted everywhere now with stuff upon stuff about World War One. The joy was to look at paintings of the old white tribe before 1933.
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