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The new Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery opens its doors today (1 April) following a £10m redevelopment project, with an exhibition of works from the collection of Dairy Art Centre co-founder Frank Cohen. Pieces by Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Abigail Lane, Bill Viola and Charming Baker, amongst others, have been curated around an animal theme to resonate with the museum’s permanent collections and explore the legacy of the rural market town’s most famous former resident, Charles Darwin.
“Darwin’s influence can be felt throughout the historic collections,” says curator Adrian Plant. “Each artwork in the Cohen exhibition in some way touches upon the connection between human beings and the animal world, and questions how much we can really know about history.”
Funded by Shropshire Council with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, the European Regional Development Fund, the Art Fund, the Walker Trust, and the Friends of Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, the five-year restoration project has transformed a Victorian music hall to create new galleries, a café bar and visitor centre in the heart of the town.
New commissions by Shirley Chubb, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead and Chris Keenan, which also go on show today, respond to artefacts in the museum and to Shropshire’s geographical and historical context.
Brighton-based Chubb has created a series of structural films that explore movement through the landscapes of Charles Darwin’s childhood home. Thomson and Craighead’s Hello World is a live work for the museum’s courtyard, a totemic LED ‘time-piece’ that displays the current world population in real time. Keenan’s film Beneath the Surface, installed within the museum’s Roman Collection, explores archeological finds excavated from the nearby site of Wroxeter.
As part of the Artist-Curators programme, Neil Brownsword and Ilana Halperin have been invited to interpret the museum’s Ceramics and Geology collections. As well as leading on the curation of these galleries and commissioning film and text pieces to animate the displays, Brownsword and Halperin have created new ceramic and sculptural works that respond to and are incorporated within the collections.
Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, The Square, Shrewsbury, 10am-5pm daily.
shrewsburymuseum.org.uk
