This Spring at UCL Museums

By Dean W Veall, on 12 January 2017

Hello dear reader! Do you want to go behind the scenes at the Print Room at the Slade School of Fine Art? How about sitting in darkness surrounded by dead animals experiencing an audio cinema? Or maybe you fancy celebrating the trowel-blazing (see what I did there) women of archaeology? Thought so! As luck would have it, here at UCL Museums we have all of that plus much more to keep you entertained over the next few months….

Exhibitions

Landscape with Bridge, pen and brown ink with brown wash, UCL Art Museum 3751

We have two great exhibitions opening this Spring. UCL Art Museum’s Legacy exhibition opened on Tuesday 10 January (until 9 June) and exploring the work of 18th Century printmaker Richard Cooper Jr (1740-1822). The show features various artist’s albums by Cooper Jr who was a versatile and experimental artist, highly regarded by his contemporaries for his contributions to printmaking. As well as looking back at the historic innovations in printing practice, Legacy will also feature a changing display of contemporary printmaking by Phyllida Barlow, Bartolomeu dos Santos, Philip Sutton and others. Delving into the UCL Art Museum’s Slade collection and inspired by Cooper Jr’s artist albums, the exhibition will feature further examples by artists such as Augustus John as well as Stanley Spencer’s bound postcard collection.

BSAE excavations at Memphis 1908

Over at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology Exporting Egypt: where, why, whose? opens at the end of January (31 January to 29 April) and is the culmination of their three year Arts and Humanities Research Council grant which investigated the fate of the tens of thousands of artefacts that were excavated from Egypt between the 1890’s and 1980’s. Many of those artefacts ended up in museums and universities but some ended up in more unusual locations. From masonic lodges to trolley parks, and from royal palaces to domestic garages, the exhibition will tell the stories of the collectors and the artefacts.

UCL Museums After-Hours

The Grant Museum of Zoology, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and UCL Art Museum have an extensive programme of after-hour events this Spring. Our museum-inspired film nights return with a diverse mix of features including the classic Merchant and Ivory’s A Room with a View (Tues. 21 March) and typography documentary Helvitica (Tues. 24 Jan.) both the UCL Art Museum. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology is showing the pilot episode of the 1970’s Wonder Woman (Thurs. 19 Jan.) as part of their recurring Monstorous or Misunderstood strand investigating classical female characters in science fiction and fantasy TV.

Impropera at the Grant Museum

We have many museum-based performances as part of our After-Hours programme starting with In the Dark x Grant Museum of Zoology (Tues. 24 Jan.), a collaboration between the Grant Museum and radio collective In the Dark creating an audio cinema experience celebrating the natural world in sound. The world’s only improvised opera company, Impropera, are also returning to the Grant Museum with Muso (Wed. 8 Feb.), using their unique form of performance to sing the specimens to life, with a little help from the audience. The Petrie Museum will be also be creating performance this Spring with their theatrical re-enactment of Flinders Petrie’s famous wartime lecture in Voicing the Past (Wed. 15 Feb). Another performance not to be missed is Animal Showoff (Thurs. 9 Mar.), where we invite researchers to show off about their favourite animal in an anarchic night of jokes, stories and laughs.

Enlightening lunchtimes

Fancy taking in some culture over lunch? The lunchtime programme at UCL Museums has some great talks, tours and pop-up exhibitions worth checking out. As part of a collaboration with Wellcome Collection for their temporary exhibition Making Nature; How we see animals, the Grant Museum brings tales of intrepid adventures by scientists in the pursuit of natural history in Field Adventures. Inspired by their Legacy exhibition, UCL Art Museum have a series of pop-up exhibitions exploring the historic and contemporary innovations in printmaking, as well as ‘In Conversation’ talks with artists and a very special tour behind the scenes of the Print Room at the Slade School of Fine Art (Wed. 1 Mar.). The Petrie Museum will be investigating the Secret Life of Objects with a series of lunchtime talks bringing some of the Petrie Museum’s 80,000 objects to life.