Today the newest exhibition at the Grant Museum opens and it’s probably not something many people will have seen before. Art by Animals is an exhibition of paintings by orang-utans, a chimp, elephants and a gorilla, and to be honest, most of them are better than I could do.

When our co-curators Michael Tuck, a graduate from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, and artist Will Tuck, first approached me about a year ago I have to admit to being shocked at the elephant painting of a flower pot – it truly displays the incredible dexterity of the elephant’s trunk, but is it art?

Here’s a video about it. (more…)

Over the past two weeks we’ve been helping a group of UCL Museum Studies students who are currently working on a research project as part of their Collections Curatorship module looking into early computer art at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1970s, and in particular the work of Chris Crabtree. Very little is known by UCL Art Museum about this period in the Slade’s history, although the 1970s seem to have been something of a golden age for the Slade, with lots of pioneering work in what we would today call new media. Even less is known about Chris Crabtree, who started out at the Slade as a student in the Etching Department in 1972 and then went on to become first a technician and then a research assistant in printmaking.

What makes Chris Crabtree so fascinating (for me anyway) is that he combined a traditional training in printmaking techniques with an interest in computer programming at a time when computers were still massively clunky machines and difficult to access (mostly to be found in university scientific research labs). I like to speculate that Chris Crabtree may have been inspired by the highly influential exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in 1968 – this was one of the first exhibitions showcasing the work of digital artists such as Nam June Paik, Leslie Mezei, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, John Whitney and Charles Csuri. (more…)

By Cathrine Alice Liberg

Every year UCL Art Museum acquires student works from the Slade School of Fine Art through the William Coldstream Memorial Prize, an annual purchase prize which recognizes a student’s particular excellence in any medium. In 2010, the prize was awarded to Tessa Power for her video installation Channel, and as a museum intern, completing a History of Art Material Studies (HAMS) placement, I have had the pleasure of setting up her work as one of the first digital art objects to be showcased at UCL Art Museum. It will feature as part of our current exhibition Word & Image, which is on display throughout the autumn term. (more…)

As an artist the sourcing of materials to make work with is an endless task; a task which has me pounding the streets and surfing the web. After four years of studying fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art I have become particularly adept at sourcing the most obscure and particular items, however, finding thirty fossils for a new installation would lead me to the most interesting place so far!

The newly relocated Grant Museum sits just across the road from the Slade, so when the banners had been strapped to the railings declaring their imminent opening back in March I was eager to get inside and see what they had done with their collection. I have always been a fan. In my first week of arriving at UCL I had visited the Grant Museum and was immediately fascinated and inspired by their collection of stuffed, jarred and pinned specimens. (more…)

On Monday UCL Art Collections opened Moreover, an exhibition featuring the final results to our third annual invitation to the Slade to revisit the past masters and create new works in response.

Moreover began with a challenge to all current students at the Slade to develop their own practice using contemporary media and new modes of thinking while taking the time to consider and appreciate what has gone before. Over the Winter term students were given special access to thousands of remarkable and historically important objects within UCL’s art collections. They explored cabinets and archival boxes to discover a number of hidden treasures: an 18th-century print of a Soho drag queen, an annotated drawing by the arts educator and painter William Coldstream, John Flaxman’s neo-classical plaster models, postcards to Stanley Spencer, paper records used by museum staff to chart the shifting locations of art work – plus more. It has been an exhausting process for the students and myself, but in the main it has been productive and highly rewarding. Out of the 35 proposals submitted, 21 finalists were chosen by a panel from UCL Museums & Collections and the Slade to exhibit their works in the Strang Print Room. (more…)