Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery marks end of Arts Council Collection partnership with Cute Carnival - with pictures

To commemorate the end of the Birmingham Museums Trust venues partnership with Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme, the venue hosted Cute Carnival to celebrate the final exhibition in the programme, Rachel Maclean's Too Cute!.

Visitors were also able to visit the Women Power Protest exhibition and attend a tour conducted by curator Emalee Beddoes-Davis.

Cocktails, cupcakes, live music from Tirikilatops, costumes and games marked the evening as well as speeches from Rachel Maclean, Birmigham Museums' Toby Watley and Arts Council Collection's Jill Constantine.

Toby praised the partnership and the volume of 'innovative and exciting' exhibitions it had allowed the venues to host.

"Over the course of these three years we have hosted nine exhibitions across four venues that thousands of you have come to see," he continued.

"It began with Night In The Museum by Ryan Gander, through to our last exhibitions, Women Power Protest and Too Cute!,

"It has been an honour to work with so many incredible artists and the people at Arts Council Collection."

Other exhibitions in the programme have included I Want! I Want! Arts and Technology, Coming Out, The Everyday and Extraordinary, Nature’s Presence and Wall Have Ears: 400 Years of Change at Aston Hall.

Birmingham Museums Trust was one of the four galleries chosen by Arts Council Collection to be National Partners. This partnership saw world-class modern and contemporary art displayed in the city throughout a three year programme from 2016 to 2019.

The Arts Council Collection is the largest national loan collection of modern and contemporary British art. The collection includes important work by most of the UK’s prominent post-war artists.

With nearly 8,000 works by more than 2,000 artists, it is the most widely circulated of Britain’s national collections and can be seen in exhibitions in museums and galleries across the UK and abroad.

Unique among national collections, the Arts Council Collection also lends to public buildings across the UK, including schools, hospitals and charitable associations.

Founded in 1946 with the Arts Council of Great Britain, the organisation has continued to grow, acquiring innovative works each year. The Collection operates as a ‘museum without walls’, supporting emerging artists by acquiring and exhibiting their work as widely as possible.

To mark the Arts Council Collection’s 70th anniversary in 2016, Arts Council England invested in a network of four National Partner galleries across England.

The four National Partner galleries were the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, Birmingham Museums Trust, The Walker Art Gallery as part of National Museums Liverpool and the Collection’s existing partner, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Speaking at the launch Jill Constantine, head of Arts Council Collection said: “Our 70th Anniversary year has been extraordinarily successful, our eight celebratory commissions have been seen and enjoyed across the country.

"Now the launch of the National Partnership exhibition programme will allow even more people to see great work from the Arts Council Collection.

"It has been really rewarding to witness the excitement of the teams in each partner gallery whilst researching ideas, discovering new elements of the Collection and sharing their thoughts and curatorial proposals across the other partners.

"It promises to be really wonderful programme and I look forward to working with the partners to develop the next round of exhibitions.”

The galleries each developed a year-round programme for art works within the collection, hosting at least 24 exhibitions from April 2016 to Spring 2019, enabling even more people – particularly children and young people across England – to see and enjoy the works.

The National Partners will also created digital and learning initiatives to create more opportunities for people to engage with the collection.

Marking a century since the first women won the right to vote, Women Power Protest brings together modern and contemporary artworks from the Arts Council Collection and Birmingham’s to celebrate female artists who have explored protest, social commentary and identity in their work.

The exhibition includes pieces from celebrated artists including Susan Hiller, Lubaina Himid, and Mary Kelly, as well as sometimes controversial artists such as Sam Taylor-Johnson, Sonia Boyce, and Margaret Harrison.

In Too Cute!, artist and filmmaker Rachel Maclean examines the world of cuteness by curating works from the Arts Council Collection and Birmingham’s collection to reveal how objects and images can have the unique ability to be simultaneously sweet and yet sinister.

The works in the exhibition range from contemporary works to 19th-century oil paintings. The exhibition is also accompanied by an interpretative video featuring Dr. Cute - a grotesque Care Bear like creature played by Maclean - presenting a short lecture on the themes explored in the show.

Women Power Protest is at the venue until March 31.

Too Cute! runs until May 12.

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