National Museums Liverpool Blog - Monday, June 07, 2010

Last month, Mersey v’s (our Young Volunteers Steering Group) visited Manchester Museum to meet with their Youth Board. Caroline, one of our Mersey v’s has kindly shared her thoughts about the day …

‘After their visit to World Museum last year with the Mersey v’s, the Manchester Museum Youth Board wanted to repay our invitation to visit with one of their own. On the 8th May, the Mersey v team ventured into the wide world to visit one of our neighbouring youth museum volunteer teams in Manchester. After a claustrophobic train journey (both Tranmere Rovers and Wigan Warriors were playing beyond Manchester), we arrived at Manchester Oxford Road ready to go to The Manchester Museum.

On arrival we were greeted by the Manchester Museum Youth Board. Once reacquainted, we had a presentation about what the Youth Board is doing in their museum. Their enthusiasm and confidence during the presentation was amazing and we were all impressed by the members of the advisory board about changes to the Egypt and classical collections and the group project to create the Manchester trail. The Manchester trail is a highlights tour of what the Youth Board believe are a mixture of Manchester greatest sites and has been so popular that it has become one of the many leaflets to accompany visits around the museum.

After a booming buffet, the Youth Board gave the Mersey v’s a tour of the Museum.  Highlights included the community gallery, showing the work they had done to help create the Manchester trail, from photos to personal stories of objects relating to Manchester including an elephant skeleton which when alive had walked to Manchester from Edinburgh. Other highlights included the Egyptian mummies, the Tomato Frog in the live reptile section and the scary encounter with Stan, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. At the end we had a chance to look at the Darwin exhibit.

Overall, it was a fantastic day not only to see another museum, but to see how a youth group like our own makes a difference in the museum. Thank you to the Manchester Youth Board for showing us around and the Volunteer team for sorting everything out for such a great day.’

Mersey v’s help the Volunteer Team to develop and deliver ideas and volunteering projects at our museums. If you are interested in volunteering and becoming part of the steering group please contact the Volunteers Team to find out more.

You can also find out more about Youth volunteering from v, the national young volunteers’ service.

National Museums Liverpool in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney are developing a new exhibition, On their own – Britain’s child migrants. The exhibition, which opens in Sydney this November before coming to Liverpool, will tell the story of child migration from Britain to Commonwealth countries. Here's the latest news about the development of the exhibition from curator Ellie Moffat:

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"From the late 19th century up until the 1960s Britain sent more than 100,000 children to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries. They all had very different experiences along the way and many former migrants are still coming to terms with what happened to them.

Those involved thought that the children would receive a better start in life in the ‘New World’, where there was also a demand for labour. They were ‘seeding’ the British Empire with ‘good British stock’. These children, some as young as 3 years old, were sent off in groups on their own. Some were orphans but many were separated from families and this often led to a lonely and brutal childhood.

Today we are launching our message board about the child migration movement. If you are a former child migrant or someone in your family was affected then we would like to hear from you. You can upload your memories and photographs to this message board. On the website you can also find links to organisations connected with child migration.

The exhibition itself is coming along well and as part of it our Audio-Visual team were filming on board our Edmund Gardner pilot vessel this week. They had a cast of 6 boys and 6 girls, along with Dave Brown and Emma Walmsley from our Education team, dressed in period costumes. There were filmed in various locations on board for two short films to be shown in the exhibition. The first film features a little girl sailing to Canada in the 1880s and the second film a boy travelling to Australia in the 1950s. The two-day shoot went very well and thankfully the weather was kind!

Have a look at more photos of the filming in our On their own - Britain's child migrants set on Flickr."

This week sees the start of stage 2 of the judging for the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize 2010!

As promised in my previous post, I will be taking you behind the scenes by bringing you an online video of all the judging action later this week.

The JM2010 jury - Gary Hume, Alison Watt, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Ged Quinn and Goshka Macuga - will be arriving in Liverpool in the next day or so and will begin judging the paintings that have got through to stage 2.

As judge Alison Watt said in the video for stage 1, this is where things start to get really exciting as the jury will be seeing the paintings 'in the flesh'. They will get to see the surfaces, sizes and textures of each painting and really get to grips with which paintings they are connecting with the most.

Above you can see the viewing cube which will be used to show the paintings to our jury as they decide which one will win that coveted first prize. The first prizewinning painting is in that room somewhere - who knows which one it will be!

You'll have to wait until September to find out, but in the mean time you can subscribe to our John Moores news feed or follow us on Twitter, to hear first when the video for stage 2 goes online... 

I like traditional African arts and crafts, particularly things made out of wood and leather that reflect the ancient cultures of the continent.

The spread of African civilisation along the slave trade routes was something people who operated the evil trade probably did not anticipate.  Enslaved Africans brought strong cultural identities and a wide range of skills when they were forcibly taken across the Atlantic to work in the Americas.

Liverpool slave ship captains traded goods for human cargoes on the African coast then took their captives across the infamous Middle Passage to the New World.

Although the enslaved Africans were kept under close restraint on the voyages, resistance took many different forms. Revolts were regular occurrences along with suicides and refusals to eat.

Another form of resistance was the retention of African culture, especially religion. African belief systems survived the horrors of the sea voyage and helped the enslaved endure their ordeal.

On display in the International Slavery Museum, in the Merseyside Maritime Museum building, is a necklace carrying charms (pictured) which are an important part of African-based religions.

Once they landed in the Americas, enslaved Africans were sold to the highest bidder and the cash proceeds spent on commodities which were shipped to Liverpool.

On rivers in the Chesapeake Bay area on the east coast of North America they worked as sailors, boatmen and watermen. During the 1600s this area of Virginia and Maryland became the world’s largest producer of tobacco.

Others worked in the fisheries of Chesapeake Bay and as crab pickers. In 1772 1.5 million herring were caught, salted and pickled – mainly by women.
The forced labour of millions of Africans and their descendents transformed the landscape and future of the Americas.

Enslaved Africans and their descendents cleared the forests and bush, built roads and houses, dug canals, worked down mines and in forges. They grew sugar, cotton and tobacco and created the wealth that supported plantation owners and their families.

Among the skills Africans brought to the Americas were rice growing and metalworking. Many owners would hire out their skilled slaves to work for others, especially in the growing towns and cities needing expert workforces.

The museum has many contemporary illustrations of plantation life including a sugar estate and mill yard in Antigua, West Indies, by W Clark in 1823.

Antigua had first been colonised by the British in 1632 – the first crops were tobacco, ginger and indigo. Sugar became the main crop about 1674.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents, bookshops or from the Mersey Shop website (£1 p&p UK).

With China Through the lens of John Thomson 1868 - 1872 closing at Merseyside Maritime Museum this Sunday, our Liverpool's Chinatown Through the lens Flickr competition has now also come to an end and it is time to reveal the winners.

We had a really interesting range of entries and exhibition curator and competition judge Betty Yao found it difficult to choose the winner from nearly 200 photos. However after much deliberation Betty chose three images, which have all also been blogged about over the course of the competition, with the overall winner being 'Chinese New Year - People' by Lee Carus, an image she says she 'returned again and again to' because '...there is so much there - capturing the people, the colours'. Congratulations to Lee, who wins a banquet meal for two at Yuet Ben.

The two lucky runners-up are Graham Morgan, whose enigmatic shot Betty praised 'for capturing the moment', and Mark McGowan, whose Chinese arch photo reminded her of two atmospheric images from the exhibition; of the pagoda reflected on the lake, and the hazy shot of a man standing by the River Min.

Congratulations to all our entrants, and one final reminder to visit the Maritime Museum this weekend for your last chance to see John Thomson's fascinating images.

This week in our celebration of the World Museum's 150th anniversary we have a blog from Curator of Antiquities, Gina Muskett. Gina is passionate about the objects in the museum's classical and European collections - here she is to tell us about one of her favourite pieces...

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I was really pleased that the ‘Kingston Brooch’, one of the objects I curate, was chosen to represent one of the ‘big dates’ in the 150 years since the museum was founded - 1867, when Joseph Mayer presented most of his collection to the museum. You can read more about Joseph Mayer here. 

So what is the Kingston Brooch and why is it so special? For a start, it’s the finest and largest (a whopping 8.5cm in diameter) brooch of its type. The brooch dates from the time of the Anglo-Saxons and is about 1400 years old. It’s made from gold and decorated with garnets (dark red stones), blue glass and shell. The person who made this used more than 830 separate pieces to decorate the brooch, and must have been very skilled indeed.

It’s also special that we know exactly where it was found – in a grave at Kingston Down in Kent. It was one of the objects buried with a woman, and she must have loved the brooch, as it is quite worn and repaired, which suggests she wore it regularly.

But that’s not all! The grave which contained the Kingston Brooch was one of many excavated by a Kent clergyman, the Reverend Bryan Faussett, who lived in the middle of the 18th century. He kept very detailed records of his digs in notebooks and diaries and they came to Liverpool along with the rest of his collection.

You can see a photo of the pages of the diary recording the discovery of the Kingston Brooch – with a lovely drawing! – alongside the brooch itself in the museum. There is also a display of some of the other things buried with the brooch and many other fantastic Anglo-Saxon objects from the museum’s collection in the Ancient World gallery on the third floor of World Museum. 

Last night I attended the launch party of this year's Liverpool Art Prize at Metal. It was my first visit to the venue, located at Edge Hill station which I guess could make it Liverpool's answer to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, with the difference that the station is still in use. So as we stood on the platform in the sunshine discussing the artworks we'd seen, every so often a train would stop on its way to or from Lime Street.

I was artspotting rather than trainspotting though and was really impressed with the work on show. There was a mix familiar faces such as David Jacques, who many people will remember from his exhibition As if in a dream dreamt by another at the former Museum of Liverpool Life in 2004, and Paul Rooney, winner of the Northern Art Prize 2008, plus some great pieces from artists I'm less familiar with, Gina Czarnecki, James Quin and Emily Speed.

The winner of the Art Prize is announced on 30 June and in an exciting new development this year that artist will have the opportunity to exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. There's also a People's Choice award, so if you enjoy having the fate of others in your hands then make sure you get down there and cast your vote before 29 June.

The Volunteers Team would like to send out congratulations to several of our youth volunteers who each passed their Bronze Arts Award last week.

The group of 12 young people (aged 16-25) have all volunteered as part of our Discovery Volunteers project based at World Museum. During this time they met with visitors on gallery and chatted about handling objects, having received lots of prior training from curatorial and education staff.

Our volunteers also attended several Arts Award sessions run by the Volunteers team, including a visit to Plantastic and writing up a project about their Arts Hero or Heroine.

Arts Award aspires to support any young person to enjoy the arts and develop creative leadership skills and is run by Arts Council England and Trinity Guildhall.

We would like to say a big well done to them all!

You can find out more about youth volunteering from v, the national young volunteers’ service.

As it is National Volunteers Week all this week (1st – 7th June 2010) we thought it would be a great opportunity to pass the blog over to one of our youth volunteers. So, here’s Emma, to tell us a bit more about Mersey v’s: Our dedicated Youth Volunteers Steering Group…

'Mersey v’s is made up of a group of volunteers aged 16-25 at National Museums Liverpool. We meet once a month, usually on a Thursday evening or during a Sunday daytime, in different venues to discuss anything and everything to do with volunteering, giving us the opportunity to pass on our thoughts and ideas to the Volunteer department.

A typical meeting will start with an update from Claire, the Youth Volunteer Officer, with any relevant news since the last meeting. Then we usually move on to look at specific topics or tasks related to volunteering, such as designing logos for volunteer projects, discussing ideas for future projects, and suggesting how the museum should recognise volunteer achievements. In order to fuel the discussions at meetings, we are usually provided with a selection of cakes or pizzas, which are always popular with the group!

Mersey v’s is a great way to have a real impact upon volunteering within National Museums Liverpool, giving young volunteers the opportunity to have their say on a whole range of issues. Mersey v’s also allows members to learn more about the organisation by visiting different venues and talking to members of staff, while also developing our own skills by doing new things, such as writing this blog!'

If you are aged 16-25 and would like to get involved or find out more, please contact the Volunteers team.

You can also find out more about youth volunteering from v, the national young volunteers’ service.

Mersey v’s Aims
• To encourage youth volunteering
• To make volunteering relevant, new and exciting
• To engage young people in museums and their work
• To develop opportunities that link to the lives of young people today
• To learn about what National Museums Liverpool does
• To achieve new skills in a social environment
• To involve people from all sections of society

I was fascinated to get close to LS Lowry’s remarkable painting, 'Waterloo Docks', now on a long loan at the Walker Art Gallery. This is a great work of art but when you try to analyse the picture’s qualities they are difficult to pin down. It is like a walk in the fields on a beautiful May day when colours and landscape become perfect for a passing moment.

Look at 'Waterloo Docks' as a complete entity and it forms a compelling whole but individual components seem no more than children’s doodles. This is the brilliant essence of its charm. Lowry, as his life studies prove, was a skilful draughtsman who developed his uniquely simple matchstick men style during years of painstaking study. 'Waterloo Docks' was painted on a visit to Liverpool in 1962, towards the end of Lowry’s painting career. It has been hung next to the gallery’s 'Fever Van', painted in 1935 – it is interesting to compare the two.

I never met Laurence Stephen Lowry but played a part in his story – right at the very end. I was a young staff news reporter with the Press Association – Britain’s national news agency – based in Manchester. Every day the agency sends out a morning schedule and on three consecutive days in 1976 you would have read the words: "MANCHESTER.  Lowry: Our reporter is waiting by the graveside".

That was me. I was despatched at 8 o’clock one bleak winter’s morning to scour Manchester Southern Cemetery for the future resting place of the recently-deceased Mr Lowry. He had ordered that the funeral be private and no details released. Lowry was a very private man and did not want crowds gawping at his coffin.

Two gravediggers loomed out of the swirling mist, working next to a large stone monument. I spotted the name LOWRY just as one hastily pulled a piece of sacking over the inscription. I checked at the cemetery office and discovered interments were only between 10 am and 4 pm. I still had to wait three grim days by the graveside and amused myself doing sketches of the cemetery.

Late on the third afternoon, as dusk descended, the funeral cortege appeared – about 10 people pursued by a Manchester Evening News photographer. I followed them into the cemetery chapel where a clergyman said a few words before we all set off to the graveside.  The mourners included two distinguished gentlemen from the Royal Academy of Arts and Carol Ann Lowry, the young woman who inherited the artist’s estate. There were just three wreathes – one from the entertainer and sculptor Tommy Steele, a Royal Academy exhibitor.  After a few words, the coffin was lowered into the brick-lined grave and covered with earth.