Museums Sheffield

Description

Museums Sheffield is the charitable Trust responsible for four of the city’s museums and galleries: Millennium Gallery, Weston Park Museum and Graves Gallery. We’re here to help connect you with art, nature, history, ideas - and each other. You can connect with us in lots of ways. Through our museums, through our exhibitions and events, when we’re out and about and right here on our website. Jump in. Discover something new about this great city.

Early 2014 will be an exciting time for Museums Sheffield as we launch not one but three brand new exhibitions across our sites, all very different in character but all unique to Sheffield.

We kick off at the Graves Gallery on 11 January with the opening of Pole Position: Polish Art in Britain 1939-1989. This exhibition draws on the private collection of Matthew Bateson, a collector of Polish art who has amassed an unrivalled collection of work by Polish émigré artists, many of whom who originally came to the UK at the start of the Second World War.

There are strong connections between this Polish work and Sheffield’s own 20th Century British art collection so the show is a natural choice for the Graves Gallery, where it will complement the permanent collection on display there. Polish émigré artists have never received the attention they deserve, so as well as shedding light on a neglected contribution to British art history, we’re pleased to be showing some of these paintings in public for the first time.

Across the road at the Millennium Gallery we’re keeping things local with a new exhibition about the printmaking renaissance flourishing in Sheffield today. Artists such as James Green, Jo Peel, and Kid Acne are employing diverse techniques to create vibrant contemporary work with a growing following. Printing Sheffield opens 25 January and will showcase the best of this work. The show will include prints for sale so you too can be a print revolutionary.

2014 will mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and museums across the country are planning to commemorate the occasion in different ways. We’ve been working on a major exhibition for Weston Park for most of 2013, researching Sheffield’s role in the war and understanding its impact on the city. Sheffield and the First World War opens on 18 February and tells the story of ordinary people from Sheffield caught up in a devastating global conflict. It feels like an important exhibition and a story which needs telling, so we hope you’ll come along and let us know if we got it right.

All three exhibitions are free, though of course we encourage you to donate if you like what you see. There will also be a full programme of events and activities surrounding the exhibitions so keep an eye on this website for ways to find out more about the subjects or have a go yourself. We look forward to welcoming you in 2014!