Horniman crowdfunds a World Gallery

There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars. All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.
- Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Shut Kwan from the Horniman Museum writes:

Some of you may have noticed that the Horniman Museum and Gardens is crowdfunding for a new World Gallery, celebrating what it means to be human.

From personalised poems by the Horniman walrus to private tours of the new gallery, a range of fantastic rewards are available for your support at crowdfunder.co.uk/worldgallery. There are just 7 days remaining for you to pledge your support - the campaign ends on 7 November, so don’t delay!

The World Gallery will include more than 3,000 objects from around the world, works of art and fun things to touch, play with and even smell. The World Gallery will be a place of inspiration for visitors of all ages and will promote tolerance, respect and empathy. It is due to open in June 2018.

Please share the link https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/worldgalleryhttps://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/worldgallery with all your friends, family, neighbours and everyone you know who loves the Horniman, and help them reach their target of £30,000 in the last few days of the campaign.

Day of the Dead Late, at the Horniman

Thursday 7 November, 6-9pm 
The Horniman’s next after-hours party for adults, Day of the Dead Late, is inspired by the annual Mexican festival. Follow a procession of fluorescent skeletons and Mexican musicians through the galleries, dance with a giant skeleton, experience a magical puppet performance with Theatre of Dolls, join in a Day of the Dead party with DJ Stylus in the Conservatory, discover fascinating skeleton facts, and enjoy short films. Food and bar open including Mexican street food and Day of the Dead cocktails.

Find out more about Day of the Dead Late at http://www.horniman.ac.uk/visit/events/day-of-the-dead-late. Tickets are £3. Over-18s only due to the nature of the events.

Night at the Horniman

Via the South East London forum:

The Horniman Garden Party featuring rAndom International
Thursday 16 May, 6-9pm
Horniman Museum and Gardens

Join us after-hours for an exclusive garden-themed evening of art, music, film and poetry.

rAndom International’s recent installation, Rain Room at the Barbican had visitors queuing for hours. Tonight, this world-famous artist collective will be weaving its magic at the Horniman with an art experience inspired by the gardens and our collections.
PLUS
- Live Brazilian music
- Film screenings
- Alternative tours
- Poetry in the Garden
- Gin Garden
- Cafe and bar open

Check our website nearer the time for up-to-date information about rAndom International’s art experience. http://www.horniman.ac.uk/visit/events/event/museums-at-night-the-horniman-garden-party

Tickets: £3. We strongly recommend booking online in advance at http://www.horniman.ac.uk/visit/events/event/museums-at-night-the-horniman-garden-party

Suitable for over-18s only.

Khufu, can you hear me?!

Mentuhotep III, Rameses XI, Qa'a, Jean Michel Jarre, Seamus Heaney, Nadine Coyle, Martin McGuinness... your boys took one hell of a beating, etc, etc.

The Horniman Museum has won the public vote to secure the next work by installation artists rAndom, collecting 1,615 vote in an online poll. The collective strength of South East London's hyperlocal communities overwhelmed the supporters of rival prospective hosts: UCL's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, the Royal Victoria Docks and Void Derry.

As a result, we'll be getting "an installation with music and storytelling inspired by the museum garden spaces and natural history collections." Well done Team South East. If anyone has any other suggestions for votes we can rig, please let us know.

Help Horniman rain supreme

The Horniman Museum is one of three London institutions in the running to host the next installation by rAndom, the team behind the hugely successful Rain Room at the Barbican, with the winning venue chosen by a public vote. The artists explain:

rAndom create artworks exploring behaviour and interaction, using light and movement. Stuart Wood, Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch, use fragments of Artificial Intelligence to encourage relationships between the converging worlds of animate and inanimate. 

The installation at the Horniman would feature music and storytelling inspired by the museum garden spaces and natural history collections. 

BCer Michael is trying to get out the vote on behalf of the Horniman. He writes:

Last week saw Horniman's share of the vote go from 15% to 30% in this competition, with the help of Sydenham, East Dulwich, Se23.com, and South East Central Forums. It would be great to enlist the support of Brockley Central. Just a couple more percentage points by Tuesday will push us from 3rd place to 1st place, and I think Brockley Central readers could make a big difference to the numbers. 

Please vote here.

The Horniman Pavilion

The Observer has reviewed the Horniman Museum's new garden pavilion, which marks the completion of a renovation process that has spanned three decades. Architecture critic Rowan Moore writes:


Walters and Cohen's pavilion, a well-proportioned, timber-framed glass box, its structure black-clad on the outside, is an instrument for making all this strangeness apparent. It's a considerably more modest version of Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House, perched like that work above a city view. At one end, alpacas will come up to the glass; at the other, a balcony opens to the panorama. The pavilion, light-filled and made rhythmic by its repeating beams and pillars, is a foil.


Click here for a photo of the new building. And here for a discussion on the South East London forum of what their licence application means for local residents.

The Horniman Museum to lose its funding after 2015 [UPDATED]

Principal Skinner: We can buy real periodic tables instead of these promotional ones from Oscar Meyer.

Edna Krabappel: Who can tell me the atomic weight of bolognium?

Martin: Ooh ... delicious?

Edna Krabappel: Correct. I would also accept snacktacular.

- The Simpsons

Artlyst reports that the Horniman Museum and Gardens are among eight national museums that will lose their funding from central government. One of South East London's best-loved treasures will have to raise funding from Lewisham Council or the private sector or face closure. It says:

The DCMS as part of its four-year business plan, has announced, it will no longer fund eight Museums that it currently sponsors. It will scrap national funding of “museums that should be the responsibility of local communities”. This effects eight non-national museums: the Design Museum; the Geffrye Museum; the Horniman Museum and Gardens; the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester; the National Coal Mining Museum for England; the National Football Museum; the People’s History Museum; and Tyne and Wear Museums. These institutions will now be turned over to their local communities for funding. If this is unworkable and private funding unavailable, they will simply shut.

However, the Museums Journal notes that funding is secure until 2015, and the Horniman itself has issued a statement saying that funding has been ringfenced for four years, which is looking on the bright side. Longer-term, the DCMS hopes to encourage more philanthropic support for museums. Raising funds from Lewisham Council, already struggling to sustain local libraries, will be tricky.

With thanks to 'D'.

Jerk Cookout at the Horniman Museum, this Sunday, 1 – 6pm

This Sunday, the grounds of the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill will be taken over by about 10,000 people (is there room?) all in search of the world’s finest jerk dishes. Jerk has some close links with Brockley - it's the home of possibly London's only jerk-bagel shop, and who could forget the legendary Eternal Jerk shack.

It's not just jerk though, there is live music, crafts, a funfair, and even a world record attempt at the largest mass electric slide! BC will have to learn how to do the electric slide first. Here’s what the press release says:


London’s Finest Jerk Chefs Compete in the Cookout (judging from 4-5pm)
25 chefs will set up in the Horniman Gardens and compete to be named creator of the tastiest jerk dishes. Each chef must submit one traditional jerk dish and one with an unusual twist (previous entries have included a jerk pineapple). A panel of judges including GMTV’s Charlene White, Brenda Emmanus from BBC London will test all the entries. Many stalls will have their own recipe jerk sauces on sale to allow visitors to recreate their favourite dish at home.

Music on the Bandstand 1pm – 5pm
Reggae from Levi Roots, African drumming from Nzinga plus gospel and steel band. Hosted by Donna Spence.

Electric Slide Formation Dance British Record Attempt, 5-6pm
Social Enterprise Fun2Dance hopes to set a new British formation dance record by gathering 5000 people together to do the Electric Slide. Money raised through the participation fee (Adults: £5, Children: £3) will go towards the Mary Seacole Trust’s appeal for a memorial statue in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital and the Black Cultural Archive’s new heritage centre in Brixton.

Children’s Funfair
Bouncy castle, face painting, storytelling in the yurt, old-fashioned sports day (egg and spoon / sack race)

Craft Market
23 art and craft stalls including jewellery, cards and unique gift ideas.


As always with anything Horniman-related, you can keep up-to-date via the excellent and witty Horniman Twitter feed.

The Horniman Museum: Robot Zoo

On its opening weekend, we paid a visit to the Horniman Museum's latest temporary exhibition, the Robot Zoo, which is running until November 8, 2009.

Like last year's "Walking with Beasts", this is a relatively small-scale exhibit that charges for entry: Adults £5, Concs £3, Children £2.50, Children under 3 free.

The exhbition is a collection of animatronic creatures that look more 64 Zoo Lane than Truckasaurus. While reasonably entertaining for 2-10 year-olds, it doesn't teach you very much about animals or robots.

Older children will probably not be able to wring more than 10 minutes of entertainment out of it. For younger kids however, there are plenty of buttons to push, handles to crank and tortoise shells to strap on.

You don't need to be an unreconstructed sci-fi nerd to find it a little disappointing that the robot zoo exhibits aren't really very robotic, but it provides a great excuse to pay another visit to the wonderful Horniman Museum.

Incidentally, the aquarium was looking far sprightlier than it has been recently. The jellyfish were in full bloom, plenty of fish in the wave tank and frogs piled on logs in the swampland case.

Horniman a cut above the rest for Valentine's

On Valentine's Day, could there be a more apt destination in south east London than the Horniman Museum?

Their latest exhibition starts on Saturday, all about Wycinanki - no, not a new web 2.0 social network, but the ancient Polish art of paper cutting. If you can't make it for Valentine's, then you have a while, as it's on until September. Could make a nice distraction over half term, and there are some children's workshops planned - see full details in the press release below.

Wycinanki: The Art of Polish Paper Cuts

Horniman Museum, Balcony Gallery. Free Admission
Saturday 14 February – 27 September 2009

This exhibition, curated by Justyna Pyz, brings together 50 examples of the Polish folk art, Wycinanki, from the Horniman Museum collection, part of which was acquired in1963 from the Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw. The collection was originally assembled by the Polish Minister of Culture and dates from the late 1950s. Several new works were commissioned by the Museum in 2008 as part of its fieldwork programme; these include works by renowned artists such as Apolonia Nowak and Czesława Kaczyńska from Kurpie region and Helena Miazek from Łowicz, whose heart design was commissioned to mark the exhibition’s opening on Valentine’s Day.

Perhaps modelled on traditional Jewish papercuts, Wycinanki originated as an inexpensive means of decorating the homes of Polish peasants and were popular from the mid 19th century. They were generally made by women using sheep-shearing scissors and any readily available paper and replaced each spring when homes were whitewashed. With the advent of communism, Wycinanki were promoted by the new administration as an example of non-bourgeois art and enjoyed enormous popularity along with other forms of folk art. With the collapse of communism Wycinanki were assimilated into the Polish tourist industry as a traditional craft, they are now however enjoying a resurgence of interest from more radical quarters. The design of the Polish pavilion for the Shanghai Expo 2010 is based on a Wycinanki pattern whilst British artist Robert Ryan’s work has brought paper cuts to a new audience.

Some of the designs on display depict everyday rural scenes; these are valuable documents of social history showing a disappearing way of life. One of the paper cuts shows peasant women using traditional flax brakes to make linen, a practice which has now died out. The collection also includes geometric designs which were popular decorations in many homes. Wycinanki were also made for religious festivals and family celebrations; these designs have a set iconography, for example, cockerels for Easter. The paper cuts on display are from two different regions: those from Łowicz are multi-coloured and made from multiple sheets whereas those from Kurpie are made from a single sheet of coloured paper. Justyna Pyz said: “This collection of Wycinanki is remarkably diverse and represents a fantastic opportunity to discover a folk art which has flourished and continues to develop in Poland and which influences artists worldwide.”

Families with children aged 3 and up will have the opportunity to participate in Saturday art and craft workshops on 21 and 28 February from 1.30pm – 2.15pm and 2.45pm – 3.30pm on both days. Free tickets are available half an hour before the session starts from the Information Desk. Children must be accompanied by an adult.

The Horniman Museum, Forest Hill

The other weekend, we popped down to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, and felt compelled to tell you how great it was.

As avid readers will already know, in a recent poll by the council on its website, The Horniman is “the place which makes Lewisham residents feel most proud of their home town” (of course, we’re talking about Lewisham as a borough here, the town would be Forest Hill, but let’s not be pedantic, eh?). With this in mind, and a sunny afternoon in the reckoning, we set off to Forest Hill on our bikes.

The impressive exterior of the museum gives an indication of the history inside. Taking up a large portion of the museum is the display of taxidermy which looks like it was shipped in from the Natural History Museum in the 1930s. You’ll either love it or hate it, and it’s sure to scare small children. There are even some dissections to be seen – a bit Damien Hirst, but very educational.

It’s not all about the dead animals though, in fact, the museum has a definite focus on the world's people and cultures. There are lots of related workshops, talks and ongoing courses, so have a look on the website for these.

An unexpected surprise was the aquarium down in the basement. A series of displays gives you a chance to gawp at tree frogs, sea horses, octopi and many others – remember, all for nothing but a charitable donation!

The gardens are a nice place to laze around too, and you get a pretty good view across London – if you can see past the ship-like Dawson Heights estate on the horizon! In all, the Horniman is recommended for a day out, and just next-door to Brockley.