Podcasts about Birmingham Museum

THE MAD LAD Michael D. Kennedy returns to the show to talk about his newest book that's out now on Drawn & Quarterly, Milk White Steed. We catch up with Michael on his journey of making the book, UK's dire economic situation and how it's impacted artists like himself, what motivates him to keep making work, and his recent residency at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. We also suck him off for like a solid 15 minutes because the book is that good. Follow Michael on IG @michael_d_kennedy to check out more of his comics. Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Email us at gutterboyspodcast@gmail.com and we'll read it on the next episode, or give the Gutter Boys a follow on Instagram and Twitter (JB: @mortcrimpjr; Cam: @camdelrosario). And of course, please rate, review, like, share, and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform and help grow the Gutter Gang Nation! If you're feeling generous, subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/gutterboys (or gutterboys.top) and browse our different subscription tiers to receive exclusive merch, behind-the-scenes comic process updates, bonus episodes, plus much more! Support this podcast: https://gutterboyspodcast.podbean.com/  

In this episode of The Localist, Gina Locklear, founder of Zkano Socks, shares the journey of maintaining a small-scale, sustainable sock manufacturing business in Fort Payne, Alabama. She discusses challenges, values and the significance of consumer choices in supporting local businesses. Locklear also highlights the impact of receiving the American Made award from Martha Stewart and her commitment to quality rather than aggressive expansion.   Mentioned in this episode: Zkano Website: https://zkano.com/ Zkano Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zkano_socks Sock Queen of Alabama article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/fashion/sock-business-alabama.html American Flannel: https://bookshop.org/p/books/american-flannel-how-a-band-of-entrepreneurs-are-bringing-the-art-and-business-of-making-clothes-back-home-steven-kurutz/20456379?ean=9780593329610 Riverhead Books: https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/ Golden Temple: https://goldentemplehealthfood.com/ Martha Stewart American Made: https://www.al.com/living/2015/11/little_river_sock_mill_fort_pa.html Mike Rowe interview with Steven Kurutz: https://mikerowe.com/2024/04/american-flannel-with-steven-kurutz-ep-380/ Liesa Cole: https://liesacole.com/ Club Duquette: https://clubduquette.co/ Wild Bird: https://birmingham.wbu.com/ Birmingham Museum of Art: https://www.artsbma.org/ Juniper: https://www.juniperbham.com/ Little Professor: https://littleprofessorbookshop.com/ Store Locator: https://zkano.com/pages/store-locator Stephen King's book 11/22/63: https://bookshop.org/p/books/11-22-63-stephen-king/7060372?ean=9781451627299  

Ep.206 David Huffman (b. 1963, Berkeley, CA) has work in the collections of SFMOMA, San Francisco; LACMA, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Studio Museum, Harlem; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Oakland Museum of California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; San José Museum of Art, CA; Palo Alto Art Center, CA; Eileen Norton Collection, Los Angeles; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, Arkansas Art Center; ASU Art Museum, Tempe, AZ; Lodeveans Collection, London; and the Embassy of the United States of America, Dakar, Senegal, among others. Huffman enjoyed a recent solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco and has been included in recent group exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Everson Museum of Art, NY; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, NC; and The Write Museum, MI. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Eureka Fellowship, ARTADIA San Francisco, Palo Alto Public Arts Commission, and the Barclay Simpson Award. He studied at the New York Studio School and received his MFA at California College of the Arts & Crafts, San Francisco. Huffman lives and works in Oakland, CA; he is currently on the board at SFMOMA. Huffman is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco and Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo credit: Francis Baker Artist http://david-huffman.com/ Casey Kaplan https://caseykaplangallery.com/artists/david-huffman/ | https://caseykaplangallery.com/?exhibitions=david-huffman Jessica Silverman https://jessicasilvermangallery.com/online-shows/david-huffman-odyssey/ SFMOMA https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/David_Huffman/ BAMPFA https://bampfa.org/event/artists-curatorial-gallery-talks-david-huffman MOAD SF https://www.moadsf.org/exhibitions/david-huffman-terra-incognita KQED https://www.kqed.org/arts/13911456/at-moad-david-huffmans-terra-incognita-explores-black-trauma-among-the-stars Studio Museum in Harlem https://www.studiomuseum.org/artists/david-huffman PAFA https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection-artist/david-huffman Hyperallergic https://hyperallergic.com/678893/david-huffman-afro-hippie-berkeley-art-center/ Berkeley Side https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/08/13/david-huffman-berkeley-art-center U.S. Dept of State https://art.state.gov/personnel/david_huffman/ California College of the Arts https://www.cca.edu/newsroom/faculty-spotlight-david-huffman-paintingdrawing-fine-arts/ Open-Editions https://open-editions.com/collections/david-huffman Miles McEnery https://www.milesmcenery.com/exhibitions/david-huffman Templon https://www.templon.com/exhibitions/cosmography/ Artforum https://www.artforum.com/events/david-huffman-3-250228/ ARTnews https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/david-huffman-protest-paintings-casey-kaplan-1234707187/ Daily Art Fair https://dailyartfair.com/exhibition/18000/david-huffman-casey-kaplan

Iseult Gonne is the daughter of the Irish suffragette, actress and republican who became a muse for WB Yeats. Novelist Helen Cullen has been researching her troubled life. Rochelle Rowe's research looks at women of colour who modelled for artists including Jacob Epstein and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, tracing the histories of women like Fanny Eaton and Sunita Devi. Tabitha Barber is curating an exhibition of women's art opening at Tate Britain in May. Naomi Paxton hosts a conversation about muses, women making art and carving out a public name for themselves.Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement runs at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 31 October From16 May, Tate Britain opens Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520 - 1920 Angelica Kauffman runs at the Royal Academy (1 March - 30 June 2024) Julia Margaret Cameron runs at the National Portrait Gallery (21 March - 16 June)You can find a collection of episodes exploring Women in the World on the Free Thinking programme website

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, Emily chats with Iraqi born, Los  Angeles based artist Hayv Kahraman...About Artist Hayv Kahraman:Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq 1981, now lives and works in Los Angeles. A vocabulary of narrative, memory and dynamics of non-fixity found in diasporic cultures are the essence of her visual language and the product of her experience as an Iraqi refugee/come émigré. The body as object and subject have a central role in her painting practice as she compositely embodies the artist herself and a collective.Kahraman's recent solo exhibitions include; “Acts of Reparation“, CAM St Louis; “Audible Inaudible“, Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha; “Sound Wounds“, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; “Gendering Memories of Iraq- a Collective Performance” which has been staged at CAM St Louis, Birmingham Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins museum of art and Duke University; “Reweaving Migrant Inscriptions” Jack Shainman, New York; “Audible Inaudible“, The Third Line gallery, Dubai; “How Iraqi are you?“, Jack Shainman, New York. Recent group exhibitions include: “No Man's Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection”, Miami; “UNREALISM: Presented by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch”, Miami Design District; “June: A Painting Show”, Sadie Coles HQ, London. Hayv was shortlisted for the 2011 Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum and has received the award “Excellence in Cultural Creativity”, Global Thinkers Forum.Visit Hayv's Website: HayvKahraman.comFollow Hayv on Instagram: @HayvKahramanFor more on Hayv's exhibition, "Look Me In The Eyes" at the ICA San Francisco, CLICK HERE. --About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

#Armenia #folktale In this story, a man's kindness is repaid many fold, but is tricked out of his riches by a lying thief with echoes of Aladdin. There is also a bit of Urashima Taro (episode 76) in taking care of animals and paying people to leave them alone. And a tiny echo of episode 106 from Korea where the dog needs to keep something precious in its mouth. Source: Armenian Folk Tales collected by A.G. Seklemian Narrator: Dustin Steichmann Music: Ashot Ghevondyan - Erevan (popuri) Աշոտ Ղևոնդյան - Երևան (Պոպուրի) Ашот Гевондян -Ереван Sound effects: 10 Minute Rain by Dustin Steichmann Podcast Shoutout: book retorts. Hosts Danielle and Sam take you through books, movies, graphic novels, and whatever else they come across to keep you entertained. Episodes come out every other wednesday and I have to say I quite enjoy their media breakdowns. And if you like their show as much as I do, go and give them a like, a rating, and a five star review to help spread them around. Listener Shoutout: Birmingham UK. “Birmingham is a major city in England's West Midlands region, with multiple Industrial Revolution-era landmarks that speak to its 18th-century history as a manufacturing powerhouse. It's also home to a network of canals, many of which radiate from Sherborne Wharf and are now lined with trendy cafes and bars. In the city centre, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is known for pre-Raphaelite masterpieces.” ― says Google. And so to my listeners in Birmingham and their lovely brummy accents I say “thank you and goodnight” Photo Credit: "Hercules Ring" by Calgary Reviews is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Video by Headliner --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sandman-stories/message

It was a pleasure to join Victoria Osborne from Birmingham Museums to discuss the hotly awaited homecoming of the 'Victorian Radicals' exhibition from a long, but successful, trip to America. Victoria tells us about the importance of the Birmingham collection and what treasures we can expect to see. From paintings to furniture to clothing, the Birmingham collection is truly astonishing; alongside some old favourites, there are many pieces from the archives that make this exhibition one not to miss!   For more information and to book tickets please visit the website: https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/exhibitions/victorian-radicals   For more information and to subscribe to the Pre-Raphaelite Society, please visit www.pre-raphaelitesociety.org    All donations towards the maintenance of this podcast are gratefully received: https://gofund.me/60a58f68     

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, Emily chats with East Bay Artist David Huffman, a painter, installation artist and educator. About Artist David Huffman:David Huffman studied at the New York Studio School, New York, NY and the California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. He received his MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 1999. Huffman has had solo shows at venues including, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2018); Worlds in Collision, Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Culver City, CA (2016). Recent group exhibitions include To the Hoop, Basketball and Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, NC (upcoming); Ordinary Objects / Wild Things, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2019); and Sidelined, Curated by Samuel Levi Jones, Galerie Lelong & Co, New York, NY (2018).‍In 2019, Huffman completed permanent commissions in Oakland and San Francisco at the Chase Center in collaboration with SFMOMA.‍His work may be found in the permanent collections of Arizona State University Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe Campus, Tempe, AZ; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of; California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, among others.‍Visit David's Website: David-Huffman.comFollow David on Instagram: @DavidHuffmanStudioSee David's work through the Jessica Silverman Gallery--About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Ep.172 features Leslie Smith. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. | He was a 2022 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow and earned a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA at the Yale School of Art. | Smith's interests lie in our conscious effort to alter personal perception. | Recent works explore Abstraction's inherent personal and political properties as they relate to broadening notions of Black representation, with a mindset that it's possible to present a new interpretation of contemporary abstraction. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; the Birmingham Museum of Art; the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham; and the FRAC Auvergne, France. Smith is a Full Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Jim Escalante Artist http://www.lesliesmith3.com/ Chart Gallery https://chart-gallery.com/exhibitions/49-leslie-smith-iii-reaching-for-something-high/ Joan Mitchell 2022 https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/leslie-smith-iii Joan Mitchell 2023 https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/journal/in-the-studio-leslie-smith-iii University Wisconsin–Madison https://art.wisc.edu/2022/09/23/leslie-smith-iii-wins-joan-mitchell-fellowship/ Two Coats of Paint https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2023/10/leslie-smith-iii-poignantly-off-balance.html Maus Contemporary https://mauscontemporary.com/artists/leslie-smith-iii/ Art Daily https://artdaily.com/news/162053/-Leslie-Smith-III--Reaching-for-Something-High--solo-exhibition-opening-at-CHART- Art New City https://art.newcity.com/2021/01/08/abstracting-lived-experience-a-review-of-leslie-smith-iii-at-hawthorn-contemporary/ M+B Photo https://www.mbphoto.com/artworks/17654/ Wide Walls https://www.widewalls.ch/maus-contemporary-expo-chicago-2019-leslie-smith-iii-interview/ Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Smith_III

Jodi Hays is a painter who has had recent solo shows at Night Gallery (Los Angeles) and two-person shows at Susan Inglett Gallery (New York City) and Devening Projects (Chicago). Brooks Museum, Fisk University, and Devening Projects, among others. She was a 2019 Finalist for the Hopper Prize and the recipient of grants from the Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Residencies include Oxbow School of Art, Stoveworks, The Cooper Union School of Art and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been published in Art Forum, New American Painting, Hyperallergic, New Art Examiner and Two Coats of Paint. Her paintings can be found in many public and corporate collections including the J Crew Group, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Ep.160 features Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b. 1992, London, United Kingdom), an artist living and working in New York, NY. Adeniyi-Jones received a BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, in 2014, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT, in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Deep Dive, White Cube, Hong Kong, China (2023); Tranquil Dive, Morán Morán, CDMX, Mexico (2023); Emergent Properties, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Voix Intérieures, White Cube, Paris, France (2022) among others. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2022); In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ (2022); Out of the Fire: The 14th Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2022); Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami's Collection, ICA Miami, FL (2022); All Things Bright and Beautiful, Birmingham Museum of Art, AL (2022); among others. Adeniyi-Jones's work is included in the permanent collections of the Aishti Foundation, Lebanon; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; among others. Headshot Photo © On White Wall, 2023 Artist https://www.tunjiadeniyi-jones.com/ White Cube https://www.whitecube.com/artists/tunji-adeniyi-jones David Zwirner https://www.davidzwirner.com/viewing-room/2022/utopia-editions-tunji-adeniyi-jones Flag art foundation https://www.flagartfoundation.org/exhibitions-tunji-adeniyi-jones Ocula https://ocula.com/art-galleries/white-cube/exhibitions/tunji-adeniyi-jones-deep-dive/ ARTNews https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/phillips-london-tunji-adenjiyi-jones-jean-dubuffet-results-1234589900/ Cultured https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2021/09/20/tunji-adeniyi-jones Hypebae https://hypebae.com/2023/3/tunji-adeniyi-jones-deep-dive-exhibition-white-cube-hong-kong-about Art Asia Pacific https://artasiapacific.com/people/the-mischievous-clamoring-of-ornament-interview-with-tunji-adeniyi-jones Morán Morán https://moranmorangallery.com/artists/tunji-adeniyi-jones/ Tatler Asia https://www.tatlerasia.com/lifestyle/arts/tunji-adeniyi-jones-first-exhibition-hong-kong Guest Artists Space https://www.guestartistsspace.com/News/event-interwoven-histories Black Rock Senegal https://blackrocksenegal.org/tunji-adeniyi-jones/ Contemporary Art Daily https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/project/tunji-adeniyi-jones-at-nicelle-beauchene-gallery-new-york-25835

Welcome back, listeners, to another exciting episode of "Exploring the World's Cities." Today, we're talking about how FD Capital now covers the whole if the UK and it's most vibrant cities and towns. I'm thrilled to talk about the diverse cities and towns of the UK and share some fascinating insights with our listeners. So, let's jump right in. When we talk about the largest cities in the UK, which ones come to mind? When it comes to size, the largest cities in the UK are London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Leeds. These cities not only boast impressive populations but also offer unique cultural experiences, historical landmarks, and vibrant communities. Let's start with London, the capital city. What makes London such a remarkable place? London truly is a global powerhouse. It's a city that seamlessly blends rich history with modernity. From iconic landmarks like the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament to world-class museums like the British Museum and the Tate Modern, there's no shortage of things to see and do in London. The city also offers a thriving theater scene in the West End, vibrant markets like Camden and Borough Market, and a diverse culinary landscape. London sounds like a must-visit destination. Moving on, what can you tell us about Birmingham? Birmingham, often referred to as the "Second City" of the UK, is a bustling metropolis located in the West Midlands. It's known for its industrial heritage, vibrant arts scene, and diverse cultural offerings. The city is home to impressive landmarks like the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Cadbury World (a paradise for chocolate lovers), and the National Exhibition Centre. Additionally, Birmingham's canals, which played a significant role in its industrial past, provide a picturesque setting for leisurely walks. Host: Fascinating! Now, let's head north to Manchester. What sets Manchester apart from other cities in the UK? Manchester is renowned for its rich musical heritage, thriving sports scene, and vibrant nightlife. It's the birthplace of iconic bands like Oasis and The Smiths and boasts a legendary music venue, the Manchester Arena. The city also hosts two of the most successful football clubs in the country, Manchester United and Manchester City. Beyond that, Manchester offers excellent museums such as the Science and Industry Museum and the Manchester Museum, as well as the popular shopping district, the Trafford Centre. Manchester seems like a city full of energy and cultural significance. Now, let's head to Scotland and explore Glasgow. Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, is known for its distinctive architecture, vibrant arts scene, and warm hospitality. The city is home to stunning Victorian and art nouveau buildings, including the iconic Glasgow School of Art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Glasgow's cultural scene thrives with world-class museums and galleries such as the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and the Riverside Museum. The city is also famous for its music festivals, including the annual Celtic Connections. Glasgow sounds like a city with a unique character. Lastly, let's talk about Leeds. What makes it worth a visit? Leeds, located in West Yorkshire, is a vibrant city that blends history, culture, and a thriving shopping scene. The city is home to stunning architectural gems like the Leeds Town Hall and the Victorian Quarter, which houses boutique shops, cafes, and restaurants. Leeds is also known for its cultural institutions like the Leeds Art Gallery and the Royal Armouries Museum. And let's not forget the city's vibrant nightlife and the buzzing Leeds Festival, one of the UK's premier music events. Leeds seems like a hidden gem with a lot to offer. Well, that wraps up our exploration of the largest cities and towns in the UK. FD Capital are the leader when it comes to FD and CFO Recruitment.

For the past 30 years, John has built Big with smart and savvy local, regional and national brand strategy alongside a passion for Birmingham revitalization. A proven public relations and public affairs strategist with a hands-on approach to agency deliverables, he is also a proud pioneer of the Magic City's cultural renaissance. He and his team support local flagship events and work in concert with multiple city-based initiatives — as well as statewide economic development campaigns — to shape Alabama's national image. John has earned numerous awards and recognitions including Leadership Birmingham in 2010, American Ad Fed's Birmingham Chapter Silver Medal in 2011, the Birmingham Business Journal Top 40 under 40 in 1998, and Ad Age Small Agency of the Year 2013. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Sidewalk Film Festival and is a past board member for REV Birmingham. Additionally, he is an active member of the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham.

On this episode our guest is Amir H. Fallah, a contemporary artist whose vibrant, figurative works have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of many institutions, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art & the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.Recorded on April 28, 2023 as a Space on X (formerly Twitter).Follow the guest:https://twitter.com/AmirHFallahFollow the host:https://twitter.com/0x_ScooterFollow Particle:https://twitter.com/Collectparticlehttps://www.particlecollection.comhttps://www.instagram.com/particlecollectionTimestamps:(00:00) Introduction(01:07) Getting Started As An Artist(05:06) Insights From Making Street Art(07:05) Evolving Into Digital Art(10:47) Appreciation For Artists(14:56) Inspiration for Artistic Imagery(18:28) Significance Of Artwork At Art Basel(25:53) Exploring Resistance Through Art(30:39) Prominent Themes From The Fallacy Of Borders(37:38) Insights From Editorial Work(42:23) Connection Between Digital & Physical Artwork(46:53) Collecting Practices & Digital Art(51:14) Hype In The NFT Space(56:28) Engaging And Connecting With Collectors(58:42) Types Of Art Collected(01:02:09) Recommended Guests For Future Collector Calls(01:04:08) Links To Amir's Artwork

Lacey Woodroof is passionate about educating others about sustainability. Her shop, basic. provides slow fashion options for people looking to support sustainable efforts and locally sourced items. Get to Know LaceyLacey is the owner and founder of basic., a slow fashion + ethically-made lifestyle shop based in Birmingham, AL A native to the area, she graduated from Auburn University with a bachelor's degree in international trade and Spanish and then returned to Birmingham for a career in finance. While serving as a financial advisor, Lacey launched basic. as a side hustle passion project that eventually shifted into the full-time dream it is today. In addition to basic., Lacey is a small business consultant and freelance e-commerce web designer. She serves on a committee for the Birmingham Museum of Art Contemporaries, Bib & Tucker Sew-Op, and is involved in many initiatives advocating for women's rights, social justice, education, and/or the arts in some form or fashion (get it?).  HostSK VaughnResourcesUpcoming Events at basic.Shop at basic.Slow Fashion GlossaryLet's ConnectInstagram |  Newsletter | Website

Sara Garden Armstrong: Layered Scapes February 11 – March 11, 2023 Installation View with artist at Steffany Martz, ONWARD Series 49 East 78th Street, Suite 2B, New York, NY 10075 photo credit: George Kondogianis Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to artist's books. Lyrical, nature-based biomorphic abstraction characterizes the work, focusing on life processes and systems. It addresses organic change and transformation, while exploring properties of materials. Breathing is a major concern, as are mechanical support systems of the body. Other recurrent themes are water and time, with its elements of decay, chance, and shifts of reality. Recent atrium commissions have focused on scientific phenomena and their interactions with the human condition such as the installation for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Alabama-Mississippi Chapter, at the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) Medical Center. A past recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven, Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 40 years. Her artist's books can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. The monograph SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers, published in 2020, reveals the influences and concepts that run through her diverse body of work. It coincides with a traveling exhibition of the same name, incorporating site-specific work. The exhibition made its final stop at the Gadsden Museum of Art, January 2023. The Museum published a catalog documenting the history of the exhibition. Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a Master of Art Education from UAB. After living in New York City for 36 years, in 2017 she returned to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works. She has recently received the 2022 Artist of the Year Award from the Birmingham Museum of Art Collectors Circle. Find her on Instagram. Layered Scape 9, 2021 Acrylic and pigmented fiber on canvas 48” x 60” photo credit: George Kondogianis Sara Garden Armstrong: Layered Scapes Installation View photo credit: George Kondogianis Sentient Matrix, installed 2014, Abaca and kozo paper fiber, acrylic, gel medium, programmable light-emitting diodes, microcontroller, aluminum, stainless steel, and PVC. Approx. 16' x 20' x 21' Photo credit: Hugh Hunter SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers Gadsden Museum of Art November 4, 2022 – January 26, 2023 Artwork in Image: Abaca Wall Backs 1 – 4 Sprayed abaca forms, plastic hoses, incandescent lights 24” x 98” x 12” Photo credit: Savannah Lowery

Ep.137 features Hayv Kahraman. She was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1981 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Gut Feelings, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022); Touch of Otherness, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2022); Not Quite Human: Second Iteration, Pilar Corrias, London (2020); Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design, Honolulu, HI (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Sussex, UK (2019); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California (2018); and Contemporary Art Museum St, Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Reflections: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, British Museum, London (2021); Blurred Bodies, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (2021); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2021); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); ICA Boston (2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, (2019). Kahraman's work is in several important international collections including the British Museum, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California, US; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), California, US; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, US; The Rubell Family Collection, Florida, US; The Barjeel Art Foundation Sharjah, UAE; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art Doha, Qatar; Pizzuti Collection of Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, US; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, US; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, US. Photo ~ Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London Artist https://hayvkahraman.com/ Book https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847862627/ Pilar Corrias Gallery https://www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/hayv-kahraman/2/ Jack Shainman https://jackshainman.com/artists/hayv_kahraman Vielmetter https://vielmetter.com/artists/hayv-kahraman The Third Line https://thethirdline.com/ ICASF https://www.icasf.org/exhibitions/7-hayv-kahraman Hyperallergic https://hyperallergic.com/tag/hayv-kahraman/ Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/ba61f731-e007-4c6c-922f-bc93dd4ad4c8 Perez Art Museum Miami https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/2020.093/ Rubell Museum https://rubellmuseum.org/nml-hayv-kahraman Art Forum https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201909/hayv-kahraman-81120 SCAD https://www.scadmoa.org/exhibitions/the-touch-of-otherness NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/770452266/iraqi-american-artist-hayv-kahraman-is-building-an-army-of-fierce-women Art Review https://artreview.com/hayv-kahraman-gut-feelings-review/ The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/21/hayv-kahraman-i-was-brainwashed-into-thinking-anything-euro-american-centric-is-the-ideal Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayv_Kahraman jdeed Magazine http://jdeedmagazine.com/hayv-kahraman-exhibits-gut-feelings-at-the-mosaic-rooms/ Mosiac Rooms https://mosaicrooms.org/event/hayv-kahraman/

THE OCTAVE DAY OF CHRISTMAS SOLEMNITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, THE MOTHER OF GOD A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke The shepherds went in haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Today's Gospel reading follows the passage that describes the appearance of an angel of the Lord to the shepherds. The angel found them keeping watch over their flock and told them: “Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” The angel told them that a sign for them would be finding Jesus in Bethlehem wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Luke says that all at once there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on who his favor rests.” The shepherds went in haste to find Jesus and told Mary the message of the angel. And Luke tells us Mary's response: “And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” The shepherds then returned, glorifying and praising God for what they had heard and seen. This Advent and Christmas, I have also been a witness to these things. Now, how do I keep all these things, and what is the way to go about sharing the joy of this message? God, through the Blessed Virgin Mary—through her yes—marvelous wonders from heaven have been brought to earth. At the announcement of an angel, a multitude of the heavenly host appeared in the sky and gave you the highest praise and glory, “and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” In the first reading, we see this same peace that God bestowed on the Israelites when he said to Moses: “The LORD bless you and keep you! The LORD let his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you! The LORD look upon you kindly and give you peace!” Give me the grace, Lord, to know and receive your blessing. The shepherds made known the message to Mary. Merciful Lord, be with me today to make me a messenger of your peace and mercy. “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” Let me remember the words of the psalmist: “May God bless us in his mercy.” Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lectiodiv/videos Web: https://lectiodiv.wordpress.com/ Philip James de Loutherbourg, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons "Shepherds come to the Shepherd King" flickr photo by Lawrence OP https://flickr.com/photos/paullew/49270631701 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license "The Angel appearing to the Shepherds, 1640-60" flickr photo by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery https://flickr.com/photos/birminghammag/6430528689 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license "Nativity of the Lord" flickr photo by Lawrence OP https://flickr.com/photos/paullew/3136800794 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lectio-divina-daily/support

Episode # 56 Carole Ann King – Alabama Quilts, 2022 Sulzby Award Recipient November 10, 2022 _________________________________ "Quilts are Alabama Folk Art and History" Today's guest is Carol Ann King, Curator at Old Alabama Town in Montgomery (Landmarks Foundation of Montgomery, Inc.) whose book, Alabama Quilts: Wilderness through World War II, 1682-1950 (University of Mississippi Press, 2020), won the Alabama Historical Association's 2022 James Sulzby Award for best book published on the state's history in the previous two years. Ms. King discusses the decade-long community quilt survey conducted by King and her co-author, Mary Elizabeth Johnson Huff (1944-2019) – known as "Sunny" throughout the quilting community of the US Southeast that she documented throughout her career —that exposed more than 4000 historical quilts in the state. They chose over 200 to photograph and tell those stories in their lavish work. Links mentioned in the episode: Alabama Quilts, University of Mississippi Press -- https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Alabama-Quilts Old Alabama Town -- https://www.oldalabamatown.com/ Birmingham Museum of Art -- https://www.artsbma.org/ Made in Alabama: A State Legacy (at Amazon) -- https://tinyurl.com/2p8ehynd Alabama Cultural Survey Records (Bham Museum of Art) -- https://cdm16044.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16044coll7 If you'd rather read the transcript, you can find it here (caveat: the provided transcript is likely to be less than 100% accurate) -- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pg2x0MuFmxprt2kw343-YtEHVmrlG8iOfxQ7kagTIP8/edit?usp=share_link _________________________________ Founded in 1947, the Alabama Historical Association is the oldest statewide historical society in Alabama. The AHA provides opportunities for meaningful engagement with the past through publications, meetings, historical markers, and other programs. https://www.alabamahistory.net/

Hello folks,I am happy to share I helped to curate a salon hang! I also took part in showing my work hahahahahttps://www.instagram.com/p/CkoYkw6LgR9/ - this is what the hung looked like (1st image on the post)RA Summer Exhibition (Salon Style)The show I went to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to see - https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/exhibitions/blacklash-racism-and-the-struggle-for-self-defenceThe best work I saw at IKON - https://www.ikon-gallery.org/exhibition/women-of-paradiseI forgot to mention I have being using BLK 3.0 for silhueta inspired work; it's dopeSocials:Instagram - @scarlettart18Website - scarlettford.co.uk - YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE POD FROM MY WEBSITE!!Mailing List - https://www.scarlettford.co.uk/contact-9Linkedin - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/scarlett-ford-485795208Email - scarlettart18@gmail.comEdited on LumafusionMusic from Epidemic SoundsMic: Samson Q2UThanks so much for listening peeps,Scarlett

Amy Pleasant received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1999).

Amy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2018, the South Arts Prize for the State of Alabama (2018), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award (2015), Mary Hambidge Distinguished Artist Award (2015), Cultural Alliance of Birmingham Individual Artist Fellowship (2008), and Alabama State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship (2019/2003). She has held solo exhibitions at Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga, TN), Brackett Creek Editions (NYC), Geary Contemporary (NYC/Millerton, NY), Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson/NYC), whitespace gallery (Atlanta, GA), Augusta University (Columbus, GA), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), Auburn University's School of Liberal Arts (AL), Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), Candyland (Stockholm, Sweden), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (AL) among others. Her group exhibitions include Brackett Creek Editions (Bozeman, MT), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, GA), Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN), Hesse Flatow (NYC), SEPTEMBER (Hudson, NY), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, FL), Tif Sigfrids (Athens, GA), Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (AL), Cuevas Tilleard Projects (NYC), The Dodd Galleries (Athens, GA), Weatherspoon Museum of Art (NC), Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga, TN), Columbus Museum of Art (GA), National Museum of Women in the Arts (D.C.), The Mobile Museum of Art (AL), and the U.S. Embassy, Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as World Sculpture News, Sculpture, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Artforum, Art Papers, Bad at Sports and BURNAWAY.

Her first monograph, The Messenger's Mouth Was Heavy, was released in 2019, co-published by Institute 193 and Frank. Amy also co-founded the curatorial initiative The Fuel And Lumber Company with artist Pete Schulte in 2013.

Mohammed Ali is a British Bangladeshi artist from Birmingham. He has recently been spending time back in the East End's Banglatown where he has family connections (as well as Bangladesh itself), listening to stories from the local community to create a mural to celebrate 50 years of Bangladeshi independence.Coming from a graffiti background, Mohammed moved into mural painting and filmmaking. He runs the arts organisation, Soul City Arts and is a trustee of the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.We managed to squeeze in this recording at our studio late one night during the creation of the piece. We talk a lot about the mural itself and its important role in giving a platform to the prominent, yet underrepresented Begali community in the urban art world.There has since been some high profile pieces, critical about the commissioned nature of the mural by Tower Hamlets, written in National papers. As these chats aren't scripted we didn't go down that route this time so I didn't get his take on this.I hope though that this recording can be a testament to Mohammed's personal connection to the community and his genuine desire to represent the people in his art as well as his integrity as an artist and human.You can find out more about Mohammed on his instagram here @aliaerosolsb 15/10/22

What is the relationship between machine learning, magic, and surprise? Tune into the Episode #17. Part II, where Jeanette Andrews, one of the most innovative illusionists in the world, talks about using the art of magic to explore the questions posed by Alan Turing of whether machines can exhibit intelligent behavior that cannot be distinguished from that of a human. About the Podcast Guest Jeanette Andrews is an artist, magician, and researcher. Andrews' work focuses on developing interactive magic and sensory illusions via performance, sculpture, installation, and audio. Over 27 years of specialized study and technical training in parlor and sleight of hand magic has now afforded her a distinct perspective on crafting experiences with nuanced psychological underpinnings, direction of attention and inattention, creating surreal visuals, and designing/building objects that function completely differently than they appear. Her research-based process centers around phenomenological philosophy, contemporary cognitive science, and physics. Her work is rooted in highlighting astonishing aspects of everyday life via moments of the seemingly impossible to create a lived phenomenology. Themes of pieces have included invisibility, impossible objects, the relationship between scent and magic, unseen communication, and how illusions can construct reality. Andrews works closely with museums and galleries to recontextualize magic within the cultural arts and explore this craft as a performance art medium. She has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, including her 2020 work “Invisible Museums of the Unseen,” which was later commissioned as a site-specific work for the Quebec City Biennial. Further site-specific works for numerous museums and galleries include the Elmhurst Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, and International Museum of Surgical Science. Andrews is also an acclaimed speaker, presenting with the Cooper Hewitt, Chicago Ideas, Fortune 500 companies, universities, and conferences across the country. She has been an artist in residence for High Concept Labs in Chicago and The Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles.  She is currently an Affiliate of metaLab (at) Harvard and an artist in residence at CultureLAB LIC in New York City. Illusion is Andrews' life's work, and her performances have been praised by the Chicago Tribune, PBS, and the New York Times. Jeanette's references and other resources Jeanette's magic & art portfolio: https://www.jeanetteandrewsstudio.com/ Jeanette's magic performances and talks: https://www.jeanetteandrews.com/ Sleights of Mind book: http://www.sleightsofmind.com/ Science of Magic Association: https://scienceofmagicassoc.org/home Illusion of the Year: http://illusionoftheyear.com/ Thomas Griffiths paper on transformations in magic, "Revealing ontological commitments by magic": https://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/papers/magic.pdf Jennifer Keisin Armstong (nonfiction workshops): https://jenniferkarmstrong.com/ Connect With Jeanette Andrews Jeanette's Instagram: @JeanetteAndrewsMagic   About the Podcast and Its Host The Neurocareers podcast is brought to you by The Institute of Neuroapproaches and its founder - Milena Korostenskaja, Ph.D. (Dr. K) - a neuroscience educator, neuroscience research consultant, and career coach for students and recent graduates in neuroscience and neurotechnologies: https://www.neuroapproaches.org/ You will benefit from neuroscience-based coaching if you want to... Get your projects DONE instead of procrastinating and feeling stuck. STOP feeling anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed when managing your time and responsibilities. ACHIEVE your goals and BUILD a successful career instead of failing. Get in touch with Dr. K. by sending an email: neuroapproaches@gmail.com Schedule a free consultation session with Dr. K. by following this link: https://neuroapproaches.as.me/

Innovation? Technology? Illusions? Meet and greet Jeanette Andrews - one of the most innovative illusionists in the world today! Jeanette is using modern technologies, including AIs and cognitive science principles, in her Magic shows!    Jeanette is an artist and an informal cognitive scientist recognized for hundreds of sold-out and standing-room-only performances for Fortune 500 companies, theaters, and universities, including Infiniti, Kraft, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Lyric Opera & Chicago Ideas Week.   Tune into the Episode #17. Part I. conversation with Jeanette Andrews to hear about her career path and advice on how to succeed in your chosen career.   Stay tuned for Part II of this Neurocareers podcast episode!   About the Podcast Guest Jeanette Andrews is an artist, magician, and researcher. Andrews' work focuses on developing interactive magic and sensory illusions via performance, sculpture, installation, and audio.   Over 27 years of specialized study and technical training in parlor and sleight of hand magic has now afforded her a distinct perspective on crafting experiences with nuanced psychological underpinnings, direction of attention and inattention, creating surreal visuals and designing/building objects that function completely differently than they appear.   Her research-based process centers around phenomenological philosophy, contemporary cognitive science, and physics. Her work is rooted in highlighting astonishing aspects of everyday life via moments of the seemingly impossible to create a lived phenomenology. Themes of pieces have included invisibility, impossible objects, the relationship between scent and magic, unseen communication, and how illusions can construct reality.   Andrews works closely with museums and galleries to recontextualize magic within the cultural arts and explore this craft as a performance art medium. She has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, including her 2020 work “Invisible Museums of the Unseen,” which was later commissioned as a site-specific work for the Quebec City Biennial. Further site-specific works for numerous museums and galleries include the Elmhurst Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, and International Museum of Surgical Science.   Andrews is also an acclaimed speaker, presenting with the Cooper Hewitt, Chicago Ideas, Fortune 500 companies, universities, and conferences across the country. She has been an artist in residence for High Concept Labs in Chicago and The Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles.    She is currently an Affiliate of metaLab (at) Harvard and an artist in residence at CultureLAB LIC in New York City. Illusion is Andrews' life's work, and her performances have been praised by the Chicago Tribune, PBS, and the New York Times.   Jeanette's references and other resources Jeanette's magic & art portfolio: https://www.jeanetteandrewsstudio.com/ Jeanette's magic performances and talks: https://www.jeanetteandrews.com/ Sleights of Mind book: http://www.sleightsofmind.com/ Science of Magic Association: https://scienceofmagicassoc.org/home Illusion of the Year: http://illusionoftheyear.com/ Thomas Griffiths paper on transformations in magic, "Revealing ontological commitments by magic": https://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/papers/magic.pdf Jennifer Keisin Armstong (nonfiction workshops): https://jenniferkarmstrong.com/   Connect With Jeanette Andrews Jeanette's Instagram: @JeanetteAndrewsMagic   About the Podcast and Its Host The Neurocareers podcast is brought to you by The Institute of Neuroapproaches and its founder - Milena Korostenskaja, Ph.D. (Dr. K) - a neuroscience educator, neuroscience research consultant, and career coach for students and recent graduates in neuroscience and neurotechnologies: https://www.neuroapproaches.org/ You will benefit from neuroscience-based coaching if you want to... Get your projects DONE instead of procrastinating and feeling stuck. STOP feeling anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed when managing your time and responsibilities. ACHIEVE your goals and BUILD a successful career instead of failing. Get in touch with Dr. K. by sending an email: neuroapproaches@gmail.com Schedule a free consultation session with Dr. K. by following this link: https://neuroapproaches.as.me/

Brief summary of episode:Zoë Charlton (Baltimore, MD) creates figure drawings, collages, installations, and animations that depict her subject's relationship to culturally loaded objects and landscapes.  Charlton received her MFA degree from the University of Texas at Austin and participated in residencies at Artpace (TX), McColl Center for Art + Innovation (NC), Ucross Foundation (WY), the Skowhegan School of Painting (ME), and the Patterson Residency at the Creative Alliance (MD). Her work has been included in national and international exhibitions including The Delaware Contemporary (DE), the Harvey B. Gantt Center (NC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR), Studio Museum of Harlem (NY), Contemporary Art Museum (TX), the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland), and Haas & Fischer Gallery (Switzerland). She is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner grant (2012) and a Rubys grant (2014). Museum collections include The Phillips Collection (DC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), and Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Charlton co-founded ‘sindikit, a collaborative art initiative, with artist Tim Doud to engage their respective research in gender, sexuality, and race. Charlton is a Professor of Art at American University in Washington, D.C., holds a seat on the Maryland State Arts Council, a board member at the Washington Project for the Arts (DC), and a national board member at Threewalls (IL).Her work is included in “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration”, a traveling group exhibition co-curated by Chief Curator Ryan Dennis of the Mississippi Museum of Art, and Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art Jessica Bell Brown of the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Charlton was an artist in-residence at The Brodsky Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in spring 2022 and participated in the Crosstown Arts residency in Nashville, TN in summer 2022.  Charlton is serving on an 8-member steering committee at the Baltimore Museum of Art to reimagine equitable and accountable structures and functions of cultural institutions within diverse local and regional communities.As ‘sindikit, Zoë Charlton and Tim Doud co-edited Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose available through Punctum Books.  Broad in scope, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose presents an overview of the different paths taken by artists and artist collectives as they navigate their way from formative experiences into pedagogy. **photo Credit Grace Roselli, Pandora's BoxX ProjectThe Truth In This ArtThe Truth In This Art is a podcast interview series supporting vibrancy and development of Baltimore & beyond's arts and culture. Mentioned in this episode:Zoë Charlton To find more amazing stories from the artist and entrepreneurial scenes in & around Baltimore, check out my episode directory. Stay in TouchNewsletter sign-upSupport my podcastShareable link to episode ★ Support this podcast ★

Noah Jemisin, 2022 Noah Jemisin was born in Birmingham, AL and obtained an MFA degree from University of Iowa, in 1974. His extensive travels in Africa, Europe and  Asia over the years have helped him to develop an approach to life and art that enables him to synthesize into a distinct and dynamic whole the various components of his identity and create work that strives tomake meaning of his personal history as well as the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary culture. There is a great deal of critical experience, of knowledge and admiration of art historical precedents in his work as well as an ever sensitive deftly balanced interaction between modernism's formal concern's with a belief in the emotive potential of painting. Solo exhibitions include Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM), Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,  22 Wooster Gallery, Myungsook Lee Gallery, Minor Injury Gallery, Broadway Windows, all in New York City, Lattuada Studio,Milan, Italy, the Hillwood Art Museum, the College of Charleston (a retrospective) and the Oswego New York Museum. He is included in the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA), New York, October 9 , 2022 – February 18, 2023. JAM was an art gallery that welcomed artists and visitors of many generations and races in New York City from 1974 until 1986. A hub for Conceptual, abstraction, performance, and video, JAM expanded the idea of Black art and encouraged both critiques of and thinking beyond the commercialization of art. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Noah Jemisin: Paintings-1970s-1980s, Skoto Gallery, New York, October 13-November 26, 2022; and “Back to B'ham”, a survey exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL.; Spring 2024. He is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington DC, the Museum of Art at the University of Iowa, Montclair Museum of Art, Museum of Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Miami-Dade Public Library, Florida. Awards include New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a travel grant from Arts International, Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Bronx River Art Gallery, Bronx, New York. The Immortality Of The Human Soul, Nyame Nwu Mawu I, 2021, acrylic, gouache on canvas Maiden Bathers, 1985, Encaustic on canvas, 54x36 inches  

In this episode of Kiss My Black Side, host Brenda Emmanus OBE talks to two established black voices in the arts achieving success in their unique ways. Former teacher Curtis Holder gave up the profession to peruse his passion for drawing – a career transformation that has rewarded him kindly. In 2020 he won the Sky Portrait Artist of the Year competition and now finds himself in a newly created role as Artist in Residence at the National Theatre. As someone who shares our hosts' ambition to be a champion of the arts, Bolanle Tajudeen has proved a force for change. From calling out the lack of diversity at her University she has gone on the challenge art establishments for the lack of visibility and support of black artists. With humour and honesty, conversations float from succeeding despite disabilities , finding professional space without traditional experience, the power of education, and of course, an undeniable passion for the arts. Host: Brenda Emmanus OBE: Brenda Emmanus OBE is a television presenter and journalist working across print, radio and television. She has established her career across a range of genres - news and current affairs, popular factual, travel, fashion and the arts. Brenda has presented features and documentaries on a broad range of subjects from Princess Diana to African Fashion. She has interviewed some of the biggest names in arts and entertainment - from Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou, to Sir Elton John and Tom Cruise. Brenda was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to Broadcasting and Diversity. Guests: Curtis Holder - Artist Former primary school teacher turned professional artist, Curtis has established himself as a creator whose tools, often graphite and coloured pencils, have afforded him an instinctive form of expression. In 2020 his profile increased when he won The Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Yaar. His winning commission – a portrait of the world renowned ballet dancer, Carlos Acosta is now in the permanent collection of the Birmingham Museum and Gallery. Curtis has recently acquired the newly established role of Artist in Residence at the National Theatre Bolanle Tajudeen – Curator, Writer, Founder - ‘Black Blossoms' Bee Tajudeen is a Curator and Founder of ‘Black Blossoms' - an expanded curatorial platform promoting Black women, non-binary artists and creatives since 2015. In 2017 she co-curated and organised a touring exhibition of 21 black women and non-binary artists, which was listed as a ‘must-see' exhibition by A-n News. In 2020 Bolanle launched the Black Blossoms School of Art and Culture, an online learning platform decolonizing art education. Her short course entitled, Art in the Age of Black Girl Magic' - has proved popular and has been taught at the Tate twice. Instagram@brendaemmanus@curtisartist @bolanle_tajudeen@Sadler's_Wells Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ep.114 features Dawn Williams Boyd, She was born in 1952 in Neptune, New Jersey. She earned her BFA at Stephens College in Columbia, MO in 1974. The artist's self-described “cloth paintings” masterfully reinterpret the traditional craft of quilt-making in a contemporary context. Working on a monumental scale, Boyd employs a collage-like technique, stitching together scraps of fabric into intricate compositions. Utilizing art historical references, current events, and religious tropes as narrative frameworks, her cloth paintings chronicle seminal moments in African American history and quotidian scenes of Black American life. Inventively combining textures and patterns, Boyd's compositions weave together history and allegory to create multivalent meanings from disparate sources. Boyd's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL; Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, AL; Columbus Museum in Columbus, GA; Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY; and the Richardson Family Art Museum at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. Her art has been exhibited at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC; Southwest Art Center in Atlanta, GA; Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, GA; Bulloch Hall in Roswell, GA; Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA; Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta, GA; and Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA. A multi-venue solo exhibition of the artist's work, Dawn Williams Boyd: Woe, was recently on view at the Lamar Dodd School of Art's Dodd Galleries, at the University of Georgia and at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY and will be on view at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY in September 2022. Photo Credit: Ron Witherspoon Artist https://www.dawnwilliamsboyd.com/ Fort Gansevoort Gallery https://www.fortgansevoort.com/ Sarah Lawrence https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/news-events/galleries/heimbold-gallery/on-exhibit.html Everson Museum of Art https://everson.org/connect/virtual-talk-with-dawn-williams-boyd-ben-green/ Daily Orange https://dailyorange.com/2022/02/dawn-williams-boyds-exhibit-woe-crafts-fiber-art-timeless-historical-portrayals/ Atlanta Magazine https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/dawn-williams-boyds-cloth-paintings-tell-stories-of-black-life-in-america/ Ocula https://ocula.com/artists/dawn-williams-boyd/exhibitions/ Metal Magazine https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/dawn-williams-boyd Elephant Art https://elephant.art/dawn-williams-boyd-faith-ringgold-inspired-me-to-change-my-art/

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Wendy Red Star discuss how making work that is meaningful, informative, and healing is not the same as making work that has to explain everything to the audience, especially when there may be expectations that you are a representative of a larger group of people. Wendy and Sasha also talk about the excitement of creating her first monograph, Delegation published by Aperture. https://www.wendyredstar.com https://aperture.org/books/wendy-red-star-delegation/ Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Entry Initiated in November 2012 by Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook's contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year. https://aperture.org/calls-for-entry/photobook-awards/ Wendy Red Star lives and works in Portland, OR. Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), both of which have her works in their permanent collections; Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain (Paris, France), Domaine de Kerguéhennec (Bignan, France), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Hood Art Museum (Hanover, NH), St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN), the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, TX), the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY), the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL), the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY), and the British Museum (London, UK), among others. She served a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University (New Haven, CT), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), the Banff Centre (Banff, Canada), National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), CalArts (Valencia, CA), Flagler College (St. Augustine, FL), and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs (Colorado Springs, CO). In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her first career survey exhibition “Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth” was on view at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey through May 2019, concurrently with her first New York solo gallery exhibition at Sargent's Daughters. Red Star is currently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), The Broad (Los Angeles, CA), Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (Santa Cruz, NM), The Drawing Center (New York, NY), The Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY), amongst others. Her new solo exhibition American Progress is on view at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (Stanford, CA) through August 2022. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She is represented by Sargent's Daughters. Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co

Flatpack Festival and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery are running a marvellous exhibition until 30th October 2022: Wonderland tells stories of filmgoing and cinema culture in Birmingham. It begins with the earliest days of cinematic experimentation, including a visit from Eadweard Muybridge to demonstrate his moving images, through the glory days of the picture palaces in the 1930s and 40s, the influence of Asian and Caribbean immigration, and the slump of the 1980s, to where we are today, with a combination of multiplexes and more specialised venues, including, of course, the Electric, which continues to proudly boast the title of the UK's oldest working cinema. It's a densely packed exhibition, full of elegantly and concisely organised information, focusing not only on places and eras but also people: individual attention is given to notable figures such as Iris Barry, the UK's first female film critic, Waller Jeffs, who popularised cinema in the 1900s with his annual seasons at the Curzon Hall and travelling show, and Oscar Deutsch, the Balsall Heath-born creator of the Odeon brand, the first cinema of which opened in Perry Barr in 1930. Wonderland: Birmingham's Cinema Stories is free to visit at BMAG until October 30th, and it's a must-see for anyone interested in filmgoing in Birmingham. The history it describes is cultural, technological, social and economic, and it's beautifully curated and designed to do just that. It's also got a big interactive map in the middle where you can look for your house and see the five cinemas that used to be on your road back in 1940. Don't miss it. Recorded on 30th May 2022.

This week we get the download from Hollie Hilton - Social Media Strategist EXTRAORDINAIRE - about graduating during the pandemic, creating a space for herself, and helping EVERYONE navigate the potential trenches of social media. She works with everyone from artists, to galleries, to larger institutions on what their strategies should be and how to maximize their presence while also STAYING TRUE TO THEIR MISSIONS/PRACTICES! Have you ever heard of anything so radical? She says you don't have to be on FB or Tik Tok if you don't want! It's great! Learn these tricks and more covid learnings nowwww! HOLLIE REFERENCES Frankly Green Web - https://www.franklygreenwebb.com/who-we-are/ Birmingham Museum - https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag Black Country Living Museum - https://bclm.com/ Reddit GLAM (galleries libraries art museum) Squid Game LOCATE YOUR HOSTS UPON THE INTERNET Hollie Hilton - @freelancehollie, freelancehollie.com Alexis Hyde - @hydeordie, alexishyde.com Dr. Erika Wong; - @topractisepractice, www.topractisepractice.com Slack channel: topractiseapractice.slack.com Email us: hydeorpractise@gmail.com Music by Cheap TV - @cheaptv_official, https://cheaptvmusic.com/ Sponsorships: off for this episode

Soapy Jones, founder of Left Hand Soap Company, is on the Localist this week to dive into the world of natural, locally crafted soap and self care products. Soapy (yes, that's her real legal name!) began making soap for gifts as a poor college grad, and it quickly turned into a business. Soapy describes moving the business during a pandemic, and how their product focus has shifted in the last year and a half. After 20+ years in the business, Soapy tells us how she stays interested, as well as how she deals with copycats. Full show notes at LocalistPodcast.com.  Mentioned in this episode:  Left Hand Soap CompanyLeft Hand Soap on Instagram Pepper Place Yellowhammer Creative  Square One Goods Co.  Birmingham Museum of Art  Alphabetizing with Burrito Punx on the Localist podcast Filter Coffee Parlor Church Street Coffee and Books  Red Bike Coffee Handcrafted Soap & Cosmetics Guild Goats Milk, Oats, and Honey soap (dry skin) Cucumber Lemon soap (dry skin)  Rosemary Detox soap (oily skin)  Soap Making 101 @ThinkLocalist on Instagram  Buy Us a Coffee!  CarrieRollwagen.com

Birmingham has its share of statues around town. There are statues of people in Kelly Ingram Park, Linn Park, the UAB campus, Samford's Campus, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Five Points South, Rickwood Field, and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. Even Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations is on 4th Avenue North at 18th Street. I could go on and on about statues around town. The big three in Birmingham are Vulcan, Miss Electra, and Miss Liberty. And until 1989, they could see each other from their perches in and around downtown Birmingham. Our subject on this episode of Alabama Short Stories is Miss Liberty. Learn why she is in Birmingham, her journey to get here and why she relocated to the suburbs.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/shawnwrightAL)

Writer and poet Benjamin Zephaniah explores Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery with his friend Robert, where they reminisce about growing up in the city, the people who’ve shaped it, and Birmingham’s cultural and political history. Together they look at Benjamin’s first-ever typewriter, where his journey as a writer began, artefacts from important protests, and a very special installation – an original curry house booth.Series 5 of Meet Me at the Museum was recorded in accordance with Covid-19 guidelines. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Adam Carver is a Midlands-based producer, performer and cultural activist. He was recently Festival Director for SHOUT and is producer for Ginny Lemon's Palaver. I saw the great Fantabulosa show they did at the Birmingham Museum and Gallery just before lockdown, a thrilling queer positive performance piece for children and family audiences. I wanted to talk to him to find out how lockdown had affected him personally as a performer and also on: queer arts in the Midlands, the infrastructure for live performance in Birmingham and his own transgressive transformation into Fatt Butcher, a sublime and edgy transformation into drag that brings in Disco, Comedy, and Bingo whilst also being a political intervention against shame.

Meet Me at the Museum is back! Join us for series 5 of the silver British Podcast Award-winning show from 11 March, featuring six new episodes including Elizabeth Day at the Imperial War Museum, Benjamin Zephaniah at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and Mathew Horne at the Museum of Brands. To hear every episode, please subscribe to Meet Me at the Museum wherever you listen to your podcasts. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode Ben discovers more about one of the most recognisable puppets ever to grace the screen: Aloysius Parker from Thunderbirds. Crafted by master puppeteer John Blundall, this version of Parker was never used in the show itself but was made in 2002 from his original design, and is part of the collection at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Ben hears from guests including Jo-Ann Curtis, curator of history at the museum; filmmaker and writer Stephen La Rivière; broadcaster and Thunderbirds fan Samira Ahmed; puppeteer Ronnie Le Drew, perhaps best known for his performance as ‘Zippy’ in the long-running children’s TV show Rainbow; and David Graham, the man who voiced the original Parker in Gerry Anderson’s landmark series.You can see an image of Parker by visiting https://www.artfund.org/whats-on/art-and-stuff See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends March 31st 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:Jon Young is Director of BVA-BDRC. With over a decade in the Culture, Tourism and Leisure. Author of Holiday Trends since 2012 and working across a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.www.linkedin.com/in/jon-young-9451a92a/www.bva-bdrc.comhttps://hcontent.bva-bdrc.com/clearsightwww.bathnes.gov.ukwww.painshill.co.uk Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I speak with Jon Young, Director at BVA BDRC, an award-winning international consumer insight consultancy. We discuss their exciting new research around pre-booking and what the drawbacks to this are in the eyes of the visitor. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Jon, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. It's really lovely to see you again.Jon Young: Yeah, you too. And yeah, I've been listening for quite a while now. So it's an honor to actually to be on here as well. I think it's got a great role to play for the industry. So thank you as well for doing it.Kelly Molson: Aww, Jon, thank you. That's super kind of you, right? Don't be too nice to me yet because you know that we're going to go into our icebreaker questions.Jon Young: Yeah. Which I'm a bit worried about.Kelly Molson: Don't be worried. I think I've been quite kind to you, Jon. So I want to know what would you rather give up, your smartphone or your computer?Jon Young: I would say my smartphone definitely because I'm always trying to spend less time on it and I think that'd be a great way of doing that. I have actually read stories of people who've done it, but they've never sort of followed it through. But yeah, so definitely the smartphone.Kelly Molson: What do you do to try and reduce your screen time? Do you lock it in a drawer in the evenings or-?Jon Young: I've put it into a separate room. I've tried that. What else have I done? You can set your settings so it's grayscale. And apparently, that sort of deactivates the colors in some of your apps, which makes them less appealing. I've actually tried quite a lot and miserably failed. I've read loads of books about that sort of thing, but I'm still sort of scrolling through a tad at night and it's next to my bed at night as well. So I've failed at that. So if you could take it away from me, I'm sure my wife would say thank you as well if you do that.Kelly Molson: Okay. I don't know if I can help you with that because I'm the world's worst. It's difficult, isn't it? Because I think I like to engage with people. We speak on Twitter every now and again. And I think that the Twitter platform and LinkedIn for me-Jon Young: Yeah. Actually, that is something I've done. So I can't access Twitter on my phone now, is just through my laptop. So that has helped. But you end up just wheeling that out then at night.Kelly Molson: I'll just get my laptop out and check.Jon Young: Yeah, check something. Yeah.Kelly Molson: Okay. All right. Next one, what was your least favorite food as a child? And do you still hate it or do you love it now?Jon Young: Mushrooms. I remember quite clearly when I was about five years old, my dad tried to feed me a mushroom. I think he thought that this would be a good way to get me to like them. And I hated them and he chose to... He actually physically puts it in my mouth and I bit his finger. And he didn't talk to me for a while. He had a few stern words. I remember it really clearly. And my wife, she's Polish and they love going mushroom picking whenever we're in Poland. It's like quite a regular pastime. So they go into the woods and they go mushroom picking and they really, really try to get me to like them. But I think I read that if you eat something five times, then you will like it. So maybe I just need to do that, but I still hate it.Kelly Molson: So you still hate them. You're still a mushroom hater. I think that's quite common, isn't it? Mushrooms are a bit of... They're a bit marmite for people, aren't they?Jon Young: Yeah. I like marmite, but mushrooms, no, unfortunately, but it's an ambition to like them.Kelly Molson: To like mushrooms?Jon Young: Yeah. That's what lockdown does. You have these weird ambitions.Kelly Molson: I love that. It's such a strange goal, Jon. Okay.Jon Young: Well, I'm full of them. Kelly Molson: All right. Well, let's go to the unpopular opinion. So tell me something that you believe to be true that hardly anybody agrees with you on.Jon Young: So I struggle with this. So I've oscillated between going really superficial to really deep. So I've ended up with something a little bit superficial, but so my unpopular opinion is that I really don't enjoy Bake Off or Strictly. Just not for me. And I've tried really hard to like both, but I just can't get excited about people baking on TV or dancing. And I like doing both. And I know the masive tube layer or something like that, the dance, and the Soggy Bottom and all that. I can hold a conversation. It's almost like people who don't like football, but they can kind of hold that kitchen conversation.Kelly Molson: You've got the cultural reference down.Jon Young: Yeah, absolutely.Kelly Molson: But you're not down with the shows. Jon Young: But it's a no, unfortunately.Kelly Molson: I'm kind of feeling you on this one because if it's on, if Bake Off's on, I'd watch it, but I'm not a massive baker. So I don't have a huge kind of interest in it. And also, I thought I would love Strictly. I used to tap dance when I was a kid.Jon Young: All right. Okay.Kelly Molson: But I was really big into tap dancing and I thought I'd love it. Just don't love it. I feel like we're taking one for the team there, Jon, because I've agreed with you on this. And I think we're going to get some Twitter backlash.Jon Young: Backlash, yeah.Kelly Molson: Sorry, everyone. But thank you for that, Jon. Jon Young: No worries.Kelly Molson: So Jon, you are Director of the BVA BDRC.Jon Young: Yes. Kelly Molson: It's also a name that I have gotten wrong about four million times on this podcast.Jon Young: I know. It's a nightmare.Kelly Molson: Something needs to be done about this, but tell us a little bit about what you're doing.Jon Young: So with the name, I think it was the brainchild of the founders about 25, maybe 30 years ago now. And they just came up with a name, Business Development Research Consultants, and there were just two of them and it got shortened. And now here we are. There's about a hundred of us and we're stuck with it, but we've got bought by BVA, which didn't help. That's where that comes from. It wasn't some kind of genius branding idea. But yeah. So as a company, we've got an international presence, so we've got offices around the world, but we are so split up into divisions. So we've got two divisions in our London office. So we've got this of the commercial team and that they work with the banks and media. So ITV, Channel 4, et cetera.Jon Young: And then we've got our division, which we call On The Move. And the teamwork in, we sort of specialise with attractions and tourist boards. So I've been there 11 years now. And throughout that time, I've worked pretty much exclusively with visitor attractions and tourist boards, so the likes of Visit Britain, Visit Wales, Visit Scotland and a few overseas as well. So we do market research and we do the whole spectrum really. So it can be anything from focus groups to one-on-one depth interviews, to online surveys. So we do audience segmentation, membership work, pricing, pretty much anything that involves trying to understand what the public thinks. Jon Young: And yeah, we work with loads and loads of brilliant attractions. It's a wonderful sector to work in as I'm sure you know, Kelly. So we work with the little museums and some of the large nationals as well. We run the ALVA Benchmarking Survey. So this is a survey that is conducted a few times a year amongst visitors to around 80 different attractions across the UK. And we then sort of benchmark each attraction against the others just to understand the visitor experience, which marketing they've used, their profile, and a load of other things as well. So it's quite broad, but yeah, it means we work with lots of great organizations.Kelly Molson: It's incredibly useful as well, the things that you provide. And I think one of the ways that we met was through the Visitor Experience Forum.Jon Young: That's right.Kelly Molson: We both spoke on one of their webinars, didn't we?Jon Young: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And I had become aware of what you guys do at the BVA BDRC because of the consumer sentiment tracker that you've been doing all the way through lockdown, which was something you were... It was something that you did off your own back. So tell us a little bit about it because it was incredibly useful for us as a kind of suppliers to the industry, but it must have been a fantastic resource for the sector itself.Jon Young: Yeah, it was really great. So it was actually the brainchild of my colleague, Thomas Folque. I'll give him a name check there because it was his idea back in, I think, late March. And obviously, a lot of our work got canceled. We work with a lot of hotels as well. So that's the other team in our division. And so he just felt it'd be good to have some sort of tracker and then we also discussed it and it grew from there. And there's, I guess, a dual motivation just like any sort of content marketing. It did obviously paint us in a good light. It was a good way to sort of stay in contact with organizations that we worked with, but also to make new contacts. And I think I spoke on about 10 different webinars in the first two months and one of which I met you yourself. Jon Young: But it was also really good for us to help out as well. And most of us in our team, we are regular attractions visitors ourselves, and we've sort of built up relationships with the people we work with as well. So it was nice to be able to provide something for free. And we did that for 23 consecutive weeks. So every week, we produced a new report. It kept some of my colleagues busy as well because I think in the end, it was about 70 pages which is a bit ridiculous by the end of it. But it was full of data to understand how people felt, whether they were open to go out in public and who was and who wasn't and loads and loads of other things. Jon Young: And so we stopped that in August, but we've now gone down to conducting the research on a fortnightly basis and producing a monthly report. And so there should be one actually landing around about now.Kelly Molson: Oh, fabulous.Jon Young: Yeah, it's been a good experience. And when we did stop originally, we had a load of lovely emails from lots of different attractions saying how useful it had been. So yeah, it was worthwhile.Kelly Molson: I think that's something that's really come across from great people in the sector throughout this situation that we've been in, is that things that have... Like you described it. I mean, ultimately, it's a marketing piece. It was a content marketing piece, but it was helpful. And that's what's been really, really important, is that anything that people were pushing out was helpful and useful to the sector. And it was so invaluable to be able to see the snapshot of how people were feeling. And even for us, we were able to kind of build our own content pieces on your content piece because we thought, "Oh, wow, people have really changed their opinion on how they feel about this thing." Now, that's something that affects what we do. Now, we can talk about it. And so, yeah, thank you for doing it because I just think it was such a great and useful piece of data to produce.Jon Young: Yeah. Thank you. And I think I'm not sure if other sectors would have responded so well to, I think, because one thing that's really striking about the attraction sector is just how much everybody works together. And more often than not, they are actually technically competitors, but they don't see it that way. They think that as the sum of the parts is greater than the individual. Yeah. You see that with ALVA and I think we've had lots of organizations who we may sort of compete with also promoting this as well. So yeah, it was great.Kelly Molson: Brilliant. Yeah. And sector communication is something that we've been talking about all the way through this. Long way, it continues.Jon Young: Yeah. Absolutely. Kelly Molson: So this brings us to a very recent and new piece of data that you have been working on. And I'm really excited because I have a little copy of it here, and I feel like there's not many people that have got this. So I feel quite special. Now, this is about a topic that has... We have been talking about this probably since March, but it is still a hot topic and it's on everyone's minds and it's pre-booking. Now, there is a huge debate at the moment around the benefits of pre-booking versus the more kind of traditional walkup approach the attractions have taken. And you've carried out a new piece of research, which is specifically around this. Just give us an overview of what you've done, of what you've carried out.Jon Young: Yeah. So actually listening to your podcast and some of the various conversations that we've witnessed on various webinars, we felt that there was a lot of debates and a lot of opinion that maybe is worth putting some numbers against some of these opinions just to understand what was an issue and what wasn't. So we added, I think, around a dozen questions to our fortnightly tracker that we've just spoken about amongst a nationally representative sample of the UK population. And we just try to understand what proportion of these people had pre-booked, what proportion had booked but not shown up? What were the reasons for this? Were they understandable? Now, what proportion had actually booked and didn't fancy a visit but actually visited because they booked?Jon Young: And then we've also looked at whether people are put off by pre-booking generally. Whether people would think it's a good or a bad thing to go to 100% pre-booking after COVID. And what are the reasons that people like it and the reasons people don't like it? So I guess that's it in a nutshell. And we've also looked at some of the different audiences and dug into some of our other data as well just to understand some of the other issues that people are talking about such as spontaneous visits. So that's it in a nutshell.Kelly Molson: Excellent. Let's dive in to this because it's really interesting. I'd have to say I am a huge advocate for pre-booking. And I know, again, I've said this over and over and over on these podcast interviews. And it's quite surprising. I think I put a post out on LinkedIn a little while ago asking people what their experiences of it are and whether they think it's a good thing, whether they're uncomfortable with it. And the responses I got were really surprising.Kelly Molson: I think potentially because I'm very much a planner and I'm very comfortable to book in advance about what I'm going to do, but obviously, there's a percentage of people that are more spontaneous and they would prefer to just decide what they're going to do on the day. And pre-booking doesn't work for them at all. And it's really fascinating, the data that's come out. So from an attractions perspective, we know what the benefits to the attractions are. We know that pre-booking, it allows them to know how many people are coming. It's great from an operational perspective. They know how much of their team they need in. They can even out that kind of pattern of visitor arrivals throughout the day. And we have seen an increase in donations and gift aid contributions as well via pre-booking. But let's start with what the visitors see as a benefit. How supportive are visitors of pre-booking?Jon Young: So I think it's quite sort of striking that the majority of your markets, so these are people who visit attractions, seven in 10 do think it's a good thing. So 70% stated that they would still go ahead and visit if they found out that the place they had wanted to visit required pre-booking. So that is a strong majority, 70%. We also asked the question in a slightly different way if post-COVID attractions went to 100% pre-booking, would you see this as a good or a bad thing? And 75% stated either a good thing, or it wouldn't make any difference to them. So these are strong majorities who are probably in your camp, Kelly, who are sort of the planners and the organizers and they're fine with this.Kelly Molson: Interesting. But that's not all of them, is it? Okay. Jon Young: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: Which we'll get to in a little while. And what do they see the main benefits of pre-booking is?Jon Young: The main benefit was to be able to plan the time with more certainty. So that was around three in five. So 57% of visitors to indoor attractions. Slightly lower for gardens, and just to make the point that we tested pre-booking at indoor attractions. So looking at museums, art galleries, historic houses, and also gardens and country parks because clearly, the weather has a big impact too. Kelly Molson: Sure.Jon Young: And we also tested the restaurants just to kind of get a feel for that sort of benchmark where pre-booking has been in place for quite a long time. So yeah, the main reason was just the ability to plan in advance. The second most popular reason was that there's less queuing when we get there. So over half stated that. People were allowed to give more than one reason.Jon Young: And then it drops a little bit to around three in 10 stating that places just tend to be less busy. One in four saying, "We can do some research ahead of the visit." And I think personally, I think that's quite an important reason even though only one in four were giving it. I think for me, one of the benefits of pre-booking to the attraction is they can have this conversation with the visitor in advance of the visit. And you can maybe raise awareness of parts of the attraction that you wouldn't necessarily see.Jon Young: Year after year in research we've done with attractions, we speak to big chunks of visitors who say they went for maybe an exhibition, but they had no idea that half of the other elements of a site were there. They didn't know that there was an original version of this document on the back and would have loved to have seen it. So I think being able to have that conversation is really important. But for the visitor, that's one in four. And then one in five stating there are fewer debates about what to do on the day. So I can imagine families, certainly, if it's not spontaneous and it's in the diary a week in advance, then you don't have to have that debate and any sort of toys thrown out of premises.Kelly Molson: Yeah. It's decided in advance, "This is what we're doing on Saturday, team. So let's plan for it." Rather than on the day, maybe have to have multiple conversations with different people in your family group about, what does everybody wants to do? The decision's already been made, we're doing this. Jon Young: Absolutely. Yeah. Kelly Molson: So what about drawbacks? Let's dive into those because I find these really interesting. So what are the drawbacks in the eyes of the visitor?Jon Young: Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, three in 10 felt it was actually... They'd probably think twice and not visit and one in four saying it's a bad thing post-COVID. And the number one reason that people don't like to book ahead was that they just don't like to commit to things too early. They prefer to be spontaneous. And that was 67% of those who thought it was a bad thing to go to 100% pre-booking. So that's quite a big chunk of people who are quite spontaneous in their behavior. And we had some really... I thought, some quite interesting quotes alongside that. So we asked people just to write out, "Why do you think is a bad thing?" I'll just read a few of those out. "I like to be able to make spontaneous decisions in my life. I don't like to be tied to a time. Because I often visit places when I'm passing by." Jon Young: And we've noticed in our research that if it's a city center attraction, particularly if it's free, you will often have up to one in five of your visitors actually deciding to visit when passing. And I do this quite often myself. Our office is in Holborn in Central London. So you'll often go for a walk maybe at lunchtime or after work. And I might sometimes walk past the British Museum. And I think, "Actually, I might just pop in," or any number of others in the area. And when I was working in Birmingham, there's Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, similar sort of thing. You can easily just pop in. And there's a lot of people for whom attractions are just nice places to be. And it's just that they might choose it over a café or over a park just because it's a nice place to spend some time. So that was quite interesting. Jon Young: The next couple I thought were also quite an interesting. So one person said, "If you plan on visiting several places in a day, that means a lot of booking and you have to be hyper-organized."Kelly Molson: Which again, with a family, that's difficult, right? It's hard enough to get people out of the house on time to get to the first attraction at the time that you've booked. But then you're constantly clock-watching because you think, "Well, we've got to get to here at this point as well." And things might happen that way-lead you.Jon Young: Paul had actually said he had his own personal experience of going to London during half term and with his son and then maybe they had a few museums planned and it's actually quite hard sticking to time. Yeah. So I think that's actually one that I hadn't thought of beforehand because you kind of think in the silo, don't you? I'm pre-booking one place. But the reality is people try to squeeze loads in, especially if they're visiting Central London or a big city.Kelly Molson: Yeah, completely. And from my personal view, I had kind of not considered how close people might be to attractions and how easy it is just to nip in. You described where your office is in Holborn. We're outside of London. So for me, I'm always kind of making a trip somewhere to go to something. So I've got to get into London first. So for me, I'm kind of always doing that plan ahead. There isn't really those opportunities to be spontaneous where I live. So I don't think about being in that zone.Jon Young: Absolutely. I mean, I know London. I'm from South Wales, but I probably know London in that sense better than anywhere in the UK. But maybe Edinburgh from when I've been there is quite similar. But if you imagine, I've been to South Kensington umpteen times and often take family there. And I'm thinking to the last time my sister came up, we went to the Natural History Museum as you do. And then we finished and we had a bit more time. So then, "Actually, should we just pop in the Science Museum?" So we went there and I think we even went to the V&A afterwards just because we were enjoying ourselves so much, but we hadn't planned the other two. It was just Natural History Museum. So I think certainly when they're quite close to each other, that's quite something to bear in mind too. Jon Young: What else was there? Another quite interesting quote, a couple of quotes around the spontaneity point. Someone said, "When it's about entertainment, it's just stupid to plan your mood." I quite liked that. Kelly Molson: I like that.Jon Young: And about three months ago, I spoke to somebody. I was doing some work for a museum in Central London, and I was trying to understand the sort of habits before lockdown, before COVID, and after lockdown. And the lady I spoke to was an artist. And we did the Zoom chats and you could see in the background, there was wonderful pieces of art. And she's clearly an incredibly creative person. And she said that before COVID, she was going to attractions maybe two, three times a week if not more. And she just liked being in the National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery or all these other places. But after lockdown restrictions were lifted, she said she'd been maybe twice in a month if that. And she had a few reasons, but the main one for her was pre-booking. And she said, "I'm such a spontaneous person. I really hate planning." And she even said that when you've got something planned say at two o'clock, then you spend most of the morning kind of thinking about that. Kelly Molson: Right. Jon Young: You know what I mean? I could actually imagine myself, there's a little anxiety. Am I doing everything for time? So there's definitely that type of person and they definitely exist and they are a minority, but they're a fairly chunky minority. And then there's the not organized people. Someone's said, "It would put me off because I hate organizing. I like to float around and browse. The commitment can be a serious burden and other events may occur." Maybe a bit extreme, but I think these people clearly exist and I think they're quite valid reasons.Kelly Molson: Yeah, completely valid. And this is really difficult, isn't it? Because as an attraction, you need to cater for all of these different types of people and how everybody needs and wants the flexibility to be able to book or not book. Gosh, it's really difficult task that people-Jon Young: It really is. And I think a couple of people gave the weather as well, which is obviously more applicable for some than others. I think one thing that maybe is missed in the debates, and maybe I've just not heard enough debates in it, but is that a lot of visits to attractions aren't necessarily those tick box, memorable moment, life-changing experiences. And if you're going to Warner Brothers or maybe a Merlin Attraction or Natural History Museum for the first time, then obviously, these are moments you'll never forget. But a lot of attraction visits are actually really casual visits. We call them the social mindset segments and they tend to make up around one in five people who visited typically visit attractions. And these are people who just go there to be in a nice environment and to maybe chat with a friend or to have a coffee or just to be around like-minded people. And I guess that can sometimes get missed off. It's not necessarily that big standout tick box experience every time.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Like the example that you gave of the artist, I'm sure she finds those environments quite inspiring for her work and for what she does and who she is as a person. To have to plan that is almost like planning your inspiration. It's not quite right, is it? You take yourself off for a walk somewhere random to be inspired. And I think having to kind of go, "Okay, well, at two o'clock, I'm going to go to the Tate for my inspiration for the day," it doesn't quite sit well with that, does it?Jon Young: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. It is a minority, but yeah, it feels quite valid.Kelly Molson: Are there any differences by visitor party types? So families, retirees, et cetera.Jon Young: Yeah. So it was quite interesting when we asked this question and when we looked at the life stage. So we looked at pre-nesters, those under 35s without children in household, older independents, so 35 and over without children in the household, then families, and then retirees. So we look at those four different life stages as opposed to age group. And families were a little bit higher in terms of being resistant. I think it is worth noting that they were a little bit higher. It's about seven percentage points. It's not a huge amount, but the vast majority were still happy with that. And I think my take, having thought about this quite a bit now, is that the differences aren't really based on life stage or party size per se. There are some, and I can understand why families would be resistant.Jon Young: There are more moving parts with a family literally and more things that can go wrong in the day. Whereas if myself and my partner, we've just got ourselves to worry about. So I can see why that would be a barrier. But for me, the biggest distinction is in attitudes. And as I mentioned earlier, we do quite a lot of audience segmentation. So we don't tend to do them on demographics anymore. So we don't do it on gender or age or any other demographic. We do it on people's attitudes and base their attitudes to life. Or it could be to how they do their leisure behavior or anything else. And that's what's come across here, I think, is that the key distinctions are attitudes to pre-booking and how organized you are and how spontaneous you are and how much you like planning and how much you don't.Jon Young: And that does transcend all life stages. Certainly, there's an indication that families are a bit more resistant, but it's not as big as the sort of differences in terms of attitudes. One other thing we noticed though is that even though families were a bit more resistant, they were actually more likely to go ahead. So it's almost as if they were gritting their teeth and visiting. And again, that did make sense because I guess when you're a family, you really need to fill your spare time and to get out and do things. So whereas maybe an individual on their own or a couple, there's less pressure to do that.Kelly Molson: Yeah. You've got the challenge again of keeping children and younger members of your family occupied. Jon Young: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So that's that. We've got to do something. Whether we like this or not, we've got to get them out of the house. They're a bit stuck in these four walls. Everyone's going crazy. We've got to go out and do something kind of attitude.Jon Young: Yeah. So my sort of take from this whole section is that not to get too caught up on the party type and just to think about these different attitudes because that feels to be the big dividing point.Kelly Molson: Okay. And audiences that are not picked up by the research. Again, I think this is really interesting to me because I hadn't thought about some of these things as actually being a challenge for people, which is it's not on them to be honest. I should have been more aware of them, but tell us about the audiences that have not been picked up by the research and how it would affect them.Jon Young: Yeah. So I think the international audiences. This was amongst a UK sample. So I can visualize here my wife's parents who are Polish and they don't speak any English. And coming over here as they have done a few times and just setting them free into London and see what they get up to. And they often do visit attractions, but they'll walk up and they'll have that conversation. And there's less room for error, but to ask them to go on a website, they don't book their National Express from Stansted. They get my wife to do that because they know that they can do something wrong. They're a great example in my mind that there's likely to be a barrier for international visitors, particularly those who don't speak English. And there's lots of those who come to London and the rest of the UK.Jon Young: So that's definitely a barrier thing. And unless you can cover all the bases with language, then I think that will be. I know that Google have an inbuilt translation function, but again, you have to be quite IT savvy to know that. So I think that's definitely one audience. The older retirees, so we conduct our surveys on a panel. So these are people who've signed up to do the surveys online. So we're naturally missing out that small proportion of older citizens who aren't that IT savvy. So I guess my Nan would have fallen into that category. She always liked to phone ahead, for example. So there is a danger that they lose out a little bit. And I think, obviously, there's always the option to phone and they do that. But perhaps that is just one extra barrier then, one extra step when maybe a year before, they would have just turned up. Jon Young: So that audience, I think, is quite an important one still, although they are becoming more IT savvy. I think a lot of data shows that. I see people's grands on Facebook now just to make that point. That's a different place to 10 years ago for sure. And I think the third big audience is the low-income audiences. So we've been doing some work for a network of libraries in the UK. And I think it was about two months ago that we had a big meeting with representatives of these different libraries around the UK. And we decided to switch our research to online, again, because of COVID. We used to have paper-based surveys that we've handed out in each library. And we felt, "This is a great idea," maybe for the same reasons as the pre-booking. It's much more efficient. You get much better data, more reliable, blah, blah, blah. Jon Young: And about halfway through, someone from a Glasgow Museum put their hand up and said, "This is great, but can we have paper surveys as well?" He said that it was around about 30% of his catchment area didn't have access to the internet. And I was really surprised by that.Kelly Molson: Right. It's a huge amount.Jon Young: It is. You don't expect numbers like that. But I know there is quite high deprivation traditionally in that area where the library is. So he said, "It's absolutely essential that we have paper surveys." And there was another way of doing this as well. And obviously, that made me think about pre-booking online too. And it's been a challenge for certainly the museum sector and cultural attractions to reach out to all of their audiences. And actually, in Glasgow, they've done a really amazing job. The likes of Kelvingrove, for example, but this audience is quite large. And I guess it needs to be thought-about too. So yeah, that's quite a big barrier as well, I think.Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. And it's a focus for cultural organizations to raise their awareness in audiences that are not necessarily their natural audiences or people that are less aware of them. Those people would fit into that category. So it's understanding all the different ways that you need to be able to help people visit, help them understand what you do and be able to book.Jon Young: Absolutely. I think certain funding like HLF funding is dependent on attractions actually doing that as well. So they kind of need to be seen to return in all these different ways.Kelly Molson: Gosh. So what are the conclusions from this? Because there's not a one answer fits all, is there? This is going to be some kind of hybrid model. Jon Young: There really isn't. I think one thing I didn't mention is the no shows as well. I don't know if you wanted to mention that. Kelly Molson: Yes.Jon Young: But I think there's a big worry as well. In our survey, around 10% of people... Actually, it's 15%, sorry, said that they booked and hadn't shown up. And so there's another, I guess, barrier as well. Although we also found that a similar proportion had shown up because they booked. So I think that maybe balances out. So I think in terms of our conclusions, that was quite an important point for me because there was a lot of people not showing up just because they were never committed in the first place. So I think about seven in 10 of those people said actually it was always 50/50, "I've just booked it." So I think there was a need to maybe make that more taboo.Kelly Molson: There's a challenge there around annual passes as well, isn't there?Jon Young: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So if you have an annual pass for an attraction, and you have to pre-book as well to use that annual pass, you book it but you might not go. But that can't then be resold. So the attraction in a way kind of loses out because there's no one else that they can put through the door.Jon Young: Yeah, it is a real challenge. And I think I was really struck by the fact that the majority of people who don't turn up just said they had more than one option that day, and they didn't really get the gravity of it. And I mentioned that we tested restaurants as well. And what was really striking was that the proportion of no shows is a lot lower. And people who don't turn up to restaurants were more likely to give understandable reasons like they were ill on the day or so. And I think not turning up to a restaurant is a little bit more taboo. You can kind of visualize in your head that empty table that you're leaving there.Jon Young: So I think the more the attractions can create that sense of taboo without sort of shaming anyone, the better. And maybe that will happen less and less. And I think they are doing that. But you said the annual pass point is quite important. So I think when people have parted with a lot of money for their pre-booking, they're less likely to do it. So yeah, I think one of the conclusions is if we can reduce that a little bit as well, that will help.Jon Young: But in terms of overall conclusions, I mean, I'm like yourself. I'm massively in favor of pre-booking. I think it's brilliant at so many different levels. And I think you listed those right at the start. It's great for the attraction. And it can really improve the visitor experience. It can see improve rates. And also, you can gain loyalty in the long-term and have that conversation on either side. So I'm really behind it. I think it really does suggest, though, that there's a need for some sort of hybrid where there is a walkup option possible because as we've discussed at length, this one in five of your visitors, they may be spontaneous visitors, depending on where you're situated. Jon Young: Obviously, it does matter where you are and how much you charge. If you are the British Library, then there's loads of people coming out of King's Cross and just popping in. But if you're in the middle of nowhere, then you're less likely to have that. So there's obvious differences. And I guess people need to sort of work those through as well. But I certainly think some sort of hybrid. And I'm glad I don't have to sort of deciding on how that works. And I just got to give the data because it's clearly very challenging. But there's a lot of operational brains out there, I think, that can really can work that through. Jon Young: And maybe there's a bit of trial and error as well. But I think the point I made earlier about just understanding it's more of an attitude, no barrier, I think, than anything else. And not to get too bogged down in the demographics of it all. And just to understand that some people hate planning. Yeah. I'm not so good at it myself. So I can kind of empathize. Yeah. And I guess just to be aware that there are other audiences out there who might really struggle. I saw some figures today from Visit Britain and their projections on inbound tourism and it's so low.Kelly Molson: Yeah. 16.9 million, wasn't it? For next year. Jon Young: Well done. I can't remember.Kelly Molson: I think that's what I read this morning. I've been looking at it myself. But it's so vastly down. It's really scary.Jon Young: It really is. And markets like the states will take longer to catch up just because there's a big lag from bookings to visiting. So we need to do all we can to get as many of our British-based visitors in as possible. So I guess we just need to have all the options we can. So yeah, that's the key conclusion, I think, really. And yeah, like I said, I'll leave it to the boffins' fractions to work out how to do it because I guess you don't want to have a situation where if you can turn up walkup anyway, why would you pre-book?Kelly Molson: It's difficult, isn't it? Yeah.Jon Young: So, balance. Kelly Molson: It is about balance, I think. I mean, a lot of attractions are just going to say, "No, that's it. We're going to keep the pre-booking. That's it." It's almost tough, but I think it depends on... It's very location-driven like you were saying. It's interesting. We've actually got Geoff Spooner coming on the podcast in the New Year from the Warner Brothers Studio Tour, The Making of Harry Potter, which obviously launched with pre-booking from opening day. So it'll be really interesting for people to tune in and hear all of the positives from that. But Geoff is very pragmatic when he speaks about it because he does say a lot of those decisions are driven by location actually in terms of kind of parking and congestion in the area where they're located as well. It made sense to do that. And so there's so many factors you have to think about, and it is going to be down to the individual attractions to work out what's going to work best for them.Jon Young: It really is, and I think the likes of Warner Brothers, as I said earlier, when you visit Warner Brothers, it is-Kelly Molson: It's magic. Jon Young: ... amazing. I went a few years ago with my niece, and we actually booked four months in advance. And it was amazing. And everyone's had the same experience, I think. So it is maybe different to the [inaudible 00:41:38] in Central London where you can visit more regularly perhaps. But I think actually one thing that Simon at Roman Baths mentioned was that their booking system is really flexible. So they've had a really low proportion of no-shows. So you can cancel, I think, up to the minute pretty much. And so I think the more flexibility, the better, and maybe that will help as well. So yeah, lots out there. And I'm sure there'll be some great best practice.Kelly Molson: Well, lots to think about for 2021. Hopefully, this podcast has given you a little insight into what visitors are thinking about pre-booking. Jon, I mean, I've been lucky enough to have my copy in advance. Where will people be able to find this research so that they can have a read of it themselves?Jon Young: So hopefully, by the time this is published, we'll have put it into a blog and maybe in a Q&A format. We'll see how it goes. Might put a few graphs in there. We love a graph.Kelly Molson: Love a graph.Jon Young: Feel a bit naked without a graph actually just talking about this. So yeah, we'll put it on our website. Follow me on LinkedIn or whatever, and I'll be promoting it on there as well.Kelly Molson: Right. Well, for our listeners, we will link to all of these things in the show notes. So we will link to Jon's LinkedIn profile. We'll link to the BVA BDRC website and their Twitter profile. So go ahead and follow them. And then you will have access to this brilliant research. Jon, I always end the podcast by asking our guests to recommend a book. Something that they love or something that's helped shape their career in some way. So have you got something to share with us today?Jon Young: I do. I've got this book called How Emotions Are Made. Kelly Molson: Great.Jon Young: So I read this on jury service.Kelly Molson: Okay. Interesting jury service then?Jon Young: Yeah. Well, when I got to the jury service, I noticed that there were loads and loads of thousand-piece jigsaws which gave me an idea that we wouldn't be doing a lot with our time. I think I spent 90% of it just hanging around. So luckily, I had this book, which is written by a neurologist called Lisa Feldman Barrett. And it's the science of how emotions are sort of created. It's a hard read. And I don't think I'd have read it if I didn't have so much time on my hands. But it's really, really fascinating and it kind of changed how I thought about the visitor experience.Jon Young: In a nutshell, it sort of talks about how you can only really feel emotions if you recognize the stimulus you're given and if you're not distracted in lots of ways. So when we test the visitor experience now, certainly in exhibitions, we will just make sure we sort of test how relatable exhibits and descriptions are and whether there are any distractions in the exhibition room, and lots of other things around that. So I do recommend it. It really changed how we thought about the visitor experience. I'm just looking at the footnotes, were about a hundred pages. So I'm not sure if anyone wants to win this, but it's really interesting.Kelly Molson: Jon, you're not really selling it for our listeners. I'm not going to lie. Listen, if you've listened to all of that, and you'd still like to win that book, then if you head over to our Twitter account, and as ever, retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Jon's books." Then you will be in with a chance of winning a copy of it. Jon, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure. And I would like to just thank you again for all of the work that you've been doing throughout lockdown because it has been invaluable for us. And I know that it's been invaluable for many, many attractions up and down the UK. So thank you. Jon Young: Thank you. Kelly Molson: This is the last episode of 2020, which is crazy. I have had an absolute blast this year talking to the most interesting people. And I'm so grateful that all of you, listeners, have been tuning in week after week after week. So thank you. We are going to be back on the sixth of January with a very exciting episode. In fact, we've got loads of exciting episodes lined up for the start of the New Year. As you heard earlier, we've got Geoff Spooner coming on from The Making of Harry Potter, which I'm really excited about. I definitely fangirled a little bit on that podcast. We have Holkham Estates coming on to talk about their sustainability plans. And we have the brilliant National Football Museum who are coming on to talk about why your attraction should have a podcast. So stay tuned. We'll see you in the New Year. But in the meantime, have an absolutely wonderful Christmas and festive break.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Precog is an independent magazine that explores science, technology, techno plastics, cyber culture and feminism. https://precogmag.xyz/ Florencia Escudero's sculptures include soft and handmade components printed with digitally-rendered imagery. Feminist theory, cyber culture, and an embrace of various techniques such as digital photo collage, hand sewing, and silk-screening place each sculpture in the realm of both the machine-made and the handmade. As the artist notes, "When making these pieces I am thinking about the history of feminist art that looks at the objectification of women's bodies. I want to flip the expectation and look at how objects become human." Escuderois also an editor and founder of Precog Magazine. She received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2012. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. https://florenciaescudero.com/ Gaby Collins-Fernandez (b. USA, 1987) is an artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.) and the Yale School of Art (M.F.A., Painting/Printmaking). Her work has been shown in the US and internationally, most recently at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama Nathalie Karg Gallery, Danese Corey, and currently in an exhibition at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Her work has been discussed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and artcritical. She is a recipient of a Fellowship at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez is also a writer whose texts have appeared in publications such as the popular Painting on Paintings blog, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her translations with Kimberly Kruge of Golden Age Spanish sonnets was published in 2015 in Riot of Perfume. Collins-Fernandez is also an editor and founder of Precog Magazine, and is a co-director of the New York-based art and music collaborative, BombPop!Up. Her work is in the collections of the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Maine, and the Alex Katz Foundation, NY. www.gabycollinsfernandez.com Kellie Konapelsky is a designer and art director that works primarily within the arts and culture. She has over ten years of experience and specializes in art direction, publishing, and exhibition design. She sees her practice as a collaborative multidisciplinary process by working closely with photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, writers, and architects. She is currently is the designer and co-editor for Precog Magazine and has worked with select clients such as Museum Kurhaus Kleve, LACMA, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Kellie is a graphic design instructor at Parsons School of Design. She holds a BA in design from UCLA and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. www.kelliekonapelsky.com

Episode No. 471 features artist Radcliffe Bailey. Bailey is included in "Person of Interest" at Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The exhibition explores portraiture from the late nineteenth century to the present in ways that test the definition of the genre. It was curated by Melissa Yuen and will be on view through July 3, 2021. Bailey's paintings, sculptures, and installations explores themes such as history, migration, and the relationship between geography and ancestry. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Aldrich in Ridgefield, Conn., the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, the Toledo Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, and plenty more. The episode was recorded for a live digital audience on Nov. 5.

The path to becoming a museum director is circuitous, and the responsibility they have to their communities is unique. We spoke with Graham C. Boettcher, R. Hugh Daniel Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama, in May during the museum’s closure and discussed his career, the role of museums in society, and how he and his colleagues are weathering the pandemic.This episode was recorded via Zoom on May 8, 2020.Learn more on the museum’s website: https://www.artsbma.orgInstagram: @bhammuseum @grahamboettcherMusic credit: Maurice Ravel's String Quartet in F major - II. Assez vif, très rythmé produced by the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum (issued under a Creative Commons License).

Neema Barnette presents BHMD Podcast premieres a new episode hosted by Whole Body Literacy & Education (WHBLE) founder, Ah-Keisha McCants.Her guests will be Dr. Kelli Morgan is a curator, author, educator, and activist who specializes in critical-race curatorial analyses. She’s held curatorial positions at the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.This conversation will premiere Saturday August 22, 2020 at 8:00pm EST on BuzzSprout, TuneIn Radio, Apple Podcast, iHeartRadio, Spotify, where ever you get Europe podcast with the video version exclusively on BHMD’s website at blackhistoryminidocs.com

Journey with me through the evocative compositions by Black figurative artist, printmaker, and weaver Emma Amos. She explores explore identity and tackles, head-on, racial, and gender inequality. Resources for this episode include the writings of art historian Lisa Farrington, Phoebe Wolfskill, Art News and ArtForum International magazines, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. If you have an Instagram page, I encourage you to follow other wonderful individuals and organizations who are blowing up their feed to engage you with female artists of color who tackle issues of racism, police brutality, and social justice through the visual expression. Please visit--@artgirlrising, @knowherart, @prettybrillaintclub, and @artsy

Journey with me through the evocative compositions by Black figurative artist, printmaker, and weaver Emma Amos. She explores explore identity and tackles, head-on, racial, and gender inequality. Resources for this episode include the writings of art historian Lisa Farrington, Phoebe Wolfskill, Art News and ArtForum International magazines, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. If you have an Instagram page, I encourage you to follow other wonderful individuals and organizations who are blowing up their feed to engage you with female artists of color who tackle issues of racism, police brutality, and social justice through the visual expression. Please visit--@artgirlrising, @knowherart, @prettybrillaintclub, and @artsy

May 15, 2020 - Internationally acclaimed artist Ik-Joong Kang in conversation about his art and career with Dr. Katherine Anne Paul, Curator of Asian Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art. For more information, please visit the link below: https://www.koreasociety.org/arts-culture/item/1358-artist-talk-ik-joong-kang-with-dr-katherine-anne-paul

The hunger for immersive experiences is stronger than it’s ever been. For this episode of the podcast, we speak to one of the pioneers of this trend, John Sear.John describes himself as a Game Designer & Software Developer, Runner of Workshops and Maker of game-like things for public spaces like Museums, Galleries & Festivals.One of his most impressive projects includes a 500 player, feature-length, collaborative game played using laser pointers, which he won the Indiecade Developer’s Choice Award (referred to as the Sundance of the Games Industry).In this episode, we discuss John’s DIY tutorials for museums so that you can build exciting ‘digital things’ without a huge budget.If you’re interested in creating an immersive experience, then you’ll learn a lot from John’s story.With everything that’s happening in the world right now, this is a brilliant podcast to listen to explore what you can do to engage your audience when your attraction, museum, venue is ready to open again.A few things we talk about:Creating games that are fun, educational and true to venuesThe importance of storytellingHow to build ‘digital things’ without a huge budgetCollaborative touch table experiencesFocusing on fun first, educational afterUsing you venue for immersive theatre experiences, when it's usually closedHeads up, this episode was recorded at the end of 2019, so some of the things we mention may be slightly out of context.Show references:http://johnsear.com/https://twitter.com/MrJohnSearhttp://johnsear.com/diy-museum-tutorials/http://www.theotherwayworks.co.uk/category/productions/a-moment-of-madness/ TranscriptKelly Molson: Today, we're speaking to John Sear, builder of magical collaborative experiences for public spaces.John Sear: We were trying to imagine what was coming in the future. What would collaborative play as a kind of visitor experience look like.Kelly Molson: John describes himself as a games designer and software developer, runner of workshops and maker of game-like things for public spaces like museums, galleries and festivals.John Sear: When you look at the kind of money people are willing to spend to go to the big experiences, the Punchdrunks and the Secret Cinemas, they're spending hundreds of pounds a night and when you start to mention those numbers, suddenly there are a few people in the museum where they go, okay, that sounds interesting. Different audiences and we could earn money from it, maybe.Kelly Molson: He's multitalented and incredibly creative. Developing projects such as A Moment of Madness, which is an urban game where players are on a live stake out in a car park and Renga, the 500 player laser game.Kelly Molson: In this episode, we discuss all of those things, plus John's DIY tutorials for museums, so that you can build exciting digital things without a huge budget.John Sear: That's what's good about in the modern age is that the tools are out there that are free and open source and a lot of cases that allow you to build these things very quickly and cheaply and then once you get started, it's kind of like the limits are just your own imagination.Kelly Molson: We'll take a look at John's approach for creating games that are fun, educational, and true to the venue and also learn the importance of storytelling. We really enjoyed speaking to John and we think that you're going to enjoy this too.John Sear: Get people excited first and then worry about the kind of educational content afterwards.Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast that celebrates professionals working in the visitor attraction sector. What do we mean by visitor attractions? Well, it's an umbrella term for a huge range of exciting organisations that are must sees. Think museums, theme parks, zoos, farms, heritage sites, tour providers, escape rooms, and much, much more. They're tourist hotspots or much love local establishments that educate, engage, and excite the general public.Kelly Molson: Those who work in visitor attractions often pour their heart and soul into providing exceptional experiences for others. In our opinion, they don't get the recognition that they deserve for this. We want to change this. Each episode we'll share the journeys of inspiring leaders. We'll celebrate their achievements and dig deeper into what really makes their attraction successful, both offline and digitally. Listen and be inspired as industry leaders share their innovative ideas, services, and approaches.Kelly Molson: There's plenty of valuable information you can take away and put into action to create better experiences for your own guests. Your host of this podcast, and myself, Kelly Molson, and Paul Wright. We're the co-founders of Rubber Cheese, an award winning digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for visitor attractions. Find out how we can create a better experience for you and your guests at rubbercheese.com. Search Skip the Queue on iTunes and Spotify to subscribe.Kelly Molson: You can find links to every episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast. We hope that you enjoy these interviews and if there's anyone that you think that we should be talking to, please just send us a message.Kelly Molson: John, welcome to our Skip the Queue Podcast. Thank you for coming on today.John Sear: Thank you so much for inviting me on.Kelly Molson: Now your bio describes you as a builder of magical collaborative experiences for public spaces and I think that is probably one of the coolest job titles I've ever read. Can you tell us a little bit about that?John Sear: Thank you. I mean, yeah, I kind of flip and flop a lot really about what my job title should be because it's quite confusing as well as being cool. So at the moment I am a real world game designer. That's my kind of brief, but that kind of confuses people as well because it's making video games but via games that take place in the real world. And I know when I've explained it to people before, like half of my job is kind of tech, half of it is kind of design.John Sear: So I was at a tech conference recently talking about what I do and at the end of it the guy was like, "That sounds like a really nice hobby you've got there." And I was like, "Yeah, that's actually my job."Kelly Molson: Oh, gosh.John Sear: There you go. I confuse most people I think. But yeah, basically all it means is that I take my game design skills and my software engineering skills and sort of the kind of modern making and kind of put that altogether to build experiences that take place in the real world. So that can be things like escape games, immersive theatre, things that take place in museums, galleries, libraries, festivals, car parks, theme parks, all sorts of crazy places. But yeah, most people think my job sounds amazing, so I should probably not ruin that illusion for them.Kelly Molson: How did you get to where you are now? You've got a long history in game design, how did you go from that to what you do now?John Sear: Sure. So I'll do the short version and then you can decide if you want me to dip into the longer version, because it's about 20 years. So, I left university and did what I thought was my dream job of working in the games industry, Proper, the AAA games industry. So when we think of video games on Xbox and PlayStation and PC, so I did that for about four years and while it was enjoyable and I worked with some amazing people, it wasn't where I wanted to be.John Sear: So then I left the AAA world to go and work in academia. So I set up a degree course teaching people how to get jobs in the games industry. But with the caveat that I'd left the games industry because I didn't really enjoy it loads, and then while doing that, I had a few other companies on the side.John Sear: So I had a company that made iPhone games and Xbox games during the kind of first, there was a kind of digital download rush when the iPhone was first released in 2008, 2010, that sort of era. And then eventually it got to this where I was doing all these things. There was a big rush in the iPhone world, which produced a lot of wealthy people in a short amount of time. But gradually that space got very saturated and the games you can make in that space were kind of less interesting and you needed more money to do it, and there'd been this big rise in independent games.John Sear: So people that were experienced in making games, leaving bigger developers to go it alone. This was kind of the first time, that sort of period, like 2008 to 2010 where people could do that. They could actually make games for Xbox or PlayStation or iPhone without a big publisher behind them, and so it meant there were a lot of kind of indie developers then. And so I sort of tried to jump onto that bandwagon and I was kind of getting bored of making things for small devices like Xboxes or iPhones or Android tablets and wanted to make things that took place in the real world.John Sear: So me and a friend of mine started a business and we made a game called Renga, which probably gets mentioned somewhere on my website, which was a 500 player game experience that took place originally for movie theatres, but it got shown outdoors as well at festivals. And so that was my kind of, that's my transition really from doing things for indoor spaces to the kind of... We use different times in different industries that we would call that the out-of-home experiences-Kelly Molson: All right.John Sear: ... Or visitor attraction experiences. So the jump from making things for small scale to making things for festivals, and obviously I sort of left behind all of my knowledge from AAA world of how to sell boxed products or sell digital download games to suddenly having to sell games where people bought tickets for it or it took place in a cinema or took place at a festival, and so it was quite different. And I'd say that back then there were a lot of people from theatre who are making things that were more game-like.John Sear: So you might have come across people like Punchdrunk in the kind of immersive theatre world or Secret Cinema but there were very few people going the other way, taking their games knowledge and going into kind of theatrical things. And still, I think that's quite a niche thing. So from about 2010 to 2013 we built and toured this giant Renga game, and then since then, I've just been attracted by making experiences for public spaces, and that's really what's led me to work with museums and castles and art galleries because they have people and they have amazing spaces. So it kind of all makes sense.John Sear: Sorry, that was supposed to be the short version. It wasn't really very short, was it? But that was the transition anyway.Kelly Molson: That's perfect.Paul Wright: So can you give us a bit of an idea of what a 500 person game for a festival or cinema looks like?John Sear: Yeah, I should have done that really, but yeah, that's a good question. So Renga was built so that it still looks a bit like a video game, but it's really about how 500 people organise themselves. So we've shown this in lots of different spaces, but the classic is in an enormous auditorium in a movie theatre.John Sear: So you have 500 people seated, we give out laser pointers to the audience, the laser pointers are used to control the action that happens on the screen. So it's a 90-minute experience. I mean, it's quite a deep strategic game and it looks a bit like a space retro game when you're playing, but it's really an exercise in how do 500 people somehow collaboratively control the experience.John Sear: So it's quite unusual in the sense that people don't make these huge games, but from a technological point of view, it's a bit like turning the cinema screen into a giant touchscreen. So each of the laser points acts a bit like a finger that can kind of touch the screen and anything you want to do in the game you have to do as a group. So you have to somehow sort of self organise yourself just purely by laser dots of light on the screen into doing different things.Kelly Molson: Oh, gosh.John Sear: Yeah, it's quite unusual, and it's one of those things that people go, "I don't think I really want to play that." Until they actually start playing it and they go, "Oh wow, this is quite different to what I was expecting." It doesn't matter how many times I explain it. I never do a very good job, I'm afraid. But it's just a really interesting thing of like how you can get different experiences happening in theatres.John Sear: So we showed it at loads of film festivals because they would be showing traditional films, and then alongside that they'd go, okay, people are making games for cinema now. So let's have a look at one of those. And then what they would do is they would invite actually quite a lot of the top directors actually got to see this because we showed it at places like the New York film festival and the Toronto film festival and some of the bigger ones, and they would invite directors into the auditorium to go look what's happening, right? Because there's obviously there's a limit to sorts of feelings and experiences you can create with film and it's a different experience when people are playing a game.John Sear: So suddenly you've got people within the audience that love and hate each other and are high fiving and hugging and running around. It's very much like a midnight madness experience as people try and control it. Ultimately everyone's got an individual laser pointer. Everyone can do anything they want. No one's in control of them. But some people get the game a bit more than others and so they're shouting out a vice or standing up in front of the screen even to try and organise teams into doing things. Did that make any sense?Paul Wright: It sounds amazing. What other examples of games like that have you created?John Sear: I mean that's the biggest game I think I've created in terms of there's 500 simultaneous players over a 90-minute experience. Often I talk about the work I do as been a bit like escape rooms. So I started doing this stuff in about 2010 and we were trying to imagine what was coming in the future, what would collaborative play out of the home as a kind of visitor experience look like, and we dismissed experiences like escape games really back then because we thought that even though they didn't really exist on mass, there'd been a few experiments into them and it felt like people wouldn't be willing to pay the 20 or £30 a person for a one-hour experience that they absolutely are willing to pay, it turns out.John Sear: So we kind of misread the future direction but one of the advantage of escape games existing, I mean, I can just say, "Well the things I make are a bit like escape games." And with that, I do go to escape games. So I build large scale escape games as well. I think they're the closest things that I do to Renga in terms of 500 players. So for a number of museum conferences or site centre conferences, both in Europe and over in Asia, I built sort of 100 player escape game experiences.John Sear: So whereas in a normal escape game there might be six of you or 10 of you locked in a room, and it sounds like you guys have played a few of these.Kelly Molson: We have.John Sear: So I've built a number of pop-up experiences where you might have, I've made 10 tables in a room and each table has got a mini escape game on it, and then those mini escape games kind of interact with each other. So you might put I don't know 10 people around each table, and then as the game progresses, it turns out in order to complete the game, the tables have to kind of collaborate together. So I think the largest ones I've done of those are about a hundred people.Paul Wright: So older games and there are digital games on each table?John Sear: No, I mean, not always. I mean, because my background is digital, I use a combination of digital and physical or analog. Yeah, so most of the games I make have a digital element. So for example, most of my escape games would have probably at least a device such as a phone or something that is a phone, but is masquerading as some other piece of equipment, which might unlock parts of the story, or you might use it to scan things.John Sear: So I'm a big fan of technologies like iBeacons and Near-field communication. So you might use the phone to scan physical objects and that might play a video or play some audio on the phone as you're using it, but sometimes that phone is in a case. So it's some kind of piece of equipment that the players have found. It's a useful scanning device. It might be masquerading as a hospital scanner or something. So you scan a patient and then you get some readout, but essentially it's a mobile phone in a fancy case.Kelly Molson: John, one of the questions I had for you is, I know that you work with galleries, libraries, archives, museums, which are classified GLAMs. When you're talking to these venues, what do you think is the biggest benefit of them using you? What's the biggest benefit to them to having a game or some kind of interactive element in those venues?John Sear: I guess the biggest reason to what it means is because I'm kind of quite a nice person really. That's a good reason.Kelly Molson: You are John. You are, it's good enough for us.John Sear: I mean it depends what they're looking for, right? I build different things for museums. So sometimes I build what we'd call I guess an interactive, so it kind of stands alone experience that might be like a touchscreen or something that you interact with, with a camera, like a Kinect Sensor. And I did do quite a lot of collaborative touch table experiences for museums, particularly around Birmingham actually. There's still quite a few of those installed. That's a piece of technology I actually really like because I'm interested in bringing people together in these spaces.John Sear: So the idea that you can have an experience in a museum that you can't have at home I think is quite important, and things like large scale touchscreens allow that. So yeah, I build those kinds of things, one off interactive things. But I think probably what I'm more passionate about is building experiences that are a bit more kind of museum or gallery wide.John Sear: So one way you could think of it is a bit like a kind of a more high tech version of a trail. We are on a way that we take people, take visitors around the museum but in a different way to what they're normally doing and maybe get them to look at different things.John Sear: So while I'd like to use a lot of technology in what I make, generally I like to kind of keep the technology hidden away, which is why I often talk about it as being magical but mostly about not trying to detract from what's already there, like museums and galleries and castles and all of these places, they're already amazing scenarios, right? They're already incredible spaces.John Sear: So what I try and do is not to detract from that, but to enhance it with technology. So often I use a lot of audio in what I do. So perhaps the device, the technology stays in your pocket while you're still kind of walking around the space, that works quite nicely. I've been doing some stuff with the National Trust property, which is closer to immersive theatre. So a bit like an escape game, but you play it around the entire venue. And if you think of some of the escape games that are out there and probably some that you've played often what they're trying to do is they're trying to replicate these spaces that already exist in the cultural space.John Sear: So they might be trying to make the office where Sherlock Holmes is based or they might be trying to replicate a castle. Well in the cultural attraction world or the GLAM world, we've already got those spaces and they're already completely authentic because they all exist. So what I like to try and do is kind of layer a game experience on top of what's already there.John Sear: So one that hopefully will go in a National Trust property sometime next year is actually one where players are essentially spies. They're working for a secret organisation and they are operating within this National Trust property. But one of the advantages of being a spy is that the whole point is you're not supposed to get caught, right? So, you're supposed to be acting as if you are a normal visitor, and this is one of the problems, right? When you set a game in a space like a museum or a castle or a historic building, people behave differently and we don't always want them to behave differently when there's all these kind of priceless artefacts everywhere.John Sear: So using these themes whereby the whole point is you're not supposed to get caught and you're supposed to be like a visitor, but secretly you're a spy doing interesting things. That mechanism works quite well I think, and that we reuse it again and again.Paul Wright: I'd love to get a bit of an understanding of what happens with these venues, what do they decide? Do they decide they would need some immersive game in their venue and then they put a brief out there, and then you come up with ideas for that brief or is it, how does it work?John Sear: Yeah.Kelly Molson: How do they know they need you?Paul Wright: Yeah.John Sear: How do they know? They don't really. Often, I mean, I think probably some people see me talk at conferences and things or they might have used, I've got a series of kind of free tutorials online, which are designed to kind of help museums build their own things.John Sear: So I think most people talk to me first and then I try and convince them that they need me rather than they know that they need me and come looking for me, if that makes sense?Kelly Molson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Paul Wright: Yeah.John Sear: Normally they say, "Okay, we're looking to build an interactive in a museum that does this." Or "We're looking to build an app that visitors use." And then that is normally the start of a conversation of, well, why do you need an app? Or why do you think you need an app? And what are you trying to do with that? And these are all the problems with that, and these are the costs of it and these are the other things you could do with the same amount of money and then people would normally look pretty terrified.John Sear: So yeah, I mean, occasionally some museums are aware of things like immersive theatre and they're interested enough to go, okay, how could we use these new types of experiences within our spaces. But I mean I think most places are kind of feeling that out at the moment. They don't really know they need it, they're not really sure they want it. There's a few places that are like, they can see the benefits, we can attract a different audience demographic or we can open at different times.John Sear: So with National Trust properties, typically they have a lot of business with a certain demographic during the day, but then those properties are closed in the evening. Well actually, at least a couple of nights a week, we could actually set a large scale immersive theatre piece in there, which would bring people in and you could also sell to them food and drinks. When you look at the kind of money people are willing to spend to go to the big experiences, the Punchdrunks and the Secret Cinemas, they're spending hundreds of pounds a night. And when you start to mention those numbers, suddenly there are a few people in the museum where they go, okay, that sounds interesting. Different audiences and we could earn money from it, maybe.John Sear: But there aren't many kind of big examples of that to look to. So it's definitely still early days in that sense.Kelly Molson: So I guess it comes back to something that keeps coming up over and over again in terms of using tech, it's about using tech to enhance the venue and engage with a different audience at different times. So essentially it is about driving more footfall from different people.John Sear: Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the appeal I think, and I think people realise they need something that's a bit more unique, that's a bit more attractive, and it's not just, okay, everyone has got an app now, we need to make sure we've got an app. Well, there's quite a lot of evidence out there that they're showing that's not really working, and generally it's a bit of a block, isn't it?John Sear: I mean, you've probably had experience with this, but like a museum produces an app because they feel like they need an app, and then of course, the problem they've got is how do they convince their visitors to install the app? And they probably haven't done it before they've arrived at the venue. So then they've got to get on the wifi and they've got to download it and then they have to use the most precious thing in the world, which is their battery life on their phone, right? Nobody wants to give up their battery life on their phone.John Sear: So, who knows? There's lots of issues with that an app is the solution to everything, and that's not to say that I don't use apps for some of the venues that I work with, but most of the time I will try and persuade them to also supply the phones with it. I mean that's always a difficult sell because the reason that museums love things like apps is because it means that I have to manage the technology-Kelly Molson: Yeah, exactly.John Sear: ... Which is a huge headache. But if you want people to actually use it in really big numbers, it's much easier just to hand them a device as they walk in the building than it is to go, okay, we need to get you on the wifi and then you need to download this thing and then you need to set up an account and then you need to go, all of that. Each one of those things is a barrier. So it slows it down and you lose people.John Sear: So obviously we're seeing more people move towards just websites that allow people to hook straight into it and use things in conjunction with the space rather than the kind of full download of an app.Paul Wright: Or progressive web apps as well.John Sear: Exactly, yeah.Kelly Molson: John, you talked a little bit earlier about the game where you could pretend to be a spy, so it was kind of keeping people acting in a certain way. You also talk a lot about the importance of storytelling, which I mean that's important to us as well. It's one of the key things that we talk about in terms of your website. How do you work with the museums and the galleries to find those stories? Do you help them create them collaboratively? Do you suggest what would work best for their space?John Sear: Yeah, I guess it's a combination really. I mean that's one of the best things about working with cultural spaces, right? Is they have so much history and so much storytelling. I mean, it's what they do, why they collect stories from throughout the ages and they've got thousands to draw on. So really, I mean, the problem is, choosing from all of those when you've got so much, and so what are the stories that they've already got that fit in best with what we're trying to do?John Sear: I mean, there's no right answer to all of that. I mean, often the kind of shortcut I guess is that people are interested in people, right? So, normally if you can find a story that's got a good character, a good protagonist, a real person at the heart of it. That's normally where we start from I think. But yeah, the problem is choosing from the many varied stories rather than kind of building something from scratch.Paul Wright: If we go back to the game making, I'm really interested about this, about how you come up with ideas for games. Would you have any tips how to create interactive games?John Sear: That's a big question. I used to run a four year degree course on this very subject.Paul Wright: Oh, well.John Sear: So, if I can summarise that in 10 seconds. I think probably one of the problems I have, and I mean, my company is called Museum Games, which is a kind of like, it does what it says on the tin type name, but I actually find making games for museums is one of the hardest things because normally what we're thinking about, we're thinking about an interactive.John Sear: So a single place within the museum or cultural space where you go to and interact with a device of some kind. That might be a touch screen, it might be something with big buttons on it, it might be a camera based thing, so all of those, and for me the things that I'm most interested in about games is the kind of deepness to them.John Sear: They're quite deep experiences, they're really engaging, you can learn from them, but we're trying to do that in a public space, in museums, it makes it much harder. How do you get people properly engaged in the experience when potentially there's an audience around them watching what they do, that makes it quite hard. And also the museums themselves, as great as they are to work with, obviously one of their primary reasons is to educate the public, and so it's really hard to drop the educational part.John Sear: I mean, this would be, the biggest tip really for me, is to make games that are firstly fun experiences and less focus on the educational part. If you're busy playing a game for 10 minutes, you can have a really fun experience. You can have a great time, you might get some good photos out of it for social media but ultimately we want you to be excited and then keen to learn more about whatever the topic is we've chosen, and they, the tutor period or something, but I'm not going to build a game that's going to mean that you're going to learn all the kings of England, for instance.John Sear: And I think that's one of the problems and one of the barriers to working with museums is there's a kind of like, "Okay, there way this game needs to be all of those things that all these other games are, but it also needs to be educational." And you're like, "Well, if I sat down a player with the list of Tudor kings or something for the next 10 minutes and made them revise it, by the end of it, they probably wouldn't remember these things anyway."John Sear: So for me it's much more about let's make a thing that is fun and enjoyable and makes people want to spend time in the museum and makes people want to learn more about these things going forward. So if you used a particular character from history in the game and as long as afterwards there's some sort of direction that says, "Okay, you can learn more about this particular king or there are some interesting stories about this queen." Or whatever it is. As long as there's a kind of hand holding to the next thing, I mean that's the thing that I'm most happy about really.John Sear: Get people excited first and then worry about the kind of educational content afterwards. Sorry, I turned that question and there wasn't really a kind of tip on how to make interactive games. That was really my gripe I guess.Kelly Molson: No, it's great. I mean it really comes through how passionate you are about it. I guess it's again coming back to kind of making sure that whatever you're creating from a gaming or technology basis ties in with their culture and the heritage and the education side of the venue that you're in as well. So it's about in you're own too.John Sear: Yeah, you've said much better than I did actually. I think it's just very hard to make a game that... And games, the best part of them is how deep they are and how immersed you can get in them when actually people are walking through a space, and have only got a few minutes to play this game and actually from the museum point of view, we don't want them standing there playing a game for two hours because that uses up the device, the interactive.John Sear: So to make a game that's deep and also quick is quite hard. So, I mean, a lot of the games that you see in museums are really much more toy-like. They're these kind of little things you can have a little play with for a few minutes but really we need to get you on and moving around the space to see the next thing.Kelly Molson: So tell us a little bit more about DIY Museum Tutorials because you actually give away a lot of kind of free content and a lot of things to help museums do this themselves as well, don't you?John Sear: Yeah, I do. It's nice of me, right?Kelly Molson: It's very nice.John Sear: Well, I mean obviously there's other good reasons, right? To be sharing stuff and ultimately the stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis, I'm always learning and there's loads of people online that share their knowledge that helped me get to the place I am. So it's just sort of my way of contributing something to the kind of shared knowledge sphere, should we say?John Sear: So this set of tutorials was really designed for museums that can't afford to or don't have a lot of technological skills in house. I mean, most museums don't have a lot of money at the best of times. They might get money when they have a round of funding coming for a particular project, but the rest of the time they're kind of scraping things together.John Sear: So it was really about taking some of the projects that I've worked on where I've actually been paid to do them, and then trying to show people how you could build a kind of a simpler version yourself. Not quite to the same level, but without spending much money, and spending a bit of time.John Sear: So either you've got people in your museum who have got a little bit of an interest in tech or you've got volunteers in your museum that are happy to kind of have a bit of a play. And so these tutorials, there's about seven or eight now, they're very much geared towards smaller museums who have got no money but might have some volunteers, and that volunteer is happy to kind of get their hands a little bit dirty.John Sear: So I mean it doesn't go very technical, it's always designed. So the hardest thing is kind of using an app on a mobile phone. It's not even things like setting up a Raspberry Pi or setting up an Arduino, which I know is a big barrier.John Sear: I mean it's lovely for me that these get used so widely. I get fantastic messages from all over the world where people have set up one of these things in New Zealand or Africa or America, which is really lovely to hear about. I mean the most popular ones are the Babbling Beasts tutorial, and that is using a technology called NFC, Near-field communication to trigger media, and it started off as a project to kind of make cuddly toys talk.John Sear: So you basically take a cuddly toy and you put a mobile phone inside the cuddly toy and you record some audio, a bit like a kind of build the bear type thing, you record it straight onto the mobile phone, you put some NFC tags around your space, and if you've not seen NFC technology before, you've probably used it at some point because it's the same technology every time you go to Tesco's and buy something with your contactless credit card. It's that same wireless connectivity.John Sear: So all of the media, all of the audio stays on the device. So that means you don't need to have any kind of wifi access, which is great if you're a National Trust building or a castle where you've got big thick walls. And then it's just a case of literally you take the cuddly toy over to your tag, your marker and when you scan it the cuddly toy talks to you. And so you can do a serious version of that. It doesn't need to be in a cuddly toy. Your mobile phone can be in anything you like, you can put it in a little wooden box or you can make a little case.John Sear: We've had people, they've had knitting groups, knit cases for them, which has been lovely for some museums but essentially a way of just triggering audio or video but without even needing to touch the device. You just literally hold the device up to some kind of tag, and again, the tag can look like anything you want because the tag can stay behind something. So you can put it behind wood if you want to or behind a sign or you can put an array of tags out there. So any way you touched your phone against the whole display would trigger the audio.John Sear: So it's very much a thing of like let's get people in and using technology really quickly, and then once you've got the hang of it, you can see how far you want to go with it. So you can push it further and further. So there's some ideas there by, you can do multi-language versions of this toy if you want, where you can do a French version and a German version, an Italian version, as well as your English version, and so before the tour starts or at any point in the tour, you can scan a flag and then as you go round you get the tour in that particular language-Kelly Molson: Oh, that's brilliant, isn't it?John Sear: ... Or we've done versions with kids and adult tours, so that the tags are the same throughout, but one is told in a kind of more serious way, and another one might be told through a character, like a small dog or a cat or something.Kelly Molson: So I guess that's a really good way of trialing something, seeing what the uptake is. It's an MVP, isn't it?John Sear: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: Minimum viable product. Try this out, see what happens, you can do this all yourself and then if it's brilliant and it gets the results you want, get us in and we'll do your bigger version of it.John Sear: Yeah, I mean, ultimately that would be nice. But at the same time I'm totally happy for people not to call me in to do it. If they've made something brilliant, great. And the idea being is once they've started doing it, they get a bit more confidence. They might want to make that more game-like or so it could be a Choose Your Own Adventure style thing, it could be quiz based. But yeah, you're right.John Sear: Some people do then call me and afterwards build a kind of a more advanced one. So I've just finished doing a National Trust version with a company called Outside Studios and that's running up at the Workhouse near Nottingham and that's using phones as kind of media players, and so as you walk around the space, which doesn't have a lot of interpretation in the space, a lot of it comes through the phone or the tablet. You can just scan things as you go, and so we've made a nicer version. It's a bit more flashy, it does a few more things. It's got better housing, different updates.John Sear: So, yeah, there's lots of ways that I can sort of do better versions for people, but you absolutely don't need to call me in for this. The idea is, yeah, build your own and if you're happy with that then great.Kelly Molson: I love that. Do you get people kind of sending you, look what we've done?John Sear: Yes.Kelly Molson: We've used your tutorial and look what we've created?John Sear: It's lovely, yeah. I love getting emails from people from all over the world telling me what they've done with it, and then yeah, like photos on Twitter, you just see kids with cuddly toys in museums and you're like, oh, it's brilliant. It's really nice. So it's-Kelly Molson: That's really cool.John Sear: ... Nice to be able to share and put something back. And so yeah. So the Babbling Beast one is popular. There's a touch screen one that's very popular as well. Like how to build really simple touchscreens, using PowerPoint. Most people kind of cringe a little bit when I say PowerPoint, but the good thing is, is that everyone can use PowerPoint or have been forced to use PowerPoint at some point in their life to create a horrible slideshow, but you can build interactives with it, and the latest version is really impressive actually.John Sear: I ran a workshop a couple of weeks ago, which was using PowerPoint to build projection mapped experiences in museums and the latest version of PowerPoint supports 3D models. So you can have animated 3D models and it also has quite a lot of motion graphics in there as well. So you can do some quite fancy looking interactives using PowerPoint and no one would ever guess that you were using it. But again, it's this idea of, let's say a minimum viable product, but just giving people enough confidence they can build a little thing with it, and once they've got over that first hurdle, they go, okay, what can it do next? Okay, how do we add video to this? How do we add audio? How do we add a 3D model? And it's just nice that you can build out really quickly and then build on that knowledge.Kelly Molson: That's brilliant.Paul Wright: I've noticed in your bio you're interested in interactive fiction.John Sear: Oh, yeah.Paul Wright: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?John Sear: I mean, so interactive fiction covers a wide range of experiences. I mean originally it kind of meant the Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you've come across those?Kelly Molson: Oh yeah. Yep.John Sear: So I grew up with these and there's a number of different versions of them but I grew up with a kind of original Choose Your Own Adventure. I think more recently they're called Goosebumps, people know them as. But there was a lot of different versions of this and we've even seen it I think last Christmas through Black Mirror, the Bandersnatch.Kelly Molson: Bandersnatch, yeah.John Sear: On a side note, I actually, for that workshop I did recently showing people what you could do with PowerPoint. I built a mini version of Bandersnatch, as in, taking the video clips from it and I built that in PowerPoint to show you could do it.Paul Wright: Wow.John Sear: Sorry, that's a completely aside really.Kelly Molson: I love that.John Sear: But I don't work for Microsoft and I don't earn anything if you use it, but it's actually a really good bit of equipment, a really good tool these days, and it's got like [crosstalk 00:37:08]-Kelly Molson: Of the presentation software is available.John Sear: ... I'm sure it is. But just use that, definitely, it's too fine now, it's 30 years old. So it should be reasonable. So interactive fiction obviously started with people like Edward Packard, who's the kind of one of the fathers of these Choose Your Own Adventure books back in the kind of late 70s, early 80s, I want to say somewhere around then. And so they had the classic thing of, you'd read through a page or two of the book, and at the end of it you would get to make choices, do you want to go into the cave or do you want to leave and jump on a horse and ride out into the wilderness.John Sear: You'd make those choices and ultimately you'd have like a hundred pages and maybe 20 different endings you'd go through. And so, I quite enjoyed playing those, but they're quite a simple touch point that most people understand in terms of building things that are interactive. The simple choices you get to make as you go through is quite a commonly understood thing. So in the Babbling Beasts example, we could actually very easily make those trails, Choose Your Own Adventure style trails. But actually in more recent terms, I mean interactive fiction is a kind of it means a wider thing.John Sear: It means like any type of fiction or text based experience where you can have some kind of choice in it, and in the last five or 10 years, there's been some fantastic tools that have made this much easier. So in the old days you might have experienced like text adventures on kind of BBCs and spectrums and PCs, back in the kind of 80s and 90s. I don't know if you're quite as old as me, but these were the-Kelly Molson: We are John, we are.John Sear: ... Okay. so you might've experienced these things. But then more recently there's been some fantastic web-based tools like Twine. And again actually, I've got a tutorial based on this because I quite enjoy teaching people how to build their own interactive fiction stories, and Twine is an incredibly simple piece of technology to use. And again you start simple building Choose Your Own Adventure style choices, then as you get more into it, you can use more programming language variables and things to make it a bit more richer. But yeah, I've seen people do all sorts of interesting stuff in tools like Twine.John Sear: I mean that's what's good about in the modern age is that the tools are out there that are free and open source and a lot of cases that allow you to build these things very quickly and cheaply. And then once you get started, it's kind of like, the limits are just your own imagination. So, there's been a whole movement really with Twine where people that aren't really anything to do with games have come from different spaces and have been able to build really quite complicated and interesting games telling very personal stories, which has been really interesting, and every year there's interactive fiction competitions.John Sear: So you can look at the kind of things that people are making in this space. And then I did some work, we're trying to put these in museums. So if you go back through my kind of website history, you'll see me discussing this a few years ago, there were some fantastic experiences where you were in the museum while having a similarly related experience. So for example, there was an experience where you had a book that was written, it was a film script, and you could sit in the museum and read the script, and actually what they'd done is they built the set around you out of things that were in the museum.John Sear: So as you read about, I don't know like someone playing a piano off in another room. Actually there is a piano just off in another room and it turns out someone might be playing that at the same time or there might be a bookcase alongside you, and some of the books that are being referenced in the story you're reading are actually on that bookcase.John Sear: So it's something powerful about experiencing the story while you're sitting in the space. So I was actually trying to get museums to build interactive fiction games or stories while being in the space, using technology like Twine. So you might have, I don't know, a castle and actually you don't interact directly with the space at all, but you just stand or sit in the space while the story happens.John Sear: You can intertwine the real experience of you being in the real physical space with the virtual, which in this case, the interactive fiction games could be played on a touchscreen or you could play them on a website. So you could play them on your mobile phone, but it might be that in the interaction fiction game in order to progress, you might need to know the name of the painter in the painting in the far room.John Sear: So actually while playing the game, you have to physically walk into the fire room, look at the painting, and engage with it, perhaps look for something in the scene or look at who the painter was and then use that in the virtual game that you're playing as well.Kelly Molson: That's cool.John Sear: So we're kind of tying these two things together, but technically it was incredibly simple and if you want to do this again there's a tutorial available which teaches you how to and really simple and I just wanted to see more museums kind of play with the idea. Building games that are set in the space they're already in but without getting too worried about the technology.Kelly Molson: We will be for our listeners be linking to all of the things that John's been talking about today. So they'll be in the show notes and we will also be having this podcast transcribed as well.Kelly Molson: John, I want to ask you about a challenge that we keep hearing over and over and over again from kind of museum world and visitor attraction world and some of the challenges they have are obviously engaging with new different audiences, which we've talked about, but one of the biggest challenges that comes up is repeat visitors and how they can engage with the same people and get them to come back over and over again. What kind of advice can you offer in terms of how to bring people back to a space and then how often do you have to be looking at refreshing the game or the interactive activity that you've got to kind of reengage with the same people? That's probably a really long question.John Sear: It's a very good question. Yeah, because the repeat visitor thing is quite a hard one and there's lots of different reasons that people go back to museums or cultural things again and again. I mean a lot of this comes down to a problem that all of us face with building visitor attraction type experiences. It's just that people are generally quite time poor. They don't have a lot of time. Once they get through all the kind of day-to-day grind and work and family and commitments, often they're out seeking things that are kind of new and unique.John Sear: That is difficult obviously with the repeat visitor thing. I mean, the classic way that most of the larger institutes deal with this is obviously through their temporary exhibition spaces that you would refresh every three to six months or whatever to give people a new thing they come and see. And then obviously there's problems with that, which is often those are paid experiences and they're quite premium products unless perhaps you're on an annual pass of some kind.John Sear: I know a lot of the smaller museums, they make the basic stuff work really well, right? Like the cafes and things. The things that you're going to use again and again. So this is very technical obviously. So for us in Birmingham, we use two of Birmingham museum trust places a lot. We use the BMAG, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and we use Thinktank, which is the kind of science museum because of they've got fantastic cafe spaces and they're quite family friendly. So often we'll go in there knowing that it ticks those boxes and then we'll go and see other stuff. I mean, I'm going in there for the cultural reasons. The rest of my family, not so.John Sear: So normally we start off there with people having a coffee and things and then I'll drag them off to go see different things every time. But I mean that's more from a kind of personal point of view. From kind of the game wise thing, I mean it depends on the types of games you're making and who you're targeting it at. I mean obviously kids generally will play the same game again and again, whereas adults generally don't. We're constantly looking for the new thing. We're looking for the new show, the new film, we're not watching the same series again and again generally. We're waiting for the next series to come.John Sear: So we're expecting to see something new every time, whereas kids actually like the familiarity of doing the same thing again, which makes it quite difficult I guess to make something that's engaging for both parents and families. With games, there are different types of games, right? There are games which are much more a single play through, which might be a story based thing where it's about unlocking all of the story. But on subsequent play throughs you could have more things you can unlock, right?John Sear: So, I mean you can have side quests that you might not do the first time round, but the second time you might do, or we have things like score based games whereby you play the game again and again in order to get a better score. Yeah, I'm not sure whether those are enough reasons that people would come back again, and again. I'm generally happy if people come once and play the experience and often that means that some of the things I run will run at set times. So they might run as part of a festival.John Sear: That is the model that people like the funders such as arts council seem to be following now, which is we know that the visitors will come out for new interesting things, right? So again, talking about Birmingham and specifically, we're quite lucky that during the summer months particularly, we have different festivals happening just about every weekend and so then every time you come to somewhere like a museum, one of the big museums, there'll be a different offering because it's taking part in a different festival.John Sear: So there'll be a few of the front of house things are changing, but often that means is that some of the games that I build or I help people build are built very quickly with the idea they might only run for that one weekend or it might be used for a number of kind of temporary things, but that also means we can use live people to add to the game experience as well, which is quite nice.Kelly Molson: That sounds really fun, and I guess you've got quite a lot of flexibility in what you're doing because you're having to be a bit more agile about the time that it's on, the time of year that it's on, the venue space that it's going to be on and how many people are going to be coming in, and playing those games.John Sear: Yeah, I mean, with solely digital games. So some of the games I make are kind of entirely digital and they're not supervised. So you might pick up a tablet or something or a device that you play on, but then there's no involvement from anyone else. Well that means that game has to kind of work flawlessly all the way through and it takes a lot more work to do.John Sear: It needs to deal with all the cases where people get lost and aren't sure where they're going. The game needs to handhold them through it. Well, obviously if you're building something for a festival, for a short experience, the game doesn't have to be quite like a hundred percent proof because we know there's going to be people around to augment the game, but also to kind of help the players along.John Sear: So it means you can cut corners a bit. You go, well we think people would get lost on this floor at this point in the game, but we don't really mind because there's going to be loads of other people playing the game anyway and there's going to be some volunteers around the space who will kind of direct them in the right direction.John Sear: So yeah. So I find it easier and cheaper and quicker to make games that are kind of temporary than it is to make a game that's a hundred percent foolproof and works in every possible case.Kelly Molson: John, earlier in the podcast you mentioned immersive theatre. Is there an experience that you have at the moment that we could go and be part of?John Sear: Good question, you could actually. So there's a game I've been working on it for a few years now with a company called The Other Way Works and they are a theatre company who build interactive theatre and I'm a games company that builds theatrical games should we say, and together we've worked on a experience called A Moment of Madness, which is currently touring actually.John Sear: It's about to go to Lincoln as part of the Frequency Festival. It's been in Birmingham and London and up North to Stockton and hopefully next year it'll tour again as well. So this is kind of approach to immersive theatre and it's a hybrid immersive theatre escape game and it takes place in a car park. So, an urban stake out.John Sear: To give you the kind of rough overview, it's about a politician. He's called Michael Makerson. We think he's a good guy, but as with most politicians, he's got a bit of a-Kelly Molson: Who knows?John Sear: ... Shady past or a shady present, and what we know about today is that he is going to give some kind of press conference about a deal that he's struck with an electric car company, which is, it's good in this kind of post Brexit world to have connections with electric car companies.John Sear: So he's going to do an announcement about that in about 90 minutes time in the kind of run up to that. We know that he's going to have a meeting in a car park, which perhaps has got some kind of dodgy connotation to it. So that's the kind of starting point. The game is played by 24 players at any one time. They're split up into six teams of four and each of those teams is eventually assigned a car, so they're going to be staking out a car park. The car is stationary by the way. They're not going to be driving around after him.John Sear: People always ask me that, "How do you get insurance for people to drive cars?" I'm like, "They don't. They're on a stake out. They're supposed to be hiding." You buy a ticket and you turn up for the experience under the pretence that you're coming to a business seminar. So we are hosting a kind of fake business seminar in a conference centre and obviously then once they come in, they get their lanyard and things which actually assigns them to a colour coded team.John Sear: They come into the space and when the business seminar starts, the doors close, and actually we reveal the real reason, which as everybody in the room knows, we are working for MI5 and we're investigating this politician, Michael Makerson and what he's up to. So we're tasked with this mission of going into the car park, sitting in the car and kind of watching what he gets up to.Kelly Molson: This sounds great. I should get a ticket.John Sear: It is actually. I'm not trying to do a really good job of selling it, but it is a really good experience.Kelly Molson: I'm sold.John Sear: Okay. Come and do it. Come to Lincoln and do it. So yeah. So you spend the kind of middle section of the game, which is 45 minutes, watching what he gets up to in the car park, who does he meet and while you're kind of trying to see what he's up to, you've got a list of suspects essentially of who you might be meeting and who they are and you can investigate them.John Sear: So a lot of the story happens through a mobile phone as you can see the connection. I like using mobile phones. You find a mobile phone, a burner phone in the car along with the collection of items that the MI5 has left for you, and what it turns out is that working for us is his personal secretary who's called Andrea.John Sear: So she suspects he's up to something and she's working for MI5 as well. So what she's going to do is she's going to text us throughout the hour or so we're in the car and tell us what he's up to.Kelly Molson: I feel like you shouldn't tell us any more, John, because I want to-John Sear: Well, I'm going to stop before I get to the...Kelly Molson: ... You need to stop.John Sear: Yeah, because obviously there's a lot that happens and there's a lot that I'm going to give a talk on this actually later in the week where I do all the spoilers. But ultimately in this game you're having this conversation with Andrea, she's given you things to do, things to watch out for, keeps you posted as to what Michael is up to. But there are escape room style puzzles that happen.John Sear: So you're trying to collect information about him and because it's an immersive experience each car has kind of leeway to go down the investigation direction they want to go. So one particular car might investigate his relationship with his wife or another car might investigate, what's happening with him and his business partner, and so then ultimately you're going to come back together, and then the players, the MI5 agents, get to kind of present all the information they've got and then make a decision about whether or not to kind of, what should we do with this information? Should we try and stop his career or do we support him on his way to becoming prime minister? And so, yeah, we've been running that around the country, and actually one of the things the politician has is this kind of a blonde wig, which makes him very visible, and it wasn't the intention when we started out, but it ended up looking quite a lot like a certain prime minister we have now.Kelly Molson: Wow, wow. So current.John Sear: So he gets, yeah, it's surprising. All of that stuff that we wrote about four years ago is all coming true. So I think we take a lot of the blame for all of the mess of the political spectrum at the moment.Kelly Molson: John, thank you so much for sharing that.John Sear: But I should say because it's supported by the arts, this show, it's incredibly cheap to come to because we don't want to make the cost of attending a barrier. So whereas like an escape room of 90 minutes is often 50, £60 a person. This is normally £40 a car and in some spaces it's been entirely free actually, which is quite nice.Kelly Molson: Oh, wow.John Sear: So there's no barrier to playing normally.Kelly Molson: Brilliant. John, thank you. We have absolutely loved speaking to you today. It's been so much fun. As I said, we'll put all of the links to all of John's information and the DIY Tutorials and where you can go and buy those tickets in the show notes. But John, thank you for coming on Skip the Queue. It's been awesome.John Sear: No problem at all. Thank you so much. It's been lovely to talk to you both and now I can get back to talking about Tottenham, right?Kelly Molson: Maybe not. We'll save that for another podcast, John.John Sear: Thank you so much.Kelly Molson: You can find links and notes from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast or search Skip the Queue on iTunes and Spotify to subscribe. Please remember to leave a rating. It helps other people find us.Kelly Molson: This podcast was brought to you by Rubber Cheese, an award winning digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for visitor attractions. Find out how we can create a better experience for you and your guests at rubbercheese.com.

Derrick Adams is a Baltimore-born, Brooklyn, New York-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations.  Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation’s Studio Program.  His work resides in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

In Episode 3, I speak to Sara Wajid, Head of Engagement at the Museum of London, about her sector-changing approach to 'The Past Is Now' (2017) exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Infused throughout our conversation are references to  Museum Detox, a networking group for BAME professionals in museums and heritage that we are both members of and which Sara co-founded when she was working at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. We talk about how Sara brings her journalism and literary studies background to inject powerful storytelling into the projects she works on to explore and further develop decolonial methodology in a museum and display context. A key part of this approach is the two-way collaboration between people who work in museums and members of the wider community, including artists and activists, and the 'emotional sledgehammer' this type of work can bring to a display like 'The Past Is Now'. Experimentation and the freedom to fail is so important and this exhibition explored the possibility of finding a new language and way of talking about collections relating to empire, and how visitors responded to this. Within this context of testing, one of the aims was to display a more honest reckoning of empire and to explore how you tell stories - and whose stories are told - as part of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's redevelopment plans so it could be reoriented for a younger, diverse urban population. For me, one of the key points in this episode is to recognise the incredible alchemy that results when you bring together powerful, innovative storytelling and experimentation into a museum. And the role of funders is vital to this: I wonder if The Past Is Now would have happened without Arts Council England's Changer Makers programme. This type of work is difficult, emotional and unsettling but what came out of the conversation with Sara is that it is also joyful and exciting. Her work shows how you can be brave when you are not naturally brave and that's an important lesson for us all. Links of interest: The Art of Leadership - leading to create greater impact with Hilary Carty, Sara Wajid & David Jubb - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99uTvT6tqqs  How can you decolonise museums? - Museum Next presentations by Sara Wajid & Shaheen Kasmani - https://www.museumnext.com/article/decolonising-museums/  Untold Stories: Birmingham, the British Empire and Bangladeshi Curry - https://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/features/untold-stories-birmingham-british-empire-bangladeshi-curry/  Birmingham Museum defends exhibition of 'evil' British Empire [behind paywall] - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/birmingham-museum-defends-exhibition-of-evil-british-empire-nb05nsbzz#  Follow Sara @Waji35 This episode was Presented/Produced by Sushma Jansari (@TheWonderHouse) and Produced by Nick Harris (@2ndThoughtTank)

Artist Bethany Collins, who has exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York City and the Birmingham Museum of Art, talks with WDAV on this episode of Piedmont Arts. She speaks about her signature works, in which she alters words and printed texts in order to stimulate viewers to consider social issues. Learn more about her artist talk Coffee and Conversation with Bethany Collins at Davidson College .

We recently stumbled upon a fascinating blog post written last year by Graham Boettcher, Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama. The headline read, “DIRECTOR RECKONS WITH ART MUSEUM’S UGLY PAST” and looks at the museum’s troubling Jim Crow-era policies in the first dozen years of its existence. We sat down with Graham to discuss this and much more.

Hello there! You are very welcome to this special, bonus episode of The Waiting Room! Just in case you've been hiding under a rock the last while and aren't blindingly aware, one of the biggest dates on the veterinary calendar is almost upon us. Yes, on April 4th, thousands of you are going to land in Birmingham for what promises to be an incredible few days at the BSAVA Congress 2019. Don't worry is you're head is spinning, but ours is too, just a tad. There is so much going on over the four dats , it's easy to get confused about what to do, what talks to attend, so on this mini episode, I'll give you a little bit of a highlight reel! Thursday, 4th at 4 PM, Hall 1 you'll be welcomed by BSAVA President Philip Lhermette followed by the prestigious BSAVA Awards, giving props to the unsung heroes of small animal medicine. One lady who's up for an award is friend of Covetrus the lovely Danielle Greenberg from the award nominated Liverpool Vets. Check out www.theliverpoolvets.co.uk We're rooting for you here, Danielle! That night, get the popcorn out for Mama Mia and it's follow up., Here We Go Again Friday night. If film ain't your thing, you can pop on your Sunday best and head over to the stunning Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for a decadent evening of drinks and food, all in the company of tori Handsley, harpist extraordinaire. And Sandals are the ready because the V19 Beach Party on Saturday night is sure to be a crowd pleaser with acts like Xfactor's Duke; Guitarist to the stars Mark Walby, who's worked with the likes of Cheryl and the Saturdays, and Frazer lepford. And he's actually touted as the next Ed Sheeran. So, eh no pressure there pal! By day, congress will play host to a veritable Aladdin's cave of treasure in the form of lectures and talks from some of the industry's biggest players. So, who's on the Agenda I hear you ask? Laura Black, Carolin Crowe, JD Foster, Ron Ofri, and as an added bonus, Covetrus are partnering up with BSAVA on talks from Gillian Page, Mickey Tivers, Miles Russell and Ruth Wilis. So, 450 hours of lectures, 30 streams. If only you could be bilocate, eh? There will also be a series of wetlabs where you can get your hands dirty. In the exhibitor zone, you'll meet dozens of your favourite brands, and the Covetrus team will be there at Stand C31, so make sure you pop along for a few treats you won't want to miss. We'll have plenty of prizes on stand, talks from the talented team in software solutions, and, you know them and love them, we'll have our diagnostics, equipment and consultancy specialist on hand to answer your burning questions. For more information or to check out the full list of lectures, visit bsavacongress.com and don't forget to join the conversation by tweeting us at @covetrusuk or use the # covetrusatcpongress. Thanks for tuning into this very quick episode of the podcast, I'll be back as usual next week with another amazing chat, but until then continue to build a practice to be proud of. Be sure to check out www.bsavacongress.com for more info about Congree and don't forget to follow us on Twitter @CovetrusUK

In episode 42 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering the sacrifices photographers make to create work and the commitment required from friends and family to support those dedicated to the medium.  You can read the full article featuring Don McCullin and Giles Duley mentioned in this week's podcast here www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/03/don-mccullin-giles-duley-photography-retrospective-tate-interview Plus this week photographer Brian Griffin takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer's the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?' Brian Griffin was born in 1948 and lives and works in London. Considered “the photographer of the decade” by The Guardian in 1989, “the most unpredictable and influential British portrait photographer of the last decades” by the British Journal of Photography in 2005 and “one of Britain's most influential photographers” by the World Photography Organisation in 2015, Brian has worked as a freelance photographer, filmmaker and TV commercials and music video film director since 1972. Brian Griffin has published over thirty books and was awarded the Best Photography book in the World at the Barcelona Primavera Fotografica 1991. Life magazine used his photograph A Broken Frame on the front cover of its supplement The Greatest Photographs Of The 80's. In 1991, after twenty years, he “walked away from photography” and began a career creating advertising commercials and music videos. He returned to photography in 2002 and has had more than fifteen solo shows and four retrospectives since. Brian has won many awards including four ‘Most Outstanding Awards' from the D&AD (Design and Art Direction), and the ‘Freedom of the City of Arles, France'. He won the ‘Best Commercial of the Year' at the Bafta Academy awards in 1992 and his short movie Claustrofoamia received the ‘Golden Monkey Award' for Best Film at the Mons International Short Film Festival in Belgium and the ‘Certificate of Merit' at the Chicago International Film Festival, both in 1995. In September 2013, Brian received the ‘Centenary Medal' from the Royal Photographic Society in recognition of a lifetime achievement in photography. In 2014, he received an Honorary Doctorate by Birmingham City University for his lifetime contribution to the City of Birmingham. Brian Griffin's photographs are held in the permanent collections of major art institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Arts Council of Great Britain, London; the British Council, London; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; the Art Museum Reykjavik, Iceland; the Mast Foundation, Bologna; and the Museu da Imagem, Braga, Portugal. www.briangriffin.co.uk You can also access and subscribe to these podcasts at SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/unofphoto on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-photographic-life/id1380344701 on Player FM https://player.fm/series/a-photographic-life and Podbean www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/i6uqx-6d9ad/A-Photographic-Life-Podcast Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer in Professional Photography at the University of Gloucestershire, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n' Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry. His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay has been screened across the UK and the US in 2018 and will be screened in the US and Canada in 2019. © Grant Scott 2019

Mohammed Ali is a renowned aerosol artist but in late 2017/early 2018 he became a curator - staging an exhibition called Knights Of The Raj at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery dedicated to Birmingham's curry pioneers of the 60's and 70's. This was before the city became known for its (mostly Pakistani run)Balti restaurants. The majority of the original curry houses were run by Bangadeshi immigrants - of which Mohammed's father was one.

In episode 6 of WGB, we vist Christina Bright at her home in Newark, NJ. We talk to Christina aka Chris Miss about what it is to be a creative in addtion to being a mom, actress, model, and influencer among the many other hats she wears. _ 
Instagram.com/ChrisMiss_ Website: www.BryonSummers.com www.
Instagram.com/WereGettingBetter — Photographer Spotlight: Dawoud Bey Bey, born in New York in 1953 holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. but before all of that he credited a 1969, visit to the exhibition Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for his determination to become an artist. Ten years later, in 1979 he exhibited his first one-person show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Bey has held numerous exhibitions worldwide, at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. In 2012 the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago organized Dawoud Bey: Picturing People, a survey exhibition of his work from 1981-2012. Harlem, USA was published by Yale University Press in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2012, where the work was exhibited in its entirety for the first time since it was first shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He recently completed a project with the Birmingham Museum of Art that commemorates the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project. Bey's works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both in the United States and abroad. In addition to his photographs, Bey's writings have appeared in publications throughout Europe and the United States, including High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975, The Van DerZee Studio, and David Hammons: Been There Done That. He has curated a wide range of exhibitions at museums and institutions. For more on Dawoud Bey check out Rena Bransten Gallery dot com — Music:
KB @push-music --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bryonsummers/support

Birmingham Hippodrome is currently producing 2,241 Reasons to Remember - a major art installation by award-winning arts organisation Metro-Boulot-Dodo to commemorate those that lost their lives in the Birmingham Blitz in WW2. Surrounding the installation will be a number of listening booths where members of the public can hear first hand accounts of how the Birmingham Blitz effected the civilians of Birmingham. This is the second preview. Metro_Boulot-Dodo and Birmingham Hippodrome would like to thank Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and member from Birmingham Air Rads Remembrance Association for the oral archives used in these recordings. 2,241 Reasons to Remember is a free event taking place by Birmingham Rag Markets from 19-21 November.

Birmingham Hippodrome is currently producing 2,241 Reasons to Remember - a major art installation by award-winning arts organisation Metro-Boulot-Dodo to commemorate those that lost their lives in the Birmingham Blitz in WW2. Surrounding the installation will be a number of listening booths where members of the public can hear first hand accounts of how the Birmingham Blitz effected the civilians of Birmingham. This is a sneak preview. Metro_Boulot-Dodo and Birmingham Hippodrome would like to thank Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and member from Birmingham Air Rads Remembrance Association for the oral archives used in these recordings. 2,241 Reasons to Remember is a free event taking place by Birmingham Rag Markets from 19-21 November.

Chris Fern, Staffordshire Hoard Research Project, and Pieta Greaves and Eleanor Blakelock, Birmingham Museums Trust, talk to Jenni Butterworth about their quest to understand the extraordinary craftsmen who created the Staffordshire Hoard treasure. They discuss: The scientific and archaeological techniques that are being used to understand the hoard at a microscopic level and work out how it was made. How the craftsmen who made the hoard might have worked, and what their workshops may have been like. Where the material and skills used in the hoard came from. KEYWORDS: Staffordshire Hoard, Anglo Saxons, Mercia, Art, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG, Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Books

Chris Fern and George Speake, Staffordshire Hoard Research Project and Cathy Shingler, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, talk to Jenni Butterworth about what the hoard tells us about Anglo-Saxon warriors and their beliefs. They discuss: How the intricate designs and high level of artistic achievement of the hoard pieces are shedding new light on the people who owned them, their beliefs and lifestyles. What the weapons in the hoard tell us about Anglo-Saxon warfare. Their work to understand why and how the hoard might have been buried. KEYWORDS: Staffordshire Hoard, Anglo Saxons, Mercia, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG, Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Books, Warriors, Beowulf

This new series of three audio podcasts explores the Staffordshire Hoard, the exceptional collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver treasure discovered in 2009, currently undergoing one of the UK’s largest archaeological research projects. Deb Klemperer, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, David Symons, Birmingham Museums Trust, and Chris Fern, Staffordshire Hoard Research Project, talk to Jenni Butterworth about their journey to unlock the secrets of the treasure so far. They discuss: How unexpected the discovery of the hoard was, and the significance of where it was found. How the hoard is shedding new light on what we know about the ancient kingdom of Mercia and its people. Where the artefacts in the hoard might have come from. KEYWORDS: Staffordshire Hoard, Discovery, Detectorists, Anglo Saxons, Mercia, Gold, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG, Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Books

The collection of Pre-Raphaelite artworks at Birmingham Museums Trust is renowned throughout the world. It includes more than 3000 paintings, drawings and prints as well as unique examples of decorative art and design.Victoria Osborne, Curator of Fine Art, faced a major challenge when she was asked by Mike Gibbs, Publisher of History West Midlands to choose a favourite piece.Surprisingly, Victoria did not select one of the collection’s iconic works. Instead, she presents a small but very fine work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1783-1854) of Saint Cecilia designed to illustrate Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Palace of Art. KETWORDS: Pre-Raphaelites, Art, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG

Amongst Birmingham Museums Trust collection of more than 800 000 objects, its collection of Baroque fine art attracts visitors and researchers from all over the world. Helen Hillyard, a National Gallery Curatorial Trainee supported by the Art Fund, is researching this exciting collection.She talks with Mike Gibbs, Publisher of History West Midlands, about one of her favourite works - Saint Andrew Praying Before his Martyrdom by the Florentine Artist Carlo Dolci (1616-1686). KEYWORDS: Art, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG

Within its collection of more than 800 000 objects Birmingham Museums Trust is the guardian of many treasures of Islamic art. The significance of some of these objects has only recently been recognised. Rebecca Bridgman is the recently appointed curator who is mapping the collection for the first time. She tells Mike Gibbs, Publisher of History West Midlands, about the museum’s exciting plans and selects a recently acquired work – “Calliope” by Halima Cassell – to introduce this unique collection. KEYWORDS: Art, Islamic, South Asian, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG

The discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard – now jointly owned by Birmingham and Stoke on Trent Councils – began new and exciting research into the so-called “Dark Ages.” Including more than 4 000 objects – many of them gold or silver – has brought to life the kings, warriors and craftsmen portrayed in the epic poem “Beowulf”. Pieta Greaves, the Conservation Co-ordinator of the Hoard, chose a beautiful gold seax handle from all of these treasures. She tells Mike Gibbs, Publisher of History West Midlands, how this object reveals new insights into the world of the Anglo Saxon warrior. KEYWORDS: Staffordshire Hoard, Anglo Saxons, Mercia, Warriors, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, BMAG, Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Books

Graham C. Boettcher, PhD, the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, presents Paris on the Bayou: The French Artistic Presence on the Gulf Coast for the 2011 Antiques Forum at the Historic New Orleans Collection.

Jesse Alexander has been involved in photography and especially motorsports  photography since the early 1950s when he covered the original Mexican Road Race.  He spent many years in Europe covering Formula One and famous long distance sports car races including the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Mille Miglia, and Targa Florio. In that period of time he also photographed theater and music personalities for the New York Times.  His work is held by numerous private collectors and has been exhibited in museums in the United States, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Akron Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He has produced several films and published many books with his most recent being Monaco, The Golden Age of the Grand Prix with the foreword by Sir Jackie Stewart.  Jesse’s current body of work includes travel photographs of Iceland, the Galapagos Islands, and birds.

Over 3,000 hours of work and 160 pounds of welded parts went into some of Craig Wedderspoon’s recent works, which travelled from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham. Wedderspoon’s sculptures are visual philosophy, engaging the viewing experience and spaces created in his work. Here, he discusses the work he does at the metal and ceramics shop on the University of Alabama campus.

This week: Live from Miami, well it was broadcast live at the time, whatever, anyways, Sharon Louden!! Sharon M. Louden graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University, School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Sharon Louden's work has also been written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other publications. She has received a grant from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and has participated in residencies at Tamarind Institute, Urban Glass and Art Omi. Louden's animations continue to be screened and featured in many film festivals and museums all over the world. Her animation, Carrier, premiered in the East Wing Auditorium of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in March, 2011 in a historical program of abstract animation since 1927. Sharon also premiered a new animation titled, Community, at the National Gallery of Art in the program, "Cine Concert: Abstract Film and Animation Since 1970" on September 8, 2013. Louden was commissioned by the Weisman Art Museum to make a site-specific work in dialogue with Frank Gehry's new additions to the museum. Entitled Merge, this solo exhibition consisted of over 350,000 units of aluminum extending over a 3,000 square foot space and was on view from October 2011 through May 2012. This piece was then reconfigured and permanently installed in Oak Hall at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT and completed in January, 2013. Also in 2013, Louden received a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in the category of Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition of new work including Community (the animation that premiered at the National Gallery of Art), as well a site-specific installation, painting, drawing and sculpture at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York in October through November, 2013. Currently on view is  a solo exhibition of Louden's paintings and drawings at Beta Pictoris/Maus Contemporary Art in Birmingham, Alabama, which will run through February 16, 2014. Sharon Louden has taught for more than 20 years since graduating from Yale in 1991. Her teaching experience includes studio and professional practice classes to students of all levels in colleges and universities throughout the United States. Colleges and universities at which she has lectured and taught include: Kansas City Art Institute, College of Saint Rose, Massachusetts College of Art, Vanderbilt University and Maryland Institute College of Art. Sharon currently teaches at the New York Academy of Art in New York City. Last summer, Sharon taught experimental drawing and collage in the School of Art at Chautuaqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York. In addition to teaching at the New York Academy of Art, Sharon also conducts a popular Lecture Series where she interviews luminaries and exceptional individuals in the art world and from afar. Louden is also the editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The book is already on its fourth printing since the first run sold out before its official release on October 15th, and has been #1 on Amazon.com's Bestseller List of Business Art References. It was also on Hyperallergic's List of Top Art Books of 2013. Recent press includes an interview in Hyperallergic blogazine, "How do Artists Live?".  A book tour started on November 2, 2013 which includes Sharon Louden and other contributors visiting cities across the United States and in Europe through 2015.  Highlights include an event in the Salon at the Art Basel Miami Beach Art Fair this past December, 2013 as well as a discussion and book event at the 92nd St Y in New York and a panel discussion at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC in January, 2014. For more information on the book tour, please click here.  In addition, she continues to conduct Glowtown workshops in schools and not-for-profit organizations across the country. Louden is also active on boards and committees of various not-for-profit art organizations and volunteers her time to artists to further their careers. Sharon is a full-time practicing, professional artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

This week: Amanda talks to artist Skylar Fein!   Skylar Fein was born in Greenwich Village and raised in the Bronx. He has had many careers including teaching nonviolent resistance under the umbrella of the Quakers, working for a gay film festival in Seattle, stringing for The New York Times and as pre-med student at University of New Orleans where he moved one week before Hurricane Katrina hit. In the wreckage of New Orleans, Fein found his new calling as an artist, experimenting with color and composition of the detritus of Katrina. His work soon became known for its pop sensibility as well as its hard-nosed politics. After a few starring roles in group shows, he had his first solo show in May 2008 at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans. In the fall of 2008, his Prospect.1: Biennial installation, "Remember the Upstairs Lounge," shined a spotlight on an overlooked piece of New Orleans history: a fire that swept through a French Quarter bar in 1973, killing everyone inside. The worst fire in New Orleans history has never been solved. His installation walked visitors right through the swinging bar doors, and offered visual riffs on politics and sexuality circa 1973. The piece was praised in Artforum, Art In America, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, among others. In late 2009, Fein had his first solo museum show, "Youth Manifesto," at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The exhibition was an ode to punk rock as a force for social and cultural upheaval. True to form, the opening reception was shut down by police responding to the look of the unlikely art-going crowd. In March 2010, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery presented Fein's solo installation, “Skylar Fein: Rise of the Youth Front" at VOLTA Art Fair in New York during Armory Week. This installation drew thousands of people and delved into revolutionary politics past and present, a continuing theme in Fein's work.In May 2010,Fein was invited by the New York curatorial project No Longer Empty to recreate his "Remember the Upstairs Lounge" installation in a vacant Chelsea space.The exhibition, once again, drew thousands of visitors and sparked renewed interest in this piece of history. In September 2011, Fein exhibited over eighty new works in his solo exhibition Junk Shot at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans. This exhibition embodied this artist’s turn towards formalism and art historical reference while maintaining Fein’s iconic sensibilities and aesthetic. Skylar Fein was the recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award and his work is in several prominent collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, The Louisiana State Museum, The Birmingham Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and collectors Beth Rudin DeWoody, Lance Armstrong, and Lawrence Benenson.

A first look at the exhibit "Suspended"http://www.archive.org/download/BirminghamMuseumOfArtVideoPodcast005newVersion/Bma005.mp4

http://www.archive.org/download/BirminghamMuseumOfArtVideoPodcast004_210/Bma004.mp4Asian Art exhibits

Birmingham Museum of Art Video Podcast: Episode 003http://www.archive.org/download/BirminghamMuseumOfArtVideoPodcast003/BmaVideoPodcast003.mp4

Birmingham Museum of Art Video Podcast 002http://www.archive.org/download/BirminghamMuseumOfArtVideoPodcast002/BmaPodcast002oct42009.mp4

Birmingham Museum of Art: Video Podcast 001September 29, 2009http://www.archive.org/download/BmaPodcast001a/BmaPodcast001sep292009.mp4

Don Wood, Chief Curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art, delivers the opening lecture at the museum Members' preview of Eye to the East: The Turner Collection of Chinese Art. www.columbiamuseum.org questions: pnugent@columbiamuseum.org