Barber Institute’s Head of Public Engagement, Jen Ridding, with nursing students courtesy The Barber Institute of Fine Arts
Cultural institutions worldwide have come up with all sorts of clever and compassionate ways of trying to cope during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, the art gallery at the University of Birmingham, UK, has engaged with the crisis in a very innovative way by launching a Nurse in Residence programme (not artist nurse). Jane Nicol, senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Nursing and a registered nurse, will “over the next twelve months be looking at the Barber’s collection through her unique lens and developing ways of using these major works of art to inform community healthcare and enrich medical training”, says a statement. Nicol will turn her gaze to works in the collection by artists such as Rubens, Van Gogh and Magritte. The move is part of a year-long health and wellbeing initiati
Museums fighting for survival, national charity warns January 22 2021, 12.03am
Supermundane Hope Patch is up for sale as part of Art Fund’s crowdfunding campaign (Art Fund/PA)
Museums and galleries are “fighting for survival” following the latest lockdown, a national charity has warned.
Others could follow in the footsteps of London’s Florence Nightingale Museum, which has previously announced it is closing for the “foreseeable future”.
Olympic artist Sir Anish Kapoor said the nation’s museums face “great difficulty”.
Art Fund, the national charity for art, predicted that small institutions are likely to suffer most and said more help is needed.
Two paintings by Emily Carr
Emily Carr is one of Canada’s best-known artists, but the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria has held few of her works until now. These two paintings were acquired by the paternal and maternal grandmothers of the brothers Ian and Andrew Burchett, who have donated them to the gallery along with a number of other Canadian paintings from their family’s collection. The works date to two distinct moments of Carr’s career: the earlier, from around 1907, depicts a Nisga’a totem pole reflecting Carr’s long interest in indigenous Canadian communities; the later, an untitled landscape thought to date to the early 1930s, evinces the post-Impressionist influences Carr picked up during her studies in France.