Created in Birmingham

Pop-up arts gallery, BlowCreates, is due to open in the Custard Factory’s Zellig building on 25 January.

This newly established PR and marketing venture had been set up by two Birmingham City University students. Follow their progress on Facebook and Tumblr, where they’ve been offering sneak peeks into the kind of artists we can expect to see in the gallery.

Blow will bring a new, exciting and innovative arts venue to Birmingham, selling work by painters, photographers, illustrators, sculptors, designers and more, many of whom are current students or graduates from Arts Universities.

The launch event looks set to be an interesting evening, with music, drinks and live art from local illustrator Joel Millerchip.

Brightspace in association with mac are holding a two day Creative Careers Festival for 13-18 year olds on 28 & 29 January 2011.

Covering everything from fashion, photography, architecture and design to filmmaking, music, dance and theatre, the festival will allow students and teachers to explore creative careers and the routes into them.

Students will have the option to book into sessions catering specifically to their interests. Through a programme of workshops, demonstrations, seminars, mentoring and networking opportunities, and panel discussions with industry professionals, students will be able to find out what opportunities are available within the creative sector.

The event is free, and booking is now open. Take a look at the sessions running and find out how to book via the Creative Careers website.

They’re also looking for a team of volunteers to help out during the festival. If you’re over 18 and fancy it, find out more and how to apply online.

Another Christmas fair to add to the calender, hosted by Tiger Bam at Margaret St. School of Art, on 5 December.

They’re currently on the hunt for interesting and creative stallholders, from vintage wear to photographers to poets, if you have a craft to sell or talent to show off, send them an email at tigerbam@hotmail.com. £5 will get you a stall for the day, which is 12 noon – 8pm.

The Arts Council recently asked for regional submissions to win a significant pot of money under the title ‘Artists Taking the Lead’ - linking into themes of the Cultural Olympiad, and leading up to the 2012 Olympics.

The first selection process has happened, and details of the potential regional winners have been announced and can be found here.  Unsurprisingly, all of the West Midlands shortlisted are designed to happen in Birmingham (with perhaps the exception of Imagineer Productions – which doesn’t specify, but has obvious Coventry connections?) and so it seemed relevant to point it out to the CiB readers and point you to the site where comments are invited on which idea excites you the most.

I have rather strong feelings on the selected few and would be curious to find out what you all think.  If any particularly strike you (either positively or negatively!) then feel free to leave a quick comment below explaining why.

Okay.  Still trying to creep back into things after spending ludicrous amounts of time in a darkened room with no technology to make me worse.  If I’ve missed your ‘thing’ then sorry, and if you have a ‘thing’ you think is good, tell me about it!

In the meantime, two things that compliment one another have come to my attention.

Firstly, an opportunity:

INTER?OGATION: WALSALL

Call to Artists:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become a secret agent for a day in order to interrogate the public spaces of Walsall.

Using the New Art Gallery Walsall as a base you will investigate the artist’s role in the post-industrial world through one of four methods:

INTER?OGATION: ACTION RESEARCH     (09/09/09)
INTER?OGATION: CONSULTATION         (16/09/09)
INTER?OGATION: COLLABORATION     (23/09/09)
INTER?OGATION: INTERVENTION         (30/09/09)

INTER?OGATION: WALSALL explores the impact that one artist (you) can make in one place, in one day.

This programme of work is organised by Longhouse and the New Art Gallery Walsall, working with lead artist Anna Francis (who can also be found here), and is designed to investigate the impact of short, sharp interventions within the public realm.  Deadline for expressions of interest is fairly soon – 12pm Friday 28 August 2009 - so go visit the site to find out more.

Secondly, I really enjoy the idea of creative practice being fused with more spy-like activities – interrogations and investigations.. where everyone gets to be a secret agent and have their own missions!  So for those of you whose toes are curling at me daring to mention WALSALL in a CiB post, I wanted to temper that with a signpost towards a great Birmingham artist – Nikki Pugh. I feel she really embodies this excitement within her practice, but best of all has taken the time to document in detail how she’s used this approach with great effect in her “How to Wow” series.

Do you know of any other local artists who work in this way?

Thanks for the thoughts and input into the future of CiB.  I hope it didn’t seem I was suggesting it be disbanded – I wanted more to open up debate on how technology itself has moved on from when CiB began and that the direction/organisation/intention of CiB needs looking at.  Your suggestions have been very interesting and insightful – many of you proposing things I have been musing over anyway (eg. a collaborative approach, funding avenues, etc.) and in the next few weeks I’m going to be following some of these things up.

In the meantime, Birmingham’s creative communities continue to toil away and many things have been going on.  Here’s a snapshot of where we’re at right now!

‘Hey for Lubberland!’ can be spotted gracing the canals around Brindley Place.  This work, by Simon and Tom Bloor (and part of Ikon’s off-site projects) will be in situ on the towpath behind Bank Restaurant in Brindleyplace until 13th September 2009.  Visitors can be transported by this working barge, and whilst onboard peruse the floating library of utopian design.  The title ‘Hey for Lubberland!’ was derived from a 17th century English ballad about the New World, mistaken for utopia, but in fact a kind of fool’s paradise.  You can be transported between 13:00 and 17:00 on Tuesdays – Sundays, and best of all admission is free!

If you’re interested in creative networking opportunities, then there’s a new group which will have it’s first meeting on August 13th.  Creative Playground is being organised by Steve Gray and Kate Manion, and offers:

..a chance for people who work in a professional capacity in the creative and digital sectors to get together for drinks and a chat, make new friends and hopefully make some new collaborations as well. Ultimately it is about strengthening the city’s creative community and we’ll be looking to the RDAs and various bodies for support to help us do this.

It looks like a slightly different group of people to those you might meet at BSMC etc. and will hopefully prove rather interesting!  You need to signup with meetup.com and then apply to become a member as there is a selection process as explained here:

The ground rules of joining are: 1) You must be in a professional role within the creative industries, 2) You or your business must be located in Birmingham, 3) You must fill out all the introductory fields in your profile with sufficient detail, 4) You must upload a photo of yourself to your profile. No company brands etc.

Also on Thursday 13th August is the private view of a brand new collection of work, entitled SAMPLE:

New work has been created by a range of Midlands artists including Daniel Westwood, Martin Donnelly, Matt Clugston, Steve Ellis, and Joe Mitchelmore.  The work will be available to view online after the launch at the SAMPLE website, so even if you can’t make it you don’t have to miss out!

And lastly, so that this post isn’t completely ridiculously long, on a transatlantic note, Birmingham-based photographer Chris Keenan (who recently featured in the Visual / Art of Ideas 2 exhibition) has had a piece of work selected for a world-class international exhibition, Art of Photography.

This year they received 16,000 entries from 57 countries.  111 images were chosen for the final exhibition and Chris Keenan’s Franz Joseph Glacier (above) was one of them. The selection was made by Charlotte Cotton, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

If you’re likely to be in and around the San Diego area any time between 29th August 2009 and 1st November 2009 then stop by the Lyceum Theatre Gallery and marvel at some Birmingham talent!

I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways.  I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling.  Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.

Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work.  With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal.  And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design.  Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.

“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online.  They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!

If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change.  The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users?  Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input.  THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!

I was really touched by what Chris wrote about Baldy’s Blog in his thank you post last Thursday. It got me thinking that if we could harness the huge support of the creative community which made it possible for CiB to win an award, what could we do if we used that support within project which would affect people who need it most, for example a charity?

When I was looking at Ben Javens’s website shop yesterday I had a flash of inspiration. Here is my idea:

• Brum’s best known 2D artists donate an original image, drawing, photograph etc. to CiB
• CiB sets up an online shop using a website service like Cafe Press.
  
• CiB sells limited edition t shirts, canvas bags, pin badges etc which sport the original images
• All the profits go to a Birmingham based charity suggested by you, the CiB readers.

So, that is the bare bones of an idea which could be made into a rather nice charity project, with a bit of your help. What I am asking you, the readers is:

• Would anyone like to offer an image / illustration to be used?
• Can anyone recommended a Cafe Press type service?
• Most importantly: What Birmingham based charity could the proceeds go to?

Answers in the comments please! Any other ideas / comments gratefully received.

The next Creative Networks event is Land of Promise: BFI National Archive on Thursday 29th January – From 6.00pm until 10.00pm at tic at Millennium Point. This month’s guest speaker is Jan Faull, Archive Producer at the British Film Institute (BFI) who will introduce and explore highlights from key documentary projects made possible through the BFI National Archive. It is free to attend.

For those who have never been to Creative Networks I can wholly recommend it. They always choose really inspirational speakers like  Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac, Kurt & Courtney) and of course Pete Ashton and Stef Lewandowski (founders of this here blog).

At each event their is an opportunity to pitch your business, project idea or to just introduce yourself to the audience. Your details then go on to a rather handsome newsletter and the website. If you would like to pitch at the next CN event please contact Dave Taylor on 07989 498 550 or email creative.networks@tic.ac.uk.