Created in Birmingham

• Job listing for Birmingham Contemporary Art Forum: Call for Proposals (The Event)
  Good to hear this is happening again, I liked the last one. “Birmingham Contemporary Art Forum is pleased to announce it is currently seeking projects from artists and curators in the UK for inclusion in The Event 2011, to take place 21 – 30 October”
• Happy Birthday to Frilly! – blog – frilly
  A big happy birthday indeed to Frilly
• Experiencing Burningham’s Live Graffiti Battle: Tagged@EXYZT
  “We hope Tagged@EXYZT opened new minds to street art and showed the soul and joy a community the city would rather not exist can create. For all of us involved it was an evening where Birmingham sparkled”
• Presenting the world’s biggest art prize: the £175,000 Gulbenkian
  “Graham Vick and his Birmingham Opera want to turn Brecht and Weill’s political satire Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny into a multi-participant online production examining the survival of the soul in a virtual world”
• Birmingham Hippodrome: Chief exec’s 10-year journey
  Interview with Stuart Griffiths
• Desert Island Life « More Canals than Venice
  Jeans Retailer Promotion in Decent Line-up of Events Shock. Featuring Project Pigeon, Flatpack Festival, LOAF, Chicks Dig Jerks, Them Lot and Mr Hudson (NB – some, perhaps all, of this has happened already)
• AE Harris
  The venue now has its own website
• Pickled
  Based in The Oasis: “Here at Pickled, we aim to provide a hireable exhibition space for anyone in the arts. From the amateur to the professional, we want anyone with an interesting art idea or project to come along and exhibit their work”
• The Style Kaleidoscope
  “A vibrant street style documentary of Birmingham, UK”

I have two reasons for posting this:

1. It amused me that the site talks up ‘free entry to the splendid Birmingham Artsfest’ when entry is free anyway
2. It’s good to see Birmingham being talked about as a destination for an arty getaway

There’s a few other items bundled into the package that might make it worth throwing your name into the hat. Link to the competition.

Elsewhere on the site there’s a good profile of Studio 4 and mentions given to the Outcrowd Collective, Them Lot, Capsule, Beat13 and Fluid’s Lee Basford. ‘Log’ Roper from Studio4 ‘paints a rosy picture of a thriving, supportive scene, where musicians and artists intermingle’

I’m doing this wrong, I know I am. What I should do is go to the places I’m about to mention, ‘experience the art’, get trollied and turn this into some gonzo jounalism effort.

Sigh.

Anyway, there are a few pubs in Birmingham that are pushing the arty side of things – two in Hockley that have been about for a bit (but not all that long) and a new pretender the other side of town.

The Lord Clifden touts itself as Birmingham’s ‘urban art bar’ and makes a fair claim on the title by having work by Banksy, D*Face, Nick Walker, Blek, Obey, Faile and Army Lion knocking about.  It’s at 34 Great Hampton Street, Hockley (map).

The Urban Art Bar people also own The Red Lion at 95 Warstone Lane, Hockley (map) which seems to follow the same formula and only opened a month ago (I think). There’s info and a few reviews on the beerintheevening.com page.

The Victoria (website soon come) is the new one – it only opened last Thursday. The pub’s been around for a while but has now been taken over by the people who own Island Bar.  The pub now boasts a Birmingham cityscape mural made by the Them Lot collective which is based on the computer game Rampage.

It’s round the back of the Alexandra Theatre at 48 John Bright Street (map) and promises DJs, bands and burlesque shows. It was also the venue for Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School the other day (and will be again on 17 Jan).

THEM LOT is a collective of artists from Bristol to Birmingham.  They’ll be exhibiting some work and doing some live drawing at Urban Outfitters on Thurs 7 August.  The show includes a large mural you’ll be able to see from New St (or from inside the shop, obviously).

Members of the THEM LOT collective had work at the last Ltd Edition and were involved in the Society of Futopia.