 Facade of Bilston craft Gallery. | |
 | |
| Established | 1937 |
|---|---|
| Location | Mount Pleasant, Bilston, West Midlands |
| Type | Arts and Crafts |
| Website | www |
Bilston Craft Gallery is the largest dedicated craft venue in the West Midlands, located at Mount Pleasant, Bilston, near Bilston town centre. [1]
The two-storey stone residential house was built in 1905 as a home for the Harper family, the local lock manufacturers. It replaced a much older Regency building, Brueton House, built in 1818 by Thomas Brueton.
Between 1918–30 the house was used by Bilston Girls High School. After the school had moved to a larger building and grounds, the house was re-modelled and a large extension at the rear of the building was added. From 1937-1990s, the building housed the Bilston Art Gallery and Museum. [2] The building also houses Bilston Library.
Bilston Art Gallery and Museum was officially opened in 1937 by Professor Thomas Bodkin, the founding Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. The core of the collection was formed from about hundred paintings which were donated in 1937 to the gallery by William Thompson, formerly of Bilston, but then a resident of Colwyn Bay, Wales. In following decades, the Gallery regularly organised exhibitions of artworks by local artists, received various gifts and donations, and built a substantial collection of local art and artefacts related to local history.
In 1990s, in the process of re-structure of cultural services across the area, the collection was transferred to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and Bilston Museum was re-styled as Bilston Craft Gallery. [2] At present, it shares the building with the Bilston Library. Bilston Craft Gallery is a part of Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service.
Bilston Craft Gallery has a permanent exhibition 'Craftsense' which showcases objects from eighteenth-century local industry alongside commissioned contemporary pieces that use similar techniques. [2] Almost a hundred Bilston enamels form the main part of the display, [3] but as part of the collection re-shuffle in the 1990s, the Bilston enamels, among other industrial and historical items, were removed to Bantock House, causing public outcry, but were returned in 2005 with the opening of the Craftsense gallery. [2] Together with those remaining on show at Bantock form the largest collection of enamels apart from that of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Bilston Craft Gallery has a programme of temporary exhibitions featuring modern craft works. It offers a range of learning opportunities for all ages including the access to the Crafts Council Photostore, featuring over a thousand selected designer-makers. [3] The creative gallery 'Craftplay' was specially designed for pre-school children.
The 'First Floor Gallery' is a hireable community space for individuals and groups to show their own exhibitions of craft and art.
The gallery backs onto a large garden populated with various flowers. It contains several craft works, including two carved wooden dragons [2] by Graham Jones and a circle of stone sculptures.
The West Midlands is a metropolitan county and combined authority area in western-central England with a 2020 estimated population of 2,939,927, making it the second most populous county in England after Greater London. It appeared as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972, to cover parts of Staffordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. The county is a NUTS 2 region within the wider NUTS 1 region of the same name. It embraces seven metropolitan boroughs: the cities of Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, and the boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull and Walsall.
Bilston is a market town, ward, and civil parish located in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England. It is close to the borders of Sandwell and Walsall. The nearest towns are Darlaston, Wednesbury, and Willenhall. Historically in Staffordshire, three wards of Wolverhampton City Council now cover the town: Bilston East and Bilston North, which almost entirely comprise parts of the historic Borough of Bilston, and Ettingshall, which comprises a part of Bilston and parts of Wolverhampton.
The Black Country Living Museum is an open-air museum of rebuilt historic buildings in Dudley, West Midlands, England. It is located in the centre of the Black Country, 10 miles west of Birmingham. The museum occupies 105,000 square metres of former industrial land partly reclaimed from a former railway goods yard, disused lime kilns, canal arm and former coal pits.
William Frend De Morgan was an English potter, tile designer and novelist. A lifelong friend of William Morris, he designed tiles, stained glass and furniture for Morris & Co. from 1863 to 1872. His tiles often recall medieval or Islamic design patterns. He applied innovative glazes and firing techniques. Galleons and fish were common motifs, as were "fantastical" birds and animals. Many of De Morgan's tiles were designed to create intricate patterns when several were laid together.
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, also known as the National Museum, in Oslo is a Norwegian state-owned museum.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States. The museum has more than 7,000 artists represented in the collection. Most exhibitions take place in the museum's main building, the old Patent Office Building, while craft-focused exhibitions are shown in the Renwick Gallery.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery is located in the City of Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. The building was funded and constructed by local contractor Philip Horsman (1825–1890), and built on land provided by the municipal authority. It opened in May 1884.
The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) is an art museum located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Situated in Rockland, Victoria, the museum occupies a 2,474.5 square metres (26,635 sq ft) building complex; made up of the Spencer Mansion, and the Exhibition Galleries. The former building component was built in 1889, while the latter component was erected in the mid-20th century.
The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (CCGG) is a public art gallery located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It is the only Canadian art gallery exclusively dedicated to exhibiting and collecting contemporary Canadian ceramic, glass, enamel and stained glass works of art. It has approximately 20,000 annual visitors.
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum is a museum, art gallery, records archive, learning centre, media studio and creative arts facility on Jordan Well, Coventry, England.
Bantock House Museum and Park, is a museum of Edwardian life and local history, with 48 acres (190,000 m2) of surrounding parkland in Wolverhampton, England. It is named after Alderman Baldwin and Kitty Bantock who once lived there. It is run by Wolverhampton City Council's Arts and Museums service.
The Oregon Public Library is located in Oregon, Illinois, United States, the county seat of Ogle County. The building is a public library that was constructed in 1909. Prior to 1909, Oregon's library was housed in different buildings, none of which were designed to house a library. The library was built using a grant from wealthy philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The grant was obtained after Oregon's citizens voted to change Oregon's library from a city library to a township library. The building was completed by 1908 but the library did not begin operation until 1909.
Wolverhampton is a city, metropolitan borough, and administrative centre in the West Midlands, England. At the 2011 census, it had a population of 249,470. People from the city are called "Wulfrunians".
Dudley Museum and Art Gallery was a public museum and art gallery located in the town centre of Dudley in the West Midlands, England. It was opened in 1883, situated within buildings on St James's Road, and remained at that site until its closure in 2016. Some of the museum collections have since been relocated to the Dudley Archives centre on Tipton Road.
The Museum of Contemporary Craft based in Portland, Oregon was the oldest continuously-running craft institution on the west coast of the United States until its closing in 2016. Located in downtown Portland's Pearl District, the museum's mission was "to enliven and expand the understanding of craft and the museum experience."
Brighton Museum & Art Gallery is a municipally-owned public museum and art gallery in the city of Brighton and Hove in the South East of England. It is part of the "Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove". It is free for local residents but charges £6.20 per non-resident.
Towner Art Gallery is located in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the south coast of England.
Jamie Bennett is an American artist and educator known for his enamel jewelry. Over his forty-year career, Bennett has experimented with the centuries-old process of enameling, discovered new techniques of setting, and created new colors of enamel and a matte surfaces. This has led him to be referred to as “one of the most innovative and accomplished enamellers of our time” by Ursula Ilse-Neuman, historian and former curator at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. Bennett is closely associated with the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he studied himself as a student, and taught in the Metal department for many years. Bennett retired from teaching in 2014, after thirty years at SUNY New Paltz.
Karl Joseph Maria Drerup was a leading figure in the mid-twentieth-century American enamels field. Trained as a painter, Drerup taught himself to enamel in the early 1940s, fusing glass to metal through a high-temperature firing process. Through his inventive, "painterly" approach to the medium, he advanced enameling to new levels of beauty, power, and expressiveness. Drerup's love of nature is apparent in every detail of his intimate woodland scenes, just as his depictions of humble workers in natural settings reveal his profound respect for humanity. A modest, self-deprecating individual, he exerted an enormous impact on the generation of enamel artists that emerged in the United States in the period immediately following World War II.
Richard Loving (1924–2021) was an American artist and educator, primarily based in Chicago, Illinois. He gained recognition in the 1980s as a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters, whose individual forms of organic abstraction embraced evocative imagery and metaphor, counter to the dominant minimalist mode. He is most known for paintings that critics describe as metaphysical and visionary, which move fluidly between abstraction and representation, personalized symbolism taking organic and geometric forms, and chaos and order. They are often characterized by bright patterns of dotted lines and dashes, enigmatic spatial fields, and an illuminated quality. In 2010, critic James Yood wrote that Loving's work "mull[ed] over the possibilities of pattern and representation, of narrative and allegory" to attain a kind of wisdom, transcendence and acknowledgement of universals, "seeking understanding of self within the poetics of the physical world."
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bilston Craft Gallery and Library . |
