Toin Adams, born in Kitwe, Zambia, is a sculptor working in steel, acrylic, fibreglass and other media. She spent her early childhood in eastern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and late teen years, in South Africa, where she attended the National School of the Arts, Johannesburg. [2] [3] In the late 80's she moved to England, where she began her career in sculpting.
Her two most well known works to date are Birmingham's largest sculpture: the 12 m high, The Green Man 2002 and the 10m high hanging sculpture The Deluge 2010 at Zellig, a 10 metres (33 ft) high hanging sculpture of falling bodies, both commissioned by the Custard Factory in Digbeth, Birmingham. [4] "I like making large scale sculpture, playing with diverse materials and figuring out how to make them...not fall over..." [5]
Adams is part of The Imaginary Beings Art Collective, a group of artists that work together to create collaborative art projects. Through this collective she has put together several art events around the world including The End of a World and Transcendence and Transformation. [6] [7] [8]
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
The Medicine Bar was a bar in Birmingham, England. Located in the Custard Factory in Digbeth, it has hosted many techno, acid jazz, funk and hip hop events. It started as a collaboration in the 1990s between the London Medicine bar and local hip hop DJ 'Simon Fat Head', who began his career at the Brothers and Sisters at the Coast to Coast club on Broad Street. It ceased to trade by 2012.
The Custard Factory is a creative and digital business workspace complex, including independent shops, cafes and bars, on the site of what was the Bird's Custard factory off High Street, Deritend, in the Digbeth area of central Birmingham, England.
Digbeth is an area of central Birmingham, England. Following the remodelling of the Inner Ring Road, Digbeth is now considered a district within Birmingham City Centre. As part of the Big City Plan, Digbeth is undergoing a large redevelopment scheme that will regenerate the old industrial buildings into apartments, retail premises, offices and arts facilities. The district is considered to be Birmingham's "Creative Quarter".
Magdalena Abakanowicz was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. Known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and for outdoor installations, Abakanowicz has been considered among the most influential Polish artists of the postwar era. She worked as a professor of studio art at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990, and as a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.
The culture of Birmingham is characterised by a deep-seated tradition of individualism and experimentation, and the unusually fragmented but innovative culture that results has been widely remarked upon by commentators. Writing in 1969, the New York-based urbanist Jane Jacobs cast Birmingham as one of the world's great examples of urban creativity: surveying its history from the 16th to the 20th centuries she described it as a "great, confused laboratory of ideas", noting how its chaotic structure as a "muddle of oddments" meant that it "grew through constant diversification". The historian G. M. Young – in a classic comparison later expanded upon by Asa Briggs – contrasted the "experimental, adventurous, diverse" culture of Birmingham with the "solid, uniform, pacific" culture of the outwardly similar city of Manchester. The American economist Edward Gleason wrote in 2011 that "cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution", concluding: "wandering these cities ... is to study nothing less than human progress."
Punch Records is a Birmingham-based music and arts agency which offers tours, festivals, international projects and educational and outreach programs for young people.
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
AIR is a 2,000 capacity superclub located in Digbeth, Birmingham in England. AIR started as a spray shop for buses, when in 2000 the building was bought by Godskitchen and converted into a club, originally named CODE. In June 2003, CODE closed for a complete refit and reopened in late September 2003 under the new name of AIR. Improvements included an extra room of music being added to the two already in use. Along with the club's name change, the 3 spaces inside were named the Oxygen Arena, the Nitrogen Room and the Carbon Lounge. The club features state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems. In 2002, Fergie said "It is one of the best [sound] systems I've ever played on, throughout the whole world".
Deritend is a historic area of Birmingham, England, built around a crossing point of the River Rea. It is first mentioned in 1276. Today Deritend is usually considered to be part of Digbeth.
Eastside is a district of Birmingham City Centre, England that is undergoing a major redevelopment project. The overall cost when completed is expected to be £6–8 billion over ten years which will result in the creation of 12,000 jobs. 8,000 jobs are expected to be created during the construction period. It is part of the larger Big City Plan project.
Lesley Dill is an American contemporary artist. Her work, using a wide variety of media including sculpture, print, performance art, music, and others, explores the power of language and the mystical nature of the psyche. Dill currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Alice Anderson is a French artist who studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris and Goldsmiths University of London. Associated with the performance Art movement Anderson works primarily with technological objects. She creates paintings by dancing with VR masks, laptops, drones, mobile phones, printers, speakers and sculptures by using an eco-friendly copper-coloured wire symbolising neuronal and technological connections of the internet debut.
Melvin "Mel" Edwards is an American artist, teacher, and abstract steel-metal sculptor. Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking. His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery. Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal. He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey.
Vivid was a centre for the production and exhibition of media art, located in the Digbeth area of Birmingham, England.
Alice Adams is an American artist known for her sculpture and site-specific land art in the 1970s and for her major public art projects in transit systems, airports, university campuses and other urban sites throughout the United States since 1986. Her earlier work in tapestry and woven forms was important in the American fiber art movement.
Eastside Projects is an artist-run space in the Digbeth area of Birmingham, England. It is a free public space that is imagined and organised by artists. It commissions and presents experimental contemporary art exhibitions and proposes ways in which art may be useful to society.[1] Eastside Projects was founded by six artists: Simon Bloor, Tom Bloor, Céline Condorelli, Ruth Claxton, James Langdon, and Gavin Wade. Eastside Projects is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee.
Sara Garden Armstrong is an American artist known for her work in digital/electronic multimedia and artist's books. Armstrong creates sculptures, paintings, drawings, artist's books, multimedia artworks involving computers sound and light, and constructs permanent installations in atrium spaces.
Amanda Browder is an American installation artist known for her large-scale fabric installations on building exteriors and other public sites. Her work incorporates donated materials and local volunteers, creating site-specific art. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Transformation Fellowship from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
Ana Vidjen is a Yugoslav, Croatian and Serbian sculptor. She obtained her MA in sculpture in 1962 at Athens School of Fine Arts, and was encouraged in her chosen field by the Greek feminist poet and writer Eleni Vakalo as well as the painter Milo Milunovic, who founded the Academy of Fine Arts in 1937. Her work includes sculptures in stone, wood and bronze, drawings, paintings and ceramics.