antiquedealersblog

I thought you may be interested to hear that I’m giving a FREE talk on ZOOM on 6th September on behalf of the Furniture History Society focused on the SOLD! the Great British Antiques Story exhibition, staged at The Bowes Museum from January 26th to May 5th 2019. The talk is called ‘Curating Sold! Dealers, Museums and the Art Market’ and is a kind of autopsy of the SOLD! exhibition, as well as a chance to offer some reflections on the exhibition itself.

For those of you that missed the exhibition this is a chance to see what the exhibition looked like and to see a wide variety of installation photographs; it’s also a chance to hear about the exhibition themes and the objectives of the exhibition.  You will also be able to see many of the spectacular objects from a wide range of museum and private lenders that we managed to encourage to come to The Bowes Museum for the exhibition.  And for those that did manage to see the exhibition this is also an opportunity to more hear about the behind-the-scenes development and delivery of a major museum exhibition and to hear about the challenges and opportunities of working on the exhibition project – which took more than 2 years in final stages of development, but was also underpinned by more than 10 years of research – so you can also hear about things that did not make the final cut!

The talk takes place on SUNDAY 6th September 2020 at 7.00pm on the ZOOM platform, and will last about 1 hour, including some opportunities to ask questions via the chat function in the Zoom platform.  The Furniture History Society are managing this talk and ask that anyone interested in hearing the talk could send them an email and they will send out the link to the Zoom room and a password for access.

Do email FHS Events Secretary, Beatrice Goddard at events@furniturehistorysociety.org for your free ticket!

Here’s some extra blurb for the talk –

Curating SOLD! Dealers, Museums, and the Art Market

SOLD! The Great British Antiques Story was the first exhibition of its kind in a public museum.  The exhibition directed renewed attention to the history of museum objects through the fascinating story of the history of antique dealing in Britain.  SOLD! brought together some world-renowned and familiar museum objects from leading public collections, but presented these objects in new and unfamiliar contexts. SOLD! highlighted the extraordinary role that antique dealers have played in the development of public museums, presenting an illuminating story of our 200 year-old fascination with ‘antiques’

This talk, by the guest curator, outlines the objectives and purpose of this ground-breaking exhibition, with reflections on the development and the processes, and the challenges and opportunities of working on the exhibition, as well as retelling the intriguing tales of expert discoveries and fortunate finds and revealing some of the stories, and myths, about antique dealing.

As you know, PDF digital copies of the accompanying exhibition catalogue, SOLD! The Great British Antiques Story (Bowes Museum, 2019) are available as a FREE download; made possible by the generous support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art – you can download the catalogue at the bottom of the Antique Dealers Research project page HERE

Hope you can make the talk!

Mark