Claudette Johnson: Darker Than Blue
22 June – 15 September 2024
Claudette Johnson is one of the foremost artists working in Britain today.
Her primary subjects are Black women, including herself, and, more recently, Black men. Through these figures, Johnson employs a powerful style to explore the body; her work challenges perceptions of identity, sexuality and wider political and social constraints, particularly those affecting Black diasporic communities.
Our exhibition will present several new works by the artist in the Barber’s freshly refurbished gallery space. It will reveal the intimacy of Johnson’s work, through line drawings and sketches of contrasting scales.
Claudette Johnson was born in Manchester and is deeply connected to the West Midlands through her studies at Wolverhampton University’s School of Art. As the recent exhibition The More Things Change… (April – July 2023, Wolverhampton Art Gallery) explored, Johnson was a vital member of the Blk Art Group formed in 1980, a radical group of artists that began the ongoing challenge to readdress the lack of representation of, and support for, Black artists.
We are honoured to be collaborating with Claudette Johnson on this exhibition, which will be the artist’s first solo show in the region. It will be accompanied by an interdisciplinary programme of events. This exhibition follows Johnson’s widely acclaimed retrospective exhibition Claudette Johnson: Presence, at the Courtauld Gallery, London (September 2023 – January 2024).
- Image: Claudette Johnson, Yellow Vest, 2023. © Claudette Johnson; image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
Hidden Lives of Plants: Botanical Illustrations from the V&A
22 June – 10 November 2024
As well as being inherently beautiful, depictions of flowers and fruits reflect the fascinating relationship between art and science, and the artistic challenge of reconciling these elements within a single image.
Our summer 2024 exhibition will feature a group of stunning botanical illustrations from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A). These will be accompanied by historic printed herbals and other related material from the University of Birmingham’s own diverse collections, together representing more than 400 years of botanical imagery.
Since its foundation in 1856, the V&A has collected examples of botanical illustration in all graphic media. These range in date from the 15th century to the present day. The purpose of acquiring such material is varied. Botanical prints chart the development of printing, from the woodcut process used for early herbals to hand-coloured etchings and colour-printing,
while printed and painted florilegia have been used as pattern books by artists and designers such as William Morris and Alexander McQueen.
This exhibition marks a new partnership between the V&A, the Barber, and the University of Birmingham’s Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies. It will be curated by ten international Art History and Curating MA students, reflecting the Barber’s ongoing commitment to supporting professional training in the curatorial sector.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a rich programme of events that explore the complex history, production and use of these images, as well as highlighting the West Midland’s region’s commitments to arts, health and wellbeing through plants and biodiversity initiatives.
- Image above: Unknown Chinese artist, Castor Oil Plant (Ricinus communis L), about 1760 – 1825. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
11 October 2024 – 26 January 2025
Scent is a key motif in paintings by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements. Fragrance is visually suggested in images of daydreaming figures smelling flowers or burning incense, enhancing the sensory aura of ‘art for art’s sake’. Scent was also implied in Victorian painting to evoke hedonism – pleasure in exquisite sensations – and
a preoccupation with beauty; or to reflect the Victorian vogue for synaesthesia (evoking one sense through another) and the penchant for art, like scent, to evoke moods and emotions.
Motifs of scent and smell intersected with the most vociferous discourses of the day, including sanitation, urban morality, immigration, race, mental health, faith, and the rise in women’s independence. Many 19th- and early 20th-century notions about smell – that it is the manifestation of disease, that rainbows radiate the fragrance of dewy meadows, or that highly-perfumed flowers are asphyxiating – seem outlandish today.
Yet this exhibition demonstrates how an understanding of these and other largely forgotten ideas about smell bring to the fore significant aspects of these extraordinary artworks.
This landmark exhibition is curated by Dr Christina Bradstreet, author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 (PSU Press, 2022). It highlights the role of the olfactory sense and its significance for some of Britain’s best-loved art treasures. from collections across the United Kingdom. Artists featured include Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, John Frederick Lewis, John Everett Millais, Evelyn De Morgan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and others.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to participate in an optional scent experience that will enliven the scents suggested in certain paintings. A wide-ranging programme of events exploring art and scent will accompany the exhibition.
- Image above: John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl, 1856. Image: Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CCO.
Women in Power: Coins from the Barber Collection
22 June 2024 – 26 January 2025
Spanning nearly 2,000 years and more than 2,500 miles, the Barber’s forthcoming coin exhibition explores historical women who have appeared on coins.
From London to Ctesiphon (now Baghdad), and from representations of gender fluid deities from the 3rd century BC to Elizabeth II in 2022, the display focuses on the female rulers, potentates and icons whose stories have often been distorted or diminished over successive centuries and millennia.
Coins are by their very nature a projection of power and propaganda: as physical objects, they can convey economic and diplomatic might, and, artistically, the images they bear present a political, social, and often religious construction of power dynamics. Coins – tiny capsules of history with intrinsic economic and aesthetic value – are the most contemporaneous of objects, bearing witness to the ways in which powerful people of all genders wished to have their power expressed. At the same time, historical narratives have often been written and amended by men – who have frequently minimised the role of women or simplified them to fit stereotypes.
In addition to reviving the stories of the women who shaped religious belief systems, were diminished by the work of historical authors, and were underestimated in their own day, leading to the downfall of their rivals, this exhibition will also explore how the very presentation of gender on numismatic depictions changed through time and cultures.
- Image above: Reverse of a gold nomisma of Theodora, made in Constantinople in 1055/6.