ePetition - Craft at Hove Museum
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ePetition details
Craft at Hove Museum
Hove Museum holds one of only three craft collections in the country. That temporary exhibitions are to cease at Hove is a great loss to the community and to a City with a strong cultural ethos. The exhibitions and related activities inspire creativity at a time when many people have increased leisure time, often against their will. Craft is one of the more accessible of the arts and can be challenging, beautiful and humorous. This issue needs to be addressed urgently in order to prevent the exhibition space falling into disuse.
This ePetition ran from 26/04/2010 to 02/06/2010 and has now finished.
25 people signed this ePetition.
Council response
The Cabinet Member for Culture,Recreation and Tourism gave the following response at his meeting on 15 June 2010 :
"The temporary exhibitions at Hove Museum have played host to a wide range of exhibitions over the years based on fine art, archaeology and local history as well as craft.The Craft programme comprising its temporary exhibitions and workshops has always been externally funded; for many years through the Arts Council and more recently through a two year grant from the Headley Trust.This funding has come to an end and therefore it has been necessary to review programming at Hove to ensure we can achieve programmes within available resources.
The Hove Museum programme in the ground floor galleriesfrom October (2010) will be built on recent projects in particular using the city's extensive collections to creatively engage and inspire our audiences: whether involving them in developing shows, allowing greater inter action with the exhibits, and/or improving the museum experience for younger visitors. Running October 2010-February 2011, we will show more work from Brighton & Hove Museum's Fine Arts Collection, developing a thematic exhibition narrative with a lively programme of events.
Programming at Hove is part of the wider pogramming context of the Royal Pavilion and Museum Service. Currently, we have craft installations at Preston Manor and the Royal Pavilion and there are plans to work with the Permanent Gallery in Hove and renowned maker Neil Brownsword using our nationally significant Willett Collection of Staffordshire pottery as inspiration. this means that craft continues to be at the core of the city's cultural offer. As with these very exciting developments the service will continue to programme craft activity as it is able to secure funding. There are two permanent galleries of contemporary craft at hove Museum housing a large proportion of the craft collection -some 300 pieces.
Craft forms a part of the Museum's decorative art collections spanning design, furniture and applied arts - more than 16,000 objects. There are no plans to remove the collectiond in these galleries from display. They will continue to, along with other collections in the city council's holdings, be used to inspire and inform programming. The Craft Council website lists some 38 museums/galleries showing craft across the UK.