Solent Showcase

05/04/2023

We've had an amazing few days at Green Park in Redbridge delivering one last project as Solent Showcase.

Kev Munday completed his fantastic mural today, made in collaboration with the amazing students from Redbridge Community School (secondary) in Green Park in Redbridge.

Thanks to all who came along to see the mural, have a go at spray painting, and show support.

In collaboration with the fund and Solent Showcase with Solent University, Southampton

05/04/2023

Really taking shape in front of our eyes! So fun watching artist Kev Munday in action, such a fast painter! And more mini painters at work.
Come down and see the mural made in collaboration with artist Kev Munday and the amazing students from Redbridge Community School (secondary) in Green Park in Redbridge. And while you're here go check out Mario's cafe around the corner for refreshments and pizza! Watch this space for more reveals! In collaboration with the fund and Solent Showcase with Solent University, Southampton

05/04/2023

Party getting started now!
Artist Kev Munday is getting going with the outlines of the mural made in collaboration with the amazing students from Redbridge Community School (secondary) in Green Park in Redbridge. Some children are taking inspiration in the moment creating work in Kev's style! Watch this space for more reveals! In collaboration with the fund and Solent Showcase with Solent University, Southampton

05/04/2023

And it starts....
Sneaking a look out from the building getting a makeover from artist Kev Munday in a piece in collaboration with the amazing students from Redbridge Community School (secondary) in Green Park in Redbridge. Watch this space for more reveals! In collaboration with the programme and Solent University, Southampton

04/04/2023

*ANNOUNCEMENT* We are sad to inform you that Solent Showcase is closing after 12 years in the city of Southampton.

After establishing a reputation for authentic community focused projects our journey is now drawing to a close. From its roots in the original Millais Gallery started by the brilliant Jo Bushnell and continued by Bridget Cussack and Les Buckingham, through to its fabulous city centre location, sadly lost during Covid, the Solent University funded organisation has had its fair share of incredible artists and people working with and alongside it.

It was a tough challenge to deliver ground-breaking creative work that served our communities on our minimal budget, but we’re incredibly proud of the projects that we created. From the early days with Eleonore Pearson, Andreea Stan, Josef Hill and Mollie Belcher, everyone worked so hard to create amazing projects such as Lighten UP and Small Faces.

The current team, Asten Holmes-Elliott, Joe Ross and Kate Maple would like to genuinely thank everyone who has been a part of this journey with us especially Peter Lloyd who gave us permission and freedom to develop our ideas – we have tried to exist in the cultural world with a passion to represent, to serve our communities, make visible, connect and tell powerful stories about lived experiences. Our team has put their heart and soul and passion into every project and we are very proud of what we have achieved and we hope the impact will be felt within the city and beyond. Recent projects such as Stand Together, Make Your Mark and Manifesting the Unseen have been the most enriching, impactful experiences to share with you all.

Our final project will follow in the same tradition, working in under-represented areas with young people at the heart of creativity. On the 4th & 5th April we will be at Green Park Pavillion, Redbridge/Millbrook painting a large scale mural co-created by Kev Munday and pupils of Redbridge Secondary School. Everyone is welcome to drop in if you're in the area!

Stay sweet Soton, love from the Solent Showcase Team x

For any future Solent University queries, please contact Head of Music & Art: [email protected]

01/04/2023

https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/puffin-scoops-brilliantly-immersive-adventure-from-writenow-graduate-ahmed-pathak

8th June 2023 is the date to remember, our very own Southampton author Nazneen Ahmed Pathak is having her first novel published! Solent Showcase is very proud to have been amongst one of the many cultural organisations that Nazneen has worked with over recent years. Buy her book! It sounds amazing. You can pre-order it here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/284111/nazneen-ahmed-pathak

Nazneen Ahmed Pathak is a British Bangladeshi writer, historian and visual artist who lives in the port city of Southampton. She spent most of her teen years in commuter belt suburbia writing, reading, and listening to melancholy indie music, going on to study English literature at the University of...

28/03/2023

Small Faces: People’s Portrait Exhibition – A New Approach to Exhibition Making

This is BBC Radio Solent’s Julian Clegg who visited the 2017 exhibition to find his portrait by Jonny Hannah in what has to be one of my favourite exhibitions we did at Solent Showcase. 7,000, (yes 7,000!) public submissions created a sea of faces and a community of people across all the walls of the gallery.

The Small Faces exhibition was inspired by an exhibition by Gillian McIntyre from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. it ripped up the rule book around curatorial control, adopting instead a democratic approach based on social networking practices within communities. It dissolved barriers to engagement by creating an open exhibition with a promise that ALL works would be exhibited. We didn’t just invite, we reached out and embarked on several months of advance workshopping and engagement and employed local artists and community leaders to connect to their own networks across all areas of the city. We produced art packs for schools, we visited local art societies but also focussed on local groups who felt that they were not creative and didn’t usually see art as something they could participate in. We made the project easy to submit to by asking for postcard sized artworks with no frames required.

It was a risk - we had absolutely no idea how many submissions we would get until the final deadline, no idea if we would even have an exhibition to show! What surprised us all was that we received over 7,000 beautiful portraits from people from aged 4 – 84 of all abilities and walks of life; images with personal stories, people representing themselves or those they loved, admired, missed or lost. Our challenge then, was to create a contemporary art installation that respected the uniqueness of each portrait and also visually transformed the gallery into a visual spectacle that celebrated the huge impact of 7,000 miniature faces. So many people helped - Josef Hill, Andreea Stan, Mollie Belcher, Vix Hobbs, Itchen College students and more. Together we turned the gallery into a sea of portraits.

Southampton resident and writer Angela Chicken wrote us the most beautiful letter so here are some excerpts that sum up the type of responses we got from people.

“I was deeply moved to see that so many people wanted to participate, to see a wide range of representation in terms of age, gender and race, it felt far more representative of the city than most galleries.......I feel that this exhibition proves that if you ask us and you don’t put too many obstacles in our way, we love to engage and furthermore there is some great…desire to come out to place....From the bottom of my heart I thank you all for making this possible. I hope other cultural providers can learn from what you have done and I hope you will be inspired to create some other projects in this vein.”

21/03/2023

MANIFESTING THE UNSEEN: SOUTHAMPTON 2021– Southampton's first exhibition of Islamic art by Muslim women artists.

In 2021 we were so proud to be the first organisation in Southampton to showcase an exhibition of talented women artists creating contemporary Islamic art in the UK today in collaboration with and city art gallery. Some beautiful artwork was on show exploring the deep complexity of Islamic traditions and contemporary approaches.

This exhibition highlighted the artistic work of Muslim women, including local artists such as and Nazneen Ahmed and sought to make the creativity of British Muslim women artists more visible, thereby fostering greater appreciation of the cultures of the growing British Muslim communities in the region.

The collective of established and emerging Muslim women artists first came together in 2018 for an exhibition in London where they invited the viewer to see the unseen and challenge their perceptions of Islam and Muslim women. It began as a discussion on the invisibility of marginalised identities in public space and how for many in the West, Islamic art remains a hidden treasure. Catching the attention of local artist Dr Nazneen Ahmed and our curator Kate Maple, the gallery invited Curator Nazia Mirza and the Manifesting The Unseen collective to create a Southampton located version of the exhibition. The collective produced ACE supported new work inspired by the city’s maritime history and its reputation as the ‘Gateway to the World’. This deep connection to the sea and the stars, that have for centuries been used to navigate and explore the world, is one shared with Islam. In particular, a stunning site specific installation was created by Choudhrey in the entrance to the exhibition.

A relationship that started before, and survived, the pandemic, bore new collaborations in the resulting exhibition kindly shown at the city art gallery, after the closure of Solent Showcase Gallery's space in lockdown. A moving and very busy closing celebration at City Art Gallery, filled with women artists and poets, marked the importance of a show like this in Southampton, and in keeping with the rich tradition of poetry in the Muslim world, featured a Mehfil (recital) of new commissioned work.

https://www.manifestingtheunseen.com

06/02/2023

When lockdown became a reality in 2020, the gallery recalibrated new engagement practices in response to Covid-19 after the removal of face-to-face interaction with local communities. The frustration of this disconnect and the desire to get directly involved in supporting communities creatively was a key motivation to developing ART TO GO. Another key factor was that communications between cultural organisations grew exponentially, as an online method of offering solidarity and discussing how lockdown would affect the city, both culturally and mentally. From these online meetings, we were able to map the growing concern that socio-economic divisions were increasing with young people particularly affected.

Whilst many venues were going publicly online with great cultural content, Southampton City Council noted that children in care did not necessarily have easy access to computers and were therefore at risk of being excluded from participation. Artist Joe Ross devised the concept of filling a pizza box full of art materials and arts activities to be handed directly to young people via key workers and carers who could deliver the boxes safely, creating the Let's Create free art packs - the ART TO GO pizza boxes. The work made resulted in a window exhibition in our lockdown closed gallery space titled 'Life In Lockdown'.

Huge thanks to Solent University, Southampton who kindly funded the boxes and materials, Southampton City Council and for making sure the boxes reach the right people, Southampton City Art Gallery for valuable help with printing and providing lots of great content and extra materials, NST Youth Theatre for providing 10 drama activities to do at home, and University of Southampton for very kindly printing the stickers for the boxes. A great collaborative effort. And we were excited to have artist Kev Munday's colour in sheets in there too!!

ART TO GO was part of Solent Showcase Gallery's lockdown Connection, Community & Creativity in Quarantine initiative to seek ways to connect with our audience and contribute to community wellbeing and plans for our city’s future.

Solent Showcase partnered up with Arts Council England, Artswork, Southampton City Council, Southampton City Art Gallery, University of Southampton who supported the making of the Let's Create packs ART TO GO pizza boxes.

Quote by micha frazer-carroll, writer and editor at gal-dem.com.

https://www.solent.ac.uk/solent-showcase/case-studies/art-to-go

03/02/2023

“This is the story of the soundtrack to multiculturalism, a hidden history that is still impacting on new British music” - Mykaell Riley

"Rebel Music: Sound System Culture, The Story of Blues Parties in Southampton" was a 2019 exhibition devised by Don John, with paintings by Gerard Hanson. It explored the impact of Jamaican music on British culture, in particular, the extraordinary story of the ‘Shebeens’ or ‘Blues’ clubs that were a key part of Southampton’s music scene in the 70s and 80s. Bringing together new artwork, old images and found footage, the exhibition creatively explored why these sound systems emerged in the city and what effect they had.

There was an amazing opening night of the exhibition celebrated with the community, with live music in the gallery from ShannonB Music and Calvin Forbes, and a screening of the renowned film "Bass Culture" by Mykaell Riley, Director for The Black Music Research Unit /University of Westminster that explores music from the 60s to the present day and the profound ways in which Jamaican music remade popular music in Britain. After the film, one of the original sound systems from Southampton, Maka Foundation Soundsystem entertained us at Belgium and Blues Southampton across the road from the gallery.

It was our 2018 exhibition Black To The Future that led to requests from the community to devise and curate the ‘Rebel Music’ exhibition about the Afro-Caribbean underground music scene in the city. ‘Rebel Music’ itself led to the start of a Southampton Black History Research & Archive Hub with Solent University, Southampton, and local communities. They got the community talking about wanting permanent artworks telling Black History stories in the city, another project that we were able to make a reality later on.

Check out the link on our new website!
https://www.solent.ac.uk/solent-showcase/case-studies/rebel-music

Images from Don John, Race & Diversity consultant, own archive
Photos and paintings by Gerard Hanson.

01/02/2023

The Solent Showcase Gallery started our work with the Southampton2025 City of Culture bid bang in the summer of 2020 lockdown, coming onboard as the Programming & Community Engagement team. It has and continues to be a great journey, and we're 'SO proud!' to have contributed to and be part of such a great result from Arts Council England that Claire Whitaker and the Southampton Culture Trust team have managed to achieve for our city!

When we got to the finals of the UK City of Culture competition, and didn't manage the last hurdle, the momentum was never lost because people still believed in our city after we showed them what we could accomplish. Can't wait to see you all at the Southampton Forward cultural conference next week at MAST Mayflower Studios!

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/23263180.1-5m-invested-southamptons-culture-art/

Solent University, Southampton

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If you're looking for advice on developing a project, need guidance on making a funding application or want to know more about ‘a space’ arts and the resources we provide, book a 1-to-1 with our Artist Development Officer Mary Cork who will support the next stages of your creative development

Follow the link to book your 1-to-1 meeting http://ow.ly/BCg350HEjKI