Student exhibition great success
A student exhibition, featuring generations past and present, has been so successful that further events are planned.
Earlier this year visitors poured into the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery (SMAG) viewing artwork created by 130 Swindon students. Four schools took part in Back to Black and White, a youth arts and heritage initiative run in partnership with Swindon Youth Forum and Swindon Borough Council’s Culture Swindon team. Inspired by Swindon photographer Albert Beaney’s collection of 40,000 photographs of residents from the 1940s -70s, young people took photos of people today, using images both past and present. The project, supported by a £25,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) Young Roots programme, saw Create Studios working with students as they created their traditional and new media artwork. Create Manager Shahina Johnson said, “In terms of audience figures, it’s estimated that 200 people a day have seen a selection of the images on the Big Screen in Wharf Green - so that’s 15,000 over a 75 day period.” Zoe Dennington, SMAG Heritage Outreach and Engagement Officer, added, “We’ve been thrilled with the response. The exhibition has helped us showcase both the Beaney archive and the photographs produced by the project's young artists, which together create a unique record of how young people's lives in Swindon have changed over the last 70 years. Visitors' responses to the project have been very personal - we've had several cases of people meeting up with long-lost friends and neighbours at events and finding photos of themselves and relatives among the archive. Just over 2800 people have seen the exhibition." Find out more.
