Curating SOLD! FREE Zoom talk 6th September 2020

A FREE talk on ZOOM on behalf of the Furniture History Society on curating the SOLD! exhibition, staged at The Bowes Museum last year.  For those of you that missed the exhibition this is a chance to see a wide variety of installation photographs and to hear about the themes and objectives of the exhibition, and to see many of the spectacular objects we managed to encourage to come up to The Bowes Museum.  For those that did manage to see the exhibition, this is also an opportunity to hear about the behind-the-scenes development and delivery of a major museum exhibition.

  The talk takes place on SUNDAY 6th September 2020 at 7.00pm, and will last about 1 hour, with opportunities to ask questions via the Zoom platform.  The Furniture History Society are managing this talk and ask that anyone interested in hearing the talk could register an email contact with them 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!

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.

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.