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Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
During 2023-24, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens hosted a varied and exciting exhibition programme featuring national treasures and world-class photography.
A series of partnerships and alliances allowed us to explore a range of themes relating to and highlighting the venue’s own collections. As part of a partnership with the British Museum, from February – June 2023 the Museum proudly hosted the Gathering light: a Bronze Age golden sun exhibition which featured the Shropshire sun pendant, one of the most significant Bronze Age objects ever discovered. Alongside this and other treasures from the British Museum, the exhibition was a fantastic opportunity to showcase some of the Museum’s own Bronze Age collection.
To accompany the exhibition, community groups from Friends of the Drop In, International Community Organisation of Sunderland, the African and Caribbean Community Association North-East and Young Asian Voices, took part in a Sun Cultures community project exploring the role of the sun in different cultures through artist-led workshops.
In April, the Museum joined forces with Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art to present Weighting Time, the first survey exhibition by renowned British artist Fiona Crisp. Exhibited across both venues, the show featured 30 years of Crisp’s large-scale photography and installations.
Activities inspired by Weighting Time included Ways of Looking family backpacks and adventure sessions, encouraging visitors to use their senses and explore. Visitors used specially designed A5 frames or belvederes to frame views of the Museum and Mowbray Park to create their own photographs and drawings.
Another highlight was Elmer and Friends: the Colourful World of David McKee, devised by Seven Stories in Newcastle. Popular with children and adults alike, the exhibition featured original watercolour illustrations by the well-known children’s author alongside interactive games and puzzles, cosy reading areas and dressing-up clothes.
Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens partnered with the Natural History Museum to bring Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the most prestigious photography exhibition of its kind, to Sunderland in February 2024. The free exhibition was incredibly well received and had over 85,000 visitors in four months. Many of the themes in the images provided a fantastic launch pad for exploring climate change and other global issues and enabled links with the Museum’s own natural science collections.
To accompany the exhibition, over February half term the Learning Team hosted a series of fringe events as part of Arts Centre Washington’s Bright Lights Youth Arts Festival including an exhibition of young people’s own wildlife and landscape photographs on display in the Museum’s Art Lounge.
In September 2023, Celebrate Different Collective, Sunderland Culture’s young arts leaders, hosted a Proggy Pride Party for Heritage Open Days, at the Museum, creating a Pride flag using traditional proggy mat techniques (see p.14). The Collective also supported other young people’s groups in Sunderland to participate in the arts through #iWill funding from the Community Foundation Tyne & Wear and Northumberland. Young people’s groups created a collective zine around social action and hosted their own Art Fest events in November 2023. We are delighted and proud that the brilliant Celebrate Different group won the Marsh Award for Museum Volunteering (North area) which they received at a ceremony held at the British Museum in October 2023.
A real treat to see this exhibition in Sunderland for free. Incredible photographs with an ominous warning about the fragility of our planet. Excellent
Visitor to Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
