It's Official: RAMM is Voted Britain's Museum of the Year!

Source: Guardian.co.uk

What do the Watts Gallery, The Hepworth in Wakefield and The Scottish National Gallery have in common? None of the are Museum of the Year; that title belongs to Exeter's own RAMM who also scooped a £100,000 Art Fund Prize!

Chair of Judges, Lord Smith of Finsbury, said of the Museum,  

“The new Royal Albert Memorial Museum is quite simply a magical place. The Victorian aspirations to bring the world to Exeter are stunningly realised through some of the most intelligently considered displays on view in any museum in the UK. Every exhibit delights with a new surprise, and provokes with a new question, and at a time when local authority museums in particular are in such danger, this brilliant achievement proves how daring, adventurous and important such institutions can be."

I couldn't be prouder of the Gerald and the gang! Everyone in town has known how great the museum is since it reopened.  More than 200,000 people have been through it's big Victorian doors since December and I can't say enough about the Cafe scran from Dartmoor Kitchen. But it's amazing to awesome hearing everyone else say it so eloquently.

My favourite quote is from Guardian reporter and competition judge Charlotte Higgins who said:

"Again and again, I felt that the museum had been put together not only by people of real intellectual rigour, but by those who understand that, at heart, the museum is a place of wonder, and of emotion. It is a curator's museum.

The real miracle in all this is that RAMM is run by the [Exeter City Council]. Many local-authority museums, and in larger, richer cities than Exeter, are neglected by careless, incompetent or plain cash-strapped councils. RAMM, however, stands as a shining example of a museum that is cared for by the public realm, and cherished as a civic good at the heart of municipal life"

I love it when a plan comes together.

Good on ya Gerald!

Debating Devon: Did James Ravilious capture real reality in rural Devon?

Ivor Brock carrying holly for Christmas Decorations by James Ravilious from Beaford-arts.org.uk

Tonight, Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) will host a debate on photographer James Ravilious' depiction of rural life in North Devon.  The subjects will be the pictures in the photographic exhibition of achive images from of one of the UK's most renowned documentary photographers, James Ravilious: Reflecting the Rural (at RAMM's Gallery until 29 July). 

A panel chaired by Sir Harry Studholme, Chair of the South West RDA and Forestry Commissioner for England, will discuss how Ravilious depicted rural Devon during the 1970 and 80s. Fellow panellists, Prof Michael Winter, Director, Centre for Rural Policy Research, Exeter University; Dr Mike Moser, Chair of North Devon’s UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Partnership; Dr Robert Fish, Exeter University, author of Cinematic Countrysides; and Mary Quicke, farmer and cheesemaker, will no doubt create a lively and frank discussion on the continuing cultural relevance of his images.

Street Scene by James Ravilious from Beaford-arts.org.uk

The Reflecting the Rural exhibition will feature a selection of images from the 70,000 Ravilious images in the Beaford Archive as curated by by photographer Liz Nicol and agriculturalist Martyn Warren (University of Plymouth).  And James Ravilious's black and white photographs of North Devon are described as showing 'a largely unspoilt, but vulnerable, country area'.

For what it's worth, I think the thing that makes these images so striking is that they are not just landscapes - they are portraits and vignettes of the people who existed in these spaces. So often, depictions of rural life don't show much life at all. We've all seen those beautiful landscape photos or windswept trees in Dartmoor and solitary ponies standing beneath Hay Tor, but Ravilious has a way of capturing the people of these spaces in a way that is much more akin to an urban photographer like Garry Winogrand. Here the people are the focus and setting is the frame. 

Dick French Family watching the Cup Final

American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand

The debate is on Tuesday 12 June at 7pm. £4.50 tickets can be purchased from the museum reception or by calling 01392 265858, concessions £3.00.