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Sculpture Season saw 13 emerging artists from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art be invited to re-curate the Museum’s spaces with their own sculptures, interpretations and installations and presented an exhibition like none other seen before in the Museum. Sitting alongside the Museum’s historic skeletons, skulls and specimens preserved in jars, the new works engage with animal/human encounters through re-animated flesh, tunnelling rats and mice, giant worms and body bags. The artists have responded to the physical spaces and specimens of the Museum, creating music technologies, phantom occupations of the Museum’s iPad apps, hand-knitted internal organs and explorations of the excessive masculinity of giant deer antlers. Specimens have been re-ordered, re-labelled and reimagined.

Emerging artists re-visit »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË’s art collections, reflecting on the themes of time and place.The sixth annual UCL Art Museum/Slade collaboration ran in conjunction with the UCL English Department's 2014 One Day in the City, a festival celebrating London, literature and art.The selected participants were invited to respond to the extensive collections of the UCL Art Museum whilst engaging with the importance of time, place, London and literature, as well as other sources of inspiration relevant to One Day in the City. The resulting pieces included four time-based media works, a light box installation as well as an array of oil paintings, intricate drawings, etchings and a bronze cast. Many of the featured artists have gone on to forge prolific artistic careers, exhibiting internationally and publishing research, such as Helena Hunter, Jonathan Kipps, Olga Koroleva, Katja Larsson, Maxima Smith, Milou Van Der Maaden & Ping Zheng, with some like Kipps, Larsson and van Der Maaden returning to collaborate with us for the exhibition RE-LAUNCH in 2015.The full list of featured artists includes: Lea Collet, Freddie Duffield and Sarai Kirshner, Robbie Fife, Benjamin Heiken, Helena Hunter, James Kelly, Jonathan Kipps. Anna Klimentchenko, Olga Koroleva and Katja Larsson, Neena Percy, Maxima Smith, Lara Smithson, Cheryl Simmons, Milou Van Der Maaden & Ping ZhengDuring One Day in the City (Friday 13th June 2014), to compliment the group exhibition, several of the artists engaged visitors with interactive installations, live events and other creative activities.More information about the exhibition is available on the UCL Art Museum blog, here and here.For more information about the UCL Art Museum/Slade Collaboration series, see here.This is part of UCL Art Collections’ commitment to interdisciplinary research-impact collaborations. For more information or expressions of interest to collaborate contact museums@ucl.ac.uk

Emerging artists respond to  UCL’s art collections. In the inaugural UCL Art Museum/Slade Collaboration, 14 students from the Slade were invited to respond to the artistic heritage of the Slade that resides with UCL Art Museum and includes works of art from the Renaissance period onwards. Chosen works from the collection included Japanese prints, maps and 16th century etchings and engravings. The Slade artists engaged with, and re-interpreted these works in order to create their own contemporary responses, which were exhibited in the UCL Art Museum and in a virtual exhibition online.Many of the featured artists have gone on to forge prolific artistic careers, exhibiting internationally and publishing research, such as Andrea Greenwood, Hyo Myoung Kim, Kate Keara Pelen, Janne Malmros and Amanda Wasielewski, with some like Malmros and Pelen returning to collaborate with us for the exhibition RE-LAUNCH in 2015.The full list of featured artists includes: Emma Connor, Patricia Delgado, Erin Gutierrez, Andrea Greenwood, Hyo Myoung Kim,  Janne Malmros, Junko Otak, Stephanie O'Connor, Kate Keara Pelen, Ryan Riddington, Alex Springer, Patricia Townsend, Amanda Wasielewski and Jayne Wilton.For more information about the UCL Art Museum/Slade Collaboration series, see here.

Share Academy was a partnership project between University College London (UCL), University of the Arts London (UAL) and the London Museums Group. The partnership came together through a shared belief in the potential for mutually beneficial collaboration between Higher Education and museums. Share Academy has been researching, supporting and promoting partnership working between the two sectors since 2012 with the support of Arts Council England (ACE).The story so farA pilot project, conducted between October 2012 and March 2013, explored the challenges and benefits of partnership working. The pilot produced a feasibility study outlining the potential for collaboration.Between March 2013 and April 2015 the Share Academy team spent two years brokering, funding and evaluating cross-sector collaborations in the London region. Details of some of the 15 projects can be found at the bottom of the page.Share Academy ran workshops for museum professionals across England to share olearning and expertise around collaborative practice. Share Academy was also working with universities and museums in the East Midlands region to develop a database that will facilitate and map cross-sector collaborations. If this proves successful it is hoped that the resource will be rolled out to the rest of the country.The research of Share Academy explores the long term and dynamic impacts of museum and university partnerships, working with and for local ecologies.Our resourcesDetails of resources published by Share Academy can be found here. List of projectsCSM x Foundling Museum Garden stories Cultivating style, fashion and horticultureInspiration examinedBritish music experience Drawing lifeThe Peckham Cultural InstituteKeats in LondonMiCLUESIn collaboration with academics at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈËThe beautifullest place on EarthThe history of publishing – William Morris and the Kelmscott PressLocal roots / global routes: the legacies of British slave-ownership.The Mollie Spoon archiveDrawing parallels – artistic encounters with pathologyStamp printing plates, dies and rollers – from vault to view

18th century Italian landscape revisited.Award-winning artist Liz Rideal was in residence at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË Art Museum during the Legacy: Richard Cooper Jnr and the Artist's Album exhibition from January to June 2017. Rideal’s Leverhulme Fellowship entitled Splicing Time focused on Rome and the Roman Campagna. She created and discovered connections between contemporary and archived photographs, prints, maps and artworks held in archives and collections, particularly that of the British School at Rome.Further information and images are available on the artist's website.Rideal's objective was to create images, curate period photographs and organise these into an interactive digital map of Rome and the Campagna. She drew together academic and contemporary strands of data in order to visualize layers of time by interfacing with Google maps using hyperlinks and geographical references.Richard Cooper Jnr’s prints illustrate the eighteenth century enthusiasm for the Italian landscape seen while on the Grand Tour. Originally gathered in albums this practice provides the perfect vehicle for new work by Rideal, relating to the album format and the picturesque. Click here to learn more about Rideal's project.

Unlocking the potential of a unique collection through curatorial research and engagement Spotlight on the Slade Collections (2015-2018) UCL Art Museum received a Curatorial Research Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2015 to help support a research curator for three years to catalogue the Slade Collections, an important historic resource comprised of over 3,000 paintings, drawings and prints. The primary aim of the project was to unlock the considerable potential of the collection by cataloguing it and researching it to faciliate widening access in the future with a high-quality visual and textual resource about this unique archive via an improved online catalogue. This research enabled us to establish that 45% of the Slade Collections comprise of work by women artists. As a result we have become a research hub for discussions around women artists past and present and gender equality in the visual arts. To this end we are in the process of developing a sustainable collaborative research network dedicated to the subject of women artists. For more information on this project please contact museums@ucl.ac.uk. Spotlight on the Slade Collections was led by Helen Downes, Paul Mellon Research Curator at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË Art Museum 2015-18.New findings from the research.Outcomes were shared through a series of events, conference papers, workshops and the exhibition Prize & Prejudice in 2018.This research continues to inform UCL Art Collections collaborations, most recently our Rightsholder research project launched on the occassion of the Slade 150th anniversary.About the Slade CollectionsUCL Art Museum’s Slade Collections form a unique document of English art school practice in the modern age. Many of the key figures in British art studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and the School's annual prize system has provided »Ê¼Ò»ªÈËith important examples of the early work of artists such as Stanley Spencer, Augustus John, Walter Sickert, David Bomberg, Winifred Knights, Paula Rego, Craigie Aitchison and Euan Uglow. The Slade was the first art school to admit women on equal terms and the collection is strong in the work of women artists. The collection’s inclusion of lesser-known artists also provides a valuable counterpoint to the collections of national museums. UCL Art Museum continues to receive prize works from current Slade students, making the Slade Collections a living resource that continues to document contemporary art school practice.While the Slade Collections are widely used for teaching and research and are extremely popular with visitors, access to this core collection is severely hampered by lack of information about the artwork and limited online catalogue entries. This project enabled the Art Museum to carry out essential collections research, enrich the online catalogue and improve its search functions to open up access to information about Slade artists and artwork.'Slade Women Artists' workshop with British Art Network (2017)The Spotlight on the Slade project prompted a series of events, displays and collaborations, which took place against the backdrop of the 2018 centenary of the Representation of the People Act. One important example was the 'Slade Women Artists' workshop on 9th May 2017 when UCL Art Museum hosted the fourth meeting of the Tate British Art Network Sub Group British Women Artists, 1750-1950 . Piloting a participatory workshop model, and experimenting with new ways of capturing specialist knowledge in relation to a primarily stored collection, the meeting provided a platform for sharing research and debating and examining methods of curating women’s art.  Through participant research, presentations and a group task, the workshop successfully generated research into 17 neglected Slade women artists and facilitated debate around possible exhibition methods. You can read a blog post about the workshop here.