Full Time, One Year Fixed Term Contract

The Salisbury Museum

Exhibitions Officer

Full Time, one year fixed term contract

The Salisbury Museum is seeking a new member of staff to oversee our major exhibitions programme. This is an excellent opportunity for the right candidate.

In 2014 the museum opened its new Wessex Gallery about the archaeology of south Wiltshire. This £2.4 million project was the first part of a masterplan to redevelop the King’s House where the museum is based. The museum is now planning further stages of the masterplan including a new gallery dedicated to the history of Salisbury. The museum is submitting a 1st round bid to the HLF in March 2018 for £3 million to take this project forward.

As exhibitions officer you will co-ordinate our dynamic programme of temporary exhibitions. Following the success of exhibitions such as Constable and Salisbury, Rex Whistler and Terry Pratchett: HisWorld you will be involved with the installation of our Henry Lamb: Out of the Shadows exhibition in May 2018. You will be a highly organised person who will be able to multi-task in a fast moving, high pressure work environment. As part of a small team you will be comfortable getting involved with all aspects of exhibition preparation from writing text to physically hanging works of art.

To apply please read and fill in a job application form.

CV’s will not be accepted

Deadline: Friday 2 February 2018

Interviews: tbc – ideally week beginning 12 February 2018

We would like the candidate to be able to start this role immediately in March 2018

Note that this job is initially a fixed-term one year contract – but there is the possibility that it will become a longer term or even permanent appointment.

For an informal discussion about the position please call Adrian Green on 01722 820542 The Salisbury Museum

About Us

At The Salisbury Museum we engage and inspire local, national and global audiences by telling the story of a unique landscape which has been the cradle of unparalleled human achievement for over half a million years.

We use our expertise, creativity and passion, and the extraordinary breadth of our collections, to present world-class displays, exhibitions and events. Our work gives context to the archaeological, historic and artistic riches of Salisbury and south Wiltshire.

Together, we create inspiring experiences, which enable our audiences to appreciate what is so special and significant about this landscape, and the people who have shaped it. In this way, The Salisbury Museum acts as a catalyst to understanding English history on many different levels.

The Salisbury Museum was founded in 1860 and was for many years located in St Ann’s Street in the city. In 1981, following a successful public appeal, the museum transferred to its present home, The King's House, a Grade I listed building in Salisbury Cathedral Close.

Since then it has won eight awards including a Museum of the Year Award in 1985, an English Tourist Board ‘England for Excellence’ Award in 1992 and, in 2004, an Access All Areas Award, sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions, in recognition of its work to improve access for disabled people.

On moving to The King’s House, the museum was able to develop eleven new galleries, eight for permanent displays and three for temporary exhibitions, with ancillary services to meet the needs of the remainder of the 20th century. In 2000, looking to the future, it began to upgrade its galleries. By 2002 the Temporary Exhibition Gallery and Stonehenge Gallery were renewed, the latter receiving a commendation in the Association for Heritage Interpretation ‘Interpret Britain Awards 2001’. In 2014 we opened the new Wessex Gallery dedicated to the archaeology of south Wiltshire.

The museum is led by Director, Adrian Green, who has overall responsibility for the building, staff and collection. We have 19 paid staff who are supported by nearly 250 active volunteers and over 1,300 members.

The museum has one of the best archaeological collections in the country. We have unique finds from the Stonehenge World Heritage Site as well as the Amesbury Archer (the most important Bronze Age burial found in the UK) and the Pitt-Rivers Wessex Collection, which offers a remarkable insight into the development of archaeology as a discipline.

Our archaeology collections are so significant that they were awarded Designated Status by the Arts Council, given to museums that have collections of national importance. We are one of only fifty regional museums to have this status. Our collections are key to the understanding of Stonehenge, and of the rich archaeological landscape that surrounds the monument. The Salisbury Museum

Our fine art collection includes works by Turner, Constable, Augustus John and Rex Whistler. We also have impressive collections of costume and ceramics. We are accredited by the Arts Council.

We organise an impressive public programme, which includes at least eight temporary exhibitions per year that attract over 30,000 visitors. Our collection is often used by artists to inspire their work – we provide a nurturing environment and platform for exhibiting their work as an integral part of our exhibition programme.

We have an extensive life-long learning programme for people of all ages. This includes over sixty family events and lectures per year. Our schools education programme reaches out to 3,000 primary school children per year.

How we are managed, governed and funded

The museum is an independent registered charity (no 289850). It is governed by a Board of Trustees (The Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum Trust, a company limited by guarantee, no 1826436), which meets quarterly and which determines the general strategy of the museum.

During financial year 2016 the museum’s turnover was £341,065. Whilst it doesn’t receive any regular funding from central government, the museum receives an annual grant from Wiltshire Council (during 2016 it received £52,903). Most of our income derives from a variety of other sources including admission charges (£96,016), membership subscriptions (£24,546), donations and legacies (£35,994) and rental income (£53,567).

Visitors

The museum has had an average of 33,000 visitors per annum – we seek to raise this to 45,000 per annum (other local attractions such as Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral attract over 1 million visitors between them each year).

Our exhibitions programme

In 2011 we mounted an exhibition called Constable & Salisbury (20 May – 25 September) to mark the bicentenary of Constable’s first visit to Salisbury in 1811. The exhibition encompassed just over 40 works of art. A large group of pictures were lent by the Victoria and Albert Museum, with other loans coming from the Ashmolean, British Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, Gallery Oldham, National Gallery, National Trust, Tate Gallery, Victoria Art Gallery (Bath) and the National Gallery of Ireland. The major highlight of the exhibition was the 1831 ‘six-footer’, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, lent from a private collection.

This exhibition was an essential part of the process of redeveloping the museum and attracting new audiences. A successful PR campaign led to excellent coverage in the national press and over 36,000 people visited the exhibition, which is nearly four times the number of people that would normally come to the museum over the summer period. The exhibition enabled us to forge partnerships with The Arts The Salisbury Museum

Society, U3A, Salisbury Arts Centre, International Arts Festival and new relationships with the national museums.

Our summer exhibitions since 2011 have continued to concentrate on well-known artists connected with the local area. In 2012 our summer exhibition was Circles and Tangents: Art in the Shadow of Cranborne Chase (25 May – 29 September). Curated by Vivienne Light, the exhibition presented a visual account of networks and circles of artists living and working on Cranborne Chase from the 1920s to the present day.

The 2013 exhibition was Rex Whistler: A Talent Cut Short (24 May – 29 September 2013). This was curated by exhibitions officer Kim Chittick, based on the Rex Whistler archive. The follow up exhibition to this in 2014 was Cecil Beaton at Home: Ashcombe and Reddish which explored the photographer’s life in Wiltshire. This was curated by local interior designer Andrew Ginger.

The Rex Whistler archive was purchased by the museum in the autumn of 2013 with significant grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the V & A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries. Over the same period the museum was also involved in a successful partnership led by the Tate to acquire Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows for the nation (the Aspire project). The painting will tour the country and was displayed in Salisbury for six months in 2016/2017.

The follow up ‘blockbuster’ to our Constable exhibition was Turner’s Wessex: Architecture and Ambition (22 May – 27 September 2015). This was curated by Turner scholar Ian Warrell. It explored Turner’s early career and his connections to the Wiltshire area through wealthy patrons such as Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Beckford of Fonthill. Alongside Turner’s works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition included extensive loans from museums and art galleries across the UK including Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, British Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, National Galleries Scotland, V & A and Whitworth Art Gallery. The exhibition was also supported by a substantial loan from the Tate collection.

More recent exhibitions have included British Art: Ancient Landscapes (8 April – 3 September 2017) and Terry Pratchett: HisWorld (16 September 2017 – 14 January 2018).

Henry Lamb Out of the Shadows

Salisbury Museum will be organising an exhibition dedicated to the artist Henry Lamb from 26 May to 30 September 2018. This will be the first major retrospective on the artist since an exhibition at the Manchester City Art Galleries in 1984. The exhibition will be co-curated by the Salisbury Museum and Harry Moore-Gwyn, an independent curator, dealer and writer on modern British art, whose previous shows have included Kenneth Rowntree (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden), Laurie Lee (Royal Geographical Society) and Walter Bonner Gash (Alfred East Gallery, Kettering). The Salisbury Museum

This exhibition is being produced in partnership with Poole Museum and will be exhibited in Poole in 2019. Poole Museum are producing an exhibition about Lamb’s contemporary Augustus John which will be shown in Poole in 2018 and Salisbury in 2019. The curator for this exhibition will be David Boyd Haycock.

About Henry Lamb

Henry Lamb (1883 – 1960) was one of the leading British figurative painters of the first part of the twentieth century. A close associate of Augustus John, patron of Stanley Spencer and friends with members of the Bloomsbury Group he was also a founder member of the Camden Town Group in 1911. He was a very accomplished musician and trained as a doctor, friends describing him as a well-read, erudite conversationalist. He became a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (1942) and the Tate Gallery (1944). He became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1940 and a full Academician in 1949.

Portraiture played an important role in his career as a painter, but his townscapes and landscapes as well as his early subject pictures of Ireland and Britany and his work in both World Wars reveal him to be a painter of considerable range and talent. This show will give a full retrospective of his work and offer a re-evaluation of a brilliant artist who was often overshadowed by contemporaries such as Augustus John and Stanley Spencer.

Our intention is for the exhibition to have a large proportion of works from privately owned collections with a smaller proportion of works on loan from national collections including the Imperial War Museum and National Portrait Gallery. A highlight of the exhibition will be Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment, 1919 (Imperial War Museum, loan agreed), commissioned by the British War Memorial Committee. The exhibition will give visitors the opportunity to see many works which have never been publicly displayed before, allowing a fresh understanding of Henry Lamb’s work.

The family of Henry Lamb are fully supportive of this exhibition. They have the Henry Lamb archive and therefore the museum will have the opportunity to thoroughly research sketchbooks, letters, preparatory sketches and other documents. Preparatory drawings will be on display alongside finished works to reveal Henry Lamb’s working methods.