From Britain's Greatest Living Sculptor to a Potter
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From Britain’s greatest living sculptor to a potter with a political agenda, from the best coffee in Manchester to Latin American arthouse flicks, and from Soviet mementoes to a hidden after-hours drinking den: this is your indispensable guide to a springtime creative weekend in Manchester. Creativetourist.com is a monthly online magazine and series of city guides that have been put together by Manchester Museums Consortium, and this guide could not be produced without the support, help and vision of Cornerhouse, Imperial War Museum North, The Lowry, Manchester Art Gallery, The Manchester Museum, MOSI, the Museum of Science & Industry, People’s History Museum and The Whitworth Art Gallery. Visit us at: creativetourist.com twitter.com/creativetourist 2facebook.com/creativetourist 3 01 “ART FOR THE VISITING DOGS AND FOR THE SWANS! MANCHESTER? ART FOR ALL.” THERE’S AN 02 WOMAn’S WORK APP FOR THAT. 03 ART IN RUDE HEALTH 04 COFFEE AND cULTURE 05 MORE SINNED aGAINST THAN SINNING Find your way through Manchester with Creative Tourist . Whether you’re looking for inspiration about which of Manchester’s cultural treats to try first, tips from locals on the best cafés and bars, fancy taking a walking tour with a mobile guide, or want to discover more about the city’s fascinating past, Creative Tourist’s free Manchester iPhone app will lead you there. Supported by Modern History. This project would not be possible Download it from iTunes now, or find out more at without the support of: 4 Matthew Hull. Design: Modern Designers. Feld, Susie Stubbs, Kate Words: 1 It can’t be easy being This spring, Anish Kapoor Anish Kapoor. Arguably the comes to Manchester. The first greatest British sculptor since survey of Kapoor’s work to be Henry Moore, he won the Turner held in the UK outside London, Prize twenty years ago, and his Flashback takes early works from 01 last major UK show – at the Royal the Arts Council’s collection and Academy in 2009 – pulled in shows them alongside recent more than 260,000 visitors, making pieces borrowed from the artist. it the most successful exhibition Although the monumental won’t “ART FOR ever held in London by a living be in evidence here the show artist. In between the Turner gives visitors a rare chance to and the Academy, the artist has get up close and personal to the unveiled artworks from Newcastle work of an artist whose reputation THE DOGS to New Delhi, all of them met with continues to grow unabated. critical acclaim. So where does Which brings us back to the an artist such as Anish Kapoor question of where Kapoor goes go from here? from here. Although some would AND FOR THE Kapoor’s colour-drenched, be daunted by such a meteoric occasionally violent artworks rise, Kapoor isn’t among them. (such as Shooting into the The artist has been commissioned Corner, a kinetic sculpture to create the (admittedly SWANS! ART that fires enormous blocks of controversial) 115-metre high blood-red wax into the corner Orbit for the 2012 Olympics, of a gallery) are mesmerizing. while the first of five enormous Perhaps it’s the fact that he sculptures planned in Teeside, FOR ALL.” uses such ordinary materials – a 110-metre long ‘butterfly net’ tottering piles of pigment, stone, called Temenos, was unveiled wax, polished steel – and from last summer. Kapoor’s place in the Anish Kapoor: Flashback, them creates such sublime canon of British contemporary art sculpture. Or perhaps it’s the seems assured, then, thanks to an from the Arts Council Collection outsized scale of his work, ability to beguile critics and public Manchester Art Gallery which literally bursts out of alike. In fact, on seeing Kapoor’s galleries or makes the aircraft lake-side sculpture unveiled one Mosley Street M2 3JL hangar-like space of Tate misty morning in Kensington Telephone 0161 235 8888 Modern’s turbine hall look a Gardens, curator Hans Ulrich manchestergalleries.org bit, well, cramped. Whatever Obrist declared that this was ‘art the reason, there is something for the dogs and for the swans! 5 March-5 June 2011. about Kapoor’s artwork that Art for all.’ Does Kapoor make work Open: 10am-5pm Tues-Sun History Museum. People’s Below: Courtesy the artist © the artist 2011. Morgan. Dave photo: Anish Kapoor, 2005, , gets under the skin. that appeals to everyone? Make & Bank Holiday Mondays up your own mind in Manchester. (closed Mondays, Good Friday and Friday 29 April). Free. Shadow Box Negative Image: Image: 2 3 Spinningfields CLOSE BY spinningfieldsonline.com The Mark Addy SPINNINGFIELDS Stanley Street, Salford M3 5EJ 0161 832 4080 / markaddy.co.uk People’s History Museum Close by, you’ll find Spinningfields. Manchester’s new business Left Bank, Spinningfields M3 3ER district, Spinningfields has more to it than glass-and-steel office blocks. 0161 838 9190 / phm.org.uk For starters, it has a waterfront. Manchester has three well-hidden rivers, with Spinningfields the only place in the city centre where the river, in this John Rylands Library case the Irwell, is celebrated (or even acknowledged). The Mark Addy pub, Deansgate M3 3EH whose chef Robert Owen Brown turns out the sort of traditional British 0161 306 0555 / library.manchester.ac.uk grub that Observer critic Jay Rayner described as ‘an old-fashioned House of Fraser treat’, is a former landing station that’s as good for real ale as it is hearty Deansgate M3 2QG food. Opposite, you’ll find the ‘sunniest riverside bar in Manchester’ at the 0844 800 3744 / houseoffraser.co.uk People’s History Museum, (a claim made by its Deputy Director so feel free to take it with a pinch of salt). The recently refurbished museum, San Carlo Cicchetti scrubbed up to the tune of £12.5 million, is well worth a visit, if simply to King Street West M3 2WY sample the staggering array of cakes in its café. The only national museum 0161 834 6226 / sancarlocicchetti.co.uk in Manchester (until the National Football Museum opens later this year), it tells the tale of British democracy, and at a time when furious political debate is being conducted at every pub, radio station phone-in and kitchen table, it’s a story that has never felt more relevant. Spinningfields is also home to the high-end shopping street The Avenue, where you’ll find the budget busting likes of Armani, DKNY and Mulberry and, at its Deansgate edge, the John Rylands Library. This fabulous neo-Gothic confection, a red sandstone building studded with intricate wrought-iron and stained glass, was built in 1900 in memory of cotton magnate John Rylands. With four million texts spanning five millennia, it’s still a working library but welcomes visitors – and surely just standing in the middle of its wood-panelled reading room and breathing deeply will lend your visit to Manchester a cerebral air. Nearby, just off Deansgate, you’ll find our favourite department store, Kendal’s. Although its official name is the rather more prosaic House of Fraser, the store, 175 years old in 2011, is better known to locals by its original name – look above the entrances and you’ll see ‘Kendal, Milne and Co’ inscribed into the stonework, the names of the original owners. A new Italian tapas-style bar on the ground floor, San Carlo Cicchetti, is particularly recommended. People’s History Museum People’s 4 5 The feminist artist Mary testimony of soldiers who served Kelly is best known for Post- in Iraq, interrogating our ideas Partum Document (1973-9), a of war and masculinity. Or The sprawling narrative installation Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, which that documents the mother- employs ordinary dryer lint and child relationship from her extraordinary music (composed son’s birth to age five. Informed by Michael Nyman of The Piano by sociology and psychology, fame) to tell the story of a child the six-part magnum opus lost and found during the war in included painstakingly detailed Kosovo. The South Gallery will host observations, incorporating Habitus, a newly commissioned everything from recorded babbling work that embeds a prefabricated to feeding diaries. Upon exhibition bomb shelter with the memories 02 at the ICA in 1976, however, it was of people born in Britain during the ‘shocking’ inclusion of her or immediately following the son’s stained nappies that made Second World War. And, of course, headlines (my, how things have Post-Partum Document, still WOMAn’s changed). Those radical nappies considered the definitive artwork will be hanging in the Whitworth on motherhood, will be displayed Art Gallery this spring as the here in its entirety for the first time gallery stages one of the most in more than 30 years. WORK comprehensive exhibitions of With its reputation for Kelly’s work ever held, Mary Kelly: staging edgy, intelligent Projects 1973-2010. A key figure exhibitions that walk the fine Mary Kelly: Projects 1973-2010 in the development of feminist art, line between historic and and an artist who continues to contemporary, the Whitworth feels Whitworth Art Gallery break new ground, Kelly employs a fitting place for the first large- Oxford Road M15 6ER multilayered narratives, text and scale international retrospective spatial elements to create work of Kelly’s work. Recent shows here Telephone 0161 275 7450 that is both political and highly have demonstrated the subversive manchester.ac.uk/whitworth personal, often breathtaking in its nature of wallpaper (Walls Are emotional force. Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture) 19 February-12 June. If the phrase ‘feminist art’ and turned a gallery into a forest Open: 10am-5pm Mon-Sat; brings to mind quilted tents and (Olafur Eliasson’s installation in 12-4pm Sun.