Collection: Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre

Collection-level records:

• Collection overview (Collection development policy)

  Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre consists of two distinct collections, the art collection and the museum collection. Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre is committed to collecting, preserving and interpreting the cultural heritage of Bury and its satellite towns (Ramsbottom, Radcliffe, Prestwich, Whitefield, Tottington) for the learning and enjoyment of the whole community.

  Art Gallery Collections

  Bury Art Gallery opened in 1901. The founding fine art collection, the Wrigley Gift (Thomas Wrigley was a local paper manufacturer) is strong in high quality 19^th century British painting (including good examples of the work of Turner, Constable, Landseer, Linnell and Cox). Early on, other local benefactors followed the Wrigley family’s example by donating gallery-quality paintings or complete collections for example the Thomas Aitken Bequest, 1915, (Clausen, Fantin-Latour, Deutsch, Weiland); these gifts tend to reinforce existing strengths. The Art Gallery continues to accept gifts that develop these strengths within the collection such as landscape painting, figurative art and narrative works. Membership of the Contemporary Art Society enables us to bring these strengths up to date. The tradition of purchasing works of art, local (views of Bury, works by local artists & works formerly owned by Bury people) & non- local, from temporary exhibitions held here started in 1908 continues to this day. There are now over 1000 works of art in Bury’s collection.

  In March 2013, The Text Art Archive, based in Bury Art Museum, was established in conjunction with Bury Archives Service and the Centre for Poetics at Birkbeck University of London with the intention of documenting, securing and making easily available information on the history and practice of Language Art. The Archive holds hundreds of physical and digital items including scanned images, correspondence, artists’ personal documents, audio, video, and original artworks. The Text Art Archive’s aim is to stimulate critical thinking and writing in the field around the subject and to re-imagine the role of an archive by unlocking its artistic wealth by inviting artists to work with the archive and create new works.

  The artwork in the collection stretches back to the 1960s and includes: ‘typestracts’ by Dom Sylvester Houedard; a collection of Writers’ Forum publications and works by Richard Pinkney also dating from the 1960s. Some of the contemporary works include and 68 prints of hand-drawn visual poems by Robert Grenier, a contemporary American poet associated with the Language School, work by Lawrence Weiner, Maurizio Nannucci, Caroline Bergvall, Liz Collini, Phil Davenport, David Osbaldeston, Tim Etchells, Pavel Buchler and Janice Kerbel.

  Museum Collections

  Bury Museum (on the lower ground floor of the Art Museum) opened in 1907. The character of the founding collections given to the Corporation dictated the direction and development of the Museum collection until the 1970s. Up until then the Museum consisted of non-local natural history, archaeology, geology and ethnography. Now that the direction of collecting has changed emphatically towards social history, these early collections are only added to if there is a strong local connection to justify acquisition.

  Since Local Government reorganisation the 1974 the Museum collections have developed to become an important, core, local/social history resource representing all aspects of life in every part of the Borough. Social history objects fall into the categories of clothing & textiles, commemorative items, ceramics, domestic items, furniture, medicine, religion, retail, sport & leisure, tobacco, toys & games, trades & professions, war, weights & measures, writing & papers. There are around 61,000 objects in Bury’s collections and the collections continue to grow steadily usually by gift, with around 100 acquisitions each year.

  Some objects from the collections are of significant historical importance, such as a Thomas Lees long case clock, George III Spade Guineas, Sir Robert Peel’s cradle, Bronze Age urns, a Roman bracelet and coins, 2 Celtic heads, bronze age cinerary urns, Roman pottery, Hutchinson family furniture, African ivories, Wedgwood vases and one hundred and fifty pieces of Pilkington’s Royal Lancastrian pottery.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: Not known

  Licence: CC BY-NC