Respect Due will be a unique gallery in the Museum of Colour, focussing on creatives of colour over the age of 65.
The Museum of Colour (MoC) is building art form galleries and within them exhibitions that tell stories of achievement. Our pilot gallery People of Letters was delivered in Autumn 2019.
The Respect Due special gallery will focus on living creatives aged over 65. Such artists can offer precious views of creative lives lived at an important historical time for our nation. It is crucial that this is captured for future generations, particularly as creatives such as these are largely invisible from the nation’s permanent collections, and their stories are heritage that is at risk.
The exhibition will use original photographs to create new art works and combine this with interviews with the subjects and photographs of some of their treasured items that they donate to the museum. This will create an insightful, beautiful picture of a very special group of people.
Why now?
Our thorough process from research and development phase to launch is done by art form and takes between a year and eighteen months to deliver. The theatre and film galleries will take longer than poetry and crafts due to differing production times. As things currently stand, it might take fifteen years to build the full Museum, which is the challenge we are currently facing.
Each and every life lost to the current pandemic of Covid-19 is a cause of sadness. None the less, it is clear that the virus is claiming the lives of people over the age of 70 at an alarming rate, with a disproportionately high death of people of African, Caribbean and Asian background. As these are the people who are essential to our galleries, this challenge that has been ever present since the inception of our gallery has now been thrown into huge relief.
A generation of creatives are growing up in the belief that they are doing things for the very first time – because the achievements of the generations that came before have not been methodically documented. Capturing as many of these unique perspectives as possible is the goal of this project, and it has never been more urgent to achieve.
To find out more about this project, please contact [email protected]