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#MuseumPassion

As museums continue to reopen and emerge from Covid-19 lockdown, a special season - from Thursday 8 October until Friday 16 October - will celebrate museums, their role in society and what the future holds for these much-loved institutions, across television, radio and digital.

Published: 8 September 2020

As museums continue to reopen and emerge from Covid-19 lockdown, a special season - from Thursday 8 October until Friday 16 October - will celebrate museums, their role in society and what the future holds for these much-loved institutions, across television, radio and digital.

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four

Inside Museums (4 x 30’)
Inside Museums will take audiences on special access tours of world-class art and exhibitions and collections at recently reopened cultural institutions across the UK.

Episode one. In the first major exhibition of Artemisia Gentileschi’s work in the UK, curator Letizia Treves and presenter Katy Hessel gives an insider’s view of the 17th century artist’s best-known paintings and recently discovered letters being displayed for the first time at London’s National Gallery.

  • A Guardian News and Media Ltd production. The Executive Producer is Jacqueline Edenbrow

Episode two. Cerys Matthews shares her passion for the 2019 winner of Art Fund Museum Of The Year - the St. Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff - looking at the lifestyle, culture and architecture of Wales.

  • A Plimsoll production. The Executive Producer is Siobhan Logue

Episode three. As the world adapts to life in the time of Covid-19, artist Lachlan Goudie will delve into Scotland’s premier art collection at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh to examine how art and artists have made sense of significant moments in history. An Avanti production.

  • Executive Producers are Sally Dixon and Emyr Afan

Episode four: Social historian Emma Dabiri explores how travel and exploration have shaped UK society at Ulster Museum in Belfast.

  • A Tern production. The Executive Producer is Brendan Hughes

Pictured: Artemisia Gentileschi (self portrait). Credit: National Gallery, London

  • Inside Museums was commissioned for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Arts and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four by Stephen James-Yeoman

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Two

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four

Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History (1 x 90’)
Presenters Lenny Henry and Suzy Klein (pictured top) celebrate the lives and works of Black classical composers and musicians across the centuries, whose stories have been forgotten and music neglected in the classical repertoire.

Black musicians have always composed and performed, played pivotal roles in their own times, and even helped shape and shift the course of musical history. In this documentary, Suzy Klein and Lenny Henry explore the lives and works of some of these remarkable men and women, people who achieved greatness despite the many hurdles that were placed in their way because of their race, and whose stories and compositions deserve a much wider audience.

The film includes special performances by Chineke! Orchestra: Europe’s first majority Black, Asian and minority ethnic orchestra, playing pieces by the composers the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Florence Price at the famous classical music venue St John’s Smith Square, London.

Along the way, Lenny will learn to dance to one of Ignatius Sancho’s minuets while Suzy plays it on a harpsichord, and he will sing Scott Joplin’s Ragtime classic Maple Leaf Rag with Suzy on piano.

Suzy meets star violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason, who plays from Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata, first performed by George Bridgetower; Lenny has a fencing lesson and learns how Chevalier de Saint-Georges’ mastery of that art informed his compositions for the violin, and rising star soprano Nadine Benjamin sings from Joplin’s opera Treemonisha and composer Shirley Thompson’s Psalm to Windrush.

The film features interviews with Chi-chi Nwanoku (founder and artistic director of Chineke!), Gillian Moore, Director of Music at London’s South Bank Centre; composer and pianist Julian Joseph; actor and author Paterson Joseph and Professor Shirley Thompson.

  • Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History is a Douglas Road Production. It was commissioned for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Arts and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four by Jan Younghusband. Producer and director is Guy Evans. Executive Producers are Angela Ferreira and Liz Hartford.

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Two

In a special episode of a new series, Inside Culture with Mary Beard, Mary is exploring the position of Britain’s post-lockdown museums.

She hosts a debate on how best to respond to a world that has changed beyond recognition and ventures out of her study to the British Museum. Here she gets to work taking miniature medieval masterpieces - the Lewis Chessmen - out of their lockdown storage, and surprising visitors on opening day, as the doors swing open once again.

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 3

On Breakfast, five curators of museums from across the nation will each bring to life a favourite object from their collections, explaining the significance it held to the people of its time, their spoken portrait complemented by a related piece of classical music.

The Director of Tate Modern, Frances Morris, will present a Sunday feature about museums. Plus Free Thinking, in collaboration with Frieze Art Fair, will host a panel of cultural leaders for an international debate on how galleries and museums are responding to the significant challenges of 2020.

With guests including Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, Director of The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art Washington DC; and Siak Ching Chong, CEO of the National Gallery of Singapore.

Presented by Anne McElvoy.

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ One and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

On 12 October, The One Show will reveal the winners of the prestigious Art Fund Museum Of The Year, which celebrates exceptional museums and galleries. Front Row will talk to the winners and will feature a museum a day that week, following the announcement.

Eleven Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ regions throughout England will work with museums in their region to feature stories on local bulletins on television, radio and online.

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Arts Digital

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Arts is working with leading organisations from the museum sector on #MuseumPassion, a chance for museums and galleries to share stories from curators, art experts and museum lovers about exhibitions and collections.

The York Museum Trust will bring back their popular Curators Battle, where museums across the world debate if they have the best object on a chosen theme.The 

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Two and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World News

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (w/t) (1 x 60’)

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 2020 faces challenges like no other in its 252-year history. For the first time since Sir Joshua Reynolds opened this august institution in 1768, the show has been pushed into the winter months and forced to contend with the realities of social distancing and the challenges of mounting such a huge undertaking in the face of so many uncertainties.

But the team behind Britain’s most beloved annual exhibition persevere undaunted, led by exhibition coordinators and Turner Prize-nominated artists Jane and Louise Wilson, and their team of fellow RA artists including Sonia Boyce, Isaac Julien and Richard Deacon. Their politically charged work will bring audiences face to face with how society has changed beyond recognition in this most unforgettable of years.

The film will capture both the effect of the crisis on the Royal Academy, showing the London building in lockdown and on the first day they were able to reopen their doors to visitors; and the necessary changes needed to succeed in bringing the Summer Exhibition to the public this year, as the committee discuss - via video conference - creative solutions to opening in a socially distanced way.

Presented by Kirsty Wark and Brenda Emmanus, we see the behind-the-scenes preparation that goes into putting the show together ahead of its October opening, meeting artists like Cornelia Parker and Brian Eno - who will be installing his ambient sound piece for the Academy’s vestibule. We’ll learn more about the work of coordinators Jane and Louise Wilson and their vision for this year’s exhibition. We will also spend time with artist Rebecca Salter, the first female President of the RA.

Along the way, we chart the journeys of three members of the public who have submitted art for consideration in this year’s show: which ones will see their work share space on the walls with the likes of Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin and David Hockney?

  • The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Studios Production. It was commissioned for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Arts and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Two by Lamia Dabboussy. The Executive Producer is Tanya Hudson. Gabriella Meade is the Producer and the Producer Director is John O’Rourke.