Art in Cambridge

Coffee, cafés and art

2024-05-13T10:00:00.011+01:00

Coffee, cafés and art:

A selection

Botanic Garden Café.

Art exists along the façade. Plants exist everywhere else. A lovely haunt. The Botanic Garden costs money and no dogs allowed, and the café can get crowded on weekends and during half-term.

Caffé Nero, King's Parade.

Sit in or in front of the café and enjoy the architecture of King's College across the road.

Fitzwilliam Museum Garden Café.

Stone lions watch as you sip. Up the steps and to your right, there is much art.

Hot Numbers.

Changing art on the walls.

Box Café.

A colourful mural adorns one wall.

Teapots MAA.

The Museum of Art and Archaeology is not a café nor does it have a café but it does have teapots. And they are lovely.

Grantchester, Orchard Garden Tearooms.

No art to be seen but artists frequented this wonderful place. Read all about them in a pamphlet available at the till. Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brookes et al.

I do love cafés. And I do love art. There may be a Part 2 of this topic at some point. 🙂

Permalink: https://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2016/03/coffee-cafes-and-art.html

Three arty things in May 2024: Politics, giraffes and Cambridge's tiniest gallery

2024-05-01T10:00:00.002+01:00

Three arty things in May 2024

Local Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj at Kettle's Yard and the Heong Gallery. Ends 26 May 2024. Mind-challenging, conceptual, political.

Linked from Kettle's Yard.

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Giraffes. They call themselves a 'sculpture trail'. But are they really, though? They are a charity event, and on the 19 June you can bid for them, and before that, donate money. Every now and again, these animals appear; a few years ago, it was cows, and I've seen dinosaurs in Norwich. The animals are manufactured by 'Wild in Art', 'leading producers of spectacular, mass-appeal public art events' (source). The sculptures are made of 'lightweight, fire resistant fibreglass', finished with a white primer and ready to paint by local artists (source). So each CB giraffe is an identical mass-produced 3-D object that is then individually painted by a raft of artists. So the art really consists in a painting trail, not a sculpture trail as such. Although why can figures mass-produced by a company not be called 'sculpture'? Food for thought.

In the meantime, there are some more or less jolly giraffes hanging around in expected and unexpected places but, I have to say, giraffes don't really have much local resonance as creatures. At least the cows of a few years back had local live counterparts.

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There's always something exciting or sweet or intriguing at the unusual and tiny Bird Box Gallery in St Thomas' Square. In March it was Alistair Burgass's carved and painted sculpture. What will it be in May?

Source: Bird Box Instagram

Issam Kourbaj at the Heong Gallery

2024-04-20T17:48:00.003+01:00

Issam Kourbaj's sad little ships

Today I saw many little ships in the Heong Gallery. Their hulls are made of bent and crushed bicycle wheelrims (Felgen, in German). Each holds a bunch of bunt matches: people. Refugees. Voyaging along the raised floor of the gallery towards the light of the window and the unbelievable green sward behind it with Barbara Hepworth's serene sculpture among the vegetation.

Issa Kourbaj is a long-time resident of Cambridge who makes art about Syria, war and displaced humans. The ships reminded me of the floating boats of Hew Locke's installation at the magnificent Entangled Pasts exhibition in London (Royal Academy). Boats that carry people who don't want to be carried. Boats that hold at the same time as they condemn.