New LGBT+ exhibitions at Bury Art Museum

Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre is delighted to be the first museum to show LGBT+ exhibition Diary Drawings.

The museum is also collaborating with artist Jez Dolan on the 60/50 project, resulting in a series of events in the permanent collection gallery.

Diary Drawings emerged from Jez Dolan’s research project, The Last Case of George Cecil Ives (1867-1950). Ives was a British-German poet, penal reformer, diarist, and founder of The Order of Chaeronea, the world’s first secret homosexual society, founded in London in 1891. Artist Jez Dolan is one of the first people to research Ives in any great depth, and the first artist internationally to create work examining Ives and his legacy. Diary Drawings will run until 13 May 2017.

2017 marks the anniversary of two milestones in UK LGBT+ legislation; the Wolfenden report, published in September 1957, and the Sexual Offences Act, passed in 1967, which partially decriminalised homosexual acts (in private, by men) in England and Wales. Both of these had significant impact around the world, and Dolan will be working with Bury Art Museum’s permanent collection on a series of events to commemorate these.

Dolan was commissioned in 2015 by the House of Commons as part of the Festival of Freedoms, celebrating 750 years of Parliament in the UK, and highlighting specific pieces of legislation which had significant impact. The first number in the edition is in the permanent collection of the Parliamentary Art collection.

Bury Art Museum is open Tuesday to Friday (10am to 5pm) and on Saturday (10am to 4.30pm). Admission is free and the museum is fully accessible. It is located on Moss Street in Bury town centre, next to Bury Library and opposite the bus/Metrolink interchange.

ENDS

Press release issued: 21 February 2017.

Picture: Nancy, part of 60/50, Jez Dolan.