Children’s authors for your Museums at Night 2014 event

Every year we collaborate with the Reading Agency to connect Museums at Night venues with authors to be part of their festival events, without charging an appearance fee.

This year we have an exciting list of 21 writers whose books are targeted at children and young adults for you to pick from, including How to Train your Dragon author Cressida Cowell and Bartimaeus author and ghost specialist Jonathan Stroud.

Download the spreadsheet list of children’s authors here – would any of these be appropriate for your venue’s Museums at Night event?

How author events work: case study

Last year, Northampton Museum & Art Gallery brought in author and historian Lucy Moore, who had recently published her biography of famous ballet dancer Nijinsky. This was relevant because the museum holds a world-renowned shoe collection, including the ballet slippers of prima ballerinas Anna Pavlova, Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer – which they highlighted in a display.

Vaslav Nijinsky in Scheherazade (c. 1912), shared under a Wikimedia Commons licence

In addition to the author talk, which was chaired by the Senior Lecturer in Dance from the University of Northampton, the museum also invited a ballet dancer along to demonstrate some aspects of the dance form and discuss how she worked.

This successful event was specifically targeted at dance students and ballet fans, many of whom had not previously visited the museum but were pleased to have the opportunity to engage with specific objects in the collection. The extra programming inspired by the author created an enjoyable and rewarding evening experience for visitors.

How to promote an author talk

Once we connect your museum, gallery, library or heritage site with a particular author, it will be down to you to liaise directly with the publisher, coordinate and cover the expenses for the author’s travel and accommodation as necessary, take delivery of books for the book sale, and promote the event to your local audiences.

The publishers may have publicity material and images they can share with you to help attract attention, as well as copies of books that can be used as competition prizes – do ask them what they expect and how they may be able to help you!

Don’t forget that you can charge for admission to your Museums at Night events – but as these authors will appeal to families, you may want to widen access to more people by pricing tickets on a cost-recovery basis.

Your next step

Download the spreadsheet of available authors and share the list with your team. Do any of these writers, or the subjects they write about, have a connection with your venue, collections or location?

If you are interested in a particular author, double check their restrictions – some are only able to go to venues within a certain geographical area, most have specified the age groups their books are intended for, and many have set the minimum or maximum number of people they prefer to come and perform for.

In addition, there is extra information about the type of skills and props the authors bring along to their talks, which may be inspiring: for example, Holly Webb‘s events usually involve puzzles and hands-on craft-making activity sessions; Ten Little Pirates author Mike Brownlow would like to hold a piratical party; and Osbert the Avenger author Christopher William Hill brings boxes full of smells which he uses to inspire kids to create their own characters and stories.

Be aware that all events featuring these authors will usually end with a sale of their books, and in many cases a book signing session for visitors – do you have the space and staffing capacity to deliver this successfully?

If you’d like to invite one of these authors to your venue for Museums at Night, please call Nick or Rosie on 01273 623336.

1 week extension: Apply for Connect10 artist Spencer Tunick by Friday 29 November

We’re nothing if not flexible at Museums at Night HQ, and in the run-up to the Connect10 competition we’ve had some really interesting conversations with organisations who are interested in applying for photographer Spencer Tunick but need more time to do location scouting and plan their bid.

So, we’ve extended the deadline to apply for Spencer Tunick to be your Connect10 artist until 11am on Friday 29 November.

To apply to host Spencer Tunick, simply fill in this form.

Spencer Tunick

Spencer Tunick stages scenes in which the battle of nature against culture is played out against various backdrops, from civic center to desert sandstorm, man and woman are returned to a preindustrial, pre-everything state of existence.  Tunick has traveled the globe to create these still and video images of multiple nude figures in public settings. Organizing groups from a handful of participants to tens of thousands, all volunteers, is often logistically daunting; the subsequent images transcend ordinary categories and meld sculpture and performance in a new genre.

Installation (c) Spencer Tunick

Given the constant threat of arrest (which has happened several times in his career) Spencer has not undertaken a group installation on the streets of New York in over ten years. In order to make his work without the threat of incarceration, the artist decide to take his work abroad – his most notable installations have been commissioned by Art Basel, Switzerland (1999), Institut Cultura, Barcelona (2003), XXV Biennial de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002), The Saatchi Gallery in London (2003), MOCA Cleveland (2004) and Vienna Kunsthalle (2008).

Spencer Tunick’s Connect10 event idea:

Given the fact that Spencer’s large scale nude installations generally require big budgets and an enormous time investment, this Museums at Night event will involve a more intimate look at his practice. Spencer’s work with ‘scopes’ (individual miniature viewfinders, like the ones he’s is holding in his self-portrait photograph) allows him a more private way of portraying his nude subjects.

The artist holding plastic scopes (c) Spencer Tunick

Just as Andy Warhol used to Polaroid cameras to capture his subjects in intimate small spontaneous portraits, Spencer intends to achieve the same thing. The act of carrying around a private portrait that can only be viewed through a small lens is reminiscent of the way we all use our iPhones to take 21st century Polaroids.

The essence of Spencer’s event will be about the nature of people’s interactions with intimate images and how that has evolved and changed (but stayed intrinsically the same) since the Victorian era ‘What The Butler Saw’ peepshows, through to the heyday of the key-chain viewer in the 50s and 60s to the present day iPhone and Instagram generation.

‘Tunick is a fourth-generation photographer. His great-grandfather owned the first Kodak photo finishing plant in downtown New York. His grandfather was a photographer for the United Nations Council on Foreign Relations, photographing heads of state, like President John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro. And his father photographed guests at hotels in the Catskills in the 1960s and ’70s, selling them back their photos in key-chain viewers.’ (From USA Today)

The key-chain viewer or scope will be the hardware in which the photos taken during this unique event will be delivered. Using real film and the E-6 process to develop the images Spencer wants to explore photographic heritage, the nature of collaboration and the contrast between a fast-moving shoot and the more time-consuming production process.

Using this technique, Spencer is proposing a mass performative portrait shoot, either somewhere in Greater London, or at a coastal venue with access to a beach, within 2 hours drive of London. The exact location will only be made available to participants.

This is not a group work, but a series of quickly taken individual portraits. Spencer is looking for 100-250 volunteers to participate in this unique piece of performance art (an even split of men and women) – the application process will be explored with the winning venue. Once all subjects have been photographed, each image will be inserted into its own individual keychain scope and given to each participant as a gift during a special artist-led event at the venue later that evening.

Location scouting

Because Spencer is based in the US and therefore unable to scout locations himself, this process itself will form the basis of the venues’ proposals. We invite London venues and coastal venues in Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Hampshire and East or West Sussex to suggest a location for this work.

Locations need to be: within 200 metres of the venue, visually interesting, preferably off the beaten track, preferably outside, probably quirky, possibly not and perhaps where there’s little or no regular traffic.

Each venue may submit a maximum of 4 proposed locations – one good quality JPG photograph of the location and a brief description (25 words each max.) required.

This shoot will take place during the day before the evening event. Later that evening Spencer would like to host a special event at the winning venue for all the participants although other non-participants could also attend. It’s during this event that the finished artworks will be presented to each participant. The aim of the evening is for each person to walk away with a genuine Spencer Tunick artwork in their hands. But will they want their own image in the viewfinder or that of a nude stranger? Just one question this event can explore. It would also be interesting to find a way of displaying the complete collection of images taken earlier that day so participants get a sense of the project as a whole. The detail of this finale event is also open to proposals.

Spencer is available to venues situated in the Greater London area or on the coast (with access to the beach) within a two-hour drive from London. The shoot would take place on the day of Thursday or Friday and the evening event on Friday or Saturday.

Up to £1,000 of the venue’s £2,000 prize money is earmarked to pay for the scope viewfinders that Spencer will use for the event.

To apply to host Spencer Tunick, simply fill in this form.

FAQs about the Connect10 competition entry form

Several people who couldn’t make it to our recent Museums at Night / Connect10 briefing sessions have asked to see the slides that Nick and I used to introduce Culture24’s work, the Museums at Night festival and the Connect10 competition.

Introduction to Culture24, Museums at Night and the Connect10 competition from Culture24 .

 

When you fill in the Connect10 competition entry form, you’ll be asked to select your chosen artist, and then answer the following questions.

1) Spencer Tunick’s event idea, which is limited to organisations in the Greater London area, involves outdoor photo shoots.
If you have chosen Spencer Tunick, please tell us about a maximum of four locations you are suggesting for this site specific work in a maximum of 25 words for each site. Then send one image per location to rosie@culture24.org.uk and nick@culture24.org.uk marked ST image.

Installation (c) Spencer Tunick

2) Please tell us why you have chosen this particular artist, and what connections you see between their work and your venue, collections or location. (Maximum 100 words) 

3) Please tell us about the event you’d like to run with your selected artist. Make sure you have read the artist’s statement and thought about what you can achieve that relates to the artist’s practice and stays within budget.

The brief outline should address questions such as: What will happen? What format will it take? How will it involve audience participation? Whereabouts in your venue will it take place? Let us know any relevant information. (Maximum 200 words)

4) What sort of audience are you aiming to attract with this event? For example, are you aiming to reach lapsed attenders, families who want a hands-on element to the event, or mature explorers who want an event with an educational element? (Maximum 100 words)

For more information about audience development strategies, read Targeting specific audiences.

5) Each winning venue will have £2,000 to spend on their event and any artists’ materials. This doesn’t include the artist’s fee and travel and accommodation costs, which Culture24 will cover.

Please use this space to provide a basic budget outline: what would you spend your prize money on? Remember to include the proceeds from any ticket sales if you intend to charge an admission fee. (Maximum 100 words)

Ready to enter? Fill in the entry form here to tell us which artist you’d like to win and what you’d do with them, by 5pm on Friday 22 November.