We held our Friend's AGM on Wednesday 6 December at 7pm at Artsite in Theatre Square.
It was well attended and we were fortunate to have Cabinet Member for Heritage, Art and Culture, Marina Strinkovsky to give us an update on the conversion of the first floor of the Civic Offices into Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, and a possible opening time as Spring 2024.
We looked at a summary of our activities in 2023; we've had some excellent speakers, some of the talks held via Zoom have been recorded and can be viewed via the website. All talks are also written up and appear in this blog, so you can find them all here. We visited Kelmscott for a guided tour this year, and also took a coach to St. Barbe, Lymington and saw the Parallel Lives exhibition co curated by Dr Gill Clarke.
The members of the committee remain the same for next year as they have been for this year which provides stability, but with 3 posts on the committee: Chair, Vice Chair and Membership Secretary becoming vacant next year, we need to recruit more members onto the committee. Please get in touch if this interests you, even if you are not currently a member. To read the chair's report and minutes of the 2022 AGM, please click on the link in the pages section along the right hand side.
In November we were very sorry to hear of the death of Lady Vanetta Joffe. Vanetta was an enthusiastic member of the committee for many years and also Swindon Open Studios organiser, her move to Bristol and closure of the museum and art gallery, meant she was less involved in the Friends.
I have included the photograph of Vanetta which appears in the chair's statement, and I'll include this photograph I came across recently. Vanetta is in her garden in Liddington showing me an extremely floriferous foxglove
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