2023 AGM on 6 December

 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

Thank you to all those who are reading this and for your continued support of the Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. I hope 2024 is the year we have a museum and gallery again.

Friends 29th AGM on 26 October 2022

 It was wonderful to hold an in-person AGM after the last two years on Zoom. We have become used to virtual and hybrid meetings while convenient, they don't have the excitement and interest which can be generated in a room by people sitting together. We were very fortunate to be able to hold the meeting at Artsite in Theatre Square in the former Post Office which has been converted into a main gallery and meeting space and artists' studios. The exhibition of works on display was by Carmen B Norris. There was a very good turnout, approximately 30 Friends and the committee members, all keen to know where we are in the journey towards reopening Swindon Museum and Art Gallery.

We approved the report I'd written on the year and approved the minutes of the 2021 AGM, both of which can be found on one of the pages on the blog. We approved the accounts and thanked Brigid Harkness for keeping track of incomings and outgoings, and also thanked Rosemary Savage for reminding people to renew their Friends' membership and writing minutes of meetings. We also thanked vice chair, Barbara Swann for her wonderful monthly newsletters, sent out to all Friends via email each month and available on the website. David Hughes, committee member kindly put together a Power Point Presentation summarising the year. 

After that, Councillor Matty Courtliff, Cabinet Member for culture, heritage, leisure and town centre experience talked about the conversion of the first floor of the Civic Offices into Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, which he anticipates will open in spring 2023. He is very positive about the new location, there will be 40% more space at the new venue than the previous one, with plans to encourage school children to visit, there's also room for a library and research area, as well as 3 art galleries and a large museum space. There was a good response to the new plans, and quite a few questions which I'll collate and publish under FAQs in another post. I've included three photos of the AGM, as I walked from the back of the room to the front.

It just remains for me to thank everyone for coming, and those who continue to support the idea of a museum and art gallery in Swindon. Our four AGM thoughts were:

• It's great to meet in person
• We're looking forward to 2023
• Great news the Civic Offices will be opening as SM&AG
• Looking forward to celebrating our Pearl Anniversary in 2023

Friends AGM

The annual AGM is one of those times when one is grateful that anyone has turned up, it's not the easiest event to attract an audience to attend. Bearing this in mind, we do work hard to make it interesting and informative, we look back at the last year's activities, elect committee members and a look forward to the coming year. This year we had a great crowd at the AGM, thank you so much to those who came along.
We started the evening listening to Councillor Dale Heenan, cabinet member for the town centre, explaining future plans for Swindon Museum and Art Gallery. When the bid to build a new museum and art gallery on the car park beside the Wyvern Theatre failed, £400000 was set aside to upgrade the current building and improve accessibility. That money hasn't been spent yet because of the difficulty in deciding how it should be spent. Apparently a lift so that the gallery could be accessed by people with mobility issues would cost £300000, three quarters of the budget. In an attempt to enable more people to see the collection, some paintings have been shown in STEAM museum and there are currently 18 located through the sliding glass doors at the Civic Offices. Clicking on the links reveals Sophie Cummings in these locations hanging paintings.Two part time posts have also been created to work in the community and with schools. We were keen to have an update on the announcement in March that there would be a Cultural Quarter created on the site of the Wyvern Theatre complex, going as far as the library and back to the law courts, possibly funded by the sale of the Civic Offices. The Cultural Quarter is in the top 3 projects being undertaken by the council, the other two are the SnowDome and Kimmerfields.

 We were very pleased that Dale came along to reassure us that plans are still in place to build a museum and art gallery fit for the collections. I think it was important as well that Friends were able to ask him questions.

 Moving on from Dale, Curator Sophie Cummings gave an excellent account of her year, and reminded us how the Friends had helped with conservation and reframing of paintings and outlined a wish list of things needed in the coming year including new ceramics cabinets. The present ones have been in use since the gallery was built in the sixties, they are hard to access, have poor lighting and security and aren't up to the job of displaying our increasingly fine collection of ceramics.

 I'll make a separate list of the rest of the fundraising we're hoping to be able to do.

 After Sophie's talk, we continued with voting in the committee, looking at the accounts and then using Mike Bradley's wonderful Power Point presentation went through the Friends' activities like talks, trips and Private Views.

 I will send a copy of the presentation via email to the Friends, and put the AGM papers on the pages of the blog.

I took a couple of photos of the audience just to give an idea of the numbers.
Once again thank you to all who came along.