On February 27, Urbis is closing down. It's going to be re-opened sometime in 2011 as the new home of the National Football Museum (which is in Preston at the moment).
To celebrate - or lament - the end of Urbis as we know it, they've put on a final exhibition,
Urbis Has Left the Building: Six Years of the Best Exhibitions in Pop Culture, so Mr Monkey scampered into town to see it.
He quickly found that the exhibits were mostly posters (a lot of which were new to Mr Monkey), with a number of videos and a few larger artifacts to add variety.
The first section Mr Monkey looked at was
Design, which was appropriate as Urbis' first exhbition,
The Peter Saville Show, was about design.
Matthew Williamson: 10 years in fashion was another show saluting local talent, while many other exhibitions such as
D&AD: The Best Advertising & Design in the World and
How Manga Took Over the World were more global.
Little Black Dress showed Urbis' pulling power by enticing the prestigious fashion show out of the United States for the first time.
Urbis also tried to spark debate, as the large model from the
Supercity exhibition showed.
Next Mr Monkey went to the
Kids & Families section and found out which exhibitions had been aimed at families and children. Urbis always aimed at providing their youngest visitors with something more than face-paints.
Videogame Nation had impressed Mr Monkey when it was on, and the
Urban Gardening had a strong family element.
He had fun exploring the Tiny Travelling Treasure Cabinet from
Play: Experience the Adventure of Our Cities, and was really annoyed that his humans had missed the exhibition.
The
RECLAIM display told Mr Monkey about the award-winning mentoring project that expanded throughout Greater Manchester after starting in Moss Side in 2007.
The project is intended to show young people that they can make positive changes to their communities and to their own lives. This includes the creation of youth manifesto for each community, and a number of these are on display.
RECLAIM will still be active after Urbis closes, and you can read about it at their website :
www.reclaimproject.com.
Being based in Manchester Urbis couldn't really help but feature music in some of their exhibitions, and Mr Monkey was reminded of these in the
Music section.
He read a John Cooper Clarke poem, and watched a video showing the opening night of the
PUNK: Sex, Seditionairs & The Sex Pistols exhibition (which was a little London-centric for Mr Monkey who felt the section on the Manchester punk scene rather raised the tone), and remembered the excellent
Haçienda 25 Fac 491 which chronicled the rise and fall of the famous venue.
Of course,
Home Grown: the story of UK hip hop, which will be on until Urbis closes, is music oriented, too.
Urbis are quite proud of their links with the creative folk of Manchester. The
Creative Community highlights some of this work.
Mr Monkey was pleased to see the poster for
Manchester 24: one city on one camera on one day because it reminded him of the fun he'd had being one of the contributors to the exhibition.
Urbis' links to the local creative community were also shown in exhibitions of the best of recent graduates work in
Celebration of Talent 06 and
Catapult 07 and with displays of local artists' work such as
Reality Hack: Hidden Manchester, which featured Andrew Paul Brooks photographs of the parts of Manchester which are hidden from the public.
The
International Artists section reminded Mr Monkey of all the exhibtions featuring art from around the world.
These included such excellent shows as the two
Ill Communication street art exhibitions, the
China Show and the rather aggressive
Black Panther: Emory Douglas and the Art of Revolution.
Finally Mr Monkey studied the poster for the
DTroit: the art, music and culture of the motor city. He was pleased to see it because
DTroit was the first exhibition that Mr Monkey had been invited to see and it seemed somehow symbolic that it was the last thing he looked in Urbis' last exhibition.
And then Mr Monkey left the building.
