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Double Awards Success for the Barber
The Barber has been honoured with two top awards that recognize its excellence in education and the quality of one of its coin exhibition catalogues.
At a ceremony at RAF Cosgrove recently, Education Officer Brian Scholes was presented with the prestigious Sandford Award for Heritage Education, which places the Barber alongside top national institutions including Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London and Dulwich Picture Gallery, as well as regional museums such as Aston Hall, Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings and the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, which also hold the award.
Inspectors Eric Steed and Wilf Weeks spent a day at the Barber in May assessing the education team’s activities. In the morning, they watched a visit by a Year One class from Little Sutton Primary School explore portraiture through drama and art activities, and in the afternoon, they shadowed a life drawing class for adults led by Brian and his team with artist Terry Mullett.
The inspectors praised every aspect of the visit. In his report, Mr Steed said: ‘It would be difficult to improve the content or quality of the programme. The presentations — including input and movement — were seamless. There was no time for pupils to drift off because the pace and interest levels were kept so high,’ he continued.
Brian Scholes said he was delighted by the inspector’s findings. ‘The fact that we are almost completely booked up for workshops throughout the school year, as well as for our adult art classes, is evidence that we must be doing something right, but it’s great to have it recognized by the experts.’
Meanwhile, Encounters: Travel and Money in the Byzantine World, by the Barber’s Keeper of Coins, Eurydice Georganteli, and Barrie Cook, from the British Museum, has been declared one of the runners-up in the prestigious AXA Art/Art Newspaper Exhibition Catalogue Award 2007.
Encounters, a vibrant portrayal of the politics, trade, travel and commerce in the Byzantine empire, was short-listed from over 180 publications published by museums and galleries throughout the UK and Eire, and Dr Georganteli, together with the colleagues from the Barber Institute and publisher Dan Giles, were presented with the award at an exclusive award ceremony held at Tate Modern recently. The overall winner was the Wallace Collection’s publication Xanto: Pottery Painter, Poet, Man of the Italian Renaissance.
The judges announced that Encounters was ‘admired for encompassing so much in such a small publication.’
‘It is the product of profound numismatic scholarship, used to recount history through the evidence of coinage: for example, what the archaeological finds of Byzantine coinage tell us about early medieval Scandinavia, which at the time was a non-monetary economy,’ the citation continued.
The book has also been shortlisted for the Royal Numismatic Society Lhotka Memorial Prize.
14 December 2007
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