The City of Birmingham is undergoing its first comprehensive city plan in 50 years. The goal is to shape the future of the Magic City, with a 20-year policy and strategic framework. Organizers hope The Plan will guide the physical development of the city, based  on community vision and goals for neighborhoods, jobs, economic development, parks, the environment, transportation, public services and infrastructure. As an early step in that process, the City is inviting you to a Citywide Visioning Forum this Saturday, October 22, from 9am to 1pm at the Birmingham CrossPlex, formerly known as the Alabama State Fairgrounds. For more information, click here: www.birminghamcomprehensiveplan.com

Wednesday, December 7, 2011
9am-1pm
at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens

The Red Mountain Garden Club has been a vital partner with the Birmingham Museum of Art since the Museum’s inception 60 years ago. When the Museum opened its doors on its present site a portion of the property was designated as a Memorial Garden established and cared for by the Red Mountain Garden Club. That stewardship continues today with the Museum’s beautiful Red Mountain Garden Club Memorial Garden, named last year among the Ten Great Public Spaces for 2010 by the American Planning Association.

This year the Red Mountain Garden Club plans a special project to enhance the beauty and function of the garden through a new lighting design. Funding for continued care and improvements to the Memorial Garden is provided by the Club through a variety of sources. One of the most significant funding sources is the proceeds from the Club’s annual greenery sale. This year’s sale will take place on December 7 from 9:00 am until 1:00 pm at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Co-chairs for the sale are Anne Couch and Holly Goodbody.

Please plan to do your holiday greenery shopping on December 7 to support the Museum’s Red Mountain Garden Club Memorial Garden. If you would like to shop early, contact the Club’s Presales Chair, Melissa Hagen, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or download the order forms below.

Please join us for a FREE opening lecture by Dr. Patrick Rowe followed by a members-only reception for the exhibition Daumier: Art for the Masses.

Friday, October 14, 2011
6pm
in the Museum's Steiner Auditorium

Dr. Patrick M. Rowe. Lender to the Daumier exhibition, will present a lecture entitled Art for the Masses. Dr. Rowe will describe how the Industrial Revolution and increased literacy allowed people with a low or moderate income to acquire art created by master printmakers.

Dr. Rowe has taught at Florida State University, the University of West Florida, and Pensacola State College. He specializes in Etruscan and Roman art and archaeology, as well as the history of printmaking during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1976 until 2002, he excavated at the Etrusco-Roman site of Cetamura in Italy. Currently, he is organizing exhibitions of drawings, lithographs, wood engravings, and woodblock prints from his private collection.

Not a member, but want to attend the recepction? JOIN NOW by clicking here.

The Museum has received a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in support of a yearlong Interpretive Fellowship. Nicole Jordan, a graduate student in the Department of Art History at UAB and recipient of the 2010-2011 BMA/UAB Fellowship, has been named the Kress Interpretive Fellow. In this role, Nicole will work with Dr. Jeannine O’Grody, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, to complete the comprehensive catalogue of the Museum’s Kress Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings. Nicole will also work with the Museum’s Education staff to develop and strengthen gallery interpretation of the collection.

The Museum continues its partnership with UAB this academic year with the appointment of Kelsey Tae Frady as the second BMA/UAB Curatorial Fellow. Kelsey is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Art History at UAB with an emphasis on American art of the 19th and 20th centuries and a particular focus on issues of race, class, and gender.

Kelsey will work closely with the Museum’s curatorial staff to learn about the inner workings of a museum and help prepare her for a future career as a museum curator. Her projects will be varied and will support the curators’ work on the permanent collection and special exhibitions. Kelsey will be with the Museum until August 2012.

In September, Dr. Anne Forschler-Tarrasch, the Marguerite Jones Harbert and John M. Harbert III Curator of Decorative Arts, gave a lecture at the Second International Meeting of the Friends of Ornamental Cast Iron held in Bendorf-Sayn, Germany. The meeting brought together scholars and collectors from around the world to present and discuss the latest research in the field. The Birmingham Museum of Art houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of decorative cast iron in the world, the Gustav Lamprecht Collection, given to the Museum in 1986 by the American Cast Iron Pipe Company. The Collection was published in 2009 in the fully illustrated catalogue, European Cast Iron in the Birmingham Museum of Art. Anne has also been invited to review the new publication, This Blessed Plot, This Earth: English Pottery Studies in Honour of Jonathan Horne, edited by Amanda Dunsmore, for the ceramics journal Ars Ceramica. The publication brings together fresh scholarship from experts in the field of English pottery.

Samantha Kelly, Curator of Education, delivered an interactive talk to incoming freshmen students at UAB during the annual Museum College Night on Tuesday, August 30. "Pictured in My Mind: An Experience in Visual Thinking" provoked students to engage with works of art in the Museum’s collection. The talk and event were focused on themes from the book Thinking In Pictures: My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin, which every freshman is required to read during the 2011–2012 academic year.

Dr. Graham C. Boettcher, The William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art, has been invited to lecture at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Thursday, October 20, at 6 pm in conjunction with the exhibition The Art of Seating: Two Hundred Years of American Design (September 24, 2011 - January 15, 2012). Boettcher’s talk, entitled “From Tufts and Tassels to Tubular Steel: The Modernization of the American Interior,” examines the changing nature of furniture in the American domestic interior, from the frills of the late Victorian period to sleek mid-20th century objects. Boettcher will discuss the impact of the sanitary movement, design reform, and the availability of new materials on American style. Graham also will give a lecture Sunday, November 6, at 2:15 p.m., at the Birmingham Public Library, entitled "The Industrial City Beautiful: Artists of the Birmingham Scene from the Great Depression Through World War II." The lecture is in conjunction with the exhibition The Birmingham Scene: Seldom-Seen Artwork from the 1930s and 1940s, organized by the Birmingham Historical Society, November 6–December 30, 2011.

During a June trip to Washington, D.C., BMA Curator Dr. Emily Hanna met with the Ambassador of Ghana, The Honorable Daniel Ohene Agyekum, and the Cultural Attaché, Mrs. Vanessa Mensah-Adu, to discuss plans for the re-installation of the African gallery at the BMA in the spring of 2013 and related programming. Mrs. Gwen Amamoo, President of the Birmingham/Ghana Sister City Committee, also participated in the meeting. Emily also conducted research on the BMA’s Native American collection at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian.

Ron Platt, the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, is organizing the exhibition LA Skin & Ink: Tattooing in Los Angeles, 1970s to the Present, for the Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles, where it will open in September 2012.

Dr. Jeannine O’Grody, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, will take part in the 2011–2012 class of Leadership Birmingham. The program prepares and encourages its graduates to engage in greater individual and group action in order to contribute to the betterment of the community and its people.

The Education Department is delighted to announce that Sarah Mills Nee has joined the team as Education Assistant. Sarah has a master’s degree in Art History from the University of Denver, and will be a great new addition to the Museum family.

 Over the past week, a team from New York has undertaken the meticulous reinstallation of a site-specific piece by Tara Donovan which is composed primarily of thousands of styrofoam cups.

Donovan, an American artist and 2008 recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, frequently incorporates mass-manufactured media in her work. She originally created this site-specific work for the Museum in 2004. Donovan chose to build the sculpture on the ceiling in the back of the Museum's Cafe, above and in front of the large wall of windows, to take advantage of the staggared surfaces and bountiful natural light.

The original installation was removed due to age, and new materials are being used to recreate Donovan's concept. Completion of the installation is scheduled for Friday, September 23rd.

As the beginning of the school year approaches, the Museum is excited to offer a new academic program to the third grade teachers and students in the nine Birmingham City Schools served by the Straight A Program. Designed to explore the impact of arts-integration on literacy and math in fourth grade achievement, Straight A will serve the following Birmingham City elementary schools over a three-year period: Avondale Elementary, Council Elementary, Glenn Iris Elementary, Hemphill Elementary, North Roebuck Elementary, Robinson Elementary, South Hampton Elementary, Central Park Elementary, and Whatley Elementary. To build on the momentum of the Straight A program and to increase preparedness in rising fourth graders, we have selected the third grade for this new pilot program.

Using the Museum’s Start with Art program as a model, participating third grade students and teachers will experience visual arts integration through six comprehensive encounters with the Museum. A Museum educator will visit each classroom three times during the academic year with sequential in-classroom instruction designed to provide students with skills and knowledge in the visual arts in accordance with high national, state, and local standards. The three Museum visits will include a curriculum-based tour of the collection followed by a studio art activity. In addition, the Museum conducted an intensive teacher workshop on September 2nd to generate enthusiasm for the project and give teachers insight into the myriad possibilities of incorporating art into their daily teaching experience.

The program primarily supports the visual arts, language arts and math curricula. Emphasis on close observation and using those observations to analyze and question works of art to help students construct meaning also supports both science and history habits of mind. The program supports important 21st-century learning skills that students must master to succeed in work and life—a blend of content knowledge, specific skills, expertise and literacy. As much as students need to learn academic content, they also need to know how to keep learning — and make effective and innovative use of what they know — throughout their lives. We believe that art is a powerful catalyst to generate advanced-level thinking and creativity in our society, and are delighted to be able to offer such a robust program to the students of Birmingham City Schools.

In addition, the Museum is developing complimentary community-based programs in these same nine communities. To truly affect change, we believe we must educate the whole child. By connecting to not only the students, but becoming a part of the students’ life outside of school, we can situate the Museum as a true partner in education. Although not fully developed, this community-based outreach will target families, community organizations, churches, libraries, and neighborhood associations.

Do you ever wish your doctors would spend more time talking to you, examining you (well…maybe not), and building a relationship with you—instead of looking at charts and paperwork to make a diagnosis?

The Museum’s Education Department is partnering with UAB Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, Stephen Russell, MD, on a new pilot program designed to help emerging doctors become better communicators and diagnosticians. A new course, Art in Medicine: Using Visual Arts to Improve Clinical Observation Skills, will be offered to second year medical students beginning October 17, 2011. The course, which will be conducted in the Museum galleries, explores the relationship between observation and diagnosis by exposing students to works of fine art and teaching them critical skills of observation.

Taught by Museum Education staff members Samantha Kelly and Suzy Harris and the General Internal Medicine Faculty at UAB, the course focuses on close looking to improve skills of description, interpretation, and how to discern emotional clues based on a given context. By the end of the three-session course at the Museum, students will have an improved skills set for clinical diagnosis, and in so doing, an improved appreciation for art and the Museum.

Who Shot Rock & Roll: Sunday Encore!
 Sunday // September 18 // 12pm -- 5pm

It's the final act of Who Shot Rock! Don't miss out on Dylan, Tina, Tupac, Radiohead, and other rock royalty. Who Shot Rock & Roll opens at 11am its last day. Show's over for good Sunday at 5pm.

Sunday Encore! Brunch
Sunday // September 18  // 11am - 2pm

Enjoy a lively brunch at Oscar's with rockstar favorites like Bob Marley's Jamaican Me Crazy Smoked Salmon, Axel Rose's Texas Style Ribs, Tina Turner's Crispy Fried Chicken, and more! Live music will be performed by Frankie Velvet and the Mighty Veltones.

Click here for reservations.