Talks, workshops, guided tours, film showings and more you’ll find plenty of events to keep you inspired at Swansea Museum.
Gwyn Griffiths
Fraternity of the Onion sellers and Growers of Roscoff, Brittany.
7pm on Wednesday 13th January 2016
The Fraternity was established five years ago after the onions of Roscoff received the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée seal of approval. The unique Roscoff onions have been sold by the men known as Johnny Onions – or Sioni Winwns – throughout Wales, England Scotland since 1828 and can still be seen in our towns from time to time. Gwyn Griffiths is the author of a number of books about these men and he founded the onion men museum – La Mason des Johnnies – in Roscoff in 1995.
Peter Lord
Merthyr Blues: Heinz Koppel and his location in the Welsh art world.
7pm on Wednesday 20th January 2016
Taking Heinz Koppel’s 1955 painting, Merthyr Blues as a starting point, in this lecture Peter Lord will explore the artistic and social context of the south Wales valleys into which the German born artist moved in 1944, the influences that acted upon him during his years of activity in Wales, and his influence upon the young Welsh painters that he met here.
Peter Lord took a degree in Fine Art at Reading University in 1970. He was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for British Art in 1994, then research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies from 1996-2003 and, more recently, at CREW, Swansea University. He has published and broadcast extensively on the visual culture of Wales in both Welsh and English languages, and curated major exhibitions for national institutions. Between 1998 and 2003 he published the three volumes of The Visual Culture of Wales, which is regarded as the authoritative text on the subject. In 2009 he published The Meaning of Pictures: Images of Personal, Social and Political Identity and in 2013 an autobiography, Relationships with Pictures. His latest book, The Tradition: a New History of Welsh Art 1400-1990, will be published by Parthian in March 2016.
Friday, 22 January 2016 at 19:00
The Euro Visions of Wales exhibition at Swansea Museum welcomes Heini Gruffudd who will give a talk on his mother Kate Bosse-Griffiths – Swansea’s German archaeologist.
Kate Bosse Griffiths was born in Wittenberg, Germany, of German and Jewish ancestry. Having lost her position in a Berlin museum on account of this, she was forced to find refuge from Nazi persecution in Scotland, then England, and eventually in Wales.
Kate became Honorary Curator in the Archaeology Department of the Royal Institute in Swansea in 1947. In 1971 she became Honorary Curator of the Wellcome Museum at the University of Swansea, which became the present day Egypt Centre.
During her time in Swansea she wrote short stories, novels and travel books in Welsh as well as scores of articles on local archaeology as well as on Egyptological matters.