Towns and their people focus of a new exhibition
DISPLAY WILL MARK 25 YEARS SINCE CLOSURE OF GALLERY
A NEW exhibition featuring striking photographs of people and places in Jarrow and Hebburn is opening - 25 years after Jarrow’s Bede Gallery, where the photographs originated, closed its doors.
The exhibition opens tomorrow at South Shields Museum on the town’s Ocean Road.
The majority of the photographs were acquired by the museum in 2016 along with other artworks, artefacts and ephemera which had formerly resided at Bede Gallery, which was uniquely housed in an ex-civil defence bunker in Jarrow’s Springwell Park.
The gallery was the brainchild of Vince Rea and Derek Bertinshaw.
The inaugural show opened in July 1970 and over the course of the next 26 years the Bede Gallery would host many popular art and local history exhibitions, from the gruesome tale of The Gibbeting of William Jobling at Jar
row Slake in 1832 to an acclaimed exhibition of work by one of the world’s greatest artists Pablo Picasso.
In November and December 1996 Bede Gallery staged its final exhibition, a show featuring the work of photographer Chris Killip and painter Ken Watts.
The exhibition at South Shields Museum will mark 25 years since that last exhibition at the gallery.
Museum Manager Geoff Woodward said: “It has been really great working with our local communities to produce this exhibition which presents an amazing photographic record of the heritage of Jarrow and Hebburn.
“We would like to express our thanks to members of Jarrow and Hebburn Local History Society for their work in selecting images and providing interpretation.”
Meanwhile, a major exhibition of the art works of the late North East artist John Peace is also on display at the museum. It features 80 works all drawn and painted throughout the North East and spanning more than six decades of Peace’s life.