Open Sesame!

16 April 2020

UPDATE! submissions for the Open exhibition will CLOSE at 5pm on Sunday 14 June 2020 – more dates to follow. We will be contacting all the artists that have already submitted next week!

St Barbe invites you to stay at home and let your imagination run riot! The Coronavirus may have forced us to temporarily close our doors and postpone our exhibitions, but we will not let that discourage us. We are re-launching submissions for our Open Exhibition… Open Sesame!

One of the few benefits of enforced isolation is that we suddenly have time. All those unfinished projects and ideas that we set aside when we were too busy can now come to fruition. If you always wanted to try your hand at watercolours, imagined a textile creation or planned a collage, we invite you to go for it! 

Artists have contacted us thinking that, as the exhibition was postponed, so were the submissions. For anyone who missed the deadline, Open Sesame! We are reopening the online submissions from Saturday 18 April 2020. (Please see our website for full details including the T&Cs). We recognise that artists who have already submitted may wish to swap their work, when the new dates have been agreed, we will contact everyone to give them that opportunity.

We haven’t forgotten our Young Artist’s Open exhibition – the usual method of entering for young people is by collecting an art board from St Barbe which obviously isn’t currently possible. Open Sesame! Young People up to 17 are invited to submit an artwork 20 x 25cm in any medium they like… a collage, painting or textile. Their masterpieces can be brought into the museum when we reopen, along with £1 and the entry form from our website. All Young Artists will have the chance to win a Ted Marsh Memorial Award, see website for full T&Cs. Wouldn’t it be great if we could smother the walls like the RA Summer exhibition?!

Maria Ragan, Director at St Barbe adds “Whilst we cannot release the dates for the postponed Open exhibition it will go ahead as soon as we can make it happen. Open Sesame! is an opportunity for us to look forward to when these challenging times are over. Our doors may be closed but we are still working behind the scenes to bring you exciting exhibitions in the, hopefully not too distant, future”

To quote Albert Einstein “Imagination is everything, it is the preview of life’s coming attractions”

St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery - Open Sesame!

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