Lear is known around the world as a prolific nonsense poet, but his first love was drawing and painting. Over a period of fifty years, he travelled in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, India, and beyond, composing thousands of pictures. 'Edward Lear, Moment to Moment' brings together, for the first time, an outstanding selection of sketches and paintings from across the whole span of his career. Drawing on several collections and archives in the USA, the UK, and Europe, the exhibition will demonstrate Lear's acute sensitivity to cultural and geographic contexts, showing how his radically associative mind and method forge connections between disparate parts of his experience. At several points, the project will encourage consideration of how Lear's artistry can contribute to debates about the dynamics of multicultural exchange. In addition, both the exhibition and the public programme explore how Lear's itinerant life, one lived in many ways from moment to moment, fed into his creative process. The artist's troubled family history and his complex attitude towards his homosexuality -- along with his lifelong troubles with epilepsy, depression, and mental instability -- had a major influence on his work. This project shows how questions about sexual and social identity, physical and mental illness, became informing preoccupations of his art -- and, crucially, it demonstrates how Lear conceived his art not merely as marked by his past but as a form of therapy for dealing with it. Pushing beyond received views of Lear as merely genial or trivial, this project concentrates attention on how the artist experienced himself as an oddity, a stranger, a spectator ('Society is a game I can't play at,' he lamented). Lear was fascinated by forms of exile and uprootedness, migration and marginality; his 'outsider' status helped to make him an acute analyst of social codes, and of the ways in which these codes might be re-thought and reshaped. The exhibition comes at a time when debates about community diversity and cohesion -- and the role art might play in developing such connections -- are prominent. In addition, recent interest in art therapy, and in forms of creative mindfulness which attend to the present moment, speak to a public need to utilize art in order to foster mental and physical health. Both the exhibition and public programme aim to respond to this need. The underlying motivation of the project is to explore the ongoing legacy of Lear's work by inviting audiences to consider how he speaks from his moment to ours.

Artists of African and Asian descent have been making art in the UK at least since the early twentieth century. However, despite this longstanding situation, a problem exists where art criticism continues to serve the art-works of these artists inadequately. A peculiar kind of eclipsing has taken place where instead of considering and talking directly about the work, the discussions have emphasised the ethnicity of the artist, and the general problematics of race and identity politics within the art establishment, thus deflecting attention away from how these art-works relate to or have influenced the story of twentieth century art. Coalesced under the term 'Black-British', this term can be considered as 'a metaphor for a political circumstance prescribed by struggles against economic exploitation and cultural domination: a state of consciousness that people of various pigmentations have experienced, empathized with, and responded to.' (Powell, 1997: 10) Here, the research will aim to elucidate a critical perspective on the complexities of trying to draw essentialist conclusions about the nature of a practice on the basis of national origin or diasporic affiliation. Black Artists and Modernism, BAM for short, is a 3-year research programme that will investigate the often-understated connections as well as points of conflict between Black-British artists' practice and the art-works' relationship to modernism. Here, the research sees modernism as an unfinished project that is extended in postmodernism, and it will look at what Stuart Hall calls the "conjuncture" of generations of Black-British artists that were 'for' and 'against' modernist dictates. By focussing our attention on art-works held in major public collections as well as key exhibitions, the research is designed to reach a wide audience from students and academics to a more general audience for the arts. The design of the research will produce a wide-range of materials. These include: An online multi-media website that will chronicle a national audit of art-works by Black-British artists held in public collections in the UK. A series of essays, interviews and videos that discuss key art-works and their inclusion in important collections, as well as historically important exhibitions. A series of public discussions will gather in places like Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Paris. Study days and symposia will be focused on signature art-works and exhibition histories looking at the impact of Black-British art on the broader narratives of modern and contemporary art practice. New displays will appear at museums like the Tate, as a way to re-think the connection between the art-work and the story of modernism. Working with Illuminations, the arts and media specialists renowned for their arts programming (including the Turner Prize programmes on Channel Four), the aim is to record the unfolding research process. Documentaries will be made for a variety of public media platforms including broadcast television. At the end of the three-year programme an edited book 'The Blackness of Modernism: reconsidering art-works, exhibitions and collecting the work of Black-British artists' will be published by Duke University Press.

The project will stimulate impact amongst new audiences and partners by staging active encounters with the Mendelsohn archive: 3,000 images taken when Mendelsohn was a student at CCCS in the 1960s, and interviews she conducted with her subjects. Undertaken in collaboration with project partners - Flatpack Film Festival, Ikon Gallery, Library of Birmingham (LoB), Ort Café and Some Cities - activities will consist of: A 'pop up' outdoor exhibition in Balsall Heath, the Birmingham district where the Mendelsohn photographs were taken, run by Flatpack. A local discussion event at Ort Café in Balsall Heath, and a symposium at the LoB. Two photography workshops with hard-to-reach communities run by Some Cities, a local photography collective. A major exhibition at Ikon, the most prominent art gallery in the region. The project follows on from the original project in encouraging audiences to engage with the legacy of CCCS by thinking critically about society. It moves beyond it, however, by working in innovative ways with hard-to-reach communities in order to challenge stereotypes about the areas in which they live, engage communities in thinking critically about their own lives, and form a definition of culture inclusive of ordinary people's experiences. First, the project will connect hard-to-reach communities with their shared histories via the Mendelsohn archive. Second, it will encourage communities to think critically about their own experiences and aspirations. Third, the project will enable communities to form visual representations of these experiences and aspirations via photography. Fourth, it will challenge stereotypes regarding life in inner-city areas and the meaning of 'culture'. And fifth, the project will develop the working practices of partner organisations, both in terms of their way of working with hard-to-reach audiences and their own understandings of culture. The local discussion event and 'pop up' exhibition will engage Balsall Heath communities with the Mendelsohn archive and facilitate knowledge exchange between academics and communities. The exhibition will reach audiences who do not usually engage with impact activities while the photographic focus will help facilitate an engagement with those who do not speak English as a first language and can therefore be excluded from activities reliant on written material; an interpreter will be employed to facilitate communication as necessary. By engaging with their shared histories, communities will be encouraged to think critically about their own experiences and, through the photography workshops, form a visual record of their lives in Balsall Heath. The Ikon exhibition and LoB symposium will challenge audiences more generally to modify preconceptions of 'culture' and life in inner-city areas. Ikon's reputation means the exhibition will reach audiences from across the country, while the LoB attracts 2,000,000 annual visitors. By putting Mendelsohn's photographs of Balsall Heath and those produced by current residents in these artistic and civic contexts, the project will challenge both negative stereotypes about inner-city areas and conservative understandings of culture that discount the experiences of ordinary people. The project will thus also develop the practices of partner organisations to include active engagement with communities such as those in Balsall Heath. The project will be based at the Centre for Modern British Studies (MBS), University of Birmingham (UoB). Partly inspired by CCCS, MBS is committed to developing new forms of impact. In the context of anxieties over community cohesion, the project represents a timely intervention that celebrates diversity and stimulates dialogue about community aspirations. Its legacies will be ensured by the production of an exhibition catalogue as well as the deposition of the new archive of photographs alongside the Mendelsohn archive in the Cadbury Research Library, UoB.

With the launch of the Coalition's plans to mark the centenary of the Great War, the Communities Secretary observed: 'As the First World War moves out of common memory into history, we're determined to make sure these memories are retained', but which common memories did he have in mind? Remembering, just like forgetting, is always a political act. The war was a global conflict which left its mark on the local. Was it experienced differently in urban and rural areas? What were the relationships between soldiers and civilians during and after the war? Did it shape individual and community identities? Did it have different meanings for contemporaries? There was a consensus that the dead were to be commemorated and remembered, but there was less agreement over how the example of sacrifice was to be understood and the meanings to be attributed to and experiences to be drawn from acts of commemoration. How have these meanings changed over time? How will it be understood today? Is it a truism that 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'? Certainly, Britain today is a very different country to that of 1914 and has been described by Parekh (2000) as 'a community of communities.' What sense will young people make of the local memorials to the dead which sit in the urban and rural landscapes and the acts of commemoration organised by an older generation which will centre upon them? What meaning will the war have for young people who have grown up in a society where live reports of conflict are readily available on a smartphone and where the return of the dead from Afghanistan is instantly reported in the media? How will they connect the past with their present and their future? As the First World War moves out of memory into history, what will be the record of commemoration they will have experienced that will be left after 2018 for future historians to reflect upon? These are just some of the questions which have been generated by reflecting on the joint Arts and Humanities Research Council/Heritage Lottery Fund commemorative project. These reflections have in turn shaped the 'Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its Legacy' project proposal. At the core of this cross disciplinary project is an institutional commitment to community engagement with research and a professional commitment 'in a mission of understanding' to investigate, analyse, apprehend, criticize and judge and thereby translate Edward Said's idea of 'communities of interpretation' into practice (Said 2003). Using Birmingham, the UK's second city, as its primary place of memory, the project will reach out to multiple communities/publics both local and national to explore through dialogue issues around memory, remembering and commemoration. The research network will respond to community requests for support in terms of capacity building and support community driven research agenda. Working with other funded centres and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) the project will invest in developing the community engagement experience of early career researchers. A strength of the network beyond its relevant knowledge expertise is the experience embedded within its membership of effective partnership working. As an internationally engaged network, it will seek out relations with cultural institutions in Birmingham's sister cities and through the Universitas 21 network to understand other national and local processes of commemoration and thereby further illuminate our understanding of memorial activities in the UK. Sharing knowledge, expertise and resources, it is intended that the project will leave its own legacy for community/academy relations in terms of the capacity for the co-design and co-production of research, an understanding of the complicated relationship between remembering and forgetting and a desire to continue to 'think forward through the past'.