Leeds City Museum || Exhibition: Leeds Queer Stories || until 15.05.2016

Leeds City Museum is currently hosting ‘Leeds Queer Stories’, a display of local LGBT*Q history co-curated with local LGBT*Q communities.

Personal stories with national links and themes are revealed through everyday objects, like T shirts, badges and flyers. The display also includes artworks, films, photographs and testimonies gathered from local people. It explores themes of; arts, culture and sports; health and wellbeing; connecting and identity; the struggle for LGBT*Q equality and participation in other movements for social change.

Leeds Queer Stories is part of the Arts Council England funded project within Leeds Museums and Galleries to engage with new audiences and has emerged from the successful Leeds Art Gallery queer cultural project PoMoGaze.

“We’ve got a past, we’ve got a present and we’ve got a future.” – Raymond (Queer Stories Volunteer).

Leeds City Museum || Exhibition: Leeds Queer Stories || until 15.02.2016

Source: Leeds Museums and Galleries

The Foundling Museum || Exhibition: The Fallen Woman || from 25.09.2015 until 03.01.2016

This major exhibition focuses on the myth and reality of the ‘fallen woman’ in Victorian Britain.

In an age when sexual innocence was highly valued and sex for a respectable woman was deemed appropriate only within marriage, the loss of chastity for an unwed woman had multiple repercussions. The figure of the ‘fallen’ woman was popularly portrayed in art, literature and the media as Victorian moralists warned against the consequences of losing one’s virtue.

This exhibition draws together the work of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Redgrave, George Frederic Watts and Thomas Faed, who considered the subject of the fallen woman in their work and helped propel the myth. In addition, newspaper illustrations and stereoscopes demonstrate how depictions of the fallen woman in popular culture also helped define a woman’s role and limitations within society.

The exhibition also explores the written petitions of women applying to the Foundling Hospital at the time. During the early nineteenth century, London’s Foundling Hospital changed its admission process to focus on restoring respectability to the mother. Only the petitions of previously respectable women bearing their first illegitimate child were considered. A specially-commissioned sound installation by musician and composer Steve Lewinson offers a new and engaging interpretation of the Hospital’s archive and brings the women’s voices to life.

The Fallen Woman is curated by Professor Lynda Nead in collaboration with the Foundling Museum’s curatorial team.

The exhibition is also generously supported by The London Community Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, The Idlewild Trust and The Fallen Woman Exhibition Supporters’ Circle.

The Foundling Museum || Exhibition: The Fallen Woman || from 25.09.2015 until 03.01.2016 poster

Source: The Foundling Museum