Ashmolean Museum re-opens
England’s oldest museum, The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was officially re-opened by the Queen last week after an spectacular £61 million re-vamp
At the heart of the museum’s impressive redevelopment programme is a state-of-the-art new building. Designed by Rick Mather Architects, it doubles the display space of the old, rather tired, Victorian building (which will now house the museum’s re-deployed collection of Western Art) and includes 39 new galleries, as well as an education centre, conservation centre, space for temporary exhibitions and even a roof-top restaurant. The new gallery displays breathe fresh life into the museum’s outstanding collection of Japanese, Chinese and Islamic art and artefacts, showing them in a carefully conceived series of interconnected galleries. These are arranged thematically as well as chronologically with the common thread being ‘Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time’, designed to provide a global overview of the collection, underlining the connections between diverse objects, cultures and peoples.
Craft aficionados will be particularly impressed by the museum’s vast collection of ceramics – particularly the Japanese export porcelain and the classic Chinese pieces from the Song and Tang heyday – as well as the fact that the museum now boasts a purpose-built, dedicated Textile Centre. The displays here explore the making and meaning of many of the museum’s textiles with the emphasis, once again, on cross-cultural displays.
www.ashmolean.org
