This first blog is by The Ruskin’s Director, Professor Sandra Kemp:
John Ruskin’s 200th birthday is just two weeks away. In the run-up to the day, we are pleased to be launching our new blog and website at Lancaster University.
Ruskin’s bicentenary year will be a momentous one. Exhibitions, activities and events celebrating the life and works of this epoch-defining writer, artist, social thinker and environmentalist will be taking place across the UK and internationally over the next twelve months. You can follow the programme of bicentenary events at www.ruskin200.com
Here at Lancaster we are already on count-down to our own bicentenary exhibition, which is timed to coincide with the official launch of The Ruskin on 25th September 2019.
For regular visitors to The Ruskin, we appreciate your patience during this period of refurbishment and it is great to welcome you back in person and online. Over the past year, the Ruskin Library, which currently houses the world-leading collection of Ruskin’s works, has been given an external facelift and upgraded, updated and refitted internally to transform the reading rooms and galleries. The Ruskin brings together the Ruskin Library, Museum, and Research Centre within the McCormac’s award-winning building. Our new programme explores how Ruskin’s epoch defining ideas can unlock urgent current and future social, cultural and environmental issues.
Tolstoy wrote of Ruskin that ‘He was one of those rare men who thinks … what everyone will think and say in the future’. Our launch exhibition – Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future – will radically expand on this insight by exploring the importance of Ruskin’s thinking about what it means to be human in an age of technology to some of the most pressing challenges of our own time. Ruskin understood how the future is embedded in the here and now. As his personal motto ‘To-day’ affirms, he was profoundly aware of how the lives we lead in the present set the conditions of the world to come.
In the coming months our blogs, events, exhibitions and research projects will draw on the thousands of Ruskin’s paintings and drawings, books and manuscripts, prints and photographs in our collection to promote debate across the arts and sciences and investigate culture and heritage, landscape and the environment. In relaunching the website, we have made more of Ruskin’s works available online and we’ve started an ambitious programme of digitisation. We’ll be blogging regularly and you can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We’d welcome your ideas and suggestions for our programmes.
Meanwhile, on Thursday 7th February, the eve of Ruskin’s birth, in Lancaster University’s Great Hall, ‘Ruskin’s Dreams’, a concerto by Lake District composer Edward Cowie, will be performed by performed by the BBC Philharmonic, with clarinettist Julian Bliss.
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/the-ruskin
Open 10.00–16:00 weekdays