This Thursday take an after-hours cultural excursion on the Art Bus. Visiting seven Birmingham galleries for this edition, (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Eastside Projects, Ikon Gallery, mac birmingham, The Parkside Gallery (BCU), RBSA Gallery and the Waterhall Gallery at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery) all will be open from 5pm until 9pm. The free bus will be transporting visitors throughout the night.

More information can be found here.

• mac
• Barber Institute of Fine Arts
• Ikon
• RBSA Gallery
• Eastside Projects

Hop aboard the bus as it travels around the city, all while enjoying a mince pie and glass of wine at selected galleries.

Some of the galleries taking part in Art Bus were featured in our brief CiB exhibitions round-up last week, including the launch of Trade Show at Eastside Projects, and Tim Johnson, David Tremlett, Amikan Toren and Dean Kelland exhibitions at Ikon Gallery.

Visit the galleries’ websites (linked above) to find out more information about current exhibitions for each of the venues.

The Art Bus will run from 5 – 9pm and a schedule of the bus times can be found here.

D’log has flagged up:

• A Series of Conversations organised by the Birmingham Photography and Archive Research Group; and
• Some events and lectures accompanying the Barber Institute’s Cityscapes exhibition. The ‘adult events’ listed on that page are either couched in heavily euphemistic terms or not actually smutty at all. I suspect the latter.

Also, We Are Eastside bring news of:

• A writing talk from Dr Paul McDonald, presented by Hooky Street Press and presumably the first in a series. This one’s about how classic theories of humour can be made relevant to writers; and
• There is no Script for This – a chance for “students, recent graduates and emerging practitioners a chance to quiz people at different stages of their careers as they talk about highs, lows and pivotal moments during their first years out of art school”

There are also loads of things happening as part of the Love Architecture Festival and it wouldn’t be outrageous to assume that the walking tours have some sort of talky aspect to them. Sticking strictly to the theme of this post, there’s a talk from LEGO’s Senior Design Manager this evening.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in partnership with The Barber Institute of Fine Arts and Grand Union, Birmingham is organising a high profile selected exhibition as well as offering five bursaries for recent visual arts graduates from the five regionally-based university art schools. The aim of the exhibition and bursaries is to profile the best, critically-engaged work emerging from the university art schools in the West Midlands since 2010 and offer new visual arts graduates a high quality professional development opportunity.

Click this here link for more info.

A moving image exhibition project, an art gallery and a South Asian arts organisation make for quite a nice banding together, I think.

Tonight’s event celebrates Chinese New Year and Fake Magazine inform us that highlights will include:

On the Way to the Sea, directed by Tao Gu which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival in 2011. They’ll also be work by China’s most famous director, Wong Kar-Wai as well as animation by Royal College of Art alumni, Sharon Liu and Setaka Mizuno. They’ll also be plum wine and a live traditional Chinese musical performance in the interval.

Anyway, Ian from 7 Inch Cinema went along and has blogged his notes. Lots of good things there, including:

The arts in the UK are blighted with fearfulness, conservatism, reactionary ordinariness. Our job is to build a more exciting, bolder future than the past has been. There is no such thing as tradition. The earth never stops moving. Stasis is a delusion. Be open to changeability.

Meanwhile, BOC are a currently rehearsing a new mini-production of Stephen Oliver’s ‘A Man of Feeling’.

Here’s the bus timetable:

On the evening the Ikon Shop will be open until 9pm offering mulled wine, warm mince pies and 10% off in their shop. Mmm, warm mince pies.

The University of Birmingham has arranged for the 1951 original typescript manuscript of On the Road – the world-famous scroll of 1951 – to come to the Barber Institute at the University during December 2008 and January 2009

They’re having a two-day conference (11-12 Dec) to celebrate the 50th anniversary of book’s publication in the UK, along with a series of events including a film night on 11 Dec, probably featuring One Fast Move and I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur.

More info on the website.