Cathy's Art Diary

Touching exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool marking the closing of Goodison Park, the Everton football stadium. The club are moving to a new ground on the banks of the Mersey at the start of the new season and the museum marked this with a display of photographs of match day rituals and activities in the surrounding streets. I loved this one of a man eating his regular chips on a wall. I hope he finds a new wall soon. Closes 21 September 2025    

Surprising installation at Sotheby’s of the old Real Madrid locker room. I’d come to Sotheby’s for the next blog entry which is much more me but in looking for it I discovered this! I love London for the bizarre things you find while wandering round! The locker room was laid out like an installation with photos of the players on the doors and one of their shirts above. They were arranged around a mosaic from the stadium. I’m not the right audience for this but it looked very impressive and like an artwork in its own right. Closed 26 November 2024  

Uplifting exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery of portraits of the England football team by Matt Small. The work was commissioned by the Football Association and was originally shown at the St George’s Park training ground and consists of 27 portraits of the team and the manager. They were painted on a patchwork of white hardboard with the heads stuck on afterwards. They were good likenesses but most movingly the same colour palate was used for all the faces despite the colour of their skin. They were good individually but also looked impressive hung as a series. The commentary says the show represents how the team came to stand for mutual support, inclusivity and diversity and to celebrate the diversity of England today.   Closes 19 February 2023

Interesting exhibition at the Brazilian Consulate of photographs of Brazilian football since 1958. OK I admit will go to anything but my main reason for going into this show, as well as the fact its poster caught my eye as i I walked past, is that it’s always good to pop into this building with its wonderful decoration which used to be the headquarters of P&O. The show has 42 images and cleverly split the two displays by date but also by the move from black and white to colour. There were some wonderful action spots but it would have been good to have more fulsome labels for the uninitiated even just the photographers name. Closed 23 December 2022

Strangely compelling exhibition at the Design Museum on design in football. I’m not a football fan but as the commentary says the game does shape how many people organise their time, dress and relate to communities. The opening section became a history of the game via developments in design of basic events like balls and boots. There were some significant objects to demonstrate this eg two balls from the first FIFA world cup final where each team provided a ball for half the game to ensure fairness before balls were standardised. It also looked at developments in player health and different game formations. This was followed by a section on Identity looking at how kits developed and the fan culture which included a colourful display of kits and a fan made Hillsbough banner.   Next came stadiums and crowd behaviour looking at things like how chants make a crowd breath and move together. Sadly it also had to look at disasters. It moved on to spectacles including the developm...

Interesting small exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of women’s football in Great Britain. The show was timed to coincide with the Women’s World Cup and consisted of good commentary boards and display cases of books and ephemera. I hadn’t realised how most major towns had a team up to 1921 when the Football Association banned women from playing. A ban that was only lifted in 1970. I loved the section on these early days including a photo of Nettie Honeyballs (a pseudonym) and details of a North v South matched played in London to a crowd of 12000. It then explained how, post the 1966 England men’s win in the World Cup, and with the rise of feminism, people began to question the ban. There was a nice collection of ephemera from this time including minutes of the first AGM of the Women’s Football Association. The last section brought things up to date by looking at the Women’s World Cup which began in 1991 and of course included a copy of the dvd of...

Nice topical display at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the life and career of Sir Bobby Moore.   The show obviously included the famous picture of his on the shoulders of his team mates holding the World Cup which cemented him as national hero along with other pictures from his career, such as one of him aged 17 when he signed to Fulham. However there was a nice balance with pictures of him at home and after his retirement from football.   The majority of the pictures were press photographs so there was the added element of seeing how the press of the time represented a public figure. Closes in January 2019 Review Guardian    

Strange exhibition at the Streetlife Museum of Transport in Hull looking at the evolution of the Hull City football team’s kit. Maybe this just proved I’ll go and see anything but actually once you started to look properly and read the commentary it was quite interesting. I missed the bit which said why the team plays in black and orange however it has given rise to their nickname of the Tigers. I loved the slightly dodgy period when the kit imitated tiger stripes, a very 70s image. I liked the story that the team played in purple for a while but lost twice so never wore the shirts again. I was also interesting to see the strange sponsors they’d had over the years including Cash Converters and Flamingo Park. Closes on 2 October 2017  

Surprisingly interesting exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum looking at story of football in Scotland. Surprisingly because I’m not Scottish and not that keen on football! The real star of the show was the Scottish Football Museum which had lent lots of items and seems to have made a concerted effort to save pieces of memorabilia from grounds which were being updated particularly after the changes to grounds following Hillsborough. There were some lovely items such as a child jersey from about 1890, a grammar book from1691 which mentioned pupils playing Pila Pedalus or football. There were lots of things for children to do without making the whole thing patronising including an electronic game about the offside rule and a virtual football pitch on the floor on which you could like a virtual ball. I didn’t see a child use it but I did see one of the security guards slip in for a kick around!