Showing posts with label Creative Tourist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creative Tourist. Show all posts

Friday, March 30, 2012

Blog North launches

Bloggers of the world, meet Blog North, a project I've been working on with our own lovely Creative Tourist and Leeds' magnificent The Culture Vulture. It's a new network for culture bloggers in the North, and an accompanying series of tasty blogger events at art venues, festivals and cultural organisations. We kick things off on 12 May in Wakefield, home to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (home to the Miro image pictured above) and The Hepworth.

What's the idea here? Well, as bloggers, we're pretty much on our own. We often start writing on the side, for fun, in our spare time. Many of us begin without formal training in writing for the internets (or otherwise), and often, writing about arts and culture is something we are doing as art lovers writing from a place of unschooled enthusiasm rather than years of training as an artist, art historian or cultural critic. The thinking behind this series is to provide Northern bloggers with an arts journalist's level of access to exhibitions and cultural events (guided tours, artist/curator talks, etc.) alongside a series of workshops and masterclasses where they can hone their writing and critical skills.

But that's not all! There will be fun schmoozing-with-other-bloggers time and the opportunity to join our Blog North network (and get shiny badges for your blog.) For all the details and booking stuff, head over to the Blog North page. And please note that we are offering six free places for established bloggers who can make a good case for why they need to be there. See you in Wakefield...

Image courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Creative Tourist arrives in Manchester

This week sees the launch of Creative Tourist, a wordpress-based online magazine about our fair city's arts and culture from the Manchester Museums Consortium.

And what a time to launch, eh? Manchester is positively stuffed to bursting with fabulous cultural encounters, life-changing art experiences and can't-miss performances. I don't know about you, but my art-appreciation muscles are getting tired. My critical faculties are so exhausted that I'm being forced to take myself off to New Jersey for a restorative week in which my most challenging cultural experience will probably involve getting past the windmill in mini golf, or maybe deciding what flavor of water ice to order. (Actually, this is a serious matter which I am already working on. Root beer or cherry?)

Issue 1 features Jeremy Deller, Ansuman Biswas (better known as the Manchester Hermit), Marina Abramovic in conversation with Whitworth Art Gallery director Maria Balshaw, Andrew Shanahan's guide to the best videogames ever, and Dea Birkett writing and ranting about children in galleries, among other things.

Creative Tourist's main features will be published monthly but the idea is that the website, blog and twitter feed will keep up a steady stream of interesting content. I will be helping out Editor Susie Stubbs with the words, cruisin' the local blogsphere for tasty bits to link to and commissioning guest posts from Manchester's finest culturebloggers.

If you're one of them, please don't be shy. Get in touch and let me know what you're doing and you may be linked to in a blog roundup or be asked to pitch in and write something, like Katherine Woodfine of Follow The Yellow Brick Road, who wrote up Procession for the Creative Tourist blog.

Anyway, back to work: Root beer or cherry?