Museums, Art Galleries and Historic Buildings
The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in Drake Circus has collections of fine and decorative arts, natural history and human history. It is closed for renovation until autumn 2008.
The Plymouth Arts Centre, established in 1948, is located near the Barbican, and regularly offers visiting displays of work by a wide range of local, British and international artists such as Beryl Cook, Richard Deacon, Andy Goldsworthy and Sir Terry Frost. As well as promoting visual arts, many independent art house and foreign films are shown.
A converted church on North Hill, now the Sherwell Centre and part of the university, hosts regular exhibitions, concerts, recitals, lectures and other public events. There are smaller and privately owned retail galleries in the Barbican.
Also in Plymouth are the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, Smeaton's Tower, the Elizabethan House, and Merchants House in The Barbican. Plymouth is home to the National Marine Aquarium. The Plymouth Synagogue, in Catherine Street, was built in 1762.
Plymouth Naval Base Museum is a maritime museum under development at HMNB Devonport.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Plymouth
Famous quotes containing the words art, galleries, historic and/or buildings:
“O mischief, thou art swift
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I have got enough of the old masters! Brown says he has “shook” them, and I think I will shake them, too. You wander through a mile of picture galleries and stare stupidly at ghastly old nightmares done in lampblack and lightning, and listen to the ecstatic encomiums of the guides, and try to get up some enthusiasm, but it won’t come.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in “the social” our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial cosiness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)