Tickets now available for the LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice symposium

Tickets are now available for the LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice symposium taking place at Manchester Art Gallery on Wednesday 6 and Thursday 7 March.

The LYC Museum & Art Gallery (LYC Museum), located in the village of Banks astride Hadrian’s Wall, showcased the work of more than 320 artists between 1972 and 1983. Its transformation from dilapidated farm buildings into a hyperactive space for art was the single-minded effort of artist Li Yuan-chia (1929–1994), whose initials gave the museum its name. The artist Shelagh Wakely, who exhibited at the LYC Museum in 1979, saw the Museum as “a work of his [Li’s]”. It was an example of social practice before such a thing was named and tamed. And after its closure in 1983, it became the site of Li’s remarkable experimentation with hand-tinted photographs.

This symposium proposes a consideration of the LYC Museum as an extension of Li’s pioneering participatory art practice; for example, he was one of six participants in Popa at Moma: Pioneers of Part-Art, at Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1971. Moreover, the symposium highlights the role of the LYC Museum as a site from which to explore the questions of how friendships inform shared practices, generate work, and circulate stories. The networks and practices that the LYC Museum enabled and enriched have yet to be studied widely.

Tickets for the symposium are free but must be booked online in advance, full details and conference programme can be found here.