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Last weekend, I learned that putting on an exhibition is a lot of work. A lot of work. It’s also a huge amount of fun.
The work comes first. More of it than you’d imagined there would be. Emails, meetings, interviews, hours of editing, more hours of formatting, days locating a venue to show it. Then negotiations, spreadsheets, endless administration. Amendments. Appointments. The all-important press release. Then the song and dance on social media. On and on and on.*
By the time we’d got it all set up, I’d spent so long working on the exhibition that I no longer had any idea whether it was good, bad, brilliant, dull, or misguided. I couldn’t tell whether people would walk in and love what they saw, or go Is that it? and walk back out again.
Finally, we opened. Well, I told myself, it’s a Saturday morning in Walsall. No-one will turn up for an hour or two. I’ll have time to catch my breath. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The gallery opened at 10am. At 10.01, the first person came in. Then another. And another. Punks came in with their parents, parents came in without their punks. They looked at the images, they read the text, they stayed and chatted. Punks everyone had talked about, punks I hadn’t been able to find, walked in, introduced themselves, and told me hilarious and outrageous stories from back in the day. (Can you fit a stolen beer keg into a motorbike sidecar? Yes, you can. Can you ride through Walsall with a mate sitting astride it, take it to someone’s house, and break your way in with a chisel and a hammer? Absolutely. Can you drink all the 56 pints of beer? Not a problem. And does it still make you laugh when you talk about it all these years on? Of course it does.)
Old friends met up for the first time in years. On the Saturday afternoon, local band Not Quite Dead Yet filled the art gallery foyer with the noise of ukulele covers of punk classics. Gallery staff clapped along, something which still makes me smile. Copies of our free newspaper were snapped up in dozens. By the time we shut the doors at the end of Sunday, I was happy, exhausted, and beaming. It had all gone well.
So well, in fact, that we’ll be doing it all again early next year. There’ll be more news about that soon after Xmas.
I can’t wait.
*I didn’t do it all on my own, of course. The wonderful images were taken by Sophie Pitchford, and I’m profoundly grateful to Creative Factory (and Deb Slade in particular) for guiding me through the funding application and all their help along the way.
