Art History Festival 2024 – Wales

Cyfarthfa Museum was first established in 1910 with a primary focus on showcasing the artworks of local Welsh painter Penry Williams. Today, the museum houses a diverse collection of his artwork.

Join us to delve into the world of artist Penry Williams, experiment with watercolour pencils, and craft your own Penry-inspired masterpiece.

Join us for this free walking tour of Swansea with Catrin James.

Swansea’s post war architecture has always inspired Catrin’s work as an artist and archivist as she highlights the built environment around her through collage, walking tours and oral history.

This walking tour will highlight the rebuilding of a bombed-out Swansea town centre, through the early 1950s to early 1980s and to the architects and styles involved that makes Swansea unique.

Taking in modernism, municipal, brutalism, fixtures and fittings, you will be able to piece together the story of Swansea city centre and ask the question if it works for 21st century city life. 

This event is part of a programme of activities to celebrate Heather Phillipson’s Out of this World  exhibition. 

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery presents Cliffs, coves and cockles: picturing Gower, on display to January 12, 2025.

Celebrating Gower as an inspiration for artists adds a special local interest to this year’s festival.

The Gower Peninsula was the first place in Britain to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and its dramatic rocky coastline, beaches, hills and valleys provide outdoor leisure and enjoyment for Swansea residents and visitors alike.

Both local and visiting artists, however, have responded to Gower and its scenery with more personal approaches. These range from industrial subjects in northeast Gower by Ceri Richards and Archie Rhys Griffiths, to summer beach scenes and watercolour landscape sketches by Will Evans and the richly coloured expressive visions of Glenys Cour.

From Cedric Morris, visiting North Gower in the 1930s, painting its hills and farms and looking across the water to the chimneys of industrial Loughor, to Czech émigré painter, Ernest Neuschul, being moved by the strenuous work of the cockle pickers of Penclawdd, the exhibition will explore farmland, moors and commons of the interior of the peninsula, the beautiful marshes of the Loughor Estuary and the spectacular cliffs and coves overlooking the Bristol Channel.