Muybridge Projects in Kingston
Led by Kingston Museum, many organisations and individuals have undertaken a range of Muybridge projects in Kingston over the years, presenting different aspects of Muybridge’s life, work, and legacy. This page provides details of selected Muybridge projects held in Kingston since 2004.
2004
Kingston Museum and many local partners organised and hosted a major, town-wide Muybridge Festival to commemorate the centenary of Muybridge’s death. The festival programme included:
- ‘Muybridge Centenary Film Festival’ at Odeon cinema, Kingston and Kingston Museum. For more information, visit here.
- ‘Eadweard Muybridge: Moving On’ art exhibition at Penny School Gallery, Kingston College.
- Large-scale projection mapping onto the Guildhall, presenting three moving images produced with the Kingston Museum’s collection. For more information, visit here.
- Re-enactment of Muybridge’s Palo Alto photographic sessions at Ham Polo Club.
- Commemorating Muybridge’s childhood home in Kingston with a plaque.
- Commissioning a mural mosaic in Kingston town centre.
- ‘Slices & Snapshots’ art exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, showcasing Andrew Carnie’s Muybridge-inspired work.
2008
Celebrating a new collaborative partnership between Kingston University and the Royal Borough of Kingston to advance research into the Muybridge Bequest, the two institutions jointly organised public lectures on Muybridge by internationally renowned scholars Philip Bookman and Marta Braun at the Rose Theatre.
2010
Coinciding with Tate Britain’s major retrospective, ‘Eadweard Muybridge’, Kingston Museum staged its own critical exhibition, ‘Muybridge Revolutions.’ The exhibition focused on Muybridge’s moving image projection, featuring the Zoopraxiscope and discs. A short video showing the exhibition is available here.
The museum’s exhibition was part of a larger collaborative project with Kingston University, ‘Muybridge in Kingston’. Its inclusive programme included:
- Contemporary commissions, “8th May 1904, Kingston” by Becky Beasley and ‘In Conversation with Trevor Appleson’ at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University.
- ‘Muybridge, Movement and Me: Our lives in Kingston’s localities’, community art exhibition at Kingston Museum.
- A video production about Muybridge’s moving projection and the making of the discs, Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope: Setting Time in Motion by Chocolate Films.
- Community outreach project, ‘Muybridge in Translation’. Working with Kingston residents who spoke English as a second language, the project produced a multi-lingual guide to the ‘Muybridge Revolutions’ exhibition.
- Many school, family, and community projects and events, including the creation of the ‘Muybridge in Kingston Teacher’s Pack’ and various art and craft workshops, such as zoetrope and thaumatrope making workshops.
2012
To celebrate the 2012 London Olympics, Kingston Museum hosted an exhibition titled ‘Olympic Celebration: Athletes in Motion’. It explored Muybridge’s photography of athletes in motion and reflected on its relationship to his wider work and 21st-century techniques.
2016
The Visual and Material Culture Research Centre at the School of Art, Kingston University, in collaboration with Kingston Museum, hosted a symposium titled ‘Muybridge in Kingston’. It presented various research projects and art practices related to Muybridge’s work.
2017
- Kingston Museum launched its first annual festival, ‘Muybridge Week’. This week-long celebration featured a variety of events for all, including talks, a staged reading of a play script, art displays, and object handling sessions. The festival’s highlight was a paper theatre performance, ‘The Hovering Horse’, based on Muybridge’s life and work, by German artist Martin Haase. For a local newspaper’s article on the festival, visit the Surrey Comet.
- The museum’s first Artist in Residence, Paul Mowatt, presented his Muybridge-inspired photographic artworks. For media coverage of the exhibit, visit The Standard.
2018
- Collaborating with professional art organisations in Kingston, including KAOS, Fusion Arts, KINC, and ACS Kingston, the museum presented a contemporary art exhibition, ‘My Muybridge: Kingston Art 2018’, showcasing around 30 artists’ responses to Muybridge in various media.
- The museum’s second ‘Muybridge Week’ festival offers different interpretations and adaptations of Muybridge’s life and work, including two poetry reading performances: ‘Muybridge: a poem’ by Literature Professor at MIT Stephen Tapscott and ‘Do Horses Fly?’ by a noted Irish poet, Brendan Cleary. You can listen to Cleary’s reading of the complete suites of poems here.
2019
- The global online platform Google invited Kingston Museum to present online exhibits about Muybridge for Google Arts and Culture. Visit here to see the museum’s two online stories, ‘Eadweard Muybridge: Ingenious Landscape Photographer’ and ‘Muybridge’s Pioneering Motion Pictures.
- The third and final ‘Muybridge Week’ festival was themed around moving images. A range of films and animations were screened at the museum and in the town centre. One of the festival’s highlights was a reenacted demonstration of a replica Zoopraxiscope. Although the 2020 festival was planned, it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020
Marking the 190th anniversary of Muybridge’s birth, Kingston Museum celebrated 2020 as the ‘Year of Muybridge’. Since physical activities were restricted due to the pandemic, the museum organised a year-long programme of online activities. The programme included:
- Commissioning an animation, Muybridge and the Time Travelling Camera, by animator Tim Wheatley.
- Weekly social media postings, ‘Muybridge Monday’, featuring images from the museum’s collection.
- A series of short videos, ‘Muy-Opinion’, capturing diverse opinions on Muybridge, including that of award-winning actor Gary Oldman. Oldman later became the Champion of Kingston Museum’s Muybridge Collection.
2022
Kingston Museum refurbished its Muybridge Gallery. The new exhibits, accompanied by various interpretation panels, highlight Muybridge’s lecturing career and his connection to Kingston. Coinciding with the unveiling of the new Muybridge Gallery display, the museum launched a major community-led exhibition titled ‘In Motion: Your Stories’. Inspired by Muybridge’s transatlantic life and work, it addressed physical, social, and cultural movement and transition. Alongside Muybridge’s original photographs from the museum collection, the exhibition showcased a range of artworks and activities created by diverse communities and individuals centred on this theme. One of the exhibition participants was a group of Kingston College students who produced short animations about Muybridge’s life and work. Visit here to see their works.
2023
Following their long-term partnership, consolidated by the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2019, Kingston Museum and Kingston University achieved significant milestones in 2023.
- The majority of the museum’s Muybridge Collection, which had been stored at a facility in Oxfordshire for over eight years, returned to Kingston, to its new home at the university’s Archives in the university’s flagship building, Town House. This collection’s move was recorded in this short video.
- Kingston University, in partnership with Kingston Museum, hosted an international conference, ‘Moving Muybridge: Transatlantic Dialogues’, at the Town House. Scholars, curators, and artists from the United States and the United Kingdom showcased their latest research on Muybridge’s work. The conference was supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
2024
Kingston Museum marked the 120th anniversary of Muybridge’s death with its exhibition, ‘San Francisco in Kingston: Muybridge and Panoramas, featuring one of the museum’s highlight items, Muybridge’s 1878 San Francisco Panorama. The exhibition also showcased three modern panoramas of the city by American photographer Mark Klett, British artists Tom Pope and James Doyle, and American historian Nick Wright. Additionally, it displayed various scenes of Kingston from the 19th century and the present day.
2025
- The museum launched a new Muybridge website, a collaborative project with Kingston University, generously supported by the university’s Research Investment Fund.
- Thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre’s Curatorial Research Grant, Kingston Museum has undertaken an in-depth cataloguing project of its Muybridge Collection. The outcome of this project is the museum’s first online catalogue, with the objective of making its entire Muybridge Collection available.
