From there I walked to the Foundling Museum to see the exhibition Found curated by Cornelia Parker, which I'll talk about in a minute. The Foundling Museum is on the site of the Foundling Hospital, the first children's charity in the UK and the first public art gallery. I visited here in 2007, but they have redone the introductory gallery.
The Foundling Hospital was established in 1739 by Thomas Coram, a seaman who had a shipbuilding business in North America. In the early eighteenth century it was estimated that 1,000 children a year were abandoned on London's streets and 75% of its children died before age five. When Coram returned to London he was shocked by this. He spent seventeen years petitioning people and finally received a Royal Charter from King George II. Mothers brought their children out of desperation, hoping for a better life for them. The children were given new names and identities (Oliver Cromwell, William Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh were some of the "new" names among the first 3,000 children), but the mothers were encouraged to leave small identifying tokens (fabric, coins, jewelry) that were sealed with their admission papers and only opened if someone came back to claim them. Here is one.
From 1742 until 1954 they took in and educated about 25,000 children. Today, it helps about one million children annually under the charity Coram. William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel served as Governors of the hospital and were responsible for bringing the arts to the site, holding the very first fundraisers. Hogarth donated his portrait of Thomas Coram and encouraged other artists to do the same, planting the seed for the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768.
Now back to the exhibition Found. It consisted of works by more than 50 artists. In the curator's words, "A lot of artists respond to the found object in their work....Artists collect and hang onto things as catalysts for ideas." Many of the pieces in the exhibition had to be "found" within the three upper floors of the museum in among the permanent collection, but the basement space held most of the pieces. Some were quite interesting, others not so much.
Jeremy Deller submitted John Lennon's school detention sheet, 1955-6, not a found object because he bought it at auction, but he "found" that it "speaks to how repressive the 1950s must have been,.., but also how troubled and anti-authority Lennon was as a young man." Some of Lennon's infractions included "not wearing school cap" and "groaning at me."
Another Found piece was from Jarvis Cocker (frontman for the band Pulp). When Pulp was playing in Bristol in 1985, he and Candida Doyle (the keyboard player) came across a bunch of Romania Today magazines in a bin. They liked the bright colors and bold graphics and took them home.
Cornelia Parker (curator) had several pieces, including There must be some kind of way out of here, 2016. When Handel House was renovating the flat that Jimi Hendrix lived in in London, "they removed a flight of stairs that used to lead to the kitchen steps that Hendrix scampered up and down daily." The artist salvaged them.
Brian Eno's Sound Machine is an electronic shruti box that produces the requisite drone used in Indian music, basically an electronic tambura. He was walking around in Southall and followed the eerie three-note sound he heard.
Another installation, not related to Found, was Mead's Medicine Bottles. Inspired by the eighteenth century recipes of Dr. Richard Mead, the Foundling Hospital physician, sick children from the bone marrow transplant and dialysis wards of Great Ormond Street children's hospital were asked to create imaginary medicines. They "created medicine bottle labels with personal ingredients that reflected their experiences of taking medicine as part of their treatment." Here are a few examples.
Favorite plaque of the day:
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