2016 looks set to be a big year for the Science Gallery, and now people from all over Ireland can enjoy what the Gallery has to offer, with the news that it has been awarded a Google grant to fund bringing people from all over Ireland to the Gallery by bus.
The Science Gallery made the announcement today (8 December), which coincided with the launch of its programme for 2016, which will include exhibitions on the future of farming and how our brain interprets the world, as well as taking a look at how the worlds of design and violence meld.
The latter exhibition is highly regarded, having been co-produced by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and the Science Gallery Dublin following an online curatorial experiment originally hosted by MoMA.
The current exhibition in the gallery, Trauma: Built to Break, will run until 21 February next year.
The Science Gallery is now the first Irish recipient of the Google Field Trip Days grant, which will enable the Gallery to cover the transport and other costs associated with facilitating a visit from every secondary school in Ireland, even those that are the most rural in the country.
The gallery now hopes to more than double the number of students coming to visit the Gallery in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) from 2,000 in 2015, to 5,000 in 2016.
The director of Science Gallery Dublin, Lynn Scarff, said: “Science Gallery Dublin’s art and science programmes provide young people with simultaneous experiences — as an artist and a scientist, a designer and an entrepreneur — allowing them to try on identities and develop the creative, flexible thinking needed for 21st-century workplaces. These interdisciplinary approaches can make science and art more accessible to a wider array of people who may not have traditionally identified with these subjects.”
The news comes following a successful year for the exhibition’s non-profit organisers, Science Gallery International, which announced in October that it was to expand internationally for the first time following an injection of €1.1m.
Science Gallery Dublin image via Miguel Mendez/Flickr
