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Bringing together 11 public art collections across the Midlands and researchers from the University of Birmingham, issue one of new online research resource and journal 'Midlands Art Papers' (MAP) is now live. The Midlands has an astonishing array of art museums and galleries with world class collections of painting, sculpture, prints and decorative arts, and MAP aims to both develop new research into these collections and provide a space for this research to be widely disseminated. 

Issue one features short focused essays on disabled Hungarian artist Károly Kotász (1872-1941), whose painting Stormy Landscape with Blue and Red Figures was donated to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1940; an exploration of Black selfhood and migration in Eugene Palmer's 1997 painting Wanting to Say I (The New Art Gallery Walsall); a discussion of Pietro Magni's nineteenth-century sculptural representations of adolescents (University of Birmingham Research and Cultural Collections); and of Terry Frost's twentieth-century British abstraction (Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museums). Two essays discuss recent exhibitions in the region, at Ikon and The Herbert, Coventry. And two longer articles explore the commemoration of the First World War by German artist J. M. Koelz in the 1930s (New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester), and the Midlands collections of work by Victorian artist Sophie Anderson, one of the first living women to have a painting purchased by a British public collection. It's an eclectic set of articles that reflects the rich array of artistic treasures in the region. 

Each issue is carefully assembled in collaboration with partner institutions to meet their research needs, but contributors are absolutely not limited to the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies. If you are interested in contributing to a future issue, please do get in touch with the editor, Kate Nichols.