Chichester Pride offers Summer Late at Pallant House Gallery

Part of the Festival of Chichester, it will be on Thursday, June 27 (free of charge but tickets required through the Pallant House Gallery website) from 5pm, promising a line-up of “fabulous entertainment” in the courtyard, including CAOS musical productions, drag performer and saxophonist Snow White Trash and cabaret extraordinaire, Dawn Gracie.

The event also includes at 6pm a free in-conversation event with Gemma Rolls Bentley and Pallant House Gallery director Simon Martin, discussing Gemma’s new book, Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, And The Spaces Between. There will also be a Pride Tour on the Bloomberg Connects app curated by members of Chichester’s LGBTQ+ community, giving you a different perspective on the gallery’s collection and exhibitions. The event also includes a guided tour of The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain exhibition. You can also take part in Pallant Pride Loom Mural, helping to weave a mural of Chichester’s market cross in all the colours of the rainbow. The session also offers life drawing with Brighton Draws Men: try your hand at sketching the human form in a drop-in workshop. Pallant Café will be offering a selection of drinks all evening.

Stuart Burrows, from Chichester Pride, said: “This is our third annual event. The gallery invited us to take over the gallery for an evening and it means that we get to invite the public to come in, not just LGBTQ+ community but also our allies, to enjoy an evening of music and performance and art within the gallery. There will be a DJ and dance and also CAOS musical productions and there will also be our co-chair Dawn Gracie who has done a set in each of the years. Dawn will play the crowd as ever with her usual skill. She knows how to get the crowd going brilliantly. And this year we'll have the drag performer Snow White Trash and the great thing about her is that she is not just a great singer but she is also a great saxophonist.”Gallery director Simon said: “It's important for us to be a place which is open and inclusive and welcoming in the city. We have a lot of queer artists represented in our collection in terms of British art and we have always tried to be very open about that history. In our summer exhibition there are several artists who are queer.”

As Simon says, this kind of event is becoming more and more usual for galleries: “There are a lot of art institutions around the world this month that are seeking to explore different histories and to celebrate Pride month. When you walk around the centre of Chichester you see the Pride flags and it's all a very different place to what it was a few years ago.”

Stuart added: “It is important to say that Pallant House Gallery were the first Chichester cultural institution that reached out to Chichester Pride. When Simon approached us about doing a late, we were still an unknown quantity. We didn't have the reputation that we have built up now. It was a risk and it showed a great deal of faith but it opened lots of doors for us and allowed us to extend our relationships.”