Opening this month

4 March-3 April

Taking place in and around Derby, the Format festival centres on street photography. It is organised into two strands: Focus, looking at established practitioners, and Exposure, featuring work by up-and-coming artists. The festival is organised by the Quad arts centre, which hosts a major exhibition of street photography by practitioners such as Amy Stein, Joel Meyerowitz and Michael Wolf.

Cost n/a
Main funders Quad, University of Derby, Arts Council England
Curators Mike Brown (Derby City Council), Louise Clements (Quad), Format steering group
Website, design and graphics Katapult


4 March-15 April

Life expectancy for women in Sierra Leone, ranked as one of the world’s poorest countries, is just 42. This exhibition puts a human face to the grim statistic, featuring 42 images by photojournalist Lee Karen Stow, who embarked on a project to teach photography to a group of women from Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2007. Angered by the gross imbalance between life expectancy there and in the west, Stow documented the daily lives of the women she met, exploring their courage in the face of hardship in a country where they do not have equal access to education, social freedoms or healthcare. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on 8 March.

Cost £4,800
Funder National Museums Liverpool
Curators Angela Robinson, Lee Karen Stow
Exhibition design and graphics in-house


8 March-10 July

An exhibition celebrating the highlights of the Fitzwilliam’s extensive Italian drawings collection. The display spans the Renaissance to the early 20th century and features sketches by some of the greatest Italian masters, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Guercino, Titian and Modigliani.

Cost n/a
Funder in-house
Curator David Scrase
Exhibition design David Scrase
Graphics in-house


12 March-29 August

From meteor showers to the occasional asteroid strike, the Earth is under constant bombardment by debris from space. Impact uses images, archive material and interactive exhibits to look at the effects, both minor and apocalyptic, of these hits on our planet. Drawing on the latest scientific discoveries, the displays explore clues provided by extraterrestrial debris about the violent formation of the solar system and life on Earth itself. Visitors will have a chance to handle real space rocks. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events and planetarium shows.

Cost £18,000
Funder in-house
Curators Rob Edwards, Marek Kukula
Exhibition design and graphics in-house design team


22 March-29 August

The western stereotype of Japanese architecture comprises clean lines and minimalist spaces devoid of clutter – but is this a true insight into domestic life in the country? This exhibition questions such preconceptions, recreating the display, decoration and living habits found in contemporary Japanese homes. Using a full-size reconstruction of a standard urban apartment, filled with furniture and possessions, At Home in Japan is based on original ethnographic research carried out in Japanese houses in 2003.

Cost £55,000
Funder in-house. Funding for the 2003 project came from Sasakawa Travel Fund, the Japan Foundation, the British Academy, and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science
Curators Susan Andrews, Inge Daniels
Exhibition design ASFB Associates
Graphics Sally McIntosh

26 March-5 June

The discovery of the untrained Alfred Wallis, a retired Cornish fisherman who took up painting on his wife’s death, by established artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, has gone down as a legendary moment in British art history.

The exhibition examines the impact of Wallis’s naïve style on Nicholson’s work from the late 1920s through to the 1940s, during which time both artists cultivated a simplistic relationship with the landscape over formal technique and traditional perspective. Featuring highlights such as Wallis’ Schooner Approaching Harbour, the exhibition also examines how naïve art developed as a genre during the 20th century. It is part of a season on folk art at the Warwickshire gallery.

Cost undisclosed
Support Crane Kalman Gallery, London, Peter Moores Foundation
Curators Alison Cox, Antonia Harrison
Graphics Rose-Innes Associates

27 March-26 June

Nearly 200 Warhol paintings, prints, posters, photographs and films are to be displayed across two of Southampton’s art galleries. The works are drawn from Artist Rooms, a collection of modern and contemporary art gifted to Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland by art dealer Anthony d’Offay. The Southampton City Art Gallery explores Warhol’s fascination with fame, and is showing paintings, prints and posters alongside a reconstruction of the artist’s Factory space. The John Hansard Gallery focuses on Warhol’s film and photography, displaying rarely seen stitched photographs, self-portraits and celebrity portraits alongside film works.

Cost n/a
Main funders Southampton City Art Gallery (Southampton City Council) John Hansard Gallery (Southampton University), Artist Rooms, Art Fund Sponsor ExxonMobil
Curators Southampton City Art Gallery, John Hansard Gallery in collaboration with Artist Rooms