Artful Remembrance
Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery
12 September – 29 October 2026
Following the success of Connections, Manchester Academy of Fine Arts returns to Stockport with a new exhibition exploring the many ways art can preserve, commemorate and reconnect us with people, places, objects and moments that shape our lives.
Through painting, printmaking, sculpture and other contemporary practices, Artful Remembrance invites visitors to reflect on memory, loss, celebration and legacy, revealing how visual art can communicate experiences and emotions that words often cannot.
For more than 165 years, MAFA artists have used art to record, interpret and respond to human experience. The Academy’s exhibitions continued uninterrupted through both World Wars, including work by members who served as official war artists documenting the battlefront and wartime industry.
Artful Remembrance continues that tradition, considering the unique ability of art to hold thoughts, experiences and emotions — and to create connections between individual memory and shared histories.
Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery provides a particularly resonant setting for the exhibition. Built in memory of those lost in the First World War, the gallery is both a place of remembrance and a much-loved public gallery where art, history and community come together. MAFA has exhibited regularly at the gallery over many years, continuing a long-standing relationship between the two organisations.
Alongside the exhibition, MAFA is collaborating with Stockport’s Write Out Loud poets, extending the conversation across art forms and generations through the question: What do we hold dear?
MAFA Artful Remembrance Catalogue
Image: Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery. Photograph: Gerald England / Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0.