Things to do this week? Ah yes, it’s Museums at Night

Richard Wentworth and friends curate an after-hours experience in Manchester this week – prepare to get lost and found.

Fancy a night at the museum? Good. You’ve come to the right place. As the nationwide nocturnal celebration of museum goodness gets underway on Thursday, further details of what’s planned in Manchester have been released. Now, we’ve spoken at length about Richard Wentworth and what he has planned already. We hope you’ve submitted pictures to our #lovecollecting campaign, and are planning on donating something to Manchester Art Gallery or Manchester Museum on Thursday night. Or perhaps you have your eye on one of Wentworth’s strange, circuitous bus tours of the city?

Electronic, mashed-up blues provide a soundtrack to Wentworth’s exhibition in a night

There is more, though. Alongside the bus tours and donation stations at Manchester Museum on Thursday, expect to find jewellery design workshops alongside a display inspired by the Museum’s collection, as well as a scientific “micro-lecture” series and tours of the exhibition All Other Things Being Equal. Discover more about the natural world and meet the Museum’s own ornithologists (and their stuffed charges). Manchester Art Gallery runs its Thursday Lates series,where the Finders Keepers DJs will be in the house (or, in this case, in the gallery atrium), providing the soundtrack to the surrender of your object. Rather excitingly, alongside the white-gloved curators guiding you through the various stages of donation/acquisition, Richard Wentworth will be on hand – for part of the night, at least. So you might get the chance to find out what he makes of your donation. There’s even a Museums at Night game, which you can play via your Smartphone – find out how to play by Tweeting @mynightmuseum and wait for a special “museum guide” to get in touch with details. There are apparently “spiritual rewards and actual prizes” on offer for players.

Over at the Whitworth on the Friday night, meanwhile, enjoy specially-produced live performances from electro blues outfit, WALK, and the electronic, improvised and mashed-up, beat-boxing and multi-layered mastery of Denis Jones, a musician whose latest release has been described by The Guardian as “scuzzy Mancunian blues at its richest and most intriguing”. Scuzzy and intriguing? That sounds like our kind of night.