‘Show Me The Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present’ is an exhibition and book that charts how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. It shows how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible nature of money and finance from the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century to the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. It includes works from the great eighteenth century satirists William Hogarth andJames Gillray, alongside newly commissioned works by contemporary artists Goldin+Senneby, Cornford & Cross, Immo Klink, Simon Roberts and James O Jenkins, and the first UK exhibition of international artists such as Molly Crabapple and Thomas Gokey. As well as works in an array of media, the exhibition also reveals the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts and electronic trading systems.

‘Show Me the Money’ demonstrates how the visual culture of finance has not merely reflected prevailing attitudes to money and banking, but has been crucial in forging the very idea of ‘the market’. The exhibition travelled to three distinct regions of the UK. In June 2014 it opened at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, close to the HQ of Northern Rock, where the public first saw signs of the 2008 financial crisis in the UK. It was then shown across two sites simultaneously in the autumn of 2014: the John Hansard Gallery, part of Southampton University, and Chawton House Library in Hampshire, which was owned by Jane Austen’s brother who was himself implicated in a financial scandal of the 1810s. From 11 July 2015 to 24 January 2016, the exhibition was at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, a national museum housing material history from the union and co-operative movements, with an additional display at Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester.

Our new project is on the history of personal financial advice, from the South Sea Bubble to the present: historyoffinancialadvice.wordpress.com