Skyscrapers to Toast Racks Art Deco Exhibition Opens Free in Manchester

A museum exhibition in Manchester titled Skyscrapers to Toast Racks: Form, Rhythm and Colour in Art Deco Design was posted on Feb 14, 2026, and an Instagram excerpt declares the show “which is now open! Entry is FREE Enjoy.” The announcement frames the display around Art Deco’s formal vocabulary while signalling public access through free admission.

The museum announcement described the scope succinctly: “While the exhibition is broader than just jewelry, it highlights Art Deco-era decorative arts and includes rarely seen works a” — the supplied extract trails off after that phrase but makes clear curators intend to foreground decorative objects alongside jewellery. The title itself - Form, Rhythm and Colour - signals the curatorial emphasis on design principles as much as individual makers.

Contemporary coverage picked up the exhibition’s aesthetic ambitions. Mtghawkesbay writes that “This exhibition is a celebration of an era that embraced bold geometry, luxurious craftmanship and allure of distant cultures. Its all-pervasiveness can be seen” — another truncated sentence in the supplied excerpt, but one that ties the show to Art Deco’s global references and handcrafted techniques. That language positions the display as a study in pattern, material and cultural borrowing rather than a narrow survey of singular object types.

Local listings and cultural context place the exhibition amid Manchester’s busy programme of shows and heritage projects. CreativeTourist’s “what’s on near Toast Rack” material records nearby activity and landmarks: “A doll with makeup peeks out of a hanging wall of butter yellow fabric. Red and black threads descend and cascade around the doll.” The same coverage highlights the Whitworth and its presentation of a major solo show by 2024 Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas, and notes how “Yuki Kihara reframes Pacific imagery through Fa’afafine voices, creating lush, critical artworks that unsettle long-standing colonial assumptions.”

CreativeTourist also provides architectural and community context for the area around the MMU Hollings Campus, known as the Toastrack, quoting Nikolaus Pevsner that the building was “a perfect piece of pop architecture” when it opened as a Domestic and Trades College in 1960. The piece records the campus closure announcement in 2012 and the Manchester Modernist Society’s subsequent role as “Creatives in Residence,” including that they “even baked a Toastrack-shaped cake (quite a feat) and collaborated with Moorhouse’s Brewery to create their own real ale complete with beautiful Toastrack-adorned labels.” CreativeTourist describes a new publication, Toastrack, as “the culmination of the entire project, collating the fruits of MMS’s labours and is a fold-out love letter to Manchester’s paraboloid landmark.”

The published excerpts supplied for this report include the exhibition title, the Feb 14, 2026 posting date, the Instagram line about free entry, and descriptive lines from Mtghawkesbay and CreativeTourist. The museum announcement characterises the show as broader than jewellery and as including “rarely seen works,” while local listings place the exhibition within a busy Manchester cultural neighbourhood that includes the Whitworth and the MMU Hollings Campus projects.