Why Museums? Collections

Museums should be safe yet challenging, calmly yet engaging, grounding yet empowering. But how and why should museums do this?

Why Museums? is a mini-series of blog posts no more that 500 words, topics that interest and inspire me to continue to work and engage with museums.

Museum Collections

Museum collections can be defined as a set of material and intangible heritage, this can take the form of many things including works of art, tools, jewellery, clothing, recorded oral histories and archival documents.

There are arguments that archives and categories of information in Western museum collections have euro-centric, misogynist tendencies. Such as the idea of lumping African, Asian and South American collections as ‘world history’ despite their complex and diverse narratives. Also the fact that women are over represented in national collections as the subject in artwork, but underrepresented as artists themselves, highlighted by the feminist art activist group, Guerrilla Girls.**

Source: guerrillagirls.com

For several years, digital technology is developing, making digitised and online collections more widely available in the museum sector. This has been escalated during the coronavirus lockdown as museums have had to close doors for several months to visitors. Social media sharing and hashtags, such as #MuseumFromHome and #MuseumsUnlocked have helped audiences to connect with museums and collections online. Google Arts and Culture has many global online museum and exhibition tours, also ArtUK has an amalgamated collection of artwork from across the four nations.

Contemporary Collecting

In terms of contemporary collecting, I and many others see this as a vital way of reflecting on contemporary life and culture in the 21st century. However, there are many conflicts around doing this. One is the question of why museum need to collect ‘stuff’, what is the purpose of this and is it the best way to preserve and engage with history and culture? There is also the issue of accessioning, storing and caring for objects that come into a museum collection, which can be time and space consuming and also expensive.

In 2016, during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis a lifejacket was collected from a beach in Lesvos and brought to Manchester Museum. The museum displayed this item as material evidence of displaced peoples in an ongoing conflict. This is a vital piece of contemporary collecting that engages a museum with the destruction and instability of life caused by civil war, but also to promote empathy and humility of those in countries supporting refugees.**

Protest paraphernalia has also been collected a number of times in the last decade. Such as the Women’s Marches in 2017 following the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA; since 2018, Extinction Rebellion protests** against climate change; founded in 2013, the Black Lives Matter protests** against institutional racism particularly of police brutality towards black citizens.

In addition, to underrepresentation of women, POC and issues of sustainability in collections, LGBTQ+ and working class histories are often overlooked or under researched in museum collections. Dan Vo (Museum Queerator and creator of Museum from Home) has been instrumental in bringing out the non-binary stories that already exist in museum collections, such as at the V&A and National Museum of Wales, but have not be give the attention or praise that they deserve.

Collecting During Covid-19

Life in Lockdown – Birmingham Museums Trust.

Manchester Museum in Quarantine.

Letters of Constraint – National Justice Museum, Nottingham.

The Museums Association have compiled a list of how museums are collecting during COVID-19.

Further Resources:

Collections 2030 – a large-scale review by the Museums Association (MA), with a steering and reference group of museum professionals and organisations including Arts Council England and the Museum Development Network, into the long-term use, purpose and management of museum collections.

Empowering Collections – report published in 2019 by the MA, 11 recommendations for the future of museum collections.

Why Collect? – report published by Art Fund and Wolfson Foundation in 2018 (no connection to my ‘Why Museums?’ blog series).

**I do not own this image.