Ipswich Museum seeks World Art Consultants

Ipswich Museum is seeking consultants to ensure that Ipswich Museum’s important World Cultures Collections are better understood, documented and readily accessible to facilitate use in new displays and decolonisation programme. To contribute towards a smooth, well-documented programme of ‘decanting’ collections in advance of building works.

 

There are 6 packages of work 

Package 1.        Specialist Overview/ report on the World Cultures Collection as a whole

Package 2.        Improving storage and basic documentation – World Cultures collections from Oceania, Indian sub-continent, North America and elsewhere

Package 3.        Improving storage and basic documentation – African Collections

Package 4.        Collections documentation research

Package 5.        Further specific specialist collections advice

Package 6.        Participation in networks with source communities

 

Regarding package 6, participation in networks with source communities, it is the intention of Museum Staff that current contacts and work in the previous 5 packages will inform and connect us with the appropriate activity, in particular the consultant should include recommendations of projects and contacts that would be useful to the work they are outlining.

Please contact James Mellish, Heritage Project Manager, Ipswich Borough Council for more information on the roles and the tendering process. 

James.Mellish@ipswich.gov.uk

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery: Objects looking for new homes.

 Buxton Museum and Art Gallery are looking to rehome by free transfer, a number of items from the World Cultures collection that formed part of the former Derbyshire School Library Service. The project is funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, and seeks to find sustainable outcomes for the collection within accredited museums for the continued use of the collection in the public realm for exhibitions, engagement projects and research. The project is guided by the Museums Association Code of Ethics.

The Museum currently has 17 Japanese prints and paintings dating from the 19^th to 20^th century, and 308 miscellaneous ethnographic objects from around the world and ranging in date from the 19^th to 20^th century.

 

If you would like more information about the project and the items and would like to apply for them via an Expression of Interest form, please contact the project lead, Bret Gaunt at: Bret.Gaunt@derbyshire.gov.uk

 

Closing dates for the applications are:

 

Japanese prints and paintings: 5pm Friday 25 September.

 

Miscellaneous ethnography: 5pm Friday 16 October

Conference: Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future

The following conference includes several panels on museums and collections which may be of interest to our members.  

ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

14 - 18 September 2020

The Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future conference is jointly organised by the RAI, the RGS, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, and the BM’s Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The conference was originally planned as a face to face conference to be held in June 2020, but it will now be an online conference to be held 14-18 September 2020.
 
The RAI believes that anthropology and geography should be close, all the more so as the two disciplines have so much in common, both today and in the past. It hopes very much that through this conference, existing dialogues can be explored and further conversations take place on a host of vital issues including the Anthropocene, definitions of ethnology, methodology and fieldwork, contemporary understanding, education and public awareness, and the place of our disciplines in the modern world. We hope equally that this will lead to a shared intellectual understanding of our past and the emergence of the two disciplines, and an even closer engagement in the future, particularly in terms of emerging fields of mutual interest: e.g. digital media, geospatial mapping, and satellite photography.

Informal enquiries may be made to info@therai.org.uk

Registration opens 1 July 2020

Full details can be found on the RAI website. 

Barkcloth Basics: Interpreting and Understanding Pacific Barkcloth

The ‘Barkcloth Basics: Interpreting and Understanding Pacific Barkcloth’ workshops which we had hoped to still take place in our partner museums, unfortunately will not take place because of the continued impact of Covid-19.

However, we are extremely pleased to announce that we will be moving our activities online and will create virtual resources and content that will closely replicate our original plans, while at the same time allowing us to reach an even wider audience than anticipated. We are delighted that our amazing tapa makers and artists Reggie Meredith Fitiao and Uilisone Fitiao will also take part in this new online content.

Together, we will be facilitating a select number of live sessions in which we can interact with museum staff, artists, makers, and the general public and talk about tapa in museum collections, as well as people’s own engagement with Pacific tapa.

The live online sessions will take place between Friday 4 September – Tuesday 8 September, with multiple times to choose from. Due to great demand, we have added the session on the 8^th to ensure UK-based museum professionals are able to attend, as Monday’s morning session is already sold out.

 For further information, and to register for a place using Eventbrite, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/113743273192. To keep up-to-date with the project, make sure to visit our social media pages (Instagram: @pacifictapa; Twitter: UofG_Barkcloth) and website (https://www.tapa.gla.ac.uk).

What do world art curators do in lockdown?

Rachel's desk (and coworker) while working from home.

A guest blog from Rachel Heminway Hurst, Curator of World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove and MEG events officer.  Rachel tells us what she's been up to in lockdown, if you'd like to let us know about your lockdown experience then get in touch!

Towards the end of March I was gearing up for spring conferences, research visits, holiday activities,busy juggling multiple project commitments, with core collections work responsibilities that are on-going and seemingly never ending at times, and will no doubt feel a familiar scenario for most museum staff! When all of a sudden we went into lockdown. I left my office as usual on Monday 16th March thinking I would be back there the next day and haven’t set foot in my office, the museum or the stores since. It still felt like winter then, and now we are enjoying full summer weather and have just passed the longest day of the year. 

 

Before the lockdown, I was feeling quite overwhelmed by the number of commitments ahead of me, when all of a sudden everything just ground to a halt. One by one events were cancelled, researchers and project partners stopped emailing, our museum postponed moving to Trust on April 1^st 2020, and all the competing deadlines just melted away and everything was ‘postponed’, and not just work, it felt like life had been postponed. 

Like many people in the UK, I developed a mild case of the corona virus during the first week of lockdown, and spent 6 weeks on a bit of a rollercoaster of good and not so good days. My head was foggy during this time and I could only concentrate on one thing at a time and gave up trying to multitask and carry on working as normal. I decided that this was an opportunity to focus on just one task, and finish something I had been working on without much success since 2016. 

I usually work from home one day a week and keep a lot of digital work files on my home computer, and I also have a freelance colleague and project curator, Kathleen Lawther, who is tech savvy unlike myself! So we set about completing a web resource that we have only had the time to work on in a piecemeal way up to now. The lockdown allowed me to focus clearly on one project and one goal, and this felt really liberating.

Myself and Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art have been working on the Fashioning Africa Project since 2015, we have been collecting garments, textiles and art that reflect fashion and style in post 1960s Africa and Africa UK diaspora, this work had been guided by an external Collecting Panel. It turned into a huge but extremely rewarding project, including working with numerous partners and donors, hosting many events and papers given at conferences, some objects from the new collection have featured in displays at Brighton Museum, and some objects will be going on loan. But creating our web resource has at last given us a platform on which to share the new collection and most importantly the stories that accompany these objects.

Working with the Collecting Panel meant we were guided by people who are specialists in African Fashion both through personal experience and through academic training. Their input enabled us to source objects that reflected the personal styles and stories of individuals as well as designers and specific communities. Our focus was on building a collection where individuals voices and stories were told, and we collected photographs of donors wearing their outfits, testimonies, quotes, pamphlets and pieces of creative writing that all accompanied the outfits. As well as film footage and oral histories.

We have collected over 400 objects and although we haven’t yet finished professionally photographing them all or processing all of the accompanying media, creating the web resource has enabled us to provide access to a large number of them with their accompanying stories. If it were not for being in lockdown and being able to work on this in a sustained way and daily over the last few months, creating this resource would not have been possible, and this would have been a missed opportunity. I also feel as if I would be letting people down, people trusted us and offered their objects and stories and wanted to share these. When finishing an interview with Ewe kente weavers and twins Fred and Richmond Akpo in Ghana, I asked if there was anything else they wanted to tell us or share and they said ‘We just want people to know we are here and what we do’. 

This work has also afforded me the time to make contact with donors and partners to check information with them, and through this contact, a chance to check in and catch up with one another. So yes other things haven’t got done, which is hugely frustrating - we don’t have collections database access at home and haven’t been able to access the stores or facilitate events and the uncertainty over budgets and resources means other projects are delayed. But I feel that I have really benefitted from this period of time to take stock, to focus on this important work, gather everything together and process it, and get something finished, and I am really pleased to be able to share the results. The question is now, when things begin to pick up and gather momentum, how do I sustain this focus and clarity? I do know that I will make a concerted effort to try and plan in blocks of time to enable this type of important work to happen.  

Take a look at the web resource.

Rachel Heminway Hurst, Curator of World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

Farewell to Sue Giles from Alison Petch

The recent AGM was Sue's last as Chair and while we fully expect her to remain an active member of the MEG community we thought we would take this oppurtunity to reflect on Sue's career.  We are pleased that Alison Petch has shared her memories of Sue with us for the MEG blog. 

I first heard of Sue when I became a member of the MEG committee a very long time ago. I didn’t meet her then because she was no longer a committee member at that point but at almost every meeting I heard that ’Sue says …” and more particularly ’Sue has done …’: I thought of her as the Stakhanovite of MEG, beavering away doing essential things for the members whilst I lolled around on the committee, pontificating (plus ça change …). To be honest, from MEG’s point of view, I think that that has always been the honest view of her labour for us all: she has always been 'exceptionally hard-working and productive’ on our behalf, latterly as the Chair of MEG. The old-fashioned paper newsletter would probably have folded without her hard work and she also guarenteed the continuing success of JME by ensuring all members got their copies for many years (and without members’ receipt of the journal what would be the point of it, or MEG?)

On a personal note I have always found Sue to be a courteous, thoughtful and helpful person, with huge integrity in a work context and a personal one. I well remember going to the Aztec exhibition at the Royal Academy with her in 2002, whilst Sue was still thoughtfully considering the first gallery, I had shallowly rushed round the whole thing! 

 I often seem to bump into her accidentally on my infrequent trips to Bristol. I last saw her in person just after she had started her final job for Bristol Museum (I was on a short holiday near Bristol), she was popping out to recycle a lot of plastic shopping bags (a characteristicly green activity) and we had a catch-up over a cup of tea and a cake in the Bristol Museum cafe. The next day I fell downstairs and broke my shoulder, but I don’t think there was any connection between the two events! 

I like to think of Sue as someone who has become a friend, as well as a colleague and I hope to remain in contact with her during her hopefully long and no doubt characteristically fruitful retirement, and bump into her on my next trip to Bristol [as this was written during the virus crisis, I have no way of knowing when that will be!]