Endangered Material Knowledge Programme.

The British Museum Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas recently launched a new grant programme to fund documentation of critically endangered material knowledge systems across the globe, with a focus on non-western contexts. The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) is a major programme to help preserve the knowledge of endangered material practices for future generations. Societies around the globe are changing at an unprecedented rate, and specialist, locally-informed knowledge is in danger of being lost - knowledge that has helped communities thrive in unique environmental, social and cultural contexts. The programme will document what we might term the ‘made world’ and how people use, build, make and repair the natural resources around them to create their distinctive societies, homes and spaces. The scope of this work will be potentially huge – material practices can range from special events, to the production and use of everyday household items like cooking implements, agricultural tools or clothes, as well the houses and buildings that people occupy.

 Funded by Arcadia – a charitable trust of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, grants will be available for digital recording of material practices, which will then be made publically available through an open access repository hosted by the Museum.

Small grants (c£15,000) and large grants (c £70,000) are available, and details of the programme and links to the application forms can be found on the British Museum website.

Headley Fellowships with Art Fund

A programme designed to provide experienced curators with the time and resources to carry out research projects deepening specialist knowledge and expertise around their collections.  It  aims to give curators the time and resource to work with focused areas of their collections, deepening collections expertise within regional museums and sharing specialist knowledge across the sector. Deadline for applications is 15 October 2018.

More details on the ArtFund website. 

History Makers grants of £90k available - AIM Biffa Award

Museum Ethnographers Group members are encouraged to have a look at the AIM Biffa Award History Makers grant programme.

Eligible organisations can apply for grants of up to £90,000 to create an exhibition telling the story of their chosen History Maker – someone who helped shape the world we live in today.

All the details can be found on the AIM website. 

We’ve already funded some great projects celebrating history makers from the worlds of education, engineering, sport, health and science, but we want more.

We are looking for projects that use the life and achievements of extraordinary historical figures to inspire and educate people today.

Your History Maker may not be a well-known public figure, but their life and/or work will have helped shape the world we live in today. People are making history all the time, so we are happy to consider history makers from any period, including more recent history.

We want the programme to be as representative of the population as possible, so are particularly keen to hear from projects based on women who made history and history makers from diverse backgrounds.

The programme is open for Expressions of Interest now until the end of September, with the final application deadline at the end of October.

Please feel free to contact Tim Burge, History Makers Project Manager at historymakers@timburge.org if you’d like to discuss a possible application and please pass this message on to any others who might be interested.

Art Fund New Collection Awards open for application

Art Fund launches the fourth round of New Collecting Awards.

The New Collecting Awards programme aims to support curators across the UK to build critical professional skills by pursuing new avenues of collecting for their museums. Offering 100% funding for focused collecting projects of the highest quality, the scheme enables curators to expand museum collections of fine art, design or visual culture into exciting new areas, or to deepen existing holdings in imaginative ways. Each awardee also receives a generous funding allocation towards research, travel and training costs to facilitate their proposed collecting plans and professional development.

Over the last two years the Art Fund have awarded 17 awards totalling £1million for acquisition projects ranging from Modernist jewellery to cartographic material. Typical grant awards fall between £50,000 and £80,000. Applications are welcome from curators who are in the early stages of their career or have had limited opportunities to collect. 

The deadline for applications is 13 February 2018. Please see here for further information on aims, eligibility and how to apply, and here for details of previous awardees and mentors. 

PhD opportunities with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Collecting Papua New Guinea; what, where, when, why, and how

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery has an extensive collection of material culture and archival material from Papua New Guinea collected from the 1920s until the 1980s by missionaries, colonial administrators, and aid development workers. It includes clothing, body adornment, ritual paraphernalia, domestic utensils, ceramics, musical instruments, and archival records.  The aim of the PhD is to enhance curatorial methodologies for collections interrogation and to challenge the role of museums in a post-colonial world. It will make a valuable contribution to understanding changing collection practices; material culture evolution in practice; the relationship between collections and archives; the role of the collector in cultural development of the source community; the role material culture plays in representing a society and the stories they tell about that society.

Academic Contact:  Dr Tamar Hodos, University of Bristol – t.hodos@bristol.ac.uk

Collections Contact: Lisa Graves, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery – Lisa.Graves@bristol.gov.uk

This is in partnership with the University of Exeter (contact: Professor Linda Hurcombe – L.M.Hurcombe@exeter.ac.uk)

For further information and how to apply visit the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership website. 

SSN Islamic Art and Culture - Specialist Support Scheme

SSN Islamic Art and Material Culture  has just launched the third and final year of its Specialist Support Scheme. This is open to any museum in the UK that has an Islamic Art and Material Culture collection. The specialist support scheme aims to provide regional museums with a toolkit to help them unlock the potential of their collections of Islamic Art & Material Culture (IAMC) and use them to engage with new and diverse audiences.

Museums can apply for up to £5075 of support. The closing date for all applications is 7th August 2017. For information on Year 1 and 2 of the Support Scheme please see:

Year 1 Overview

Year 2 Overview

This is the final year of this scheme under current funding and so we would encourage all interested parties to apply, including those who have not been successful in previous rounds.

Curatorial Development Opportunity from the Art Fund

The Art Fund are pleased to be partnering once again with Whitechapel Gallery to offer a series of professional development courses for curators and museum professionals this autumn.

This series is targeted at both early-career and more experienced curators, whether new to the topic or wishing to refresh and expand their existing knowledge. These hands-on courses will draw on the expertise of staff from across Whitechapel Gallery, as well as other industry leaders. Each course will focus on practical training and use current projects as case studies, allowing attendees to gain valuable guidance and insight from behind the scenes.

Taking place in October and November 2017, the courses will cover the following topics:

·         How to curate talks and events, Friday 13 October

·         How to write about art, Friday 20 October 

·         How to curate the moving image , Friday 27 October

·         How to fundraise: individual giving, Friday 3 November 

·         How to handle and install art, Friday 10 November

·         How to fundraise: writing grant applications, Friday 17 November

Places normally cost £195, but curators and museum professionals are invited to apply for one of 34 funded places offered by the Art Fund. 

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award

Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD studentship on indigenous maps within the collections of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). 

This award is made by the Science Museums & Archives Consortium under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. The project, due to begin in September 2016, will be supervised by Professor Felix Driver (at Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Catherine Souch (RGS-IBG).

The project will consider the significance of indigenous maps within the RGS-IBG collections. Such maps were typically acquired, commissioned or co-produced in the process of exploration and territorial expansion preceding the imposition of formal colonial rule. Similar materials in comparable collections have been treated variously as sources of geographical information for the use of western cartographers; as ethnographic objects to be studied in their own right; or as hybrid documents of cultural exchange and encounter. The project seeks to document their extent and significance within the RGS-IBG collections, to consider the contexts of their acquisition and their subsequent histories and to explore their historical significance as sources of geographical evidence, as ethnographic objects and especially as artefacts of encounter.  This will involve developing in-depth ‘biographies’ of specific maps in the collection, including examples from various cultural contexts. It will also require more general consideration of the ways in which indigenous knowledge has been defined, presented, inflected or obscured within the cartographic archive. There will be opportunities to present this research to public audiences within the public programmes of the RGS-IBG as well as within the context of a PhD.

Information on eligibility, funds and how to apply is available here 
The application deadline is 6 April 2016.

Curatorial development opportunities offered by the Art Fund

Navigating the Art Market

 

The Art Fund is excited to announce a refreshed version of the Navigating the Art Market professional development course for 2016. Developed in partnership with Sotheby’s Institute of Art, the course is designed to promote a practical understanding of the art market through a combination of online learning and seminars in London, with spaces fully-funded by the Art Fund. It is targeted at early career curators with limited experience of engaging with the art market, and more experienced curators wishing to refresh their knowledge.

 

In 2016 the course will be delivered in two parts, each comprising two online sessions and a seminar day.  The first part will take place from mid-February to early March, and the second from mid-April to early May.

 

The deadline for applications is 12 noon on Friday 29 January.

 

To find out more and to apply for a place please visit the website.

 

Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grants Programme

 

The Art Fund is delighted that philanthropist and patron Jonathan Ruffer has generously increased his support for this programme by 50%, from £50,000 to £75,000 per year. This programme provides funding for travel and other practical costs to help curators from museums large and small undertake collection and exhibition research projects within the UK or anywhere in the world; since its inception in 2012 the scheme has benefitted over 200 curators in 130 institutions. Applications for grants under £1,500 can be accepted at any time, while applications over £1,500 are only considered three times a year. The deadlines for 2016 are as follows:

 

·         Wednesday 20^th January

·         Wednesday 20^th May

·         Wednesday 14^th September

 

Full details on the scheme and the application process can be found on the website.

Bard Graduate Center/AMNH Fellowship in Museum Anthropology

Bard Graduate Centre and the American Museum of Natural History invite applications for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship jointly appointed at Bard Graduate Centre and in the Anthropology Division at the Richard Gilder Graduate School of the American Museum of Natural History. The fellow’s project focuses on a specific area of material culture: Southeast Asian textiles, including textiles from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Philippines. 

Past areas of specialization have included the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, Oceania, South American textiles, and Australian Aboriginal cultures. The project makes use of the AMNH collection. A PhD in Anthropology or a related field is required.

The fellow teaches one graduate course each year and mounts an innovative small exhibition, ideally drawing on the collections of the AMNH, in Bard Graduate Centre’s Focus Gallery. A major purpose of the Bard Graduate Centre-AMNH Fellowship is to promote mutual scholarly interest and interaction among our fellows, faculty, and students, and the AMNH academic community.

To apply, please submit the following materials via email as a single PDF to fellowships@bgc.bard.edu: cover letter, curriculum vitae, sample publication, and a list of three references. Candidates will be judged primarily on their research abilities, experience, and on the merits and scope of the proposed research. The Fellow will have office space and be expected to participate fully in the intellectual life of both institutions. Salary is $35,000 per year. Housing is available, as is a small research/travel fund while the Fellow is in residence. The deadline to submit the application is November 1, 2015 and the position commences in the fall of 2016.

Bard Graduate Centre is an AA/EOE employer. Please direct any questions AND YOUR APPLICATION to fellowships@bgc.bard.edu and see our Frequently Asked Questions page. Please add “AMNH Fellowship” to the subject line when you submit your application.

 

 

Staff wanted for a major AHRC-funded project on Pacific barkcloth

Three job opportunities for a major AHRC-funded project on Pacific barkcloth (tapa/kapa), starting in January 2016. The project is led by Frances Lennard at the Centre for Textile Conservation at the University of Glasgow, and is in collaboration with Adrienne Kaeppler (Smithsonian) and Mark Nesbitt (Kew Gardens), with a distinguished advisory board. Staff will be based in Glasgow but with travel to the partner institutions. The project combines research into tapa as a plant material with research into its history and cultural context. It is centred on the museum collections of the Hunterian, Kew and Smithsonian.

Three posts are being advertised, closing date 20 September 2015.

011026 Historical researcher (post-doctoral) 36 months

011025 Scientific researcher (post-doctoral) 30 months

011024 Research conservator 24 months

 

Full details can be found here.
Queries can be sent to Frances Lennard and/or Mark Nesbitt 

The Textile Society Museum and Conservation Award 2015

Deadline for applications 1 June 2015

The Textile Society offers an annual bursary award of up to £5,000 for a textile related project within the museum, archive or conservation sector in the UK.  The Award is designed to support textile related projects within a museum, archive, or conservation studio for exhibition, publication or conservation that will help achieve greater awareness and access for the public. To apply or for more information visit here.