Horniman Museum's World Gallery gets go-ahead

Plans to create a World Gallery at the Horniman Museum and Gardens have received the green light, thanks to confirmed funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), announced today (10 May).

Thousands of objects will tell stories from around the world, celebrating the wonder and complexity of what it means to be human, in the new world-class anthropology gallery opening in 2018. Alongside this will be a studio, home to a cutting-edge programme of performances and exhibitions inspired by the Horniman’s internationally important collections.

HLF has awarded £3.3m to the project, which will also fund a learning and engagement programme. The Horniman is raising a further £1.4m of funding to complete the project.

Janet Vitmayer, Director of the Horniman Museum and Gardens, says: ‘This grant from HLF will transform our galleries and programmes. We will share exciting new research and build on the Horniman’s leading work in the development of community collaboration, to create programmes that stimulate curiosity and help our diverse audience relate to and engage with some of the many different ways there are of living in our extraordinary world.’

Robert Storrie, Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman, says: ‘The World Gallery will display more than 3,000 objects from our collections, in a beautiful and joyful space that celebrates human creativity, imagination and adaptability. The displays will show how “things” connect people – practically and emotionally – as well as giving each of us a glimpse into other ways of understanding the world we all share.’

Stuart Hobley, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund London, says: ‘Already much-loved in South London, the Horniman has an incredible global story to tell. Thanks to National Lottery players this project will enable previously hidden items from the museum’s anthropology collections to be enjoyed for the first time and ensure that people – from our ancestors to today’s visitors – remain at its heart.’

The Horniman’s current anthropology galleries will be closed to the public from September 2016.

New Director announced for the Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University has today announced its new director.

Dr Laura Van Broekhoven will take up the directorship on 1 March 2016, following the retirement of Professor Mike O’Hanlon in September.

Dr Van Broekhoven is currently Head of the Curatorial Department and Curator of Middle and South America at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (encompassing the Tropenmuseum, Volkenkunde and Afrika Museum) in the Netherlands and Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Leiden University.

She said: 'It is both an honour and a delight to be joining the Pitt Rivers Museum. The Museum enjoys the highest reputation internationally for the quality of its curatorial expertise, its extraordinary collections and galleries and as a centre of scholarship.

'This is thanks in particular to the outstanding leadership of Professor O’Hanlon. I am greatly looking forward to working with colleagues in the museum and also with academic colleagues across the University.'

Professor Anne Trefethen, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Academic Services and University Collections at Oxford University, said: ‘I am delighted that Dr Van Broekhoven will be joining us at what is a pivotal moment, both for the Pitt Rivers for the University's other museums and collections.

'All of these outstanding collections are now working – individually and collectively – to extend their contribution to the delivery of the University’s strategic aims and I greatly look forward to Dr Broekhoven joining us in this shared endeavour.'

Call for papers: ‘Faith and Community: Interpreting beliefs in the Modern Museum’ MEG Conference 2015

Manchester Museum
18 and 19 April 2016

Manchester Museum is part of the University of Manchester and is internationally renowned for its encyclopaedic collections, innovative exhibitions, and extensive learning and engagement programme. The museum is critical to communicating the results of ground-breaking University of Manchester research, such research has informed exhibitions including Breed: The British and Their Dogs, Rapa Nui: The Statues from Easter Island and most recently Gifts for the Gods: Animal Mummies Revealed. This year it has initiated an exploration of South Asian collections across the museum, the Whitworth, and Manchester Art Gallery, collectively known as the Manchester Partnership,  in preparation for several exciting forthcoming projects. A significant percentage of this material is linked to faith in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, making the conference topic particularly relevant to this research. The conference will provide Manchester Museum with an invaluable opportunity to hear from other colleagues and organisations working in this area, we’re hoping for a diverse range of papers to stimulate debate and discussion. Manchester Museum actively encourages you to consider submitting a paper proposal and welcoming to Manchester in April 2016.

If you are interested in submitting a paper for the conference please send your title and draft abstract (c.100 words) to Stephen Welsh at Manchester Museum by 5pm on 12th February 2016.

Dr Bawtree missing artefacts...

My name is Michael Borsk and I am a third year history major studying at the University of Toronto. I'm currently working at Awenda Provincial Park on the shores of Georgian Bay as the Natural Heritage Education Department's Cultural Heritage Specialist.

In the course of our research, I came across an early 19th century report from a Doctor Bawtree, who excavated some Huron ossuaries around Awenda. In the foot note of his report on his findings, he notes that these specimens are destined for the Fort Pitt Museum. Among them are a collection of pipe and pottery fragments, a conch shell, and rusted sword. In attempting to locate these artefacts, I read an article from the 1985, No. 17 Newsletter by the Museum Ethnographers Group addressing the location for these specimens. While they had not yet been found in 1985, I am wondering if they resurfaced in the past 30 years and if any of your members may know their whereabouts. We currently have Dr. Bawtree's watercolour sketches of his findings, but we would like to get images of the artefacts themselves to add to the Park's archives.

If any MEG members can help with this enquiry, please contact Michael direct via email

Percy Manning: The man who collected Oxfordshire

Regular MEG conference attenders with long memories will recall that the 2008 conference theme was 'Museum Ethnography at Home'. This conference arose out of a research project at the Pitt Rivers Museum (members of which project helped to host the conference) called (in short-hand) The Other Within. 

The after-life of this project continues to this day. One of the folklorists and local antiquarians whose collections were considered during the project was Percy Manning (1870-1917). He spent his adult life in Oxford, and collected many hundreds of objects which are spread between the Ashmolean, Bodleian and Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. 

Mike Heaney, who wrote Manning's entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, has convened a working group of representatives from all the main Oxfordshire institutions who have an interest in the collections to organize a series of events, exhibitions and activities to celebrate the centenary of his death in 2017. It is early days yet but the following events have been mooted:

Morris dancer's costume from Kirtlington, Oxfordshire (1895.46.1 )

1. An exhibition in the Lower Gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum from February to March 2017. This will comprise a series of objects donated by Manning and his close collaborator Thomas James Carter including a morris costume from Kirtlington. We are hoping to work with members of the 2015 Kirtlington Morris to provide images and related activity events.

2. In connection with this it is hoped that the VERVE project will organize a series of folk and morris events around May Day 2017 which will celebrate Manning's contribution to the renaissance of morris in the early twentieth-century.

3. Linked exhibitions at the Ashmolean and Bodleian (Weston Library)

4. Trail of the other Manning related objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum which will be made available to the visiting public free of charge

5. The digitalisation, annotation and publication of Manning's map of Oxfordshire which records many previously unknown archaeological sites

Possibly a website, publication and workshop are also being discussed and planned. 

Further information about these events will be circulated nearer the date to MEG members. If you know your museum has any objects or manuscript collections from Percy Manning, or you wish to know more about the man, his collection or his centenary please contact us.

Faye Belsey, Madeleine Ding and Alison Petch

Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Exhibition Tour and Curator's Talk

Exhibition Tour and Curator's Talk

Indigenous Australia, British Museum, Wednesday 29 July

Members to meet by the information desk in the Great Court of the British Museum at 1.45pm, to view the exhibition 2-3pm followed by the curator's talk at 3-4pm.

Mask. Mer, Torres Strait, before 1855 © The Trustees of the British Museum

MEG members are invited to attend the British Museum to explore the BP exhibition Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation and speak to Gaye Scunthorpe the curator behind the show.  Indigenous Australia is the first major UK exhibition to present a history of Aboriginal peoples through objects and to celebrate their cultural strength and resilience.  This 60,000-year-old culture has continued in diverse environments of this vast continent; each group defining their own area, language and tradition.

This show has been met with positive feedback but has also received criticism for conveying the effects of colonialism on the indigenous population.   Poignant interpretation aside, Indigenous Australia is worth exploring.  A review in The Telegraph in April stated that the visitors’ experience is an all-too-familiar account of dispossession, malfeasance and massacres by the British; an approach that is all too familiar to British Museum shows.  Regardless of contention, Indigenous Australia is a visual feast of traditional historic items and contemporary art.

  

This is a free event for MEG members

Numbers are limited and the event can accommodate no more than 20 people, places will go on a first come first served basis.

Those who want to attend should contact Tony Eccles 

New research on South Sudanese material culture

Mrs Powell-Cotton buying artefacts in Warrap, South Sudan (1933).

Image courtesy of Trustees of Powell-Cotton Museum.

I’m pleased to introduce some new research currently being undertaken on South Sudanese material culture. The first phase of this is funded by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and is being conducted by Dr Zoe Cormack and Dr Cherry Leonardi. The aim of our work, still in the early stages, is to establish plans and feasibility for a substantial research project involving these collections.  We are currently scoping relevant collections, surveying associated documentary material and developing institutional links in Europe and South Sudan.

Collections from South Sudan in European museums were mainly assembled between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. They were created by an assortment of European travellers to Sudan. The nineteenth century was a period of commercial exploitation in what is now South Sudan, as the region was incorporated into Ottoman Egypt. Some collections were assembled by men such as Franz Binder and John Petherick with close links to the slave and ivory trade. Others where gathered by missionaries – for example by the Italian order of Comboni Fathers.  Collectors like Maj. Powell-Cotton and his wife, who is pictured above buying artefacts in the remote village of Panhomweeth, have also left a considerable quantity of material.  So too have anthropologists who worked in South Sudan during the British colonial period.

Decorated clay bulls, collected by anthropologist Evans Pritchard.

Image courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum (1936.10.85).

Broadly reflecting the nationalities of the collectors, this material is now widely dispersed across Europe. There are important collections in France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Holland, Italy and significantly in the UK. Much material is also housed in ethnographic museums in Khartoum and Cairo. Rich photographic and documentary sources are also available. Some collections have been studied individually, but they have never been looked at together.

South Sudan has experienced chronic civil war. Most international engagements with South Sudan are focused on urgent responses to conflict and humanitarian emergencies. Cultural heritage has, understandably, not been prioritised in this context. Yet material culture has the potential to open up the discussion of the South Sudan’s history and cultures at a time when the overwhelming focus of national and international discourse is on war and crisis. One key concern for future work is to address museological questions about working with collections and communities from conflict affected areas.

As well as helping to raise the profile of cultural heritage in South Sudan, we hope that work on these collections will facilitate sustainable links between Institutions and scholars in Europe and South Sudan. This will build on successful recent experiences, for example, The Pitt Rivers Museum’s collaboration with UNESCO to provide historical photographs for a travelling exhibition in three states of South Sudan.

For more information contact Zoe Cormack 

Zoe Cormack