Extending Our Reach
The Authenticity of Alabama’s “Lay-Curators”: Select Consignment and Thrift Collections
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Windham Graves, Elisabeth Palmer
Through photographs and descriptions, we will discuss the theory behind semi-commercial amateur collecting: consignment and thrift. Our paper focuses on collections that show obvious curatorial intent or direction and present them as the collector intended. This is a popular and accessible form of curation and expression in the lives of people who are not the standard patrons or benefactors of traditional museum collections. We explore systems theory and others as practiced by the “lay-curator.” This provides new and inclusive perspectives for museum professionals to consider candid forms, styles, and systems for exhibition and presentation.
The Museu Ambulant (Traveling Museum)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Albert Batlles, Leticia González
The Natural Science Museum of Barcelona has engaged for several years now in an outreach project that is proving to successfully overcome the physical boundaries of the museum. The Museu Ambulant is a portable natural science museum designed to reach penitentiary centres and bring natural heritage to those who cannot come to the Museum. It contains real pieces from our zoological collections that the students from penitentiary schools can directly manipulate. The materials are accompanied by complete educational guides that allow development of multiple activities in a totally autonomous way. The next steps for us at the Museum are to reach nursery schools (for small children whose lack of mobility makes it difficult to do excursions out of the crèche) and children hospitals with long-term stay units. Here we are facing new challenges, like the preparation of natural heritage material compatible with hospital sanitary restrictions and children/patients' needs.
Your "Premiere" at the Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leticia González, Albert Batlles
The Natural Science Museum of Barcelona (Spain) has engaged in an outreach project that is proving to successfully overcome the physical and often also mental boundaries related to a science museum. The annual Long Night of Museums has become the tool to achieve a real public co-programming at the Museum. It triggers exponentially the density of a (stubbornly built) vicinity synergy mesh in a socially and economically deprived neighbourhood, with initially little interest in the Museum. This will be the fourth year that the Museum premises become a space for creation and celebration for our neighbourhood communities. Last year we counted with the participation of eight artistic and cultural groups, with whom we planned, programmed, implemented, and energized the Night of Museums. The implication of the communities in the actual programming has an impact on relevant and interesting proposals for proximity publics and non-publics. That night they felt the Museum was really theirs, and our challenge is to prolong that feeling, which is actually a fact in a public museum.
Grassroots Museums as Community Curators: A Study of Three Small Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Vella
Curator practices in small independent museums created by grassroots affiliates often differ greatly from those of traditional institutional museum models. These curators practice a closer, deeper, and active relationship with the local community. Curators and their museums become spaces and channels to the voice of the community they represent: both inside and outside the museum walls. The museum becomes a community space where the community’s history is presented as it happened and pristine from the sanitisations of institutional hegemonies. Curators of independent grassroots museums can present a community as it perceives itself and a historic imaginary as the local community itself experienced and interpreted it. They can choose either to transform their community and its perceived image or recede from any involvement outside the traditional role. The curators of the independent grassroots museums in this study demonstrate how curatorship goes further than the museum building and exhibits. This type of inclusive museum, its practices and curatorship take also a social and political role from which the community, its surroundings, and country likely benefit.
