Knowledge Exchange: Curating Public Unrest
Museums are often required to respond to social and political calls to collect, manage, and interpret high profile objects, or objects that provoke a variety of responses. These objects often explore challenging, divisive, or problematic narratives or provenance.
This knowledge exchange was delivered by Ray Barnett, Head of Collections & Archives for the Bristol Culture & Creatives Industries team within Bristol City Council. Ray speaks about Bristol’s connections with the transatlantic slave trade and how Bristol Museum and Art Gallery helped to tell these stories through various exhibitions over the years. Ray also talks about how the statue of Edward Colston came into the museum’s possession and the challenges of preserving and displaying the statue.
This video and associated resources are useful to organisations aiming to address the challenging, emotive, and at times omitted legacies of the collections they hold. The resources include practical guidance on displaying, interpreting, and presenting objects and histories with an anti-oppressive lens, employing a people-centred approach to collection documentation work.
Further Resources
Approaching Race and Empire in Collections of Nineteenth-Century Art and Design is a resource pack produced by the Race, Empire & the Pre-Raphaelites research group. This resource is aimed at museums and galleries who are in the process of addressing legacies of race and empire within their collections. This resource provides examples of how objects connected to colonialism, empire, and transatlantic slavery can be redisplayed and reinterpreted to acknowledge these links.
People-Centred Cataloguing by Kathleen Lawther is a document aimed at those working with museum collections to centre the needs of users. This resource includes case studies and recommendations on how museums can take a more people-centred approach to their collections by considering terminology, content warnings, and working with community groups.
Everywhere and Nowhere: Guidance for ethically researching and interpreting disability histories was the result of a collaboration between the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries and the National Trust. This resource provides guidance, reflective questions, and an ethical framework useful to organisations researching and presenting histories linked to disability and the lives of disabled people.
