PRAM

In recent weeks I have had reason to connect back to the early days of gallery education and to some of the inspiring (almost exclusively) women who were key to its development. Firstly I have been collating tributes and writing my own celebratory obituary to Sue Clive, OBE. Sue was an inspirational figure who was instrumental in developing gallery education programmes at a number of galleries including Cornerhouse in Manchester and the Arnolfini in Bristol in the 1980s and 1990s. Jenni Lomax, OBE is an equally important and influential figure, who developed and headed up the Community Education and Public Programmes department at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 1979 to 1989, before going on to be the Director of the Camden Arts Centre. I had the pleasure of hearing Jenni in conversation with artist Mohammed Adel and Dr Richard Martin, the current Director of Education and Public Programmes at the Whitechapel last week.

What has become apparent to me through these connections is how much the values, methods, aims and desired outcomes of the field of gallery education were shaped by the work of these and other pioneering practitioners working at that time. Reading the tributes to Sue written by colleagues who collaborated with her and hearing Jenni talk about her Whitechapel programmes, I have been struck by the significance of the following themes. In my mind, these are still fundamental to gallery education practice today.

The centrality of artists and artists practice

Both Sue and Jenni worked closely with artists as educators in the gallery and beyond. They recognised that artists brought an approach to teaching and learning that was informed by their own artistic practices. These artists foregrounded processes of thinking and learning through making that sought to bring learners closer to the art on show. Feeling comfortable with open-ended exploration, the artists allowed learners to engage creatively and collaboratively with the art and each other.

Situating the gallery as a place of exchange

For Sue and Jenni, the gallery was a meeting point. It was not only a place where visitors came into contact with art, but was also the space where the visitor could share their knowledge and creativity with gallery staff and with others. Hence, the pedagogic methods they adopted were fundamentally collaborative. The emphasis was on co-construction and shared learning, through dialogue. On a programmatic level too the priority was to take the art out into the local community as well as invite that community to come to the gallery. Artist-led outreach programmes were as important as in-gallery workshops.

Celebrating experimentation and cross-disciplinary ways of working

The language of ‘innovation’, ‘fluidity’ and ‘boundary-crossing’ cropped up regularly in the tributes to Sue and in Jenni’s talk. Both practitioners advocated for cross-disciplinarity and worked, not only with visual artists, but also with performance practitioners and musicians. In the 1980s gallery education was an emerging field, not bound by disciplinary conventions. This allowed for considerable experimentation and creative risk-taking; both making and ‘unravelling’ established ways of thinking, as Richard Martin observed when talking to Jenni.

Recognising the importance of praxis

My own memory of Sue is of an extremely generous and thoughtful colleague who was fully committed to establishing gallery education as a legitimate and valuable field of creative teaching and learning. She knew, as others did at that time, that for this to happen, gallery education needed to have a strong theoretical underpinning and recognisable good practice. For all the focus on experimentation and permeability, the practice that Jenni, Sue and others developed was extremely rigorous and care-full. Their methods were informed by concepts drawn from critical pedagogy, feminism, anti-racism and cultural theory. They were aspiring to bring about change – in learners, in the gallery, and in the wider community. Gallery education for them was never about colouring in worksheets, or transmitting the pre-determined expertise of gallery professionals and art historians. It was, and hopefully remains, a much more radical undertaking, providing an intellectual, emotional and creative space for questioning, re-thinking and re-making. 

I was delighted to hear that Jenni is writing a book about the education programme at the Whitechapel. Gallery education’s history is woefully under-documented and the brilliant work that colleagues undertook from the mid-70s onwards is very patchily recorded. This is perhaps because gallery education by definition emphasises innovation and engagement with the present. However, I also believe that it is salutary and important to engage with the history of the practice and acknowledge the work of these pioneering educators. There is much to learn from what they did and how they did it.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Helen Legg, the director of Tate Liverpool at an event that marked the temporary closing of the gallery. In our conversation Helen reflected on her vision for the museum which is undergoing an architectural reshape. She spoke eloquently about how the function of the museum has changed since Tate Liverpool opened in 1988 and described how more than ever the art museum needs to be an open space, intellectually, artistically and physically; a place that is welcoming to all visitors. She showed enticing images of the future building, with windows that were previously bricked up, now open to the river and the city.

During the conversation we touched on the subject of interpretation. We both agreed what a vital, but complicated role it plays in making the museum and art within it accessible and interesting. To illustrate this point, Helen shared a story of visiting art museums with her father whose approach to looking at and and making meaning from art was informed by his training and expertise as an engineer. He always, Helen had observed, started with how things were made, the properties they were made from, what held them together. He was inspired by the technicalities of a work, more than its history or iconography. We both wondered out loud how well his interests were supported by any interpretation provided by a museum, given that most wall texts tend to be written by and therefore present the knowledge of those trained in art history.

Photo © Mark McNulty

I have been reflecting on this conversation since then and about what and whose knowledge occupies a visible place in the art museum. At the same time I have been thinking about the steps museums take to try and represent multiple and diverse forms of knowledge – a recognised concern of art museums in the UK at least since the late 1960s. Exhibitions and displays curated by artists or members of a local community, or an advisory group of young people are manifestations of this agenda. Similarly, including interpretation texts written by invited individuals with relevant lived experience or specialist expertise are now familiar strategies museums employ to present different perspectives from those of the curators. In my experience, interventions such as these are often bound up with cultural organisations’ attempts to counter critiques of elitism by seeking to be more inclusive, representative of and accessible to a wider demographic.

Inspired by these thoughts I have revisited the brilliant text by Tara Yosso in which she powerfully deconstructs the theory of cultural capital closely associated with Pierre Bourdieu. Drawing on critical race theory (CRT) Tara Yosso moves away ‘from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged.’ She advances six alternative forms of capital – what she calls ‘community cultural wealth’ – including ‘resistant capital’ and ‘navigational capital.’ Importantly, these are cultural attributes held by Communities of Color which differ from, yet are as important as established cultural capital categorisations from which they are customarily excluded. In making this argument, Tara Yosso demonstrates the fundamental error in assuming that the knowledge and skills of any dominant group are the only ones of value.

One of the many things I take from Tara Yosso’s paper is that the knowledge the museum choses to represent in, for instance, the wall labels, is imbued with considerable authority. Yet this may at best not be the most interesting or relevant to whole groups of museum visitors and at worst may be actively excluding. And while periodically presenting other voices and interpretations in the gallery spaces is a positive step, my sense is that it will take more than this to achieve the open and genuinely culturally representative space that Helen was describing.

Inspired by recent conversations I have been revisiting some of the ideas around and literature on creative learning that emerged in the UK in the early to mid-2000s. Reading these texts has reminded me how important the concept of creative learning is and got me thinking about how it remains all too relevant to museums today.

But first a brief bit of history.  The impetus for the interest in creative learning at that time was in part due to the publication of the ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education’ report in 1999.  This document was produced by the National Advisory Council on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE), chaired by the influential exponent of creative education, Sir Ken Robinson.  Amongst other recommendations, the NACCCE report argued strongly for a much greater emphasis on creative and cultural learning in formal education and a rebalancing across the curriculum away from the acquisition of knowledge and skills to focus on exploration, experimentation, and creativity.  The report led directly to the establishment by the then Labour government of the large-scale and well-funded ‘Creative Partnerships’ programme which ran from 2002 – 2011 and sought to embed creativity across schools in England.  It was in many ways an optimistic and exciting period where the value of creativity and cultural education appeared to be recognized and supported by policy makers and educators.

My own interest centred on the connections between creative learning and artistic practice. I researched and wrote on artists’ processes of creation and teaching and learning.  Specifically I was interested in how artists’ questioning, experimentation, analysis, reflection and learning through doing align with the fundamentals of creative learning, which include imaginative thinking and engagement through active, meaningful learning.  I explored with Viv Reiss how some of the other characteristics of creative learning – such as challenging assumptions and conventions and making inventive connections – are what artists seek to ‘teach’ when they are working in educational settings.  And I examined to what extent the art museum offered a fertile space for creative teaching and learning to thrive. 

I remember at the time being very struck by the writing of artist and educator Roy Prentice who argued that creative learning could only take place where collaboration, trust and dialogic exchange existed.  In his view, learners including small children needed to have autonomy and to see the relevance of what they were being expected to learn.  He argued that the learning process should be as open-ended as possible, with inbuilt moments of reflection so students can explore and make sense of things as they go along.

Re-reading these texts in light of my more recent interest in professional practice in the art museum, prompted me to wonder to what extent these characteristics of creative learning are present in the work we do as, amongst others, curators, educators, and conservators in the museum.  To what extent do we feel we have autonomy?  Are we able to use imaginative and inventive thinking to challenge conventions in productive ways?  How much time do we have for meaningful reflection and learning in the post-pandemic working environment?  I suspect not a great deal.

In the early 2000s I also did a fair bit of observation of artist-led creative learning in action.  I saw firsthand how transformational it could be when learners were trusted and enabled to work creatively and often collaboratively.  I know too how empowering it is to embed questioning, and more open-ended processes within the workplace.  For these reasons alone, it is worth celebrating and embedding creative learning, not just for visitors, but also for those working in the museum.

Recently I have been having conversations about practice-based research with a foundation that is a significant funder of art historical and museum-based research in the UK. The foundation is receiving an increasing number of applications for financial support for what they refer to as practice-based research projects and wants to establish clearer and more transparent guidelines in relation to this. This has prompted me to look again at the different definitions – ‘practice-based’, ‘practice-as’ and ‘practice-led’ for example – and consider what differentiates ‘practice’ from ‘practice-based research’. I’ve also been digging deeper into what assessments of quality should be applied to practice-based research and want to share some of what I’ve found here.

The first place I looked for guidance was UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), not least because they issue guidelines in relation to how they assess research for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It is instructive to note that UKRI score all research in terms of three things, ‘originality’, ‘significance’ and ‘rigour’. I have put down the definitions they give for each of these terms here:

Originality will be understood as the extent to which the output makes an important and innovative contribution to understanding and knowledge in the field. Research outputs that demonstrate originality may do one or more of the following: produce and interpret new empirical findings or new material; engage with new and/or complex problems; develop innovative research methods, methodologies and analytical techniques; show imaginative and creative scope; provide new arguments and/or new forms of expression, formal innovations, interpretations and/or insights; collect and engage with novel types of data; and/or advance theory or the analysis of doctrine, policy or practice, and new forms of expression.

Significance will be understood as the extent to which the work has influenced, or has the capacity to influence, knowledge and scholarly thought, or the development and understanding of policy and/or practice.

Rigour will be understood as the extent to which the work demonstrates intellectual coherence and integrity, and adopts robust and appropriate concepts, analyses, sources, theories and/or methodologies.

In addition to these three criteria, UKRI also assess:

• The research process: (the question and/or issues being explored, the process of discovery, methods and/or methodologies, the creative and/or intellectual context or literature review upon which the work draws, or challenges or critiques),
• Research insights: (the findings, discoveries, or creative outcomes of that process)
• The time and manner of dissemination: (how and where the insights or discoveries were ‘effectively shared’).

UKRI’s assessment conditions are helpful, not least because they provide clear and detailed definitions of terms including ‘rigour’ that are open to varied interpretation depending on the discipline and epistemological position being taken. Notable too is their acknowledgment that ‘originality’ and ‘significance’ can be judged in terms of the impact on ‘policy or practice’ as well as ‘knowledge and scholarly thought.’ In other words, good practice-based research can and should make a positive difference to practice (and policy) as well as inform academic discourse.

The UKRI criteria also highlight that the quality of any research depends on the integrity of the process and the extent to which any findings are effectively shared as much as the originality of the discoveries. We need, therefore, to consider how the research will be/was undertaken as well as what will be/was examined and discovered.  While looking into this I came across the work of Charles Glassick and his colleagues who undertook a survey of the criteria and standards employed to evaluate scholarship in American universities. They constructed a set of useful standards that form a sequence of unfolding stages to assess the quality of any research:

1. Clear Goals – are the questions being asked important? Are the ambitions realistic and achievable, are the purposes of the work clear?
2. Adequate Preparation – has the researcher got the necessary skills, do they show an understanding of the existing work in the field both practical and theoretical?  Have they got adequate resources to realise it?
3. Appropriate Methods – is the researcher using appropriate methods, are they modifying processes and methods appropriately as the work progresses?
4. Significant Results – does the researcher achieve their aims? Does their work add to the field (of practice and/or theory), does the work open up additional areas for further exploration?
5. Effective Presentation – does the researcher present their work effectively?  Do they communicate their work to the intended audiences? Do they communicate with clarity and integrity?
6. Reflective Critique – does the researcher critically evaluate their own work? Do they bring an appropriate breadth of evidence to that critique?  Do they use evaluation to improve the quality of their work?

The focus within these criteria on reflective critique, and on the potential for ongoing modification in the processes and methods, seem highly relevant to practice-based research, as is the focus on clear and ethical communication.

The need for transparency and ethical research methods are some of the determinants of research quality identified by academics Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. They identify alternative measures, which are potentially relevant to practice-based research, particularly if the study seeks to effect positive change and/or involves collaboration with others.  They argue for emotionality, personal accountability, and responsibility to be considered in judging a research study’s trustworthiness, alongside an ethic of caring and political praxis.  Going still further they maintain that any social-justice oriented approach to research should be evaluated according to its emancipatory potential, with quality judged in terms of caring, personal accountability and the representation of the experience of oppressed people.

I found that a similar set of principles and guidelines for ethical collaborative research has been produced by researchers at Durham University. Their criteria include democratic participation, personal integrity, equality and inclusion and active learning. In my mind these offer compelling alternatives to more ‘conventional’ assessment criteria.

So what can we take from these different assessment criteria? My first thought is that it is helpful to have clear definitions of all the key terms . This helps in making transparent assessments of quality in relation to practice-based research. Secondly, there is much to be learnt from the more ‘alternative’ criteria that acknowledge that assessments must take account of the ethics of any research process. Finally, given the importance of researcher reflexivity within practice-based research, any quality assessment framework would benefit from including reference to this amongst its criteria.

Part of the reason why I became interested in how research operates within the art museum was that I found it very confusing. My sense was that the dominant model of research was of a specialized activity, based largely around the collection, which curators were tasked with undertaking. However, my experience was that curators were rarely able to commit time to collection-focused research. At the same time there was a wealth of other activity happening across the museum that often went unrecognised as ‘research’. Amongst others, conservators, learning team members, those working in the library and archive and colleagues in marketing were regularly engaged in rigorous modes of enquiry, often practice-based, that led to the generation of new insights for themselves and others. Yet this work was at times overlooked in conversations and publications around research. So why is the model of the scholar curator so dominant?

In trying to find answers to this I have recently been examining the history of museums to see if historic constructions of research can help illuminate how current discourses are operating. My investigations suggested to me three historic agendas that help formalise the central role of the ‘expert’ curator and the primacy of curatorial research in justifying the choice of the objects in a collection and to some extent the museum itself. Below is a whistle-stop tour of these ideas.

1. Research as a means of conferring status on the collector

The scholar curator first emerges in the service of those wealthy Europeans who, from the 15^th century onwards were acquiring rare and precious objects to demonstrate their power, status, erudition, and taste.  For example, Cosimo de Medici, the head of the powerful Florentine family relied on the advice of the artist Donatello to acquire paintings for the palace he had built in 1444. The palace itself and the collection of objects within it constituted a visible demonstration of the family’s political and financial dominance.  Therefore, from the earliest formulations of the museum, the quality of the collection and the judgements on which it is founded are of vital importance as a reflection of the owners themselves.

2. Research as a way of ‘ordering’ the world

The 16^th century sees the growing popularity of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ – private collections of miscellaneous objects that presented a sometimes eclectic picture of the world. However, when we reach the 17^th century we see the establishment of private collections whose purpose was actively to assist scholars. The drive to collect and taxonimise was aligned with the Enlightenment ambition to establish a universal science based on order and classification. Objects from antiquity and specimens from nature in private collections were examined and rationalised to increase knowledge of humanity and the wider world at that time.

One such individual was Dr John Lettsom (1744 –1815) whose estate encompassed the house where I live in South London. An eminent physician, who established the Medical Society of London, he also acquired sizeable botanical and geological collections through financing expeditions. He also researched and published.

In several cases it was these private collections with the associated scholarship undertaken by private individuals that provided the sources for the ‘university museum’. Many will be familiar with John Tradescant the 16^th century British naturalist, who created a large collection of artifacts and natural specimens. This collection became the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum, the first university museum. Likewise, the collector and ‘Grand Tourist’ Richard, seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion, bequeathed his works of art and library to the University of Cambridge in 1816, seeking to create a place of learning as well as a gallery. 

This trend away from the private ownership of collections was accompanied by the growing involvement and greater status of expert ‘keepers’ whose job in part was to establish and maintain collections for use as educational resources. And whereas research had been regularly undertaken by scholarly amateurs, within art museums increasingly it was connoisseur art dealers and curators who were tasked with creating new taxonomies of schools and histories.

3. Research to create and uphold a dominant narrative

Expanding on the collection as an educational resource, a further development sees the creation of the national museum in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Originally associated with Enlightenment ideals of knowledge and rational judgment bringing about a just and ‘better’ society, the national museum was imagined as a ‘utopian’ space providing the ‘best’ of science and culture to educate and improve the populace.

What constitutes the ‘best’ of art and culture is needless to say inextricably linked to the presentation of a particular national narrative through objects. We can see this playing out in the early collection displays within the Louvre Museum in Paris founded in 1793 and conceived as a centre of scholarship for the whole world. The chronological sequence of paintings displayed culminated in the French School, thereby affirming the principle of progress on which the French Revolution was based. At the same time, the presentation of the collection was consciously designed to communicate that the future of art belongs to France. Museums and their rationally organized collections thus offered an irresistible opportunity for newly formed nation states to present a positive national narrative.  Consequently, we have the opening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (1808), Prado in Madrid (1819) and the National Gallery in London (1824), amongst others.

We can see therefore that by time we enter the 20th century, curators working within museums to build, maintain and display their collections are tasked not only with demonstrating the taste, maturity and status of the owners (be they individuals or nation states) but also justifying the irrefutable rationality of these collections. At the same time their expertise is relied upon to tell a powerful narrative that unites these two agendas, thereby validating the very existence of the museum. The writer Anthony Shelton makes this point beautifully in identifying that the expert curator brings their knowledge and rigorous research processes to the object thereby ensuring the integrity and authority of the collection. This becomes a self-serving cycle, whereby ‘curatorship guarantees the knowledge-value of material culture, whilst the knowledge-value of material culture reciprocally guarantees the curatorial authority on which museums are based.’

Having explored this history, the dominance of the scholar curator as the legitimate researcher within the museum makes more sense to me. However, as regular readers of this blog will know, that does not mean I think that this model is appropriate for the 21st century museum. Museums clearly need collection-focused research undertaken by experts, but that is not the only form of research that should be (and is being) done within these complex organisations.

A longer version of this text formed the basis of a talk I gave recently at Cambridge University. A recording of this talk can be found here.

There are certain phrases that to me brilliantly encapsulate a complex and important issue.  I came across one of these in the early 2000s when I was exploring methods of collaborative research and it has stayed with me since then.  The quote is from a text written by Peter Reason in 1998 on participatory action research, and it goes as follows; ‘one of the key questions about research is the political one; who owns the knowledge, and thus who can define the reality?’

One reason why this quote is so significant in my view is that it draws attention to the fundamental relationship between research, knowledge and power and reminds us that whoever authors or ‘owns’ any research holds a great deal of power, which in turn comes with responsibility.  Specifically, Peter Reason highlights the relationships of power and representations of knowledge that researchers need to negotiate if they are working collaboratively.  This applies throughout a research process but is especially true at the point when any findings are written up or communicated publicly in any way.  For it is at this moment that the ‘reality’ of the research becomes defined.

Peter Reason’s observation has resonated for me particularly when I have been involved in research or evaluation projects that have explicitly been concerned with empowering participants and/or have aimed to enable co-researchers to have an active role in improving their practice or transforming their social, personal, or working conditions.  In projects of these kinds, I have at times occupied the role of principal researcher or evaluation consultant, tasked with ‘leading’ the project, or in the latter case, examining and analysing the success of an activity in achieving its aims.  Over time I have become aware of the privileged and powerful position the researcher or evaluator occupies in these projects, not least because it is generally their responsibility to author the final report.

Take for example a collaborative research project that involves older people who are not regular museum visitors as co-researchers exploring models of co-curation within the museum.  Underpinning the project is the ambition to give these older people agency and visibility. Such a project might be funded by an external trust or foundation or research funding body and ‘co-led’ by a museum staff member and an academic, both of whom are likely to have developed the idea initially.  The project might well also be evaluated by an external consultant.  During the project activities are structured to give the older people freedom to lead, experiment, and develop new knowledge and practices, guided by the museum staff member and academic who work alongside them throughout the process.  

However, in my experience, at the culmination of the project it is more than likely to be the museum staff member and the academic who will write up the research findings in a final paper and go on to speak about the project at academic and professional networking conferences.  Likewise, it will be the evaluation consultant who will author the report detailing the success of the project.  In both cases the voices of the participants will hopefully be present in the reports and their views and opinions highly visible.  Nonetheless, even though this project seeks to give the older people power, at this vital moment when the ‘reality’ of what happened is being defined and communicated, the agency that comes with authorship is effectively removed from the older participants and placed in the hands of the researchers and evaluator.

There are often pragmatic reasons why research and evaluation reports are authored in this way.  Some of these might include that the funders have stipulated it, or that the project was not designed to enable collaborative writing and evaluation once the actual programming activity had ended.  Alternatively, the older people might not have the time or resources to be able to attend conferences or even to write up their thoughts after the project has ended.  And whereas there will be considerable professional capital to be gained for the researchers in ‘owning’ this project, the same may not always be true of other participants.  Either way, it can be challenging to ensure that a research project of this kind is authentically co-owned at the point of reporting and presentation.

There are no easy answers, yet there are alternatives.  In her book on Inclusive Curating in contemporary art, Jade French describes how zines can provide a mode of ‘democratic communication’ and can challenge the hierarchies present within more formal research publishing routes.  Similarly, Dr Roz Stewart-Hall has worked for many years pioneering the use of participatory models in the field of evaluation, for example on Tate’s Circuit programme.  These are just two examples and there is not space here to delve into the potential of digital technology to allow for co-authorship.  What cannot be overlooked though is the issue of representation, power, and authorship in research. Therefore, Peter Reason’s provocation is one that researchers need to have at the forefront of their minds from the very earliest stages of planning any research project that involves others, and especially any initiative that frames itself as collaborative in any way

I have been thinking about practice research a fair bit recently.  As the title of this site suggests, research, practice, and the relationship between the two are subjects of enduring interest to me and I have written in previous posts on practice research, here and here.  I was prompted to revisit this topic again partly because of recent conversations I have had with UK, European and US colleagues and partly because of a recent blog post from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which spells out their support for practice research.  The AHRC post in turn draws on a recently published report on practice research published by the Practice Research Advisory Group (PRAG UK).

I will not go into the details of the PRAG report or the AHRC post, both of which are available to read online, but I will flag a few things that stood out for me.  In the first instance, both texts provide definitions of practice research, although these slightly differ from one another.  Whereas in the PRAG report, practice research is characterized as ‘when practice is the significant method conveyed in a research output’, in the AHRC post practice research is defined as ‘any form of arts and humanities research that incorporates, reflects upon, or embodies practice as part of the research process or the research outputs’.   Whilst I welcome the broad reaching and inclusive framing adopted by the AHRC, to my mind the PRAG definition is the more useful in the museum context.  This is not least because the latter’s focus on practice as a legitimate research method helps foreground the rigorous modes of inquiry that museum practitioners undertake.  I also wonder what forms of research might fall outside the AHRC’s definition of practice research, given that both the PRAG report and the AHRC blog acknowledge that ‘all research involves some form of practice’?

I am nit-picking though and would stress again how much more positive it is to have a broad definition, rather than a narrow exclusionary understanding of practice research, given how difficult it is to pin down this slippery form of knowledge generation.  Other encouraging observations of relevance to museum-based researchers in these publications include the acknowledgement that practice research does not necessarily lend itself to text-based outputs (and can include artefacts, performances, and exhibitions) and that it often takes place in communities through collaboration. These, combined with the recognition in the PRAG report that practice research can offer ‘ways of knowing’ that are intuitive, tacit, embodied, imaginative, affective, and sensory, can only help validate the work of museum practitioner researchers engaged in collaborative explorations with internal and external colleagues.  

My recent conversations with museum colleagues have reinforced for me the extraordinarily rich and rigorous research that is currently being done within museums and how vital, yet fragile research as an activity is within these institutions.  Earlier in March I listened with interest to a presentation given by the museologist Francois Mairesse at an event convened by The Flemish Institution for Cultural Heritage (FARO) in Brussels. In his talk, Professor Mairesse reminded us that the 2022 ICOM definition privileges research as one of the foremost activities of the museum, but he questioned how much time and resource is actually allocated within museums to enable this research to be done.  Consequently, in his view most research in museums is undertaken by academics, whilst well-established hierarchies within academia in what constitutes ‘valid’ research mean that museum-based research tends to be neither adequately recognized, nor funded.  Professor Mairesse took a global perspective, and although his comments suggest that research is operating in challenging circumstances, he concluded by emphasizing how important museums are as sites of investigation into the complex problems facing the world today. 

Reflecting on this talk has reinforced in my mind the importance of investing in the research that IS being done by curators, conservators, learning curators and many others in museums, often against the odds.  In light of this, the AHRC’s public endorsement of practice research in all its different manifestations is all the more welcome. The AHRC have said that they ‘welcome further discussion on the next big idea which will help support existing practice communities to flourish and exciting new areas of research to emerge’. They point to their Where Next scheme as an open opportunity to submit ideas to them, which I would urge all practitioner researchers in UK museums to do!

This last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to Oslo.  I spoke at the Making Sense event organized by the recently formed Nordic Network of museums and separately met with colleagues from the Munch Museum.  It was a rich and fascinating experience.

The focus of Making Sense was ‘art-based learning’. We heard presentations from the national museums of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland on how they were exploring pedagogic methods that draw on artistic practice to connect their audiences more closely with art.  The emphasis throughout was on moving away from didactic teaching towards visitor-centred, more playful, and enquiry-based approaches that seek to make the art museum a more inclusive space.  As well as talk of artist-led and arts-informed pedagogy, there was acknowledgement of the values that inform this work.  Presenters spoke of the need to allow for risk and uncertainty, whilst Anna Carin Hedberg from the National Museum in Oslo used the term ‘trust-based interpretation’ when describing the interventions in the collection display spaces that actively encourage visitors to connect with the works on show in multi-sensory ways.

One presentation that resonated for me was given by Jonte Nynas and Johan Hildingsson from the Nordic Watercolour Museum in Sweden. ‘Art promenade’ is an art educational project aimed at care homes in the municipality of Tjörn where the museum is based that aims to make art accessible for elderly people who cannot visit the museum. The project started during the Covid-19 pandemic, working with the care-home residents, and has had various iterations, from an initial digital tutorial for residents, to providing in-person training for the care home staff and more hands-on workshops using watercolour techniques.

What struck me as Jonte and Johan were presenting was how genuinely exploratory and experimental their approach was.  Working over a longer and seemingly unfixed time period, their process appeared to involve making an intervention (the digital tutorial for instance), then pausing, speaking to staff and residents, analysing and reflecting on what had taken place, considering what had worked well and what did not appear to be so helpful and then making a subsequent intervention to try another approach.  This process happened several times as they reworked and refined the project to provide a fuller and more sustained experience for the residents and staff.

A similar highly thoughtful, yet experimental approach is being taken by colleagues working at the Munch Museum in Oslo in relation to their interactive gallery space on the 11^th floor of the museum. This space is periodically given over to artists who work closely with Learning colleagues to design an immersive environment where children especially are encouraged to freely explore, create, and play.  The first intervention in 2022 – ‘The Brain Maze’ – was created by the artist Jenny Bringaker and the team at the Munch are now preparing to open the second installation.  In each case the aim is to support children and their families (especially those who may not be familiar with art museums) to feel welcome and to see the potential for art to play a positive role in their lives. 

Before, during and after each installation the team engage in extensive planning, observations and audience research.  They test out ideas with children as the installations are taking shape, review with visitors during the time the installation is active and undertake evaluation once the exhibition is closed.  Crucially, as became apparent as I was speaking to them, the team analyse and reflect on this research with the artists and make changes to the installations as each work is being created.  They also draw on their knowledge and direct experience to inform the next iteration of the programme. Thus, the project unfolds and responds, as opposed to being fixed from the start, with the programming team researching and learning as it progresses.

I titled this blog entry ‘experiential programming’ as the approach being taken in relation to these two projects reminded me of the Experiential Learning Model.  This theory of learning focuses on direct experience, coupled with reflection as an effective way of generating new understandings.  It is regularly represented as a circular process. 

Experiential learning is at the centre of arts practice and therefore in many ways seems appropriate in the art museum learning context.  It is often what we museum educators seek to facilitate for our visitors, but perhaps do not so often see it as a way of developing our own practitioner knowledge. 

Yet as these projects demonstrate, it is an approach that museums large and small can adopt.  Speaking with these colleagues it became clear that time is crucial, alongside the support of their institution more broadly to commit to projects where the outcomes are not entirely fixed at the start.  And the rewards are many, not least because the projects themselves become creative, exploratory spaces where ideas can continually be tested, by programmers and visitors alike.

(The Making Sense Conference is available on You Tube:

Jonte Nynas and Johan Hildingsson’s presentation starts at 1:46 minutes)

One of the great pleasures of my new freelance life is the time I have for reading and writing, activities that I found hard to do when I was in my full-time role at Tate.  Over the last weeks I have been reading the collected writings of the American poet, writer and activist Audre Lorde, brought together in the 2017 publication ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You.’  There is so much here I have found enlightening and instructive in relation to life generally, but also to museums, not least because it is fascinating to reflect on how Lorde’s ideas are permeating these institutions.

I, like many others I imagine, was familiar with the much-quoted sentence that forms the title of one of her essays; ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, that Lorde first gave as comments at a conference in New York in 1979.  Reading the essay from which the sentence comes, I was struck by how multi-faceted this observation is.  In the first instance Lorde is making the vital point that ‘only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible’ if the tools of a racist patriarchy are ‘used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy.’  In other words, real change cannot come about if the consciousness and experience of those who have historically or traditionally been excluded from the dominant community are not recognized and empowered.  She goes on to say that there is great danger in members of society (white feminists in the specific case Lorde is referring to in the text) assuming that their experience is universal.  Instead, what is urgently needed is not just the recognition of difference, but a championing of the ‘creative function of difference in our lives.’ It is through paying attention to our differences, seeing them as positive sources of strength and interdependency that we can start to bring about genuine transformation.

In terms of the twenty-first century art museum the obvious insight I take from this is the need to have a multitude of knowledges, perspectives, and experiences, not just accepted but actively and consistently advocated for within these organisations.  Without this, and despite all the declarations about and commitments to greater equality, diversity and inclusivity, museums will struggle to bring about systemic and sustained change.  This change goes beyond diversifying the workforce, which is not to say that this is not a crucial undertaking.  More broadly, ideas, opinions, and ways of knowing that diverge from and at times challenge the accepted canon, must be seen as positive and enhancing rather than threatening or problematic.  Is this possible within institutions whose authority, even existence, has historically rested on the creation and maintenance of a well-regulated canon of art and artists?

In an online essay on Lorde’s influence Gemma Bird talks about her own experience of teaching political science at a UK university.  She describes how she moved away from an uncritical celebration of the canon of political writers and theorists to using the same texts as a ‘springboard’, ‘a vehicle to magnify voices and lessons that have been forcibly disappeared.’ She emphasizes how Lorde and other writers helped her see how the presence of a canon silences marginalised voices whilst perpetuating existing dominant ones. And she argues that teachers can and should empower students to both critically engage with the canon and look for voices and ideas from outside it.   I wonder what this means if we situate the museum as a teacher according to the model Gemma Bird is advocating?  To what extent are museums already alert to this, seeking through their education and curatorial programmes to move away from the notion of a canon, to foreground hitherto marginalized voices and empower visitors to question dominant narratives?  What more needs to be done?

I gain further inspiration from Audre Lorde’s ideas that the dismantling of the master’s house is a creative as well as critical project.  She is clear that it is not enough to critique existing structures and knowledge. What is needed is the recognition of difference as ‘a crucial strength’ which allows for productive confusion and the emergence of new ways of being.  Or as Lorde describes so beautifully, we need ‘to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future.’  Museum professionals might justifiably feel anxious at the idea of descending into chaos, however, the key point I see Audre Lorde making is that we must never fear ideas that diverge from our own, but instead value the potential of difference to transform and improve.

In the last post I wrote I referenced Donna Haraway’s text ‘Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene’.  I have been re-reading this and finding much in it that resonates with how I see we need to consider our work and research in museums now and going forward in these extraordinary times.

Donna Haraway’s argument is introduced in her introduction and I will share what is quite a long quotation with you here:

‘We – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times.  The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response…. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places…. Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.’

What I take from this specifically is firstly that we must respond to this challenging situation from the position we find ourselves in; from the present moment.  We must try and avoid nostalgia for an already idealised past, or project ourselves forward to a hazy, as-yet unimaginable future.  In other words, we need to work with what we have right now.

In the case of the art museum this translates into the recognition that time spent mythologizing about when visitors could physically visit our spaces is unproductive, as is fantasising about a magical future time when ‘things are back to normal.’  It is how we respond in the present that matters right now.

Every day I am witnessing the dynamic museum colleagues I work with and am reading and hearing about, adapting their energy and creativity to the current situation incredibly swiftly.  There is a palpable urgency – colleagues want to take action, to make changes to what they are doing and how they work.  New priorities are being set and programmes, projects and activities are being adapted to fulfil immediate needs and demands.  Most obviously this is evident in the shift to digital content, but there is much work going on behind the scenes also.  Education resources that would have been given to schools on their visits to the galleries are being sent directly to support home schooling. Food that would have been prepared for the museum cafes is being distributed to key workers.  The art museum is engaging with people and places in new and fruitful ways.

This shift speaks to the second inspiring point that Donna Haraway makes in my view, which is that we are all ‘entwined’.  We and the museums we work in are intimately and inevitably connected to our histories and geographies, and to ideas and ways of operating that shape what we do.  We need to recognise these connections but not be defined or constrained by them.  We are at an exceptional moment where we can build on the positives of the pasts that have brought us  institutionally and personally to where we are now, but we can also change our museums, radically if we need to.  As Arundhati Roy has articulated so powerfully in her article in the Financial times, the pandemic is a portal that offers us a chance to rethink our world.

Research can help with this process of staying with the trouble and bringing about change.  Research foregrounds the asking of questions – ‘why are we doing this’, being an obvious one to apply to any new or revised strand of activity – and creates space for people to reflect and learn.  Charting the processes of change means we can develop insights to inform our work going forward. These analytic and reflective processes must not be ignored in the rush to address the challenges we are facing.

Donna Haraway talks of settling ‘troubled waters’ and rebuilding ‘quiet places’ as well as stirring up potent responses. As I see it, action and response are essential right now, but so is questioning and deep thinking so that we understand the value of what we are changing. In other words, we need to do, but also to review and examine what it is we are doing, why and for whom, to learn how best to negotiate our ‘unfinished’ present.