The curators
Many curators feel their work is undervalued and under threat. John Holt finds out about some of the challenges that they face
It’s often not long into an otherwise perfectly polite discussion among museum professionals that the c-word rears its ugly head.
“When I’m carrying out mentoring, junior members of staff regularly tell me they’re keen on curatorship,” says Hedley Swain, director, museums and renaissance, at Arts Council England.
“So I ask: ‘Do you want to be a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum undertaking a PhD and years of heavy research or one in a small museum where you could be the only full-time person doing a bit of everything?’
“One of the biggest concerns about curatorship is that the term itself is unhelpful. There’s such an incredible range of roles that we now vaguely categorise under that word.”
In the face of cuts and cost savings, onetime specialists are increasingly expected to be multi-tasking generalists. So most modern curators have to be communicators, just as comfortable in front of visitors or out in the community as they are with their collections and as self-assured with spreadsheets as they are with specimens.
Add in those essential education programmes and marketing responsibilities and the pressure is on to be jacks-of-all-trades rather than simply masters of one.
Essentially, museums should play to their strengths and strike a balance according to the size and need of the institution and its core audience, says Swain.
“Specialist knowledge and expertise are fine but everyone in a museum should understand the basic tenets of why they are there. A collection is important but it has to be well managed and used effectively to connect with audiences,” he adds.
“But some people continue to cling on to a conservative view of what they think curatorship should be,” Swain continues. “Perhaps we need a new term to describe a new breed of museum professionals.”
Nick Poole, chief executive of the Collections Trust, believes the problem is not that the nature of curatorship has changed, but that museums have forgotten why they needed curators in the first place.
“I think we’re suffering from something of an identity crisis,” he says. “There has been a rejection of the idea of curatorship in the race to liberate museums to become more socially engaged.
“But that’s why we need it; one of the things that makes us relevant is knowledge and expertise. The best way to be socially just is to know what we’re talking about.”
While the era of curators prowling the museum floor like hard-hearted hoarders of knowledge is long gone, the evolution of a new breed has left some experienced staff feeling their expertise is no longer valued, says Poole.
“We really need to articulate a more confident and celebratory model of what a balanced museum that’s both socially engaged and knowledgeable looks like,” he adds.
As the organiser of the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund and collections coordinator at the Museums Association (MA), Sally Colvin has seen an increase in grant applications from specialist collections that are now lacking expert curators.
“Some colleagues who are part of national museums say they’re feeling the pressure of having to share their expertise with the wider museum sector as there aren’t so many specialists out there,” says Colvin.
The MA also runs the Monument Fellowship programme, where retirees pass on their knowledge to the next generation of museum professionals. Colvin adds that this is another way of catering for the desire for specialist knowledge.
John Holt is a freelance journalist
Brendan Carr, curator, Reading Museum
Brendan Carr is one of four versatile Reading Museum curators who – as well as supervising their own dedicated subject areas – are also tasked with supplementary roles
In addition to looking after the social history and ethnographic collections – he’s something of an expert when it comes to the local Huntley & Palmers biscuit business – Carr also promotes the museum’s community engagement programmes.
These projects include a Happy Museum collaboration that aims to reveal the hidden histories and stories of some of Reading’s most socially deprived neighbourhoods.
“It’s important to know that your collections are unique to your locality as opposed to simply housing objects that were collected for no other reason than they were old,” says Carr, who says talking to different communities teaches him new things on a daily basis.
“Some people think that curators are a fount of all knowledge; that’s fine but I don’t think you should just be a human Google and you should, instead, direct inquirers to make discoveries for themselves.”
Ciara Canning, curator of community history, Colchester and Ipswich Museums
Ciara Canning, a recipient of Esmée Fairbairn funding for a community project with the homeless, is among the new breed of curators.
“I think my background in training to be an architect provided me with a different way of looking at the world.
It’s not the traditional approach at all and I think that annoys people sometimes,” says Canning, curator of community history at Colchester and Ipswich Museums.
“I really had to fight, for example, to set up an allotment for the project; I had the support of my managers but there was a lot of negativity elsewhere in the museum. Some could not understand why a curator was spending two afternoons a week with these people but it felt right to me in order to collect their stories and objects.”
The project proved to be a success and helped change attitudes about people who are homeless but Canning endured some distinctly non-curatorial distress along the way.
“It was stressful and I wasn’t prepared for the level of anxiety it caused. Five of the homeless people I worked closely with died last year and that affected me deeply. “You can’t change everyone’s opinions, though. I know, for example, that some museum people still can’t see the value of collecting the contemporary.”
Mark Macleod, operations and projects curator, Museum of the University of St Andrews
Although the job is concerned with the management of the venue and its visitor experience, the operations and projects role at the Museum of the University of St Andrews retains the word “curator” in its title to reflect the organisation’s chief focus on collections.
“Within a university environment, job titles help to better understand what people from other departments do,” says Mark Macleod, who is maternity cover for the current holder of the post.
“Alongside the collections team, this role has a wide remit and it’s not unusual for us to work several hours a month on the front desk.”
Macleod says the job is less focused on knowledge and more tuned towards the relationship between collections management and the public.
“This includes the importance of environmental conditions when managing a public space to account not only for the careful balance between visitor comfort, object conservation and security but also the implementation and maintenance costs.”
Macleod says that as museum job cuts continue, curators will have to take on more responsibilities such as finance, fundraising and personnel issues in order to prove the worth of their institutions.
“Curators can no longer think of themselves as ‘the experts’ without being able to qualify it. It’s probable the Wikipedia model will infiltrate the museum sector providing multiple theories for an object that will provide the viewer with a much larger context about it,” he adds.
Michelle Brown, community curator, London Transport Museum
As the community curator at the London Transport Museum, Michelle Brown actively encourages visitors to take a very hands-on role in developing and diversifying the collection.
“One day I might be accessioning posters or writing exhibition text, the next I might be working with contemporary artists, filming vox pops with commuters or running a digital storytelling session,” says Brown, who has been the community curator since 2008.
She has recently been involved in the museum’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme, Stories of the World. The main focus of this was the Mind the Map exhibition, which featured a range of maps from the museum’s historic collection, as well as some newly commissioned artworks.
A lot of the development of the exhibition involved Brown working with the museum’s young consultants, a group of five young people who act as advisers to the museum and its staff.
The museum is currently working to embed participatory practice firmly within the exhibition development process, adds Brown, who says the chance to meet and work with people from all walks of life provides great job satisfaction.
Oliver Blackmore, curator, Newport Museum and Art Gallery
Oliver Blackmore joined Newport Museum and Art Gallery as curator of archaeology in 2009, taking on additional art and social history roles as overall curator a year later when budget cuts began to bite in earnest.
“The lack of that specialist knowledge is a constant challenge and I have built up a good network of specialists for advice but this will never replace the expertise of my former colleagues,” says Blackmore who is curating more exhibitions with local community groups.
“The erosion of curatorial knowledge in museums will result in the collections becoming less accessible to the public. Records will become out-dated and the ability to engage audiences at a specialist level will be lost.
“Inevitably, aspects of collections care will be missed and the collections will suffer. In the longer term this will affect the high standards the public have come to expect. Dependant on what the sector looks like post-recession, I think museums will be forced to re-recruit to address this issue.”
Jamie Craggs, aquarium curator, Horniman Museum
Jamie Craggs’s job description has a fairly traditional ring to it: keeping a very close eye on a collection while overseeing research and interpretation at the Horniman Museum in south London.
What sets him apart from his peers is that the collection comprises 2,500 living creatures and Craggs employs some very specialist skills in his role as curator of the museum’s popular aquarium.
“By its very nature, the collection isn’t static. It’s an ever-changing thing due to either shifts in exhibition priorities, focused captive breeding programmes of endangered species or research areas.”
Knowledge is power in Craggs’s underwater world where a great deal of the work involves forward planning and developing new practices and procedures.
“This is done by closely observing the behaviour of the livestock, conducting medical screenings and water chemistry analysis,” says Craggs, a former underwater cameraman, who also scuba dives as part of the job.
“When I’m carrying out mentoring, junior members of staff regularly tell me they’re keen on curatorship,” says Hedley Swain, director, museums and renaissance, at Arts Council England.
“So I ask: ‘Do you want to be a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum undertaking a PhD and years of heavy research or one in a small museum where you could be the only full-time person doing a bit of everything?’
“One of the biggest concerns about curatorship is that the term itself is unhelpful. There’s such an incredible range of roles that we now vaguely categorise under that word.”
In the face of cuts and cost savings, onetime specialists are increasingly expected to be multi-tasking generalists. So most modern curators have to be communicators, just as comfortable in front of visitors or out in the community as they are with their collections and as self-assured with spreadsheets as they are with specimens.
Add in those essential education programmes and marketing responsibilities and the pressure is on to be jacks-of-all-trades rather than simply masters of one.
Essentially, museums should play to their strengths and strike a balance according to the size and need of the institution and its core audience, says Swain.
“Specialist knowledge and expertise are fine but everyone in a museum should understand the basic tenets of why they are there. A collection is important but it has to be well managed and used effectively to connect with audiences,” he adds.
“But some people continue to cling on to a conservative view of what they think curatorship should be,” Swain continues. “Perhaps we need a new term to describe a new breed of museum professionals.”
Nick Poole, chief executive of the Collections Trust, believes the problem is not that the nature of curatorship has changed, but that museums have forgotten why they needed curators in the first place.
“I think we’re suffering from something of an identity crisis,” he says. “There has been a rejection of the idea of curatorship in the race to liberate museums to become more socially engaged.
“But that’s why we need it; one of the things that makes us relevant is knowledge and expertise. The best way to be socially just is to know what we’re talking about.”
While the era of curators prowling the museum floor like hard-hearted hoarders of knowledge is long gone, the evolution of a new breed has left some experienced staff feeling their expertise is no longer valued, says Poole.
“We really need to articulate a more confident and celebratory model of what a balanced museum that’s both socially engaged and knowledgeable looks like,” he adds.
As the organiser of the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund and collections coordinator at the Museums Association (MA), Sally Colvin has seen an increase in grant applications from specialist collections that are now lacking expert curators.
“Some colleagues who are part of national museums say they’re feeling the pressure of having to share their expertise with the wider museum sector as there aren’t so many specialists out there,” says Colvin.
The MA also runs the Monument Fellowship programme, where retirees pass on their knowledge to the next generation of museum professionals. Colvin adds that this is another way of catering for the desire for specialist knowledge.
John Holt is a freelance journalist
Brendan Carr, curator, Reading Museum
Brendan Carr is one of four versatile Reading Museum curators who – as well as supervising their own dedicated subject areas – are also tasked with supplementary roles
In addition to looking after the social history and ethnographic collections – he’s something of an expert when it comes to the local Huntley & Palmers biscuit business – Carr also promotes the museum’s community engagement programmes.
These projects include a Happy Museum collaboration that aims to reveal the hidden histories and stories of some of Reading’s most socially deprived neighbourhoods.
“It’s important to know that your collections are unique to your locality as opposed to simply housing objects that were collected for no other reason than they were old,” says Carr, who says talking to different communities teaches him new things on a daily basis.
“Some people think that curators are a fount of all knowledge; that’s fine but I don’t think you should just be a human Google and you should, instead, direct inquirers to make discoveries for themselves.”
Ciara Canning, curator of community history, Colchester and Ipswich Museums
Ciara Canning, a recipient of Esmée Fairbairn funding for a community project with the homeless, is among the new breed of curators.
“I think my background in training to be an architect provided me with a different way of looking at the world.
It’s not the traditional approach at all and I think that annoys people sometimes,” says Canning, curator of community history at Colchester and Ipswich Museums.
“I really had to fight, for example, to set up an allotment for the project; I had the support of my managers but there was a lot of negativity elsewhere in the museum. Some could not understand why a curator was spending two afternoons a week with these people but it felt right to me in order to collect their stories and objects.”
The project proved to be a success and helped change attitudes about people who are homeless but Canning endured some distinctly non-curatorial distress along the way.
“It was stressful and I wasn’t prepared for the level of anxiety it caused. Five of the homeless people I worked closely with died last year and that affected me deeply. “You can’t change everyone’s opinions, though. I know, for example, that some museum people still can’t see the value of collecting the contemporary.”
Mark Macleod, operations and projects curator, Museum of the University of St Andrews
Although the job is concerned with the management of the venue and its visitor experience, the operations and projects role at the Museum of the University of St Andrews retains the word “curator” in its title to reflect the organisation’s chief focus on collections.
“Within a university environment, job titles help to better understand what people from other departments do,” says Mark Macleod, who is maternity cover for the current holder of the post.
“Alongside the collections team, this role has a wide remit and it’s not unusual for us to work several hours a month on the front desk.”
Macleod says the job is less focused on knowledge and more tuned towards the relationship between collections management and the public.
“This includes the importance of environmental conditions when managing a public space to account not only for the careful balance between visitor comfort, object conservation and security but also the implementation and maintenance costs.”
Macleod says that as museum job cuts continue, curators will have to take on more responsibilities such as finance, fundraising and personnel issues in order to prove the worth of their institutions.
“Curators can no longer think of themselves as ‘the experts’ without being able to qualify it. It’s probable the Wikipedia model will infiltrate the museum sector providing multiple theories for an object that will provide the viewer with a much larger context about it,” he adds.
Michelle Brown, community curator, London Transport Museum
As the community curator at the London Transport Museum, Michelle Brown actively encourages visitors to take a very hands-on role in developing and diversifying the collection.
“One day I might be accessioning posters or writing exhibition text, the next I might be working with contemporary artists, filming vox pops with commuters or running a digital storytelling session,” says Brown, who has been the community curator since 2008.
She has recently been involved in the museum’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme, Stories of the World. The main focus of this was the Mind the Map exhibition, which featured a range of maps from the museum’s historic collection, as well as some newly commissioned artworks.
A lot of the development of the exhibition involved Brown working with the museum’s young consultants, a group of five young people who act as advisers to the museum and its staff.
The museum is currently working to embed participatory practice firmly within the exhibition development process, adds Brown, who says the chance to meet and work with people from all walks of life provides great job satisfaction.
Oliver Blackmore, curator, Newport Museum and Art Gallery
Oliver Blackmore joined Newport Museum and Art Gallery as curator of archaeology in 2009, taking on additional art and social history roles as overall curator a year later when budget cuts began to bite in earnest.
“The lack of that specialist knowledge is a constant challenge and I have built up a good network of specialists for advice but this will never replace the expertise of my former colleagues,” says Blackmore who is curating more exhibitions with local community groups.
“The erosion of curatorial knowledge in museums will result in the collections becoming less accessible to the public. Records will become out-dated and the ability to engage audiences at a specialist level will be lost.
“Inevitably, aspects of collections care will be missed and the collections will suffer. In the longer term this will affect the high standards the public have come to expect. Dependant on what the sector looks like post-recession, I think museums will be forced to re-recruit to address this issue.”
Jamie Craggs, aquarium curator, Horniman Museum
Jamie Craggs’s job description has a fairly traditional ring to it: keeping a very close eye on a collection while overseeing research and interpretation at the Horniman Museum in south London.
What sets him apart from his peers is that the collection comprises 2,500 living creatures and Craggs employs some very specialist skills in his role as curator of the museum’s popular aquarium.
“By its very nature, the collection isn’t static. It’s an ever-changing thing due to either shifts in exhibition priorities, focused captive breeding programmes of endangered species or research areas.”
Knowledge is power in Craggs’s underwater world where a great deal of the work involves forward planning and developing new practices and procedures.
“This is done by closely observing the behaviour of the livestock, conducting medical screenings and water chemistry analysis,” says Craggs, a former underwater cameraman, who also scuba dives as part of the job.