Thirty new museums: that's the plan for the Caribbean island of Barbados in the next ten or 20 years. The small island on the eastern side of the region, famous for cricket, carnival and of course tourism, is starting to place increased value on its cultural representation.
The Barbados Museum is the main museum on the island and its 270,000 artefacts live in an old British military prison in the capital, Bridgetown. There are two other town museums, one on the east of the island, the other on the west.
Alissandra Cummins is the director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, and when she came to London to address the Museums Association's (MA) conference in October, I asked her to explain why a population of about 300,000 needs 30 museums.
When the Barbados Museum was created in 1933 by enthusiasts and collectors, they based its presentation on a Victorian model.
The needs of the local people were far from the forefront of that thinking. There are seven galleries including archaeology, Amerindian culture, social history, decorative arts, prints and paintings, and a recent African gallery addition. There is also a research library, which has more than 5,000 books and documents.
Cummins says she wants to bring the Barbadian people back into focus. 'The local community are the number one visitor category,' she says. The new museums will tell the story of the whole of Barbados and will be seen across the island, not only in the capital.
A slavery museum, parliamentary museum, a Jewish history museum, a cricket museum and a sugar mill are just some of those planned. Many will be satellites of the main museum or of the National Trust. Others will be small and specialised and some will be independent.
She says these ideas for new museums have sprung from local interest groups. Owen Arthur, the prime minister of Barbados, has made heritage a priority, with the release of a national consultation on culture.
And he has made it clear he wants to see the rapid development of a creative economy. 'With limited natural resources,' says Cummins, 'Barbados must invest in its people.'
For now, she is focusing on her work as the chairwoman of a committee to establish a new national art gallery. Though excited about the ethos - bringing together artist and community - she says she will be happy when the legislation for the gallery goes through the country's parliament and the committee will cease to exist.
This is not such a strange reaction for a woman who last year became the president of the International Council of Museums (Icom). A deputy director has been appointed to the Barbados Museum to assist her with her workload and pick up the slack when she travels the globe to represent Icom.
How does she cope with having to juggle projects? 'By being grateful when they finish,' she says. That Cummins is both the first woman and the first Caribbean to be president of Icom has attracted much publicity.
So how does she imagine that it will change the face of Icom? She says her appointment sends the message: 'Icom is diverse, Icom is inclusive. You can have a say and you can change the way Icom functions.'
Cummins says that Icom's membership is predominantly from western European countries and is particularly lacking representation from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
She is determined to address this through the work that has already started. The executive committee has been expanded and has welcomed more eastern European countries into the fold. She wants to see further geographical diversity.
I ask how effective Icom has been. 'Icom as a global institution is trying to affect change at the national level and that isn't always easy,' Cummins replies.
She believes it plays its best role as an enabling organisation, providing the tools and opportunities for museums to take action. She says this has been most successful in campaigns on illicit trade and cultural property and with the 100 Missing Objects and Red List series.
Disaster preparedness and the safety of intangible as well as tangible heritage are priorities for her. In view of the natural disasters that have occurred this year - the earthquake in Pakistan, Hurricane Katrina and generally a more politically volatile world - this is all the more pressing. She says that waiting for human recovery before salvaging heritage is out of the question.
Cummins's new global profile has been 20 years in the making. She left Barbados in the late 1970s to study art history at the University of East Anglia (UEA). It was something she had been interested in as a child and was fully supported in the endeavour by her family.
They were in a position, she says, to allow their children to follow their passions. Unusually, her father was adamant that his children should not follow him into medicine. But having chosen art she was unsure how to use her skills.
A study option introducing her to the work of museums 'saved' her, she says, from teaching art. A condition of studying abroad was that she would return to Barbados to offer her knowledge to the community there. But she was not hopeful of finding museum work in the Barbados Museum because of low staff turnover: 'Usually the director or curator dies in office.'
Before the UEA course ended, the Barbados government ran a programme to encourage young Barbadians to consider a museum career and be trained in museum studies. She applied and won the post of trainee director. After the two-year masters at Leicester she returned to the Caribbean as the deputy director.
'Mentally I was prepared to go back to Barbados. Intellectually there were things I wanted to do in the UK,' she says. Cummins realised professional isolation was quite possible in the Caribbean. She was interested in art, particularly African art, cubism, 17th-century Spanish paintings and 15th-century Flemish schools, but these could not be directly studied in the Caribbean.
Placements while at Leicester at the Museum of Mankind (where she stayed for eight months longer than planned, researching the African collection) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York went some way to rectifying the situation. The important contacts she had made helped to keep her in touch with her specialism.
On her return to Barbados she continued her thesis on the colonial impact on Caribbean museums and the Caribbean psyche, travelling around the region for three years while helping to run the Barbados Museum. Her travels led her in 1989 to set up the Caribbean Museums Association, to engender a network of sharing across the region.
It was probably then that she became especially interested in cultural tourism. And she is keen for Barbadians to explore their identity and heritage. She wants to see people excited by their history and to bring it alive: 'Once we do it well for that very critical market then we are doing it well for anybody.'
Most Caribbean people live abroad. For Barbados this situation was encouraged from the mid-1940s until the 1970s with the policy of sending the unemployed to Britain. But Cummins says that the Barbados love affair with England is waning.
Unlike many of the other Caribbean islands that had been ruled by a variety of European colonial powers, England's 350-year hold on Barbados held firm even after they left in 1966.
With Nelson taking pride of place in Bridgetown's Trafalgar Square and the parliament building modelled on the Palace of Westminster, it is no surprise that Barbados was proud to call itself Little England.
In the past ten years things have changed on the island. Trafalgar Square has been renamed Heroes Square. The bronze statue of Nelson has been turned away from the main street and there is now even talk of its removal. It is controversial stuff, although even this move comes 40 years after the British relinquished power.
Cummins herself is less controversial. She has on occasions been described as strong-willed but her plans for her museum and for Icom are essentially conservative.
She backs the idea of museums being facilitators rather than creators, in the light of the response of the public to museums. She sees that museums must do more to provide greater accessibility to collections, particularly those museums that hold collections from around the world.
She questions the universal museum model, but at the same time admits to enjoying being able to see the world under one roof. Return for return's sake is not up for discussion. 'I am not by any means an advocate of restitution of everything back to the country of origin. It just isn't useful and its not necessary.'
She talks about the burgeoning of the world museum as being a pull against the universal model. 'I consider museums to be custodians and not owners of work,' she says. And the global museum concept understands this.
In the absence of a family of her own, Cummins says she has put projects in their place. And it is engaging the public where her greatest reward lies.
'I am always happy when some of the youth in Barbados gets it - when they get the connections between working in a museum and helping to conserve heritage and identity. And I like to think I have played a part in that.'
http://icom.museum
http://www.barbmuse.org.bb
The Barbados Museum is the main museum on the island and its 270,000 artefacts live in an old British military prison in the capital, Bridgetown. There are two other town museums, one on the east of the island, the other on the west.
Alissandra Cummins is the director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, and when she came to London to address the Museums Association's (MA) conference in October, I asked her to explain why a population of about 300,000 needs 30 museums.
When the Barbados Museum was created in 1933 by enthusiasts and collectors, they based its presentation on a Victorian model.
The needs of the local people were far from the forefront of that thinking. There are seven galleries including archaeology, Amerindian culture, social history, decorative arts, prints and paintings, and a recent African gallery addition. There is also a research library, which has more than 5,000 books and documents.
Cummins says she wants to bring the Barbadian people back into focus. 'The local community are the number one visitor category,' she says. The new museums will tell the story of the whole of Barbados and will be seen across the island, not only in the capital.
A slavery museum, parliamentary museum, a Jewish history museum, a cricket museum and a sugar mill are just some of those planned. Many will be satellites of the main museum or of the National Trust. Others will be small and specialised and some will be independent.
She says these ideas for new museums have sprung from local interest groups. Owen Arthur, the prime minister of Barbados, has made heritage a priority, with the release of a national consultation on culture.
And he has made it clear he wants to see the rapid development of a creative economy. 'With limited natural resources,' says Cummins, 'Barbados must invest in its people.'
For now, she is focusing on her work as the chairwoman of a committee to establish a new national art gallery. Though excited about the ethos - bringing together artist and community - she says she will be happy when the legislation for the gallery goes through the country's parliament and the committee will cease to exist.
This is not such a strange reaction for a woman who last year became the president of the International Council of Museums (Icom). A deputy director has been appointed to the Barbados Museum to assist her with her workload and pick up the slack when she travels the globe to represent Icom.
How does she cope with having to juggle projects? 'By being grateful when they finish,' she says. That Cummins is both the first woman and the first Caribbean to be president of Icom has attracted much publicity.
So how does she imagine that it will change the face of Icom? She says her appointment sends the message: 'Icom is diverse, Icom is inclusive. You can have a say and you can change the way Icom functions.'
Cummins says that Icom's membership is predominantly from western European countries and is particularly lacking representation from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
She is determined to address this through the work that has already started. The executive committee has been expanded and has welcomed more eastern European countries into the fold. She wants to see further geographical diversity.
I ask how effective Icom has been. 'Icom as a global institution is trying to affect change at the national level and that isn't always easy,' Cummins replies.
She believes it plays its best role as an enabling organisation, providing the tools and opportunities for museums to take action. She says this has been most successful in campaigns on illicit trade and cultural property and with the 100 Missing Objects and Red List series.
Disaster preparedness and the safety of intangible as well as tangible heritage are priorities for her. In view of the natural disasters that have occurred this year - the earthquake in Pakistan, Hurricane Katrina and generally a more politically volatile world - this is all the more pressing. She says that waiting for human recovery before salvaging heritage is out of the question.
Cummins's new global profile has been 20 years in the making. She left Barbados in the late 1970s to study art history at the University of East Anglia (UEA). It was something she had been interested in as a child and was fully supported in the endeavour by her family.
They were in a position, she says, to allow their children to follow their passions. Unusually, her father was adamant that his children should not follow him into medicine. But having chosen art she was unsure how to use her skills.
A study option introducing her to the work of museums 'saved' her, she says, from teaching art. A condition of studying abroad was that she would return to Barbados to offer her knowledge to the community there. But she was not hopeful of finding museum work in the Barbados Museum because of low staff turnover: 'Usually the director or curator dies in office.'
Before the UEA course ended, the Barbados government ran a programme to encourage young Barbadians to consider a museum career and be trained in museum studies. She applied and won the post of trainee director. After the two-year masters at Leicester she returned to the Caribbean as the deputy director.
'Mentally I was prepared to go back to Barbados. Intellectually there were things I wanted to do in the UK,' she says. Cummins realised professional isolation was quite possible in the Caribbean. She was interested in art, particularly African art, cubism, 17th-century Spanish paintings and 15th-century Flemish schools, but these could not be directly studied in the Caribbean.
Placements while at Leicester at the Museum of Mankind (where she stayed for eight months longer than planned, researching the African collection) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York went some way to rectifying the situation. The important contacts she had made helped to keep her in touch with her specialism.
On her return to Barbados she continued her thesis on the colonial impact on Caribbean museums and the Caribbean psyche, travelling around the region for three years while helping to run the Barbados Museum. Her travels led her in 1989 to set up the Caribbean Museums Association, to engender a network of sharing across the region.
It was probably then that she became especially interested in cultural tourism. And she is keen for Barbadians to explore their identity and heritage. She wants to see people excited by their history and to bring it alive: 'Once we do it well for that very critical market then we are doing it well for anybody.'
Most Caribbean people live abroad. For Barbados this situation was encouraged from the mid-1940s until the 1970s with the policy of sending the unemployed to Britain. But Cummins says that the Barbados love affair with England is waning.
Unlike many of the other Caribbean islands that had been ruled by a variety of European colonial powers, England's 350-year hold on Barbados held firm even after they left in 1966.
With Nelson taking pride of place in Bridgetown's Trafalgar Square and the parliament building modelled on the Palace of Westminster, it is no surprise that Barbados was proud to call itself Little England.
In the past ten years things have changed on the island. Trafalgar Square has been renamed Heroes Square. The bronze statue of Nelson has been turned away from the main street and there is now even talk of its removal. It is controversial stuff, although even this move comes 40 years after the British relinquished power.
Cummins herself is less controversial. She has on occasions been described as strong-willed but her plans for her museum and for Icom are essentially conservative.
She backs the idea of museums being facilitators rather than creators, in the light of the response of the public to museums. She sees that museums must do more to provide greater accessibility to collections, particularly those museums that hold collections from around the world.
She questions the universal museum model, but at the same time admits to enjoying being able to see the world under one roof. Return for return's sake is not up for discussion. 'I am not by any means an advocate of restitution of everything back to the country of origin. It just isn't useful and its not necessary.'
She talks about the burgeoning of the world museum as being a pull against the universal model. 'I consider museums to be custodians and not owners of work,' she says. And the global museum concept understands this.
In the absence of a family of her own, Cummins says she has put projects in their place. And it is engaging the public where her greatest reward lies.
'I am always happy when some of the youth in Barbados gets it - when they get the connections between working in a museum and helping to conserve heritage and identity. And I like to think I have played a part in that.'
http://icom.museum
http://www.barbmuse.org.bb
