Co-curation has been gaining increasing prominence as a way of working that is representative, collaborative, and allows museums to explore ideas and subjects that might not have been covered by a more traditional approach.

Last year, high-profile examples of co-curation included the Multaka-Oxford project at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the completion of a six-year redevelopment of St Fagans National Museum of History in south Wales, and the opening of the Endeavour Galleries at the National Maritime Museum in London.

A useful practical textbook for this work is Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum, published in 2010. The book itself was written in a participatory way and is available to read online for free.

It describes a participatory museum: “Rather than delivering the same content to everyone, a participatory institution collects and shares diverse, personalised, and changing content co-produced with visitors. It invites visitors to respond and add to cultural artefacts, scientific evidence, and historical records on display. It showcases the diverse creations and opinions of non-experts. People use the institution as meeting grounds for dialogue around the content presented. Instead of being ‘about’ something or ‘for’ someone, participatory institutions are created and managed ‘with’ visitors.”

Co-curation represents a challenge for institutions, but also an opportunity. Running projects or whole institutions in a truly participatory way requires a shift in practice and can be more resource-intensive than traditional models, but it also brings a wide range of benefits.

Time and resources

“The main challenge is probably time,” says Gail Symington, the director of collections and public engagement at Royal Museums Greenwich, which includes the National Maritime Museum.

“It is about planning, building relationships and piloting and trialling things early on, so that when it comes to the more practical bits of the project, you're not still building trust and trying to fit things in and manage the expectations of the people you're working with.

“Some groups might be used to working with institutions and some might not – some might not even speak the language that you speak. It really depends on who it's with.”

Co-curation does usually require more resources than a traditional curator-led model and without funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for an activity plan, it would not have been possible, says Symington. But it has been a much more integrated and open process, she says, more equal and less authoritative from the museum’s side.

Charlotte Connelly, the curator of the Polar Museum in Cambridge, agrees that co-curation takes longer. She believes that it is right for some projects but might not be for others – it depends on what the museum is trying to achieve. “I think some projects demand it, particularly where you're working with sensitive issues where you don't have the in-house expertise.

“There are some topics I wouldn't feel comfortable curating on my own, because I haven't lived the experience, and reading about something isn't the same as living it. So I think those sorts of projects demand it.”

For Connelly, 2017’s The Year that Made Antarctica exhibition, themed on the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58, fulfilled the museum’s objective of engaging volunteers in back-of-house museum work and was “incredibly valuable” in meeting that objective.

New ideas

Another benefit of working in partnership with other groups is that it can result in different subject matter for the exhibition itself. “The process led to ideas that we wouldn't have got to ourselves,” says Connelly.

“We asked which type of audiences they would like to reach and gave them some options based on our audience research about under-served communities. We felt that for that particular exhibition we should make sure that everything felt accessible to local women.” This led to a press call-out and finding the story of a local girl who had listened to Sputnik’s beeps on her amateur radio.

“Whether it's a better or worse exhibition is a null point, really,” says Connelly. “It was a good exhibition. And we would have approached it really differently if I, as a historian of science, had done it all on my own. It would have been a very different set of stories.”

While she was at the Science Museum in 2012, Connelly worked with Cameroonian communities in both Cameroon and the UK on part of the Information Age gallery, leading to a clear case where the right curatorial decision was reached because of that approach.

“We'd made a rule for ourselves internally that we weren't going to do anything that wasn't electromagnetic communication – so semaphore is out, but the telegraph is in, for instance,” says Connelly. “We got to this story about how mobile phones have quickly changed the landscape of communication in Cameroon. One of the things that the community members were telling us was that the talking drum was really important. But it broke our rule.

“Had we been doing it on our own, we just wouldn't have gone there. First there was that rule; and second we were quite nervous of doing a reductive story of ‘they used to have drums and now they've got mobile phones’. But by giving them the opportunity to curate it themselves, they said no – the talking drum is still part of our culture.

“It's now the first object you see when you go in the main entrance of that gallery.”

Changing approach

At St Fagans National Museum of History, a six-year redevelopment completed in 2018 made co-curation and partnership working central to all museum activity. “We're continuously co-curating,” says Sioned Hughes, the keeper of history and archaeology at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museums Wales. “Co-curation is now a core activity of our curatorial team. It's not just one or two people's jobs, it's part of everybody's job. The galleries power that work, and are the platform to show the results of that core activity.”

This was a significant shift, says Hughes. “In the past co-curation tended to be project-led, so you worked with a community for a certain amount of time, either to deliver a temporary exhibition or to have a programme that had a beginning, middle and end. It tended to be at the periphery of the work we did as curators, primarily funded by project funding, with different pots of money, not a core-funded activity within the museum.

“The redevelopment really gave us an opportunity to broaden our definition of it, and I still think we're on a journey getting to grips with all the challenges.”

At the National Maritime Museum, the co-curation process behind the new Endeavour Galleries did lead to challenges, says Symington. “We've had to be quite humble about how we responded to those challenges – particularly when you're dealing with people's identities, and their sense of where they've come from. The process has really taught us how to listen and work with people.

“It's also led to future projects, so it's not just about this project. The same Caribbean social forum that co-curated the Sea Things gallery is now working with us on various other projects: now we’ve built those relationships and those people are keen to keep things going, we can work with them on pilot projects, full-scale capital projects, or developing programmes.”

Hughes believes that St Fagans is “on a journey”. The work is never ending, she says, with a lot more to be done on decolonising and reframing the collection, and making it more representative. The new galleries are designed to make changing the displays as easy as possible in response to the participatory work of the curatorial team, and that has given space “to be able to show the outcomes of points along that journey”.

“Obviously resources are an issue for the sector, but I think if you prioritise it as something that really supports the vision – and our vision is ‘Inspiring People, Changing Lives’ – then you prioritise your resources to support it as a core activity.

“It's freed us up, and made us able to keep changing, and keep learning.”

Photo: Bronze busts in the Sea Things gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Local groups from the Girl Guides, Mermaids and Action for Refugees in Lewisham worked with sculptor Eve Shepherd to create them. Credit: © Hufton Crow