Uncomfortable issues have been the subject of exhibitions in recent years. But are museums ready to address their own complicity in past injustices?
At this month's Museums Association conference, a session called Collaborative Dialogue with Audiences on Sensitive Issues will look at how museums can communicate honestly about their difficult histories.
Museums and galleries have reflected and propagated the ideologies and bigotry of their times. Take the thorny issue of human difference.
As well as categorising animals, plants and Old Masters, Enlightenment and Victorian museums pigeonholed ethnic groups into rigid racial hierarchies. Only a century ago, museums arranged their physical and cultural anthropology according in order of sophistication from "negroid" to "mongoloid" to "Caucasian".
Last year in the Manchester Museum, as part of the region-wide Revealing Histories project, we opened a modest exhibition called Myths about Race.
A team drawn from within and outside the museum selected objects and images demonstrating racial stereotypes that museums and other media had helped to perpetuate, displayed alongside evidence of challenges to them.
The Manchester Museum's own role in constructing racial hierarchies is only one part of a wider discussion about the theoretical underpinning that had once justified slavery, but even so, the process was delicate and painful.
The Manchester Museum was one of the many collections founded or expanded at the height of empire. Readers of this magazine will be aware of the steps taken to address the political issues surrounding human remains, but what of the other millions of specimens?
Next year, museums will be engulfed by a frenzy of activity marking the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. With creationism higher on the political agenda than it has been for a century, how many museums will dare to expose some of the less savoury applications of his ideas, especially social Darwinism?
Many museums in the UK and the US have had close ties with the eugenics movement: few are as honest about this as UCL Museums and Collections in London, which promotes as a historical resource the collection associated with Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and the so-called father of eugenics.
Is rooting around for past indiscretions merely a hair shirt for guilt-ridden liberal curators and academics? If so, I would be the first to go and do something useful instead. Just as soon as museums, and the public culture of which they are a part, show no traces of the prejudice that they once helped to justify.
Sam Alberti holds a joint appointment at the University of Manchester between the Centre for Museology and the Manchester Museum. He chairs the Museums and Galleries History Group.
At this month's Museums Association conference, a session called Collaborative Dialogue with Audiences on Sensitive Issues will look at how museums can communicate honestly about their difficult histories.
Museums and galleries have reflected and propagated the ideologies and bigotry of their times. Take the thorny issue of human difference.
As well as categorising animals, plants and Old Masters, Enlightenment and Victorian museums pigeonholed ethnic groups into rigid racial hierarchies. Only a century ago, museums arranged their physical and cultural anthropology according in order of sophistication from "negroid" to "mongoloid" to "Caucasian".
Last year in the Manchester Museum, as part of the region-wide Revealing Histories project, we opened a modest exhibition called Myths about Race.
A team drawn from within and outside the museum selected objects and images demonstrating racial stereotypes that museums and other media had helped to perpetuate, displayed alongside evidence of challenges to them.
The Manchester Museum's own role in constructing racial hierarchies is only one part of a wider discussion about the theoretical underpinning that had once justified slavery, but even so, the process was delicate and painful.
The Manchester Museum was one of the many collections founded or expanded at the height of empire. Readers of this magazine will be aware of the steps taken to address the political issues surrounding human remains, but what of the other millions of specimens?
Next year, museums will be engulfed by a frenzy of activity marking the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. With creationism higher on the political agenda than it has been for a century, how many museums will dare to expose some of the less savoury applications of his ideas, especially social Darwinism?
Many museums in the UK and the US have had close ties with the eugenics movement: few are as honest about this as UCL Museums and Collections in London, which promotes as a historical resource the collection associated with Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and the so-called father of eugenics.
Is rooting around for past indiscretions merely a hair shirt for guilt-ridden liberal curators and academics? If so, I would be the first to go and do something useful instead. Just as soon as museums, and the public culture of which they are a part, show no traces of the prejudice that they once helped to justify.
Sam Alberti holds a joint appointment at the University of Manchester between the Centre for Museology and the Manchester Museum. He chairs the Museums and Galleries History Group.
Links
www.mghg.org
www.mghg.org
