If you can’t come to us, we will come to you

It seemed we all woke up one morning to a new and scary dawn, a brave new world of separation. Tenby Museum and Art Gallery locked down to the public on 14 March, the same day that Sian McGill’s beautiful art exhibition Into the Blue was scheduled to start its five-week run. They say timing is everything, but this was taking it a bit far. And so we entered the Covid-era. Frantic grant applications, Zooming from the sofa, thinking of ways to keep going for an unknown period of time. At first, ideas came freely and in an unplanned manner – after all, as a small independent museum we don’t have a tech team to assist with this. Every visit to Twitter showed that museums were using this time to engage in some way with their now distant audience and I felt the need to do the same. At first there was a certain amount of urgency, a need to establish a visual presence, to remain in the public consciousness, to say we had not gone away and we were sharing the experience. I flooded our Facebook page with competitions, haiku writing, word searches, and quizzes, but to very little avail. The new world was awash with resources that I could not compete with. With the only other member of staff furloughed, it was a daunting experience. I took a breath, stepped back and considered options. The next idea was a Museum of Memories project, which proved more successful. This garnered a great deal of media attention as well as being referenced in Museums Journal as a “responsible way of collecting” during the coronavirus pandemic. People were asked to keep a record of how lockdown had affected them. This brought individual experiences into the fore and led to an archive of journals, poems, paintings, sculpture, that showed how people felt about the situation. A display of this material is provisionally planned alongside another community project by Artisan Avenue in January 2021. The next project – and by far the most engaging – was #MuseumFromHome. This virtual museum, which shared objects from our collection on Facebook, started on 6 April and has been running daily ever since. At the time of writing, we’re on day 87, with enough material planned for another 20 days and more set to follow. I sourced images (this was the hardest part, being physically removed from the collection) and wrote interesting labels, stories, articles about the objects they showed. I asked people to contribute creatively in various ways and share their memories of these and similar objects. In this way we celebrated Tenby’s fabulous collection together. There have been posts on fine art, including Gwen and Augustus John, John Piper, John Knapp Fisher, and Nina Hamnett. Sian’s exhibition, that had been set to open, was put on Youtube via a film I had put together on my home computer. We also covered archaeology, natural history, social history, photographs and rare books from the museum research library.