Obituary | Mar Dixon, 1970-2024

Mar Dixon was a groundbreaking force in the use of social media by museums.

Always regarding herself as an outsider and self-styled troublemaker, she helped to usher in the more reflective, authentic and open way in which museums interacted with and communicated with their audiences – being more people focused, family-orientated, welcoming and fun.

It was never a case of dumbing down – her work helped to celebrate the experts in museums and showcase the stories within collections. She wanted people to be able to feel at ease in museums; she hadn’t always felt like that herself when she visited museums with her young daughter and felt that museums should embrace everyone.

Mar came from Morrisville in Pennsylvania and worked in IT for the Attorney General’s Office for the state of New Jersey, before moving to Bridgnorth in Shropshire and later teaching ICT at Wolverhampton College.

As an avid reader and parent of a young child, Mar was a regular visitor to her local library, so she was concerned to hear new reports about libraries closing. Her response to this led to her first experience of going viral on social media.

In January 2011 she tweeted "Libraries are important because ... [fill in your answer & RT] #savelibraries", starting a #savelibraries worldwide trend on Twitter. It was remarkable enough to be reported on by the Guardian as over 5,000 people responded, including authors such as Margaret Attwood and Neil Gaiman.

Although the numbers surprised Mar, the passion with which people responded didn’t. Prior to the rise of social media she had been an enthusiastic participant on online forums dedicated to the Muppets and Sesame Street and understood how the shared interests of people who had never met could forge strong connections. She didn’t distinguish between “online” friendships and “in real life” friendships.

Mar was an original voice in social media, passionate and authentic, and she had the great ability to get people on board.

She co-founded Culturethemes on Twitter in 2011 with Michael Spencer, head of culture at Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, who was at that time the museum manager at Poole Museum Service, with the idea of running monthly themed hashtag days for museums to become much more proactive and engaging in the way that they used social media.

Early successes included #WhyILoveMuseums day on 5 April 2011, which again created a global trend on twitter. She went on to single-handedly run Culturethemes with great success throughout the 2010s, although she would point out that it was the people who ran museum social media accounts who put in the effort to make these days a success.

Her biggest and most longstanding success is #MuseumSelfie Day, which first ran in January 2014, one of the many times a themed day carried over into national and international news. It has now become an internationally known day, repeating annually without co-ordination.

She relished in the fact that #MuseumSelfie day was a little subversive, making a museum visit a fun celebration to be recorded as a selfie at a time when not all museums welcomed this kind of photography – or indeed fun – in galleries.

As a result of her great success with Culturethemes, Mar was approached by Twitter UK to run the first MuseumWeek in 2014. At this time, Twitter wanted to get more museums and other cultural institutions to use the platform, and as a result of the success of MuseumWeek they made her the social media lead on #LoveTheatreDay in 2015.

She picked up #AskACurator from Jim Richardson of MuseumNext in 2012, running it annually and encouraging all museum staff to get involved. She launched 52Museums on Instagram in 2016, handing the reins over to different museum a week each year to do whatever they wanted in that time.

Mar came to be acknowledged as an expert on social media and gave up her teaching job to focus on consultancy work that was to take her all over the world.

Mar was also a technologist who loved playful experiences. If you met her in 2014 you will have undoubtedly been asked to try on the Google Glass that Mar, through connections, managed to get hold of prior to its launch in the UK.

She appeared on BBC Newsround as a tech expert to talk about this and she regularly popped up on TV to talk about new tech, as her down-to-earth way of speaking and natural enthusiasm was a winning combination.

She was a natural leader for the first Museomix in the UK, which took place in Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in 2013, bringing together people from different sectors and with different skills to form multidisciplinary teams who worked on three-day marathon to build prototypes for the museum.

Museomix 2014 took place at Derby Silk Mill, and although a follow-up never quite happened, it is obvious from talking to those who took part what a huge impact it had on them in terms of their thinking, their careers and the friendships they made.

Mar and I cofounded the “unconference”, MuseumCamp, in 2012, with the idea of making a level playing field where anyone, no matter their status or the museum they worked at, could talk about ideas, problems and projects with other interested people. We wanted to challenge the stronghold of expensive conferences by creating a democratic alternative.

Although we only ran two unconferences, as it was hard to get funding for conferences with no speakers or set agenda, it was a wonderful experience to see the mix of people and the sharing and learning that went on at these events. And Mar made both conferences the biggest cakefests ever.

Although known primarily for her museums work in the UK, Mar worked for other sectors including theatre. She worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company for #Dream2016 A Midsummer Night’s Dream - A Play for the Nation, in 2016, making the cast and crew essential players in social media, and ensuring from then on she would always be bumping into actors she knew.

She was also a travel blogger and TV presenter, being the joint presenter on a Brazilian TV show focused on contemporary art in 2017.

Many people met Mar at conferences and events around the world, and she had an ability to put people at their ease and the confidence to talk to anyone.

She also had a remarkable ability to know who someone should meet – she was the ultimate networker, able to create networks for other people. Her great, infectious energy made her fun to be around, the “troublemaker” that people wanted to party with when the conference ended.

Mar was passionate about Shropshire and her local community; among other things she worked with Virtual Shropshire to do video reports on the Wenlock Olympian Games in 2012, even bravely being filmed doing her first ride in a glider in order to report on the competition.

She was also member of the Friends of Bridgnorth Library and facilitated author events and visits; and she arranged and attended regular Shropshire meet ups.

She had a great love of pop art, in particular her idol Andy Warhol, and she was also a huge fan of Jim Henson’s Muppets, Murder She Wrote and the Golden Girls. She chatted to people on Twitter with a charming warmth and openness – and was also very funny.

So many people met her online and felt like they knew her, and they weren’t wrong – that was Mar, if she had decided that you were her friend then you were.

It is perhaps Mar’s gift of friendship that had most impact, not just on people but on museums themselves, as she challenged and coaxed them into being their better selves.

Mar Dixon died after a short illness on 16 March 2024. She was 53 years old.

Mar's partner Paul Hutchinson and her family are working together to create celebration events for her in the UK and US, as well as a hashtag tribute event. The dates and locations will be confirmed in due course.

Linda Spurdle is the digital development manager at Birmingham Museums Trust