A Cabinet of Curiosities: International Museum Day

Today, 18^th May 2022, is International Museum Day. I have been visiting museums for nearly seventy years, and International Museum Day (IMD) has been marked every year since 1977. I confess, though, that I’ve only just become aware of this event, designed to focus attention on the importance of museums great and small. The International Council of Museums puts it like this: 

 

‘Museums have the power to transform the world around us. As incomparable places of discovery, they teach us about our past and open our minds to new ideas – two essential steps in building a better future.’

 I’m the more embarrassed about my ignorance of IMD because for the last four years I have been Chair of the Friends of The Wilson, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum. And for two of these years The Wilson has been closed. It shut its doors in March 2020 and has yet to re-open them, though it is due to do so in July. The Cheltenham Trust, which manages The Wilson on behalf of Cheltenham Borough Council, promises that when it re-opens after ‘a complete re-design’ it will offer ’the very best of Cheltenham’s cultural community and history’.

Trying to keep The Wilson at the forefront of people’s minds even while, like an empty theatre, it has been ‘dark’ for so long has been a large part of the Friends’ role during this time. I’m not sure how far we have succeeded, but I hope very much that a revitalised museum will be good for the town and become again a place people want to visit and – more important still – to revisit; that it will tell the story of Cheltenham in new ways and with broader perspectives. 

Another museum closed for the past two years but just re-opened is Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG), facing Chamberlain Square. This is almost certainly the first museum I ever entered, for I was born in Birmingham at the tail end of the post-war baby boom, and my father wasted no time in introducing me to museum visiting. By the time I was seven we had moved to the Fens, and I went for a year to school in Wisbech, a town still (and rightly) proud of its fine Victorian museum – though this had too many stuffed birds in it for my liking. 

One of my father’s first tasks as Rector of Tydd St. Mary was to repair the church roof that was riddled with dry rot. One evening he brought home a handful of twisted and rusted hand-made nails that workmen had retrieved from the rotten beams of the late medieval roof. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Now you can start your own Cabinet of Curiosities.’ I’ve always liked that antique description. Our Rectory garden soon yielded further specimens for my collection: fragments of clay pipes, an old willow-pattern candle holder, an ancient pair of scissors, its blades pitted by rust. I cherished these objects. Holding them in my hand I began to get an idea of the past and a sense of other, earlier lives that had been lived in this place long before we arrived. 

I visited BMAG this week. I was welcomed by a caramel-coloured poster proclaiming ‘BMAG UNPACKED’ and cheerfully warning: ‘IT’S BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM & ART GALLERY, BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT!’ And truly the great Round Room that the visitor comes to first has been transformed. Gone are the tier-upon-tier of Victorian paintings; in their place a joyous celebration entitled We Are Birmingham. Where once hung one of my favourite pictures, William Logsdail’s ‘St. Mark’s Square, Venice’, now you find a Birmingham street-vendor’s bicycle festooned with yellow and orange flowers; above this the walls display jazz musicians, Asian fabrics,  a 1990 Menu & Price List from BMAG’s Edwardian Café, and on the left a stunning window of abstract stained glass by the Birmingham Arts & Crafts artist Florence Camm. I was struck by an accompanying interpretation panel: ‘Our Joy…’, it announced,
 

…focuses on objects and artworks selected for the joy they bring. Stories of creativity, community, pride and pleasure. They speak of the richness of multi-cultural life where food, music and the arts create and heal communities.’

We are Birmingham is a display designed to introduce the city of Birmingham, its people and post-war history, both to those visitors who live and work there and to the crowds from around the world expected soon for this year’s Commonwealth Games. In its former incarnation, BMAG went nowhere as near as this to represent the diversity of the city to itself, but now I am struck by just what a diverse lot we visitors have become. Any museum achieving this transformation in a month is doing something very right.  Another thing BMAG is doing right is reminding visitors who owns what. Writ large on the walls of the Bridge Gallery are these words: ‘There are over a million objects in Birmingham’s wondrous collection, and they all belong to you …’. Below are collages of images and objects: a familiar Pre-Raphaelite painting; metalwork from Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter; the ancient typewriter belonging to one of Birmingham’s best-known poets, Benjamin Zephaniah, and a black marble head by Barbara Hepworth. This apparently random collection reminds visitors that, collectively, the items tell the story of their city – and many other stories too. It’s also a reminder that it is the job of every museum in the world to store, conserve, research and display the objects it holds in trust.

Exhilarated by my visit – ‘joy …wondrous’ not words always associated with museums –and hoping that when The Wilson opens again in Cheltenham visitors will feel the same lifting of the spirits as I’d just felt, by chance my eye caught the following words:

‘…. Passionate about bringing the untold and forgotten stories from the past to life, so that we can understand the conditions and possibilities that frame human existence.’* 

I can’t think of a better way, on this International Museum Day, of describing what museums should be about.

© Adrian Barlow

Notes
*These words introduce a profile of Sujit Sivasundaram, Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge, on This Cambridge Life.
I have written before about my childhood home, in Lives of House (i): The Rectory, Tydd St. Mary.
Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘In a Museum’, was the subject of an earlier post to my blog: 
Short Measures (ii): Time and Thomas Hardy
 
Illustrations:
(i)              The Wilson, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 12 November 2021
(ii)            Birmingham: Chamberlain Square from the steps of the Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG), 16 May 2022
(iii)           Part of the current ‘We Are Birmingham’ display, on view until the end of the year.
(iv)           Part of the current display in BMAG’s Bridge Gallery.

All photos taken by the author.