Join us for a the first of a NEW SERIES of MGHG online In Conversation Events over the coming year. The first in the new series is a discussion on museum and exhibition cultures in the 19th century and beyond with Dr Rebecca Wade and Dr Claire Wintle, hosted by MGHG Chair Mark Westgarth.    

Rebecca Wade and Claire Wintle have both recently published books on public exhibition cultures - Rebecca's  An Exhibition History of Victorian Leeds (2023) is a groundbreaking account of public exhibitions in Leeds in the nineteenth century, taking in the establishment of Leeds Art Gallery; Claire's edited volume (with Kate Guy and Hajra Williams), Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process and Practice (2023) offers a 'behind the scenes' investigation of museum exhibition design from the 19th century to more recent times.  Both authors will be in conversation with each other and with Mark Westgarth at this exclusive MGHG event. There will also be an opportunity for the online audience to put questions to Rebecca and Claire.

20% Discounts on Claire and Rebecca’s books will be available to participants.

The In Conversation event is FREE for MGHG members; £5 for non-MGHG members. This is an online event via Microsoft Teams.  To register for this event please book tickets via Eventbrite. A Teams link will be sent to all registered participants.

Our next In Conversation events (number 2 & 3 in our new series) will take place in January 2025 (date TBC), with Philip Deans talking about his new book on Museums of Conflict; and in April 2025 (date TBC) with Anne Nellis Richter talking about her latest book, The Gallery at Cleveland House: displaying art and society in late Georgian London. Do look out for updates.

A one-day symposium at the University of Leeds and online. Museum microhistories offer a rich field of potential to explore broader historical questions; in the words of William Blake, ‘see the world in a grain of sand’. Microhistory also aims to highlight the significance of the seemingly insignificant, to focus on the lacunae of history, purposefully drawing in and directing attention towards marginal(ized) voices and perspectives and emphasising the agency of the ‘ordinary’. Microhistory aims to explore the relationships between large historical narratives and individual case studies and to disrupt established grand historical narratives, countering oversimplification. It encourages close analysis of primary source materials ‘with a microscope not a telescope’, ‘following’ clues through sources (Ghobrial 2019).

Jodrell Lecture Theatre, Royal Botanic Garden, Kew

19 January 2023, 10am—4.30pm

MGHG are pleased to announce a PGR/ECR study day to explore methodological approaches to researching museum history. The day is aimed at those working with museum archive material and/or museum objects as part of historical research projects. With keynote contributions from Dr Emma Martin (University of Manchester) and Dr Isobel MacDonald (British Museum), the event will explore different approaches to the range of museum sources, from the data-driven to the object-focused. In a programme incorporating keynote papers, work-in-progress papers, engagement with material from Kew’s museum and archive collections and discussion sessions, it will challenge participants to think about what sorts of history are produced by different sources and analytical approaches, and how we can develop museum history methodologies to explore new aspects of museum history.

To inherit from toxic conservation

Lotte Arndt

After a brief presentation of the international research project Reconnecting Objects. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums (2021-2025), my presentation will concentrate on conservation in so called ethnological and natural history museums, and its aftermath. It takes the simultaneity of the rise of conservation as a science and the peak of colonial collecting in the end of the 19-century as its point of departure, to interrogate the lasting consequences of imperial collecting and toxic conservation. As places dedicated to conservation, museums promised the minimization of decay of the objects, and obtained life span prolongation through the isolation of artifacts from living environments, both culturally and materially. Today, demands for restitution and transformative practices question museums as vectors of imperial modernity, and are confronted with the lasting alteration of artifacts by conservation policies, especially in the case of the presence of chemicals. On the basis of heterogenous materials, my presentation asks for practices beyond Eurocentric notions of collecting, conserving, and exhibiting.

Biography

Researcher and curator Lotte Arndt (Paris) accompanies the work of artists who question the postcolonial present and the antinomies of modernity in a transnational perspective. As part of the international project Reconnecting Objects. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums, she is currently conducting a research project on biocides and the antinomies of curation in ethnographic museums. Between 2014-2021, she taught at the École supérieure d'art et design Valence Grenoble. She is co-founder of the online journal Trouble dans les collections. Among her projects: Elvia Teotski: Molusma, La Criée, Rennes, Sep 2021; Extractive Landscapes (with Sammy Baloji, Salzburg 2019); Tampered Emotions. Lust for Dust, Triangle France (2018); Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (2017, curated with L. Morin, Bétonsalon, Paris; 2018, with P. Pirotte at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main). Selected publications: Toxic afterlives of colonial collections. Trouble dans les collections, no. 2, September 2021 https://troublesdanslescollections.fr/2246-2/; Candice Lin. A Hard White Body (ed. with Yesomi Umolu), Chicago University Press, 2019; Magazines Do Culture! Postcolonial Negotiations in Parisian Africa-related Periodicals (2047-2012), Trier, WVT, 2016; Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect (ed. with Mathieu K. Abonnenc and Catalina Lozano), B42, 2016; Hunting & Collecting. Sammy Baloji (ed. with Asger Taiaksev), MuZEE, Galerie Imane Farès, 2016.

4-4.30pm—MGHG Annual General Meeting

4.30pm-5pm—Refreshments

5pm-6pm—MGHG Annual Lecture

Professor Ludmilla Jordanova (Durham University) Museums, Galleries and the Powers of Portraits

Portraits, whether originals or reproductions, are common in museums, while galleries devoted to them are currently enjoying considerable popularity.  Indeed, portraits have long been displayed to diverse audiences—museums and galleries are important but not the only places where they may be seen.  As a result we have a chance to reflect on how museums and galleries use portraits in the wider context of publications, digital culture and venues where public access is limited. Professor Jordanova will explore the diverse ways in which portraits are put on show and are assumed to offer insights into past times, often through the idioms of heroism and villainy. So portraits are at once ubiquitous, unremarkable, taken for granted, and endowed with the power to evoke specific human beings and prompt a myriad of reactions. What kinds of powers do portraits have? Do these aid historical understanding? And what can usefully be said about the roles they play in museums and galleries?

Free to MGHG members, £9 for non-members and £5 for student non-members

Click here to order your ticket