Picture This (Mattie Reynolds, USA, ITP 2024)

Written by Mattie Reynolds (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Department Chair + Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, Institute of American Indian Arts (United States, ITP 2024)

Picture this: twenty-odd museum professionals make their way through the crowded Great Court, role-playing as one of the most valuable parts of the museum…its visitors. With guidance from Stuart Frost, Head of Interpretation & Volunteers, we put ourselves in the shoes of family groups with small children, multiple language speakers, and differently-abled people moving through the British Museum. We imaged how we, as the choreographers of their museum experience, might improve their visit or, better yet, understand their needs.

The British Museum hosts a truly impressive number of visitors each year, somewhere in the realm of 6 million people, presenting a museum-wide challenge for staff: how to work across departments to provide an entertaining, moving, and educational experience for an exceptionally wide range of people. Stuart took the ITP fellows on a journey through the BM’s audience makeup, methods for reaching each of its seven audience segments, and detailed data reported on temporary exhibits. It was not only a fascinating look into the type of people filling the galleries of the BM but also the apparent effort the museum takes to understand how best to approach them.

Our role-play assignments aimed to highlight where the galleries, and museum at large, could improve for particular segments of visitors. Overall, crowding and way finding were obstacles for almost all of our assigned roles, feedback that visitors regularly provide.

The afternoon brought a session dedicated to community engagement case studies from the National Museums of Northern Ireland. NMNI centers their local communities and issues that matter to their communities in collaboratively-driven projects as a means to decolonize their museum work.

Something that Agrippa Njanina, Assistant Curator of Inclusive Global Histories, said stands out to me: “museums have a lot of power and should share it equally”. In a world where the Western narrative still dominates the conversation, I see the work done in collaboration with, and respect to, the peoples being represented in museums as a move to reframe the narrative based on truth and transparency and to rebalance the scales in favour of equality. A slow moving and less than perfect process, to be sure, but moving nonetheless.

Using these examples in my museum studies classes to compare to decolonizing efforts in US museums will be incredibly valuable for my students, pushing them to expand their understanding and recognition of the undeniable global similarities that colonized communities across the world experience and to challenge them to re-envision museum work on behalf of those communities.

With that, I leave the next blog post in the capable hands of my colleague, Heba Abd Ellatif Mohamed Abd Elnaby, from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

PS- Stuart, I am totally stealing your scenario assignment idea for my classes…