Seasons Greetings and Reflections on 2017

Jessica Juckes, International Training Programme Assistant

We wish the global network of ITP fellows and followers Seasons Greetings and all the best for the coming year!

2017 has been an active and fulfilling year for the International Training Programme.

 

The 12th annual summer programme brought 25 museum professionals from 18 countries to the UK from 1 July to 12 August. Fellows from Guatemala, Indonesia, Lesotho, Myanmar (Burma), New Zealand and Zimbabwe attended for the first time.
The ITP network now boasts 253 museum professionals from 39 countries!

We were delighted to welcome Norfolk Museums Service as a UK Partner for the first time.

This year, fellows worked in partnership on their exhibition proposal projects, which provided yet another excellent opportunity to develop strong working relationships, enhance the ITP global network and demonstrate the benefits and challenges of working collaboratively. New workshop themes were also introduced on national partnerships, visitor experience and audience feedback.

Our Senior Fellow this year was Hayk Mkrtchyan (Armenia, 2014), Project Coordinator at the Museum Education Center, Yerevan.

Beyond the Summer Programme

We launched ITP+ this year, with the first two ITP+ courses running in May (Temporary exhibitions and permanent displays) and December (Photography and Documentation).
The week-long courses offer an opportunity for ITP fellows to reconnect and to meet participants from across the twelve annual programmes (2006 – 2017), while also providing a forum for museum and heritage professionals to create and support subject-specialist networks.

2017 marked a new partnership between the ITP and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Massachusetts, USA. Four students from the WPI spent seven weeks with the ITP team developing ideas for an ITP mentor scheme.

The Spotlight Loan exhibition of ITP 2011 fellow Manisha Nene (Asst. Director (Gallery, CSMVS Mumbai), Celebrating Ganesha, is currently at its 8th venue, Manchester Museum, and will be travelling to its final venue, Wardown Park in Luton, early in 2018. We were delighted to see figures in September that showed that the exhibition had already attracted over 500,000 visitors!

ITP 2016 fellow Barbara Vujanovic (Senior Curator, The Ivan Mestrovic Museums – the Mestrovic Atelier, Zagreb, Croatia) has now been invited to develop a Spotlight Loan, Rodin: rethinking the fragment, under the mentorship of British Museum curators Ian Jenkins and Celeste Farge. Barbara has been visiting the British Museum to work on preparations for the exhibition, which will be presented at three UK partner museums in 2018: Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, The Holburne Museum in Bath, and The New Art Gallery in Walsall.

The ITP team attended the Museums Association conference in November this year with fellows Joyee Roy (ITP 2011, India), Waed Awesat (ITP 2014, Palestine), Saadu Rashid (ITP 2012, Kenya) and Rike Nortje (ITP 2007, South Africa). We spent a week in Manchester, also meeting with ITP UK partner representatives for museum visits and sessions focussing on display, audiences and engagement.

The inaugural Collaborative Award, launched at the end of 2016, has been awarded to fellow Nelson Abiti, Uganda National Museum (ITP 2013), for his project on engagement and reconciliation through cultural heritage within refugee communities of Uganda and South Sudan. The project team, encompassing fellows from Uganda, Kenya, Egypt and Sudan, will be holding their first planning meeting in Kampala in February 2018.

We look forward to an exciting year to come, the beginning of which will include hosting two fellows in London for the British Museum symposium Exhibiting the Experience of Empire in March, the continuation of our partnership with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and welcoming ITP fellows to Aswan, Egypt in April for an ITP-organised conference and workshop on museum interpretation at the Nubian Museum.

Warm wishes to all!

Jessica, Becca and Claire