CAG on museums: Museums and Heritage Show 2013

Olympia exhibition hall

For the last few days, I’ve been down in London at a conference on museums, heritage, and general museum practice. There were many topics covered such as funding for museums and the possible hardships coming up for UK arts institutions, marketing and knowing your audiences, the difficulty of exhibition designs, and the use of social media. Overall, there was a very wide focus on museum strategy, retail, and design, which are all things that can be constantly improved to aid the success of museums and visitor experience.

Football Museum presentation

 Of the more exciting talks, within the spectrum of conference nerd-timez, was a talk called ‘Social media through thick and thin’, which was given by the marketing team from the Football Museum in Manchester and focused on their ability to connect to new and old audiences by engaging through social media.

V&A 'The challenges of exhibiting costumes'

Another, really interesting insight was given by the curators and designers of the V&A’s ‘Hollywood Costume’ on the challenges of exhibiting costumes, the conservation issues for those specific textiles, how to preserve the feeling of action relevant to motion pictures, and how to convey a sense of being in a film set to create the Hollywood vibe of the exhibition.

Morris Hargreaves McIntyre on Grayson Perry

Although I work mainly with anthropology collections, I am very interested in the world of contemporary fashion and the inclusion of this into museum collections for world cultures (my previous post on this issue for Pacific fashion). I attended other interesting talks on audience engagement through exhibitions and collections research, but the V&A one really stuck with me.  Here are a few nicked photos of the costumes from the exhibition, because I have a whole new appreciation for the complexity of textile mounting now.

Credit: Chole Nelkin

Credit: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for The V&A