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Making Histories Visible produces visual art projects with internationally recognised museums and galleries, in which new artworks and installations activate institutional and curatorial policies to re-examine collections and collecting. By investigating the historic through the contemporary, using the mechanisms of display and interventions, youth centred workshops, symposia, web-sites and publications; we help museums find new relevance within contemporary society.
Thin Black Line(s) Tate Britain (2011/12), Cotton Global Threads Whitworth and Manchester Galleries (2011/2012), Jelly Mould Pavilions NML (2010), reflect collaborations and sustainable relationships with a wide, influential range of museum curators, directors and community leaders.
Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB) has provided a resource for curators of new media art, which in turn has impacted upon the practice and policy of Curators, Museum and Gallery Directors in connection with collecting new media art. Here, the major impact has been upon the practice of a regional, local-authority-funded art museum and gallery, The Harris Art Museum and Gallery. CRUMB researchers worked over some years with curators and Museum staff on exhibitions and symposia, building up to changes in collecting policy.
Ysanne Holt was Academic Advisor and Commissioning Editor for Tate's Camden Town Group in Context project, funded through the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative which aims to transform how museums disseminate information about their collections. Holt undertook and commissioned new research into the Group's artworks and their broader contexts. Impacts derived from the project's online catalogue include increased awareness for national and international public and specialists; and improved access to the art and its contexts via a multi-platform open access facility. In addition, the project has influenced the Tate's Digital Strategy and led to the creation of the new post of Digital Editor within Tate's Research Department.
The case study demonstrates how research conducted by staff in the Centre for Museology has informed the development of innovative display and interpretation practices in public museums in the UK and overseas. It shows how applied critical and reflexive museology has been used in a range of curatorial contexts, thereby directly affecting institutional practice and, in turn, providing visitors and volunteers with new opportunities for engagement. The impact is evident in the curatorial process, involving both staff and stakeholders, and in critical responses from practitioners and policy-makers.
The practice-based research output nanoq: flat out and bluesome, a cultural life of polar bears has had impact on cultural life, civil society and on both artistic practitioners and museum/gallery professionals. These impacts have been created through the interdisciplinary nature of the work, and have challenged engrained approaches to the divide between art and museology, and to fixed perceptions of human interactions with the natural world.
Evidence for the cultural impacts and influence on civil society, through provoking consideration of environmental issues on the level of an emotive response to changing values and the consequences of societal norms, is primarily provided through reviews of the outcomes themselves, mainly through arts and science journals, book chapters and testimonials by scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields. Similarly, impact on the approach to professional practice in art curation and, particularly, in museology is similarly documented in the public domain.
An exhibition researched and co-curated by the University of Reading's Alun Rowlands — The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art — at Tate St Ives presented an accessible new approach to the display of the Cornish gallery's artworks. It widened public access to this important resource and enabled public understanding and appreciation of 20th-century British art by juxtaposing, and drawing connections between, famous historical artworks, contemporary pieces and examples from popular culture, literature, film, music and local folk ritual. This democratic approach was extended through the associated educational projects, performance events and publications. The model has subsequently influenced strategy at Tate museums across the UK, demonstrating that connections can be drawn across different categories of culture as a way of emphasising the contemporary relevance of previously underused and obscure public collections and as a way of promoting public interaction.
Irit Rogoff has shaped the emergence of an `educational turn' in the arts and humanities, arguing that contemporary artwork, together with its institutions and social platforms, transforms education practices in non-academic arenas such as museums, theatres, bookshops, art academies, and social and political occupations. This work started at the moment in which both the Bologna accord and neo-liberal impacts on education began pulling towards the professionalisation and homogenisation of Higher Education culture. All of the projects elaborated within this case study have aimed to expand the understanding of how cultural actors become educational stakeholders.
Rogoff's theoretical and curatorial research has taken diverse forms including scholarly publications, exhibitions and social forums, and she has brought these issues to audiences from the arts and public organisations beyond the university sector through advisory roles, public speaking, and social organising. Following numerous publications, exhibitions, and events, she founded freethought, an experimental platform for pedagogy, research and production. Launched in 2012 at the Austrian arts festival, Steirischer Herbst, freethought has subsequently developed a core project on `infrastructure' launched at Berlin's House of World Cultures in 2013. Her published research, exhibitions, and public forums have been widely influential in debates on education in the public sphere, as evidenced for example by her involvement as a funded partner in the establishment of a freethought laboratory in South Korea's new Asia Cultural Complex.
The `Northern Spirit` research project entailed the co-production of a new gallery about the visual culture, histories and identities of North-East England at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, the region's foremost public historical art gallery. The project generated a range of impacts across the local and national cultural, social and policy spheres:
Research by Simon Tanner has had a significant effect on open access policy in the museum sector. His research demonstrated that the cost of managing intellectual property and maintaining payment structures in cultural heritage collections almost always outweighs actual revenue. Museums, galleries and archives internationally have embraced unmediated, open access to digitised assets and Tanner's work is frequently acknowledged as a catalyst for this change in policy. Since 2008, the number of high quality digital images freely available from art museums has risen to more than 2 million. The key beneficiaries have been the general public, schools and life- long learners.
Research into the artist Dora Gordine established her importance in twentieth-century art and design, and her significance in the wider cultural and political arena. This research led to the establishment of an ambitious large-scale exhibition on Gordine at Kingston Museum.
This exhibition had a lasting beneficial impact on the practices and capabilities of the museum, enabling it to use the skills and experience gained in the Gordine exhibition to launch a new exhibition on Eadweard Muybridge and to build new partnerships with the British Film Institute and the Tate. This has significantly changed the culture and approach of Kingston Museum, enhancing its local, national and international standing.