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Abstract
With the decrease in funding for museums, increasingly scarce resources are, of necessity, concentrated on audience engagement. The responsibility for public exhibits is now shared between interpretation and display professionals, and curators and academics, but in practice the balance between scholarly content and accessibility can be precarious. This article considers the redisplay of the permanent gallery of ancient Greece and Rome at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which was a project driven by curators, conservators and university academics working closely with technical and practical specialists. It records the processes and issues that are often encountered in the creation of a gallery but too rarely published, and argues for the complete integration of academic research as central to the creation of museum displays. The success of the Fitzwilliam display demonstrates that subject-specialists can produce exhibits that are at once academically rigorous and visitor-friendly.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to various audiences for stimulating discussion during many presentations of this material (2009–2011), and to the staff and volunteers of the Fitzwilliam Museum, particularly to the Antiquities Department, for their friendship and support during my time there. I am grateful to the AHRC and Mrs Wendy Rebanks for funding, and to B. Akrigg, C. Hall, L. Burn, R. Osborne and the anonymous MMC reviewers for comments.
Notes on contributor
Kate Cooper was the curatorial AHRC Research Associate in the Fitzwilliam Museum Antiquities Department (2008–2012). She is now the Rebanks Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum, where she combines curatorial duties with research and teaching. In addition to an interest in the presentation of Classical antiquity in museums, Kate specialises in archaic and classical Greek art, and her PhD from Kings College London focussed on the iconography and trade of archaic Corinthian pottery.
Notes
1. ‘Collaboration’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘partnership’ have developed distinct meanings in science and business, but are less well defined in the museum field and I use them interchangeably. Dierking (Dierking et al. Citation1997, 5–6) sees ‘collaboration’ as sharing financial gains and burdens of an enterprise, which is not the model of the Fitzwilliam project.
2. An example of the range and complexity of these collaborations is the Cultural District of Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, where a Guggenheim Museum and an outpost of the Louvre Museum are being built, while the British Museum is consulting for the new Zayed National Museum: http://www.saadiyat.ae/en/.
3. The evaluation was conducted over 2 weeks (11.00–15.00, Tuesday–Saturday) in August and November 2010. Volunteers observed a random selection of visitors, tracking their movement, and conducting 15-minute interview-led questionnaires which focused on the visitor's background, reasons for visiting the Fitzwilliam, and experiences in the Greek and Roman gallery. A total of 849 visits were observed and 94 people were interviewed. Further comments were gained from short self-conducted questionnaires and a ‘comments book’ left in the gallery.
4. This was true of the Fitzwilliam when the Greek and Roman project began, but there have since been changes particularly in the supervision of special exhibitions.
6. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the New Acropolis Museum, Athens and the Neues Museums, Berlin all re-opened in 2009.
8. She recently curated an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute (Curtis and Vout Citation2006).
9. This includes ‘A Don's Life’ blog for the Times Literary Supplement, and television programmes including the 2012 production Meet the Romans.
10. Including an online project diary: http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/ant/greeceandrome/display/diary/index.html
15. The Cambridge branch is now Brown & Ralph Ltd: http://brownandralph.co.uk/
17. See Footnotenote 3.
18. It also develops more innovative partnerships, such as Egyptian curator Dr Sally-Ann Ashton's ‘Working with Prisons’ project. http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/ant/egypt/outreach/prisons/
19. The British Museum's cleaning of the Elgin marbles in 1937–1938 is a notorious example (Jenkins Citation2001).
20. Suggested by 2008 gallery observation and confirmed by 2010 gallery evaluation (Cooper Citation2011).
21. See Footnotenote 3.