Manchester Museum, which closed to the public in August 2021 to undertake the final phase of its ‘Hello Future’ transformation project, has set its reopening date for February 2023.
The £15 million project, which will feature the Belonging Gallery, the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Gallery, and the South Asia Gallery, aims to build understanding between cultures, and to work towards the creation of a more sustainable world, according to Manchester Museum’s director, Esme Ward.
The museum, which is part of the University of Manchester, also recently launched the Carbon Literacy for Museums Toolkit, created as part of the ‘Roots & Branches’ project, in partnership with Museum Development North West (MDNW) and the Carbon Literacy Trust.
Inclusivity in museums
Speaking to blooloop about her journey so far, and the Hello Future project, Esme Ward says:
“It always amazes me slightly that I’ve ended up running a museum because I didn’t ever visit one. The first time I actually set foot in a museum, I was 19. They just weren’t part of my life, growing up. I think that has really shaped me and the work I do in museums.”
She is interested in how museums might be more inclusive, and less intimidating:
“I’ve always had that really strong sense of threshold anxiety, on going to a new museum. So, exploring what can be done to engender that sense of belonging and connectedness has always interested me.”
Her first-ever museum was Tate:
“Now, of course, we know it as Tate Britain. It really blew my mind: the world was so much bigger than I’d imagined.”
At this point, Ward was at university studying French:
“I also did a module in history and realised that I was really quite interested in political and cultural history. That led me to then do an M.A in French revolutionary culture and printmaking. And so for me, the role of (in this case) art and museums was always fascinating.”
Before Manchester Museum
During her degree, she started to visit a lot of museums:
“What I loved more than anything else was that encounter between the art, the collections and people. Maybe it’s no surprise that I was so drawn to learning in a museum context. Almost every relative in my life is a teacher, so it’s probably in my DNA, but I was also so interested in museums as a space for learning. It seemed that they were hugely powerful as a space for learning.”
After finishing her M.A, Ward decided to reach out to museums:
“I wrote to every museum director imaginable. In the end, I found voluntary work with Dulwich Picture Gallery on extraordinary projects, such as the first-ever Art for the Unemployed programme. I worked across schools in south London, working with old masters, and I also had paid work at the V&A.”
She coordinated all the gallery talks at the V&A. Then, she went on to become the budget administrator for the education department at the museum.
“It was great for me,” she says, “I know it’s not glamorous. But it really helped me understand how things work operationally. In my spare time, I started doing more and more of the work around learning. I’d done freelance work with the Wallace Collection, and all sorts of things, just soaking it all up.”
The Whitworth
At this point, Ward moved to Manchester, where she initially worked freelance across museums, before a job opportunity presented itself at the Whitworth Art Gallery, at the University of Manchester. Ward became the gallery’s first-ever education officer and worked there for the next 19 years.
At the Whitworth, she led the growth of audiences and programmes, including award-winning early years, health and culture and age-friendly work. For several years, she worked alongside Maria Balshaw on the £15 million transformation of the Whitworth.
“In terms of that capital project, I was concerned with thinking about how the Whitworth could better serve its communities. I wondered how the park, in particular, could be a place that brought art, nature, and people together.”
Learning and engagement at Manchester Museum
Around three years before the Whitworth opened, Ward’s role extended to become head of learning and engagement at Manchester Museum and the Whitworth.
“By this stage of my career, I had become increasingly interested in broader collections – in natural history; in a much wider range of collections, and people’s relationship to and understanding of those collections.”
On taking over as Head of Learning and Engagement in the museum, that felt like the direction of travel she wanted to explore:
“After the Whitworth opened, I knew I wanted to do something else. I decided that because I’d done so much work around health and ageing, in particular – as a teenager, I worked in a care home – I wanted to look at how we can be age-friendly; what does that really mean? What role do culture and creativity play in how we age?”
An age-friendly city
Manchester, she explains, is an age-friendly city:
“It has this extraordinary cross-sector approach to thinking about the experience of ageing. I left for a couple of days a week, and was seconded to the public health team in Greater Manchester; in our context, we had a devolution of health and social care.
“I worked with them to look at the role of arts and culture and how you embed that within population health plans, and how you start to think about arts and culture as fundamental to public health.”
Museums and galleries, she contends, are part of the public health workforce.
“I know we don’t necessarily describe ourselves in those terms,” she says. “But I think our role, particularly around supporting social connectedness and tackling social isolation, is so critical. I learned so much, working with a range of public health practitioners, gerontologists, and so on, not least that their focus was on asset-based community development, and finding other ways to connect with people.
“For me, and I’m now chair of the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance nationally, that will always be part of my own personal interests. I also think it’s fundamentally part of a museum’s work to tackle those inequalities.”
Ageing well
Ward is also the strategic lead (culture) for Age Friendly Manchester and the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub. This hub works with and for older people to make the city region a better place to age well.
“The role of arts, culture, and particularly museums, in really working with people, is hugely powerful. I’m interested in how museums become the museums that they need to be for their context, and who shapes what that is.”
The role of arts, culture, and particularly museums, in really working with people, is hugely powerful. I’m interested in how museums become the museums that they need to be for their context, and who shapes what that is.
“In my experience, the fact that I’m in the room with a culture hat on, and the person next to me is the lead for health, and the person to my left is the lead for urban planning, and someone else is the lead for transport, and, collectively in our region we are saying, ‘How do we work together to make this the best place in the world to grow older?’ – that feels really exciting.”
Culture is, Ward says, a fundamental part of that infrastructure:
“Those cross-sector partnerships are critical, and underpin, for me, a lot of the work we are doing in Manchester.”
What are museums for?
Having completed the secondment, Ward went on to complete a Clore Fellowship, in 2017. She spent a year, she explains, trying to understand what museums are for:
“I spent time in Poland, in California, in Berlin, as well as lots of places in the UK. I spoke to all sorts of different people, really grappling with the question of what these museums are for. Because their dynamic has changed so much over time. And I came to a really clear sense – and it won’t surprise you – that they are about learning, and civic and social action; they are a space to understand our place in the world.
“My sense is that in caring for the past, you really are staking a claim on what matters in the future.”
It was a year in which she reaffirmed her love of and commitment to museums. Then, in 2018, the role at Manchester Museum came up.
She says:
“Manchester, for me, is an extraordinary city. It’s a hyper-diverse city; it’s a city I love. The context of a university is amazing. The focus on social responsibility within the University of Manchester is really powerful. I had assumed that becoming a director would mean having to leave Manchester. I still pinch myself that I’ve not had to.”
Hello Future
Hello Future is the transformation project currently underway at Manchester Museum, ahead of its reopening next year.
“The project existed, and I had worked a little bit on it when I was in the learning engagement role,” Ward says. “Its change in name signals the shift it underwent. It used to be called the ‘Courtyard Project’ because it was focused on building a two-storey extension in the courtyard. It has become quite a lot bigger than that.”
Additionally, she points out:
“‘The Courtyard Project’ doesn’t really mean anything to anyone, and it’s very internal; it’s about this building. It was always about more than the building, of course. I’m not terribly interested in bricks and mortar. In museums, I think, you reap what you sow. I thought: no.
“This project is so much more than that, so we told our visitors what we were trying to do. We talked a lot about the values that drive that, and we asked them what we should call the project. A young lad, probably about seven or eight, said, ‘Why don’t you just call it ‘Hello, Future.’ I love it. Visitors always have the best lines. It so beautifully summarises the sense of possibility.”
Three commitments at Manchester Museum
In terms of narrative, there are three commitments.
“Museums, particularly museums like Manchester Museum, born of empire, have been telling the same stories for decades. What stories do we want to tell ourselves about ourselves as we move forward? I did a lot of work with staff and with all sorts of people about what values are driving this. They were always there, driving the work, but we really homed in on them.”
There is a clear commitment to inclusion:
“What does it mean to have that commitment to inclusion? How does that shape your museum?”
The museum will be multilingual, she explains. “The Chinese Culture gallery, for example, will be trilingual. In the South Asia Gallery, there will be six languages. Manchester is a hyper-diverse city; a multilingual city.”
There also will be numerous new spaces that speak to what a commitment to inclusion should be:
“So, we will have a changing place. We will have a room dedicated to prayer because prayer is a really important part of a lot of people’s lives. If we want to engender a sense of belonging for all the people of Manchester and beyond, we have to create the conditions that enable us to do that. Thinking about more inclusive narratives sits at the core of our work, in terms of who the museum staff is, and who we work with.”
Imagination is key
There is also a commitment to imagination:
“We’re in a university, for goodness sake; research is the highest form of imagination. So how can we be as imaginative as we should be? We’ve got these extraordinary collections, and opportunities to work with amazing people, both locally and all over the world.
“Let’s really think about how we can be imaginative, whether that’s around the artists we work with, whether that’s around the fact that the top floor of the museum is home to Project Inc. and Rekindle School, two forms of alternative education working with neurodiverse young people, working with young people locally, giving them room and space and supporting them to develop their work and their thinking.
“What does a commitment to imagination look like?”
A commitment to care
Finally, there is a commitment to care.
“This is really critical,” Ward says. “I’ve done a lot of work and thinking about this, and lots of it comes from thinking around public health, as well.
“Obviously, in the museum context, we care for collections. Manchester Museum has 6 million objects; it is fundamental. But we’ve been thinking about what a new ethics of care might mean for an organisation like us.”
A boiler. An engine. A concrete block. A bag of peat.
— Manchester Museum (@McrMuseum) April 12, 2022
Are these the kind of objects you’d expect to see in museums?
We are working on something exciting 🎥 Coming soon… 👀 #behindthescenes pic.twitter.com/oJUU0nZFEF
“If we extend that care to the way we think about our relationships with people – how do we care for people, and ideas, and beliefs, and relationships, and the environment – everything starts to look different.
“For example, if you think about our work around restitution and repatriation, that absolutely aligns with our ethics of care and thinking about building relationships, not framing that as loss, but about understanding what you gain through new relationships, and more; those collections are revitalised in their new context.”
New galleries at Manchester Museum
They are no longer collections, she comments:
“They are belongings. Even the language of museums feels so limiting at times.
“We will have a new Belonging Gallery. This starts to explore the emotional realities of belonging, that thinks about all of these things I’ve mentioned, but also: why do we have nature over here, and culture over there? What’s that about?”
“We are interested in how you start to set a tone and use a language which is more around building empathy and understanding for our world and each other than previously. I do think museums like ours with the collections we hold and the way we work with people are really well placed to do that.”
Concerning the bricks and mortar, she says:
“We will have a new exhibition hall, which is a great space; a playground for ideas: how are we going to explore the big ideas of our time? That gives you the space to do that.”
Different exhibitions
The opening show will be Golden Mummies of Egypt, currently touring China.
“It is an extraordinary collection, which is thinking about gold, sex, death, decolonisation: it’s all there. And the show that will follow that – and which is very different – is going to be a show about Wild: the notion of ‘wild’ as the colonial construct; our sense of wildness in an urban context, and thinking about rewilding projects.”
“So we will have the exhibition hall; we’ll have a new Belonging Gallery, where we’ve worked with 15 comic artists from all over the world who are looking at these new narratives around belonging, whether that is related literally to belongings and collections, or to repatriation stories, or to a sense of belonging in the natural world sense of invasive species, and the language we use.
“It might be around belonging and migration, borders, refugees, and where people belong, and how our collections enable us to think about those.
“Then you will walk through into a new Chinese Culture Gallery. This has an explicit mission to build understanding between the UK and China. We are working closely with the Manchester China Institute, researchers, and all sorts of partners to think about the way we do that.”
Working in partnership
It is, Ward continues, thematic:
“There is a big section on caring and healing, and how we might all share one sky, but we actually read and understand it differently. We have done a lot of work researching collectors and their relationships with China.”
Then there is the South Asia Gallery, which is a partnership with the British Museum.
“With the South Asia Gallery, the thing that, for me, feels really exciting is co-curation,” she explains. “I stopped the project, about three years ago, and brought together about 120 of the diaspora that we work with in Greater Manchester, for a huge meal at a brilliant restaurant in east Manchester. I said, ‘what do you really care about?’ Because what this gallery could be and will be is a gallery to explore diaspora experience and contribution through that lens.
“We have 31 people, most of them of South Asian heritage who are co-curators. It’s co-curation on an epic scale.”
Manchester Museum and the climate crisis
Identifying the central theme, she says:
“If anything frames all that I’m describing now, it’s probably the idea that the only way we are going to get through this world we are in is together. We have to be more transparent about the process of opening up the museum, opening up our decision-making processes, how we distribute funding. We’ve got to bring other people in.”
The museum will have a new entrance on Oxford Road. Its entire top floor will become co-working spaces for environmental and educational charities, including Project Inc. and Rekindle.
“We had funding from the Arts Council for a programme called Roots and Branches. This aims to accelerate the museum sector’s ability to respond to the climate crisis. We are the world’s first carbon literate museum and are in partnership with an incredible charity called the Carbon Literacy Project, based in Manchester. We now have an Environmental Action Manager.”
Adding different perspectives
One interesting development, she comments, is starting to bring in people who are different from those who have been in museums before:
“The last three curators we have appointed, it struck me, are examples of this. Our curator of our South Asia Gallery, Nusrat Ahmed, is hugely knowledgeable about South Asian history and culture. But her background is in community organising and the voluntary sector, working directly with communities, particularly South Asian communities.
“Understanding the curatorial role is different. It’s about co-production, co-curation and creating the conditions for that.”
Understanding the curatorial role is different. It’s about co-production, co-curation and creating the conditions for that.
“We have a Curator of Indigenous Perspectives. After we started the work with partners in Australia, I had amazing conversations with Aboriginal leaders. It became clear to me that we have such a limited Western view of our collections.
“So, supported by the John Ellerman Foundation, we developed a Curator of Indigenous Perspectives who can work across the museum, challenge our thinking, move us forward, and bring those indigenous perspectives to the heart of the museum, and indigenise the museum. We have Dr Alexandra P. Alberda in that role.”
A curatorial shift
Dr Alexandra P. Alberda was previously a doctoral researcher and research illustrator at Bournemouth University. Her PhD is titled Graphic Medicine Exhibited: Public Engagement with Comics in Curatorial Practice and Visitor Experience since 2010. Her research critically engages with institutional structures of power that limit civic engagement and do not facilitate needed reparative reconciliation, amplification of marginalised voices, and displacement of (colonial) power.
“Then, just recently, we’ve appointed Dr Njabulo Chipangura as a curator of living cultures,” Ward adds.
Dr Chipangura holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. For ten years, he worked at the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe as a curator in the archaeology department. Chipangura has previously carried out research that looks at how national museums in Africa continue to reproduce colonial forms of knowledge and of being, and what it means to decolonise museum practice.
“We are really interested in something around a curatorial shift,” Ward explains:
“It’s about how we support all of our curators and educators and others to work together, really thinking about the collections we hold, the use of those collections, and the stories we make together.”
Manchester Museum will reopen in 2023.
Header image credit Chris Bull, for Manchester Museum
