TAITMAIL Museum of the Year – now make the cultural glue stick
So it’s Plymouth’s The Box, winner of this year’s Art Fund Museum of the Year and the £120k that goes with it. And here’s the thing: it mostly won it for the change effect it’s had on the community.
No-one expected it, least of all Victoria Pomery, its chief executive, who was, she said, flabbergasted at the result, “beyond my wildest expectations”.
She shouldn’t have been all that flabbergasted. After all, she nearly won it in 2012 with Turner Contemporary which she founded on Margate’s shoreline in an award-winning building designed by David Chipperfield, the year she got an OBE for her achievement. A few years later she moved on to get The Box open.
That Margate project prompted a piece by me for the Independent on Sunday which asked “Can museum architecture transform a town?” The article was inconclusive: wait and see. We did, we have and it can – what that place has done for Margate has been just that, transformative. It has even made Tracey Emin fall back in love with her birthplace and devote her life, work and fortune to it.
That place was at the start of the movement we’re seeing now in full spate, museums that exist as much beyond the gallery walls as within, with outreach programmes, festival partnerships, school links, community events, nearly always in cahoots with the local council.
Museums used to be treasuries, collections of art and artifacts carefully preserved – and out of the reach of sticky fingers in glass boxes - for you to admire, and then go away. For curators in those bad old days, visitors were a nuisance that had to be tolerated; their day was the one in the week when the place was closed to the public and they could get on with what they and the objects were created for: research.
Not any more. Modern curators are producers and presenters, standing on their scholarship.
This Museum of the Year presentation, in sweltering heat, was at the Cutty Sark, the old tea clipper preserved in a dry dock in Greenwich and part of Royal Museums Greenwich, the biggest object in the museum’s collection. But these days this troublesome treasure (it’s been almost destroyed by fire at least twice and repaired at vast cost), is much more, according to the museums’ director Paddy Rodgers.
“It’s our ship of ideas” he said. “She is the vehicle that we use to make connections, to build relationships, to encourage curiosity, to develop dialogue”. It gives us a chance to reflect and add to our personal narrative, he adds.
Something has changed of which The Box is an acute symptom, and Art Fund is a major part of that change.
Art Fund was founded, what, 123 years ago to help galleries buy art because the government’s contribution was criminally inadequate and for about 100 years that’s what it did, with mixed success. Its formal title is still The National Art Collections Fund.
Then, under Stephen Deuchar, it had a long hard look at itself. “We are the national charity for museums and galleries” his successor, Jenny Waldman, told the representatives of museums and galleries around the country congregated at the Cutty Sark, “raising money, galvanising support to help galleries, enrich collections, connect with audiences and bring ambitious projects to life” she said in her preamble to the handing over of the cash. “And we’ve been advocating for the role, the vital role, that museums play for everyone - inspiring visitors, sharing knowledge and serving their communities which every museum in this room, and there are hundreds of you, do so brilliantly.”
And that, maybe slightly pious, little statement gives a clue to how Art Fund is pushing the progressive element. Another pointer to the future, and where politicians need to pay close attention, is that the winner, against the National Gallery, the Fitzwilliam (founded, 1816), V&A East Storehouse and Norwich Castle, was a local authority museum/art gallery/archive. They may all be higher up the pecking order than The Box, but they are all buying into the new museum philosophy that at the centre of the business is the visitor, not the object any more.
The Box, like Turner Contemporary, owes its existence to the resolve and resources of a local authority. It is Plymouth City Council’s £46m declaration of faith in its past and future, and it opened in 2020 with another aphoristic mission statement: “To redefine the collections-based institution for the 21st century, expanding its horizons from local to global, placing collections, artists and audiences at its core”. The Box is a declaration that Plymouth is turning to culture, art and its community to look forward.
It takes its name from the old civic library that it has replaced, along with St Luke’s church, and together with the city museum and art gallery it now in a huge glass space designed by AtkinsRéalis, free to enter, and your first sight is the large cafeteria. Everywhere around the entrance there are human guides to send you where you need to go. There’s an overarching sense that this is a place with children in mind, a playground with the serious purpose of bringing people together and helping them understand life in the context of this city.
It has an open lay-out and there are gizmos all over the place to bring visitors ever closer to the story the objects are here to tell. It opened five years agio and is getting 280,000 people a year, unheard of for a local authority museum of the old school. It’s bright, no lurking in shaded corners to preserve the integrity of the objects, with electronic maps and hands-on objects. In the large and comprehensive archaeology gallery there’s a life size reconstruction of a woolly mammoth, Mildred, based on a skeleton unearthed on the city’s outskirts.
But among the throng at Greenwich are haunting worries that all the hugging can’t defray. Funding. Already, between 2024 and 25 16 museums have permanently closed and the closure rate, according to the Mapping Museums Lab at University College, London, the overall closure rate is about 1% a year. The May local elections this year saw a rearrangement of the political furniture, with Reform UK winning 14 councils, and indications showing that cost-cutting is a priority. The minister for museums, Fiona Twycross, was on hand to give the government message – “Museums are so much more than the collections they hold, they are keeper of our national story and a gateway” she said – but whoever is culture secretary in a couple of weeks needs give cast-iron assurances that devolution will ensure we have centres in every town and city where we can know about our national and local identities.
“We’ve achieved so much in short period of time in a city that really needs culture” said Pomery. “We connect with communities, we are the glue, we are so vital at this moment in time.”