Leominster Museum has been selected to join Creative Museums, an eighteen-month programme of experimentation for six small museums from across England and a wider cohort of peer museums. The six participating museums: Brent Museum and Archives, Leominster Museum, Manchester Jewish Museum, Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery, Scarborough Museums Trust and Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, will use a process called Scratch to build lively programmes and venues that enrich the experience for visitors, directly and creatively involve their audiences, tackle challenges and generate new business opportunities.
Creative Museums is a unique practical programme of collaborative learning and testing. It will feature workshops and master classes with a range of heritage, performance and arts specialists. Over the course of the programme the six museums will be partnered with a producer from Battersea Arts Centre to plan collaborative creative projects for their venues, potentially commissioning an artist from a theatre-making background to help realise their ideas. The group will share learning by exchanging skills, ideas and processes.
Creative Museums is run by Battersea Arts Centre in partnership with independent consultant Gaby Porter who brings a wealth of experience in the museums and heritage sector, especially around innovative approaches to interpretation, audience development and organisational learning. The volunteers at Leominster Museum are especially interested in thinking firstly about the future of their building, and how to improve it; and secondly about making much deeper and more sustainable links with the whole population of the town, both young and old.
Creative Museums is supported using public funding by Arts Council England through the Museum Resilience Fund.
John Orna-Ornstein, Director, Museums, Arts Council England, said:
“Museums need to find ways to be increasingly relevant and important to their different audiences at a time when the world is changing fast. Our museums are full of creative, talented and enterprising staff. Battersea Arts Centre’s Creative Museums project is a flexible, fun way of connecting these staff to their communities and stakeholders. It should help museums to be better, more imaginative, more responsive and more able to try new things. I’m really pleased that we have been able to support this exciting project and look forward to seeing the results!”
David Jubb, Artistic Director & CEO, Battersea Arts Centre, said:
“Battersea Arts Centre has used Scratch over the last fifteen years to develop new ways of doing things, working with theatre-makers, architects, school teachers and young entrepreneurs. Creative Museums will test out Scratch in a museum environment. We hope that the Scratch process will be a useful tool for all of the Creative Museums who are part this programme, enabling them to undertake experiments and explore new ways of working. We also have lots to learn from a group of ambitious colleagues in each of these great museums. It promises to be a shared adventure which I hope will have good benefits for all those who are passionate about the role heritage can play in building stronger communities.”
Gaby Porter, Independent Consultant, Creative Museums, said:
“The Creative Museums programme will be genuinely participative and creative in its approach, generating more personal and immediate ways of connecting museums with people. We hope that it will enable museums to create value for and with others, thus strengthening or redefining their sense of purpose and their role. We are delighted that the selected museums will be using Scratch – or agile working, as other sectors and industries often call it – to address organisational change and governance; shape building extensions or move to different premises which are fit for people, purpose and the future; create a dialogue and build a stronger relationship with local people and their stories; change roles and perceptions of volunteering. The six Creative Museums encompass a fantastic range of independent, local authority and volunteer-run museums across England.”
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