Curators, COVID-19, and The Role of The General Public

        On Wednesday, February 24, 2021, I attended the first part of a speaker series on “Collecting Covid-19.” This event sought to chronicle the ways in which museums in the United Kingdom are telling stories about the current pandemic, particularly regarding their interactions with local communities. In the past, I have learned about museums and their changing roles in the 21st century, which inspired me to attend this event.

During the event, there were two sets of two guest speakers. The first two guest speakers, Andrea Hadley-Johnson and Simon Brown, respectively Artistic Program Manager and Project Curator, were affiliated with the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Hadley-Johnson and Brown described their experiences working with the general public on projects such as “Letters of Constraint” during the first pandemic lockdown in the U.K. These 64 letters were written by members of the general public in the U.K. over the course of six weeks and highlighted the variety of responses to the lockdown, from frustration to optimism and from depression to resilience. Plus, the mediums with which people wrote their letters varied; some wrote physical letters on paper, but others responded to calls for action on social media, and yet others wrote on their hands and sent photos of their work. Examples of excerpts from these letters can be seen below as slides from the presentation. In addition to the letters, however, the museum worked on compiling the letters to make 13 monologues, which were adapted into YouTube videos and a forthcoming podcast. One of the videos, which was shown during the meeting, had lots of natural imagery presented through a black and white filter. Even though I couldn’t hear the audio, the video was very profound and reflected the bleakness of the pandemic through the writer’s eyes.

Excerpts from the Letters of Constraint.

Hadley-Johnson also raised questions the two thought about during their work: how is the museum work relevant to our lives today, and how do the curators ensure that they do not exclude anyone’s voices? On a similar note, Brown discussed the lessons the museum learned from COVID-19, namely the importance of embracing creativity, the value of blending the physical and the digital to create societal intersections, and, most importantly, the value of taking a participatory, human approach, working with people and not to people.

On the other hand, the second two guest speakers, Stewart Emmens and Imogen Clarke, respectively the Curator of Community Health and Assistant Curator of Medicine, were affiliated with the Science Museum Group in London. Emmens and Clarke have worked with the general public to collect objects that tell different stories about the pandemic, forming a permanent record of the impact of COVID-19 on the personal, societal, and cultural parts of life. These items included an Evening Standard headline on the British outbreak, vials from the first Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines given, a DIY dental kit, and other ephemeral items. Interestingly, Emmens pointed out that these items reflected the pandemic’s unpredictable nature. Like Hadley-Johnson and Brown, Emmens and Clarke tried to focus on a human element in the project to make it more relevant and more relatable to audiences. Likewise, Clarke directly worked with members of the community to demystify preconceptions of what does and does not belong in a museum - she recalled a game of Scrabble that was collected in the now-defunct Common Cold Unit and presented in a previous Zoom meeting (seen below), as well as her collecting of items like homemade masks and a woven table mat (seen below).

Screenshot of a Zoom meeting for Arts4Dementia, featuring a picture of a Scrabble game collected from the Common Cold Unit (above).

Photos of a woven table mat, homemade face masks, and a card allowing carers access to essential services, all of which were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic (below).

Overall, the event was quite well-done, and I enjoyed seeing the work of all of the guest speakers. I particularly appreciated the insights provided by Hadley-Johnson and Brown, as I felt that they were relevant to work in the history of science, particularly social history. Emmens and Clarke made quite a few good points as well: I enjoyed their take on what does and does not belong in a museum, and their story about the game of Scrabble in the Common Cold Unit was quite engaging. All this being said, I am interested in seeing how prominently the lessons from collecting the pandemic will be in post-pandemic life.