Share this:
Last week Liverpool based members of the Volunteer Archive and Research Group joined Kay Jones, curator of Community History at the Museum of Liverpool, for a guided tour of the galleries. The Museum of Liverpool is one of our key delivery partners and will host a major exhibition on the History of Place project.
The tour focussed on how the Museum of Liverpool curate and display community history and engage Merseyside based communities in telling their stories. The tour had an emphasis on disability history and included a couple of objects related to the Royal School for the Blind.
Courtesy of the Museum of Liverpool
The tour helped us to understand how our research and responses to archival material and objects may influence the History of Place exhibition. Items in the gallery that we looked at included former Royal School for the Blind, Wavertree pupil Caroline France’s admissions form (1921), creative responses to items in the gallery created by pupils from the school and an England Blind Football Team shirt worn by Craig Lundberg in 2009. The Museum of Liverpool has a wider range of objects related to the school that they hope can be displayed as part of the exhibition.
We visited two of the current temporary exhibitions- ‘Poppies: Women and War’ (which runs until 5th June 2016) and ‘Reel Stories’ (which runs until September 2017) to gain insight into how temporary exhibitions complement permanent exhibitions. Temporary exhibitions have the scope to tell meaningful stories and can act as a signpost to further information. They also have the ability to tell stories in more detail, expanding on the items on display in the permanent exhibition and enabling communities to curate their own history.
A big thank you to Kay for such an interesting and enjoyable tour. We are really looking forward to joining Kay for an object handling session in the museum stores next month.