30 before 30: Museum Rites of Passage

How is it Spring already? When we first thought about this article the year was looking fresh and we were starting the countdown to our 30th birthdays - now they are fast approaching! Age is only a number isn't it? But this has given us an opportunity to reflect on our time so far and how we have developed into mid-career professionals. Sure, we're pretty peeved that we've not made it onto the Forbes 30 before 30 list but has anyone in the museum world?! Where is our museums 30 under 30 list - looking at you Museums Association!

While 30 before 30 lists may feature of our #careergoals Pinterest boards they certainly give unrealistic expectations to what you can achieve, especially in an industry where it takes years of studying, volunteering, bouncing around positions to get a single toe on the ladder. So, the typical Ministry fashion we thought we'd mix it up a bit and think about the 30 rites of passage you may experience as you move from early career professional to mid-career professional. 

1.  Get a paid museum job! It’s been a hard slog and you’ve spent way more hours volunteering with way too much responsibility but you’ve made it! 
2. Apply for a new job a month into your contract – with short term contracts we’ve all spent time at work ‘in the stores’ applying for a job as soon as you’ve got one.
3. Break an object (because we've all been there)
4. Sign up for Museums Showoff 
5. Delete a record on the Collections Management System - by accident of course.
6. Have a strop for not being invited to an exhibition opening 
7.  Finally get invited to an opening 
8. Get so drunk at an opening on the excitement of free booze and canapes that you puked in the toilets - hey at least its not on an object!
   
9. Pull a sickie for a hangover (after the opening)
10. Pull an all-nighter on an install (or several in a row)
11. Wake up in the middle of the night and panic about the location of an object or status of a loan.
12. Go to a museum late and dance the night away 
13. Rip your jeans at work - right. across. the bum.  
14. Play pallet truck races in the stores (a safe distance from the objects, obvs). 
15.  Eat at the nearest dirty café to the museum
16. Schmooze your way into a free coffee in the museum cafe
17. Speak to the director of your favourite museum, have a fan girl panic, then creepily add them on LinkedIn. 
18. Have your photo taken for press and marketing 
19.  Stalk a celebrity in the museum - and know how to act around them
20.  Be called a curator (even if you’re not) correct them, explain, give up, let someone call you a curator. Conservator also counts. 
21. Explain to your family that you won't be going on antiques roadshow. Also why you won't be buying a house any time soon. 
22. Explain that you're not able to give valuations for their ‘priceless’ vase/necklace/hunk of junk that’s been in the garden shed for ten years. 
23. Go on a courier trip! 
24. Realise that overseas courier trips are actually a bit lonely and there is a lot of waiting around. 
25. Fall out of love with museums, fall back in love with museums. In, out, shake it all about - this one never goes away. 
26. Spend every Thursday lunchtime refreshing the Leicester museum job page. 
27. Spend every weekday working in your museum, then every weekday evening at other institutions at events and openings. 
28. Visit an exhibition and spend most of your time checking out the art hanging, checking the distance between the object and the barrier and tutting if it’s against your own museum policy. 
29. Check out a range of museum stores and have storagegasms at their plan presses, rolling racking, shelving, the things we would do with good storage facilities! 
    
    
    
30. Make friends and as you move on, get insider info from museum across London and the country!

This is not an exhaustive list and nor is necessarily something to aspire to but most of these points have been part of our journeys.  We'd love to hear more about how your museum career looked in your 20s! Tweet us @curiositytweet using #30before30. And if you are writing for the MA and want to publish a UK museums 30 under 30, just make sure to publish it in the next few weeks, ok?!

Everyday sexism in Museums

Image via @feministfightclub

Here at the Ministry we have promised to be champions of women in museums and draw attention to issues that we encounter in our working life. After a recent conversation with some fellow female museum workers, we were left wondering about chauvinism in a female-dominated field. The Ministry of Curiosity’s Terri Dendy and Laura Humphreys discuss big picture misogyny and everyday sexism in arts and heritage.

Museums are in that rarified position of having a female-dominated workforce - a (male) colleague recently joked that having one man in a pool of job applicants counted as ‘diversity’. Anecdotally, those working in curatorial, collections management, and learning often report that their teams are almost exclusively female. Great, right?!

Well, kind of. Arts Council England’s most recent report (2015-2016) states that around 55-62% of the museum workforce is female. Not quite the dramatic split you were expecting? Us neither. But there is a simple, if depressing, explanation. The same ACE report states that in the upper echelons of Arts organisations, it’s still a sausage party - up to 66% of leadership roles are occupied by men. And as for the very top jobs? The museum industry has made some progress in appointing women to top jobs recently - like Sonia Solicari at the Geffrye or Maria Balshaw at Tate - there is still a long way to go. If you look at membership of the National Museum Director’s Council, 13 of 45 member directors are female - roughly 28%. These statistics all refer to the UK - is it any better across the pond? NOPE - of America’s 13 largest Art museums, only one is headed by a woman. That’s 93% male!

And as for why? It seems to be a sorry combination of all the usual suspects. Museums are generally a low-pay sector (don’t get us started on what this does to diversity as a whole), and when that pay has to cover childcare costs, you’re often paying to go to work . Men in leadership roles tend to recruit more men to leadership roles, and representation of power in museum displays and boardrooms alike is rather oestrogen-lite. And then there’s the old chestnut that women don’t think they are qualified or experienced enough, and without encouragement don’t tend to go for that stretch position of power.  

These sorts of statistics for the top of the field are available in several places (if often sorely lacking in intersectionality and detail), but what of the lower ranks? Early to mid-career stats are even more difficult to extract meaningful data from. But something that keeps coming up over lunch, on courier trips, at the pub and in angry whatsapp groups are the stories of everyday sexism piling the pressure on women in the museum sector.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the more physical aspects of our work. Collections roles require a range of skills, and in the all-hands-on-deck chaos of a gallery install, from fine art to spaceships, is where chivalry/chauvinism really comes into its own. Women know their way around a toolkit, safely maneuver heavy objects around, and manage large teams of contractors on a building site. And if they can’t do it yet, they can learn! But stories vary from the common ‘I’ll lift that for you’ to the downright outrageous - ensuring that a man is seen doing a ‘man’s job’ by visitors, because it’s ridiculous that a respectable girl should be seen anywhere near a scaffold tower, right?! Her delicate lady-brain isn’t used to heights.  Between us, we have been happily carrying a crate when a contractor take it out of our hands, been ‘taught’ how to screw mirror plates on after fitting hundreds and judged for our looks, not to mention become invisible on a gallery project we’re managing when a more junior male colleague appears.

Image via @feministfightclub instagram

And this behaviour is not limited to on-gallery situations: after a consultant visited a National Museum to talk about representations of women, we overheard three male colleagues discussing how wrong she was: without a trace of irony her presentation was described as ‘hysterical’ and alas, they did not mean funny.

It’s tempting to put out a call for more examples of this everyday sexism in museums (a la everydaysexism.com), but we thought that was bloody depressing. And women don’t need to hear about stories of sexism - we live through them all the bloody time. So, instead, we thought we would ask you: how do YOU deal with sexism in museums? Here’s a few from us to get started…

• It hurts us to include this one but we’ve been blindsided on too many occasions not to: when someone subjects you to some old fashioned casual sexism, CALL. IT. OUT. This one is easier said than done, we know. In our early careers, on short-term contracts or even as volunteers, we let things go, because kicking up a fuss seemed more trouble than it was worth. Be polite - even when people really don’t deserve it - and don’t let it slide.

• Are you a manager or a senior team member? DOUBLE the above point. Then triple it. Junior colleagues may lack the confidence or experience to call out sexism - especially from contractors or visitors. You have a responsibility to them to make sure your staff work in a respectful environment.

• Embrace the sisterhood: AMPLIFY! After being constantly spoken over in a meeting, we were the beneficiary of Amplification: a tactic from the Obama Administration which women employed to make sure bright junior voices are heard - when you hear a good idea that gets shouted over or ignored, repeat it! Say you're colleague had a good idea and run over it again, or make room for her to do so!  
  
  
  
  
  You know what? She helped a bright idea make a difference. AMPLIFY!

• Believe in yourself, your abilities, and your ambition. Get a mentor, join a network, follow @MuseumAgender.

So, how do YOU guys smash the patriarchy in your museum career? Leave a comment!!

Colour and Vision

There’s a million extraordinary things about the Natural History Museum in South Ken, its stunning gothic building, it’s incredible permanent displays and of course dinosaurs but over recent years its failed me on the exhibition front,  although the images are great I’ve become a bit tired of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Corals was an interesting idea but didn’t live up to its posters on content (was I the only one who thought there would be more live fish?) but I loved the scenescape of the show.

But spending some time in their latest show Colour and Vision I was completed thrilled to see the density of the collection on display, the incredible design and detailed content – the exhibition really is a feast for the eyes. The shows intention is to ‘Follow a 565-million-year journey through the eyes of nature’ and it does just that.

The exhibition is instantly given an exciting feel as it opens with a light installation by Liz West commissioned by the museum for the exhibition, a great video on the museum website documents the artists journey towards making the work in thinking about the influence of the specimens and their presence in the space too.

Exploirng the evolution of the eye the richness of the Natural History Museums collection is showcased by a whole wall of pickled eyes checking out the visitors and even Darwin's pet Octopus (yep!) makes an appearence to show that the similarities between Octopuses eyes and humans.

Londonist.com

The theme of colour is again explored with the richness of the collection and the incredible stacking of showcases in the later sections showing off the full spectrum and discussing how some colour in the natural world can stand the test of time.

This is a really great show from the Natural History Museum not only because of its extraordinary design and showcasing of permenant collections but also because of its presence outside the gallery space. The exhibition posters across London are striking and stimulating and luring to an adult audience. The online participation is for this too with a social media driven interactive where anyone can upload a picture of their eye to feature on the eye wall in the exhibition space and the website. And again the NHM's buyers out do themselves with a fabulous range in the shop including on trend colouring books and colourful homeware.

The exhibition really is a must-see this autumn!

Plus learn more here on the amazing Exhibition Developer Fiona Cole -Hamilton here.

Using collections to drive social media: MA conference digest

Thank you so much to everyone you came along to our Smarter Training session at this year’s MA conference or who joined the discussion on twitter. We had an absolutely fantastic time sharing our passion with you and we were thrilled with your really positive response! As promised, this post includes some of the guidelines and suggestions we talked about to help you develop content for social media using your collections.

Before that though, just a few thoughts on some of the issues that came up on the day. First of all, we were really interested to see the broad spectrum of people who came along- from social media newbies to old hands. We were asked by a few people which sites we recommend for museum social media and how to get started. Just quickly- we love twitter and instagram and see museums moving more towards periscope and tumblr in the future. To be honest we don’t use facebook that much and wouldn’t really recommend it for a museum audience. It’s not nearly reactive or interactive enough! If you are just getting started, make an account, follow some people, and watch how its done for a few weeks before wading in. Also – get cozy with other local museums and heritage institutions who can draw attention to your new account!

We were also asked how we think a museum should deal with twitter accounts when lots of people want to get involved. Personally we don’t see a problem with museum staff tweeting from their personal accounts- as long as they are following guidelines of common sense and professionalism. Since that makes some museums nervous, we suggest that each department be in charge of its own twitter account – and the main museum twitter can focus on big stories and events, and supporting its separate departments.

The main subject of our talk was using collections for social media. As everyone who works with online accounts knows, the social media rat race is a hungry hungry beast. It needs to be constantly fed with new content, images, opinions and posts- and that’s where your collections and your staff come in! There are so many different ways to look at one object that your collection is a boundless source of inspiration, as are they people who work with them everyday. We believe in empowering collections staff of all varieties, from volunteers to curators, to engage with objects and create new content.

But of course, not all of us are used to thinking like social media people. So how do you tell a story with an object? Well here are some of our tips:

 At the Museums Association Conference in 2014, we ran a collaborative workshop in which we, along with fellow delegates, created the Social Media Manifesto. We think the Manifesto summarizes some really important points about museum social media which should be kept in mind when creating your content:

Finally, we’ve put together just a few thoughts which we’ve called the ‘Golden Rules of Social Media’ – based on the Manifesto as well as our own experience as museum professionals and museum bloggers:

We hoped that the workshop, as well as these resources, will inspire you to think about your collections in a new way, and to give staff across the museum a better sense of how they could get involved!

If you have any questions or comments- please feel free to get in touch! @curiositytweet or curiositycollect@gmail.com!