Hello London! Recovered from the marathon? Ready to have a sit down, a drink and hear amazing things about museums? We’ve got a fabulous evening lined up for you, with ten top museum people showing off the best bits about their work.
Museums Showoff is back on Tuesday 14 May. We’ll be at our new home, upstairs at The Black Heart, 3 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm. Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting on the door for our charity of the month.
Strutting their stuff on stage, divulging things about museums that you’ve never even thought of, will be:
Steve Cross – a man whose entire knowledge of museums consists of ways to tease the Science Museum.
Sharon Ament – Museums: are we just too polite? What Old Flo has to teach us about how standing up for what we believe in creates a wide-reaching resonance.
Lola Arellano-Weddleton – I’ll be talking about my attempt in 2012 (and again this year) to visit a museum daily, and what I’ve learned through the logistical challenges of becoming a glutton for culture. In particular, I’ll talk about museums in Warsaw, Poland, where I was living last year, on a Fulbright research grant in museum studies.
Ruth Adams – The Curious Tale of Tipu’s Tiger: Or the story of how a notorious man eating musical instrument was kidnapped from India and brought to London, to be immortalised in poetry, chocolate and cyberspace.
Adrian Murphy & Vicky Pearce – We will be talking about what it’s like to be the voice of museum on Twitter – the highs, the lows, the fun and games, taking a journey from Macedonian socks to Ethiopian lyres via many, many pangolins. And we’ll try to give you actual, practical top tips if you have to be your museums’ voice but we may just make lots of puns and alliteration.
Emily Yates – Sherlock Holmes and The Museum Inaccuracy. Sherlock Holmes may be a clever guy, but when running around a museum he does have some odd ideas about how we operate. I have set up my own casebook of investigations into how museums operate in the Holmesian world, and why we may disagree with him.
Kat Nilsson – Kat expresses her love for science and frustration with the personalities of objects available to tell science stories. When did they become so bland and what on earth can be done about it?
Rachel Jennings – Museums are a lot like icebergs: what’s on display is just a tiny part of the whole, and what’s hidden is much more interesting! I will take you on a brief tour through the weird and wonderful world of stored collections at the Horniman Museum.
Meriel Jeater – A little-known part of the Museum of London’s medieval collection is its bawdy badges depicting male and female genitalia, amusing visual puns and mating chickens. Why were these badges made and who wore them? Curator Meriel Jeater explores the sexy side of medieval life and asks whether these badges are as naughty as they might seem to modern eyes.
Miranda Stearn – What’s all this contemporary art doing in my museum? From Grayson Perry at the British Museum to Mark Wallinger at the National Gallery, recently it’s been hard to escape contemporary interventions in our museums. I’ll be showing off my PhD research musing on why this might be.
Richard Sandling – Richard Sandling collects Videos. He has so many he would like to turn his house into a VHS museum. Could he? Should he? Can he? How do you even become a museum? Find out tonight!
Museums Showoff 