Stanhope Forbes’ England – Evaluation

It’s been nearly two months since the artworks for Stanhope Forbes’ England went back to their owners and one year since we began the Skills for the Future traineeships, so I have been reflecting on all that I have learned.

Stanhope Forbes’ England at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum

As part of evaluating the exhibition, I hosted a swap shop, introducing the trainees to the principles of front-end, formative and summative evaluation before we spent a few hours observing visitors to Stanhope Forbes’ England. From these observations and evaluating visitor numbers and the comments book we now know that:

• There were around 19,000 visitors to the building during the duration of the exhibition
• 81% of visitors came specifically for the Forbes exhibition
• 51% of visitors came from outside the WR postcodes

We also received some inspiring comments in the visitor book, including:

“Thank you for bringing this exhibition to Worcester”

“Excellent exhibition. Inspires me to find out more.”

“Chadding in Mounts Bay – one of the great paintings of the 20^th century. A fine exhibition well worth the drive from Newlyn to Worcester!”

A particularly lovely moment in evaluating the exhibition came when one of the trainees observed two couples who came separately and did not know each other, but began to talk about the exhibition and then continued around the museum together. These types of comments and observations make me feel so proud of everything that Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum achieves and highlights what exhibitions can bring to the local community.

Stanhope Forbes’ England at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum

Evaluating my learning while working on Stanhope Forbes’ England has also filled me with pride, in both my own achievements and in the people I work with. I was offered a rare combination of freedom and support from the team here at MAG, which I believe significantly fast-tracked my learning. Curating Stanhope Forbes’ England offered me an in-depth understanding of the complex processes behind loans based exhibitions including project management; securing Government Indemnity insurance; arranging transportation and packaging; managing environmental conditions; planning an exhibition hang; writing interpretation, marketing materials and a companion publication; as well as giving public talks and tours.

I am aware what an incredible privilege this is at such an early stage in my career and the benefits I have gained do not only lie in this widened skills set, but have also had tangible results as I have been offered ongoing curatorial work at Museums Worcestershire. I have also been awarded a position on the British Arts Network’s Early Career Curators Group (supported by Arts Council England and Tate) for the next two years which includes a professional development bursary. I hope to use these opportunities to continue bringing great exhibitions to Worcester and to continue developing as a heritage professional.

Emalee Beddoes

Stanhope Forbes’ England Part 2

In my previous work in publishing, creating content for marketing and press was a day to day task for me, but there I had the benefit of an existing international specialist-interest audience.  When beginning work on press for Stanhope Forbes’ England, I was conscious that exhibition press is a very different species: it must appeal to both those who spend every weekend gallery-hopping and those who rarely visit, as well was both Forbes newbies and enthusiasts.

Stanhope Forbes’ England advert

My previous post, Stanhope Forbes’ England Part 1, gave some of the draft press material I had written to send to our talented PR team: Museums Worcestershire’s Marketing & Events Manager, Helen Large, and freelance PR consultant Helen Annetts. I met with the two Helens last week to discuss the draft and our plans for marketing. I was extremely pleased to find that they were happy with what I’d provided and used the text in various different ways throughout the press materials. Helen Annets also shared all sorts of useful advice about writing for the press, some of the key points that stood out for me were:

• Begin by writing down bullet points of the key things that you wish to highlight – much like planning keywords before writing a blog post.
• Including quotes from someone like the curator, a well-known subject specialist or even a member of the community involved in the project can add interest to a media pack.
• Make key pieces of information easily accessible –the press are extremely busy people!

Working with ‘team Helen’ has highlighted the importance of dedicated marketing professionals in the heritage industry. While curators or front of house staff might be able to tweet, blog and make calls to the local press; the media savvy, contacts, and experience of PR and marketing teams are an essential step in insuring the success of exhibitions.

A Smithsonian Institution report on audience building highlights that “Museum marketing is unique because museums have a mission to educate the public as well as build audience and revenue.”[1] As heritage professionals we have the privilege of working with objects and stories that are entirely fascinating and do much of the work for us. The key duty of museum marketing, therefore, is not simply to stimulate revenue, but as a service that makes these objects and their stores accessible to as many people as possible.

[1] Smithsonian Institution, Audience Building: Marketing in Museums, October 2001 <http://tinyurl.com/l3aytca>  p. 1

 

Emalee Beddoes

 

Exciting exhibition concepts

In May this year, Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery hosted Skylight Landscape: Paul Nash and David Prentice. I saw this exhibition long before I started work here at MAG and I was immediately impressed by its format. The exhibition explored the spatial and temporal relationship between two painters: modernist painter Paul Nash (1889 – 1946) and local Worcestershire artist David Prentice (1936 – 2014),* highlighting the impact the former’s work had on the latter. Focusing predominantly on the two artist’s works depicting the Malvern Hills, the exhibition celebrated the area’s greatest assets, which created local interest and made the exhibition very accessible to its audience.

Skylight Landscape: Paul Nash and David Prentice at Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery

While this in itself is an interesting subject for an exhibition, Skylight Landscape went further by drawing attention to twentieth-century landscape painting more generally by highlighting Nash’s war art and Prentice’s background in more hard-edged abstract painting. The art historical dialogue culminated in the real gem of the exhibition: a series of panels, photographs and letters that documented Prentice’s research into Nash’s paintings which lead him to discover the exact window from which Nash painted Skylight Landscape, explaining the previously mysterious geometry which bisects the piece (Prentice’s 1997 article chronicling this discovery in The Artist Magazine can be read online Here). This treasure not only highlighted the joys of art historical research, but also created an interesting temporal link between the two artists and added to our understanding of Nash’s work.

Skylight Landscape was accompanied by Barbarians: The Age of Iron, a collection of images and artefacts highlighting the ongoing efforts of archaeologists to understand the history of the hillforts of Malvern’s British Camp. The coupling of these two exhibitions expanded the impact of both shows, creating a dialogue about the timeless landscape that has been – and will continue to be – personally, intellectually and artistically important to local people for millennia.

Skylight Landscape: Paul Nash and David Prentice at Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery

The layering of dialogues achieved so naturally in these exhibitions was quite a feat, especially for small exhibitions. For me, these shows were an example of what can be achieved at regional institutions, so this week I was excited to start work on a 2016 exhibition of a similar format that will display the works of local artist, Bridget Macdonald, alongside paintings that have inspired her by Claude Lorain, Peter Paul Rubens, Samuel Palmer and their followers. In the upcoming exhibition, this format will allow us to open up a discussion about idealised landscapes and the intertextual nature of artistic production. Exciting stuff!

*Sadly, Prentice died on May 7th this year, just three days after the exhibition opened. But the show served as a fitting tribute to the artist’s work, his engagement in the arts and his great love of and skill for landscape painting.

Emalee Beddoes

Creating My First Mini Display

Over the past month at the Library I, Dee, have been putting together a small display on Worcester Cathedral Organists through the ages. With the help of the library volunteers, I am happy to say my mini exhibition is now complete, and can be found in the south nave aisle of Worcester Cathedral.

My display aims to uncover the lives and work of six Cathedral organists, who lived through some of the most tumultuous periods in English history. The display is made up of three glass cases. The first case focuses on organists of the monastic foundation, the second contains a Civil War organist and an organist of the Hanoverian era, and the final case includes a Victorian and an Edwardian organist. The display covers from 1468-1945 and, as you might expect when working with such a large time span, this posed a few challenges!

Challenges Faced

The size of the display cases placed restrictions on the amount of material I could use in the display. As time went on, I found it more feasible to concentrate on six rather than eight Cathedral organists. Daniel Boys (organist until the dissolution of Worcester’s Benedictine monastery in 1540) and Nathaniel Giles (1558-c.163) both sadly got the chop from the main body of the display. The extra space, however, allowed me to provide a fuller biography of the six organists who remained: Richard Green, John Hampton, Thomas Tomkins, Thomas Pitt, William Done and Sir Ivor Atkins.

A second challenge was balancing the amount of documentary sources with photographic / visual material and artefacts. For the organists of the monastic foundation, Richard Green and John Hampton, account rolls / books and deeds of appointment from the monastic registers made up the body of source material. To place a pile of pictures of account rolls and monastic registers in a case would have made for a rather colourless display with a lot of LONGGGG Latin-English transcriptions (bleurgh!!).

I think that I managed to make the case containing organists of the monastic foundation as visually enticing as the other two cases (in which there were portraits and artefacts . The documents used are often superimposed with text and they also include arrows which draw the reader’s eye to a particular section. With documents in Latin, its important (in the absence of a full transcription) to provide a lengthy enough caption so that readers not proficient in the language can ascertain the essence of the document.

Skills

Whilst this display had its challenges and limitations, it also provided a good basis for me to acquire some new skills. Photography was never my forte but now  I feel substantially more confident in photographing a range of material. I photographed documents and books, portraits, organ pipes, conductor’s batons and I even photographed photographs (if that makes any sense).
What’s next?

Now that I am happy with everything in the cases, I’m hoping to make a little comment card over the next day or two so that I can get some feedback on the display from members of the public. I have to start thinking about my larger summer exhibition (yikes), and to have a rough idea of what worked and what needs improvement from my current display will be a great starting point when I start to conceptualize the presentation of my larger exhibiton, which will use a much larger amount of source material.