Reimagining how we display Victorian art
Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites
The British Empire is an important historical context for the emergence and reception of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Victorian art. With support from the University’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, Dr Kate Nicholls, Associate Professor in Art History, co-led a research project that is influencing how Victorian art is interpreted and displayed.
Museums and galleries across the UK are actively exploring new ways of ‘decolonising’ their interpretation and display of Victorian art in a manner befitting a modern museum and its diverse audiences. ‘Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites: Decolonising Victorian Art and Design’, a collaborative project between the University of Birmingham, University of Exeter, and Birmingham Museums Trust through the British Art Network, examined the relationship between Victorian art, race, and empire. With support from the University of Birmingham’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, the project has created helpful tools to spark much-needed conversations about how presentation of such art can reveal, or conceal, imperial histories.
A global history of Birmingham
Birmingham is the ideal home for this work. The city holds one of the most significant and largest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world. Birmingham’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, managed by Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT), comprises over 3000 objects across a wide range of media – paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints, books, and decorative art. Birmingham’s global historical context is also rooted in the British Empire. That history includes all Birmingham communities, from the 19th century working classes whose manual labour powered the city’s industries, to recent migrants from Commonwealth countries.
Between 2021 and 2023, the University of Birmingham’s Kate Nichols (Associate Professor in Art History) co-led the project along with Dr Sabrina Rahman (University of Exeter) and Victoria Osborne (Senior Curator [Art], BMT). They worked with a network of over 100 UK and international museum professionals, academics, and artists to explore best practice, using Birmingham’s rich collections as a starting point to facilitate wider conversations about how Pre-Raphaelite and other Victorian arts and craft material might be interpreted in a more global context. This has also created a rare opportunity to bring all these people together – with a diverse range of experience – to reconceptualise how collections can be displayed to address more contentious issues these works can raise.
The project has been timely, helping to inform the display of the ‘Victorian Radicals’ exhibition upon its return to Birmingham after a US tour and coinciding with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG)’s preparations for phased reopening following extensive refurbishment.
An essential foundation for museum professionals
Between December 2020 and June 2023, the network held 10 workshops to explore the three key research questions:
- How can we rethink Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts objects through the lenses of antiracism and decoloniality?
- How can contemporary museum practitioners interpret and engage audiences with these complex and difficult histories of art and design; what challenges and opportunities do they offer?
- How are contemporary artists and designers of colour engaging with these 19th century objects?
Following the workshops, the group developed a resource pack for museum professionals. Launched at the Museums Association Annual Conference in November 2023, the resources provide an essential foundation to support museum professionals with barriers they face in addressing these topics while also enabling those who were not able to participate in the network activities at the time to benefit from its findings. It includes case studies on reframing Victorian collections, working with contemporary artists, and approaches to display and interpretation.
During the workshops, museum professionals spoke of a lack of confidence in tackling these topics, or simply did not know where or how to start. Many work at under-resourced local authority-funded museums, where there is little capacity to undertake research on the complex histories of empire and race needed to underpin such re-evaluations, or to explore alternate modes of interpretation and display.
A legacy for re-thinking and re-framing art and history
The resource pack is already proving successful and, aided by the collaborative nature of the workshop process, it has already informed curatorial practice at network members’ institutions, including Tate Britain, the De Morgan Museum, and Glasgow Life Museums.
Unsurprisingly, BMT has also benefited directly from the project. The group’s research has already informed acquisitions for the city’s collection and shaped a section within the Victorian Radicals exhibition in Birmingham testing novel approaches to displaying and interpreting the Pre-Raphaelites. It also underpins plans for future showings of these collections in the Museum & Art Gallery, which will include a display placing Victorian art and design objects in a global context.
The group’s research network activity provided unprecedented opportunities to rethink and reframe these collections of art and design and to build on BMT’s ongoing commitment to examining its collections through the lenses of anti-racism and decoloniality.
The research underpinning Nichols’ contribution to the project will be published in Dr Nichols’ new book, A Global History of Victorian Painting, set to be published in 2026, which will explore the mobility of Victorian paintings in the context of British Imperialism. The relationship between Dr Nichols and BMT has continued beyond the funded lifespan of the network. In September 2023 and March 2024 Dr Nichols was ‘researcher in residence’ at BMT, undertaking new research on objects selected by curators.
The resources and new understanding developed as part of the project will continue to shape how museum and galleries (re-)interpret their collections in the UK and internationally, influencing how we understand Victorian art in a global context.