Co-production at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

Marguerite Nugent, Cultural Director at Culture Coventry Trust (CV Life)
Lisa Ford, Head of Learning and Engagement
Rosie Addenbrooke, Head of Exhibitions and Events

Collection: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry

Keywords: Community, City of Culture, Turner Prize, Collecting, Digital Skills

The Coventry City of Culture 2021 programme led the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum to invest in a community engagement team, who developed our co-production model. This has led to several exciting projects that have enabled us to deepen our relationships with different community groups and animate our gallery spaces. Three of these projects will be explored in this article. Through our work, we offer visitors a fresh perspective on the story of Coventry, engaging meaningfully with our communities with the objective of improving lives through targeted programmes and interventions both within our venues and in neighbourhoods. [1]

We have two Community Engagement Officers who take our work out into the city, but we also want to ensure that local people feel welcome in our buildings. The long-term ambition is that the Herbert becomes a cultural hub at the heart of the city, alongside our Cathedral Quarter neighbours: Coventry University, St Mary’s Guildhall, and the iconic Coventry Cathedral. Hosting the Turner Prize as part of the City of Culture 2021, and the arrival of Dippy the diplodocus on loan from the Natural History Museum for three years, has provided huge potential to develop new audiences. Building on this, we have been expanding our work with community groups, enabling them to feel a sense of ownership of the museum, to see it as a place where they can contribute to a vibrant programme, but also somewhere that they can just ‘be’. Most of all we want local people to help shape our future.

Marguerite Nugent, Cultural Director at Culture Coventry Trust

Q:How have you used co-production within recent art exhibitions?

Lisa Ford (LF): A good example is the 2021 Turner Prize exhibition. For this, the content was pre-determined, so it wasn’t about the exhibition itself having a co-production element, but rather how we could use co-production to get communities and individuals to engage with the exhibition. The Turner prize is huge but not many people understand what it is about, so, as a starting point, we invited various community groups and organisations in the area to a VIP tour. It was a great way of reaching out to people in a relaxed and informal manner. Through this, we were able to establish new relationships, where we could reach out to people again to find out how they might want to connect with us in the future.

As part of our exhibition programme, we created the Coventry Banner project, which was inspired by Array Collective’s Turner Prize entry [fig. 1]. [2] Array used banners in their installation and that inspired our project, where people of Coventry could create their own banners and use them to say whatever they wanted. It wasn't about inspiring high-end art, it was a real mixture of both talent and voices: some of the banners were simple, some were made by very young children, and others featured exquisite embroidery or magnificent paintings [fig. 2]. Word of mouth spread about the project, and we started getting banners from people we’d not previously connected with. We had hoped for fifty banners, but we ended up with over two hundred and eighty. The final display took over one of the biggest spaces in the museum and I think that it was the most powerful part of the programme, because it gave people a platform to share their voice.

Fig.1 Installation view of Array Collective’s The Druthaib's Ball from the 2021 Turner Prize at the Herbert, 2021, photograph by Garry Jones. © the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery

Rosie Addenbrooke (RA): The Banner project was also inspired by another Turner Prize entry: Project Art Works. [3] This collective’s work, which is produced by and alongside neurodivergent artists, was very much about amplifying voices. I feel like that's a thread going through our projects: it's about amplifying the voices of people that don't feel very heard. One of the things that I noticed with the Banner project was that there was this outpouring of experiences from people who'd been impacted by the pandemic and by lockdown, because this project was taking place a year or so after. There was a sense of people expressing how lonely they'd been, and how this was an opportunity to share experiences. That was something that we hadn't really anticipated would come out of the Banner project.

We were also influenced by the way Project Art Works set their exhibition up as a dynamic space – including a studio space where an artist could sit and work whilst also speaking to visitors – basically animating an exhibition space.

LF: We carried through the same ideas into the Community Flags project, which came out of the 2023 Divided Selves exhibition [fig 3]. [4] This was a much smaller scale co-production project, largely due to display logistics at the time, but it continued the relationships we had built up with community groups. This time we worked with just four groups and built the project over a longer period, running sessions in their meeting spaces and inviting them to the museum to create art in the space. One thing we learned from the Banner Project is that some of these groups need a safe space where they can be creative, have access to resources, or just have someone to help them realise their vision.

RA: The Flags project, in a similar way to the Banner project’s link with Array Collective, went back to an artwork in the Divided Selves exhibition; a work by Larry Achiampong, Pan African Flag for the Relic Travellers Alliance (2017) [Fig. 4]. So, in both instances it was about starting with an artwork, or a series of artworks, and then using that as the inspiration for co-production.

LF: Both the Flags and Banner projects really brought to light the importance of having welcoming spaces within the museum – tables and chairs that are signposted to say people can use them. Sometimes you get gallery visitors sitting there and resting for a few moments and other times groups use these spaces, either because they haven't got their own space where they can meet with their peers, or because they've recently lost access to spaces that they have had.

RA: Another thing we learned was that there doesn’t always need to be an intended output. People want to come together and share ideas and experiences and that's something we can facilitate.

Fig.2 Community groups working on The Banner Project at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery. © Lisa Ford

Q:You are working on a new project, Collecting Coventry. How will you use co-production in this?

RA: We are currently questioning what our collections and exhibitions represent going forward. We're keen to find out what our visitors think a museum in the twenty-first century should be like, what the collections should be, and what we should be representing. All these different strands are coming through the Collecting Coventry project. It's a time for us to reflect, but also to include other people's views, so that we remain relevant and we're able to represent the people of Coventry.

LF: Museum collections have so much history associated with them, we often hear from groups who feel ‘it's not a place for me’ and that's what we really want to change. The museum belongs to them – they are the people of Coventry, and we want them to feel ownership over it. With Collecting Coventry we want to ask people ‘What would you put in the museum?’ ‘What would represent your story?’ We do this through a lot of our interpretation anyway, but Collecting Coventry is an opportunity to expand on this.

RA: We’re using two separate co-production approaches in this project. We’re hoping to involve some groups right from the start, drawing on the connections we built up through the Banner and Flags projects. These groups will be involved in selecting objects for an exhibition and creating some interpretation for them. Then our second approach will happen during the exhibition: we’re hoping to engage with new groups, particularly young people. There are some people that we've brought with us, and we're about to start working with new sets of people. We don't know what ideas are going to come out of that; it may result in something that we can display as part of Collecting Coventry , or it might result in something else that's got nothing to do with this project and becomes something that we pick up further down the line. I think we've reached a point where we thought, we're happy to see where the journey takes us.

LF: For Collecting Coventry, we’re hoping that the people we work with will also be able to provide objects from their own lives and communities that will help provide a more rounded history of Coventry. This might also help inform what types of objects we should be collecting in the future. There is still a lot of unknown because we don't want to dictate exactly what or when things are going to happen. I think that's an important thing for co-production. Having an envisaged end-product doesn't work because the other people on the journey might have completely different ideas.

Fig. 3 The Flags Project on display at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery. © Lisa Ford

Q:What do you hope participants will gain from co-producing with you?

LF: One example is how we are opening up our digital platform to young people, because that's what they're accessing. We are currently developing a supported internship programme for a digital content creator who will use the collections as a basis for developing digital content, in order to appeal to and reach their peers through online platforms. This can have such a wide reach, but it's also very open ended. We want young people to be at the heart of how our digital offering looks. This is about giving people a platform; for young people, it’s also about employability.

This also relates to how we engage people who are new to the city. Our Community Engagement Coordinator is working closely with the council's migration team, as well as with smaller organisations who are supporting refugees and migrants that are new to the city. The aim is to improve well-being but also to help them get up-skilled and develop their CV.

In both cases, we know it's hard to enter the arts and culture sector: there's not many opportunities, so this is about giving people a foot in the door. They might go on to work outside of the museum sector, but we hope working with us will give them some valuable experience in a caring, nurturing environment that will support their wider well-being and also embed them in the city they now call home.

Fig. 4 An Installation view of by Larry Achiampong’s Pan African Flag for the Relic Travellers Alliance, (2017) on show in the Divided Selves exhibition at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in 2023, photograph by Garry Jones. © the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery

Q:What does co-production look like to you?

LF: For me it's about finding mutual benefits for both parties. We never want to work with a group just to meet our own needs. I think it's important to keep having conversations throughout that focus on what you both hope to gain from the project.

RA: I think it's about not having a set idea about what the end project will be. We have the resources to start conversations and create opportunities for people, and we need to be open to any output that comes out of this.

LF: I also want to add that we're still learning. We are not leaders in the world of co-production, and I don't know if anybody ever will be, because co-production should always be a journey to learn more. We're learning lots of things as we go along, and we want to continue to do that.

Notes

[1] We are part of Culture Coventry Trust and, since 2021, a part of the wider organisation CV Life, which focuses on the impact that culture, sport, and other services can have on the lives of individuals, families, neighbourhoods, and communities.

[2] More information on the Array Collective can be found on their website; Array Collective, http://arraystudiosbelfast.com/array-collective.html, [accessed February 2024]

[3] More information on project art works can be found on their website; project art works, https://projectartworks.org/, [accessed February 2024]

[4] Divided Selves: Legacies, Memories, Belonging, Exhibition at Herbert Museum and Art Gallery, 18th February - 24 September 2023, https://www.theherbert.org/whats-on/1711/divided-selves-legacies-memories-belonging [accessed February 2024]