Introduction: Co-production in regional collections
The essays in this volume explore and reflect on practices of co-production in public museums and art galleries across the Midlands. Through a series of case-studies and position pieces from curators, learning officers, and researchers, we show here that co-production is not a set of fixed or clearly defined practices, rather that it is varied and multi-faceted.
- Sophie Hatchwell and Gregory Salter
Co-production stands as an umbrella term for the different ways in which curation, collections research, interpretation, and engagement can be developed through dialogue and collaboration between museums and their many publics. It has the potential to destabilise the traditional hierarchies inherent to museums and art galleries – through co-production, knowledge is not simply transmitted to audiences by the institution, but mutually created. At the same time, pre-existing power dynamics and structural issues around access pose challenges for open dialogue and collaboration. We argue then, that for co-production to be effective, it needs to be underpinned by values of openness, trust, and care.
Two overarching questions have shaped our exploration of co-production. First, how can co-production be used as a method for interpreting artworks, and what role can art history and art historians play in facilitating this process? And second, how has the regional context of the Midlands shaped practices of co-production? The contributions in this volume indicate that co-production takes a range of forms at different moments and in different local contexts. It is being used to diversify and multiply the voices and experiences at the heart of museums and art galleries, to add nuance and document the complexities of local identities, and to offer agency to audiences. Co-production, at its best, folds museums and their publics into relationships of dialogue, exchange, and care. At the same time, as our contributors show, the success of all of this is very much dependent on establishing ongoing, trusting relationships with community co-producers, and on further improving access to collections and their histories.
While the focus of this volume is on museums and galleries in the Midlands, we hope it will resonate with practitioners working in other contexts, given that co-production has become a fundamental element of gallery practice across the UK. Funding for museums, art galleries, and art engagement projects more broadly now commonly require an aspect of community engagement, as well as a commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion. [1] These sector-wide requirements are accompanied by a genuine desire from gallery workers and their audiences to expand the voices that can be represented and heard in such institutions. In the short term, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 have made the turn towards co-production and the embedding of practices of care in museums and art galleries ever more urgent, as a means to connect with audiences who have endured isolation and loss and to begin to reckon with longer histories of racism. However, museums and art galleries in the Midlands have been engaged with co-production over the much longer term, as austerity-driven policies have encouraged museums and galleries to adapt how they work with communities who have experienced a withdrawal of many other social and cultural provisions.
From within this challenging context then, the following essays present a pragmatic approach to co-production, as our contributors seek to grow and broaden the range of audiences who visit and engage with museums and art galleries, while moving towards models of practice that are rooted in forms of care and mutual benefit. The aim of this issue is not to quantify the ultimate ‘success’ of co-production, but to take a critical and reflective look at the processes galleries are using, to understand how these processes relate to the challenges that institutions are seeking to overcome, and to identify the hurdles and attendant solutions that emerge in the process. Museum studies scholar Nuala Morse has suggested we are seeing a shift from the question of ‘what can the community do for the museum?’ to ‘what can the museum do for the community?’. [2] We are interested here in a further question: what can the museum and community achieve together?
Notes
[1] For example, Arts Council funding: Arts Council drives towards community engagement are detailed here: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/creative-people-and-places-0/learning-creative-people-and-places [accessed Feb 2024].
[2] Nuala Morse, Museum as a Space of Social Care, (London, 2021), p.188.