Curating art at the Science Museum
Curating with Courtauld colleagues during the pandemic © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
Four and a half years thinking about art at the Science Museum requires some reflections to mark the end of an era. As with all museums, it is the collections and colleagues that have made this such a rich and rewarding experience.
I’ve been lucky to work on a wide range of projects, from co-authoring a book on images of the Sun, to co-leading an international conference on ‘Representing the Medical Body’. I worked with an inspiring range of artists, on the five new commissions for Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries, and on the ongoing Science Fictions project with Bedwyr Williams at the Science Museum Group’s National Collections Centre.
I loved collaborating with the Courtauld Gallery’s ‘Illuminating Objects’ programme to display a series of their decorative art objects from a science perspective, three at the Science Museum and the last at the reopened Courtauld; or working with a multitude of colleagues at the museum and Google Arts & Culture to digitise our works on paper and coins, medals & tokens collections. I learned so much working with ArtUK to digitise and share our varied sculpture collections.
Perhaps top of my list is co-curating the exhibition The Art of Innovation: from enlightenment to dark matter alongside a book and BBC Radio 4 series. We had the chance to bring the SMG collections together with some unparalleled loans to investigate a series of stories of art and science in dialogue.
Research for The Art of Innovation also helped inform what I hope is my greatest legacy at SMG. Working with colleagues across our five museums, we produced a series of documents to support staff across the group working with art and artists, both practically and conceptually. This includes a Framework of simple ‘What, Why, Where, Who, How’s’ questions.
The Why? is, of course, the most challenging but also nicely encapsulates why I think art adds so much to a science museum, ideas which will continue to guide me in my next venture at Parliament. So, why have art in a science museum?
Art can help people to look at science differently, looking for meanings and references that might need decoding.
Art can demonstrate how science is cultural. The arts encourage visitors to look for historical contexts and understand where science fits.
Artists challenge and question science. Art and artists open possibilities and explore complexities. They help to challenge visitors’ assumptions.
Art and science are in every part of our lives. Breaking down artificial divisions in the museum helps visitors to see their lived connections.
Science asks different questions of the arts, a unique offer for art in a science museum context. We bring those questions to our visitors in unexpected ways.
I offer these as reflection, provocation, perhaps valediction, as I handover to the next curator.