The art and science of being a young museum professional

This is a cross-posted contribution that I was honoured to make to the University of Cambridge Museums' 'Art and Science of Curation' project ...

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In April, I gave two workshops on working in museums and heritage for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The idea was to get young professionals, whom the AHRC had funded for their PhD, to talk about the various sectors in which they now work. I spent time carefully planning how to get the students to think about the wide range of jobs available under the broad ‘museums and heritage’ umbrella, and how their skills learnt doing a PhD would help them to succeed in these. I wanted to stress that ‘PhD skills’ aren’t just the ability and stamina to do extensive research, but the whole myriad of abilities that you learn as a PhD student, from time and budget management, to networking, presentations and, above all, perseverance.

Both workshops were the same in terms of my planning and outline. We started with the students meeting and introducing each other's skills and experiences that they might use in a museum. Next, we talked about the many different types of venues encompassed by ‘museums and heritage’ and the many different types of job they might do therein. In both sessions, one of the first examples suggested was ‘curating’ and in both sessions almost immediately someone else said ‘What exactly does a curator do?’ I answered with the usual response of how it depends fundamentally on the size and style of the institution, and with the slightly glib suggestion of it varying from changing light bulbs to staging a blockbuster exhibition that also acts as cultural diplomacy.

But, since the workshops, and being asked to contribute to these discussions on the ‘art and science’ of curation, that seemingly simple question has given me pause. I started a PhD in 2010 knowing that I wanted to be a ‘curator’ and hoping that the skills and qualifications developed over those three years would help me to get there. I chose a collaborative project between a university and a museum, in the hope that it would help me develop precisely the breadth of skills I outlined at the start, requiring me to learn more and negotiate multiple institutions. I had spent the previous two years working a wonderful but unstable succession of short-term jobs in a range of museums, learning that I was either under or over-qualified for most (more permanent) jobs for which I applied.

Now, I can merit from a CV that shows time spent, either as temporary staff, freelance, intern or volunteer, at rather a lot of the national museums in London – the British Museum, Natural History Museum, National Gallery, V & A, National Maritime Museum, Wallace Collection – as well as university museums in Oxford and Cambridge – the Pitt Rivers Museum, Museum of the History of Science, Ashmolean, Whipple Museum of the History of Science. I can say that I’ve worked with every conceivable sort of exciting object, from coins, medals and banknotes, to furniture designs, to telescopes, to maiolica, to watercolours of leopards, or paintings of sunflowers. I can show that I’ve learnt about handling objects, cataloguing collections, surveying groups of objects across different institutions, researching small but fascinating archives, facilitating education events, and ‘assisting’ the public in the gallery space, with all the different responses that requires.

At the time, I yo-yo’d between joy that I had any kind of job, however small, in a museum, and terror at where the next rent payment was going to come from. There is endless talk in the museum sector about the problem of entry-level jobs, expectations of unpaid volunteer or internship work, and the paucity of opportunities in proportion to the hundreds of graduates from museum-studies or curating courses every year. In many ways I was incredibly lucky. I came from studying in an institution (Oxford) that helped to give you the confidence to mix in certain worlds, I had parents willing to help me struggle towards an uncertain goal, and I met wonderful more-senior museum professionals who gave me their time, expertise and support in trying to seize that next opportunity. Crucially, without them, I know I would not now be in a position to contribute to these discussions as a 'curator.'

So, my conclusion is that 'curating' is fundamentally as much about people as about objects, the ‘art’ of communication, if you like, as much as the ‘science’ of collections. I mean this in the broadest possible sense, and hopefully not superficially. Curating is about nurturing audiences and colleagues, as well as collections. One skill that you learn moving constantly between different collections and working environments, I hope, is to listen and respond quickly, to get a feel for the ethos and concerns of a museum, and for what different collections have to offer. Curators rarely stay in one museum for their entire career anymore, slowly building an intense specialism, but instead move with opportunities. This requires flexibility on all our parts, building different ranges of skills, and supporting the development and maintenance of these in others.

Crucial to much of these changing needs is, I think, the ever-advancing place of digital technologies in the cultural sector. The job of curating is changing rapidly as new tools allow collections and ideas to be shared more widely, as well as more quickly. Social media like Instagram, Facebook, and especially Twitter, allow museums to interact in a fundamentally different way with their audience, maintaining a range of conversations outside of the museum, but requiring constant attention. We are faced with the challenge of creating light-hearted relationships without falling into the trap of superficiality. Curating must, of course, remain rooted in the wonderful collections that are the reason we are here. We must continue to research them, but what digital technologies offer are the possibilities for making the objects available and visible to as many other interested people as possible.

What they also allow is for individuals to create and maintain an independent profile online, communicating from the space of authority created by their institution but also expressing their own views. You can't hide behind the bastion of your museum anymore, but you can also clearly exist as a more broadly-networked person. A career becomes more visibly part of a complex, connected life. I am currently embarking on the road of 'official' curatorship, extremely lucky to be employed as the Curator of Art, pre-1800 at Royal Museums Greenwich. As such, I write here from the position of a 'curator' but also as someone with a complex career history, who blogs and tweets (very much) my own views and concerns as 'Spoons on Trays.' Both of these are part of who I am and what I do, and constantly inform how I think about curating.

This is what it means to be a young professional in museums these days, to situate yourself within a broad network of museums, collections, colleagues and specialisms. We can no longer afford to operate in isolation, either as individuals or as institutions. Curating is not simply an art or a science, it's an endless conversation; a conversation that I think can only enrich how we think about and communicate our collections.