Commissioning Artists: Community Engagement, Ethnographic Collections, and Changes in Curatorial Practices from the 1990s to 2000s in the UK

Abstract

The commissioning of artists, makers and communities to respond to collections is an important curatorial strategy used by many national and regional museums and galleries. The display of commissioned work within the ethnographic collections at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and Manchester Museum are focused upon in this investigation. They are presented as examples of regional museums in England responding to the authority of the New Labour government’s cultural policies. The role these commissioned pieces play is discussed in relation to shifts in curatorial practices; the influence of New Labour’s cultural diversity agenda on this activity; the emphasis placed on the visibility of community engagement; and the issues surrounding the framing of these museum commissions as ‘authentic’.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.