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Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objectsare all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of BeninCity, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
Museum and Gallery Publishing examines the theory and practice of general and scholarly publishing associated with museum and art gallery collections. Focusing on the production and reception of these texts, the book explains the relevance of publishing to the cultural, commercial and social contexts of collections and their institutions. Combining theory with case studies from around the world, Sarah Anne Hughes explores how, why and to what effect museums and galleries publish books. Covering a broad range of publishing formats and organisations, including heritage sites, libraries and temporary exhibitions, the book argues that the production and consumption of printed media within the co...
Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions abou...
The British Museum is the oldest publicly funded museum in the world. This volume tells the story of the collections, the buildings that house them, and the people who have administered and curated them since its foundation in 1753.
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object ...
Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico's national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.
Make your own 3D decorations with this brilliant board book of press-out ancient Egyptian ornaments!
Online activities present a unique challenge for museums as they harness the potential of digital technology for sustainable development, trust building, and representations of diversity. This volume offers a holistic picture of museum online activities that can serve as a starting point for cross-disciplinary discussion. It is a resource for museum staff, students, designers, and researchers working at the intersection of cultural institutions and digital technologies. The aim is to provide insight into the issues behind designing and implementing web pages and social media to serve the broadest range of museum stakeholders.
Reflections: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa brings together an extraordinary collection of work from the British Museum for the first time. The contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa is rich and vibrant. Whether living in their countries of birth or in diaspora, the featured artists are part of the globalised world of art. Here we see artists responding to and making work about their present, histories, traditions and cultures, reflecting on a part of the world that has experienced extraordinary change in living memory.The British Museum has been acquiring the work of Middle Eastern and North African artists since the 1980s, and the collection - principall...
A new exploration of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman, published to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum. The Venetian-born artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) is best known for his dramatic etchings of the architecture and antiquities of his adopted home city of Rome and for his extraordinary flights of spatial fancy, such as Le Carceri (“Prisons”). Published to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum, this volume explores Piranesi’s celebrated skill as a draftsman. While many studies are concerned with Piranesi’s activities as a printmaker, this beautifully illustrated book examines new dimensions of his art by focusing on his drawings. Curator and author Sarah Vowles establishes a clear relationship between his drawings and prints, discusses the involvement of studio hands in his late works, and examines how his style as a draftsman evolved. Piranesi Drawings reveals the quality and lasting impact of the pen and chalk studies by a remarkably talented draftsman, as demonstrated by the superb collection at the British Museum.