LGBT and Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

I’m Rob and I usually work in the Booking Office in the Royal Pavilion. At university I studied Fine Art and particularly enjoyed organising and setting up our exhibitions. I found it really interesting to see more of the behind the scenes work that goes on, as at the time I was mostly working on my own art practice. When this opportunity to work with Laura Waters on new interpretation and a trail for Brighton Museum & Art Gallery came up as part of the workforce development programme, I thought this would be a great time to broaden my knowledge of art from a more curatorial or research-based angle.

Between Laura, myself and Kelly (who also began working on the project through workforce development) we decided to theme the trail on the LGBT history of our collections then went on to select some artists or historical areas to research. Over the next couple of months we researched, photographed objects, filmed videos and typed up our text for the trail leaflet. I was not too happy that I woke up on the morning of the filming to discover I had a bad cold – so keep that in mind if you watch the videos on YouTube please!

A video screenshot of Kelly and I discussing Alexander McQueen

As a gay man myself I found researching the lives of others, especially those further back in history, really intriguing. It was fascinating to see how LGBT people lived in lots of different time periods and as part of very different societies to ours today. Originating from Nottingham, finding more out about the history of Brighton Pride and also Brighton’s gay past in general was great too.

Alexander McQueen was probably my favourite person to research though. I loved seeing all the images of his very elaborate and dramatic clothing designs as well as reading about his rather crazy catwalk shows. This part of his creative work was something I’d not known anything about until this project, and the descriptions of the theatricality, intensity and darkness to his shows make me wish I could have seen some of them in person. Glass cubes filled with moths, models in gas masks, huge shipwrecks – sounds pretty amazing to me!

As I write this our trail leaflet is being designed and printed and the videos are being prepared to go online. The trail opens at the start of May and I hope that it offers a new, alternative history of some of our collections to the visitors to the museum as well as other staff members. Kelly and I will also be working with Ellie Newland on organising the Out Late event in July, linked to both this trail and Brighton Pride. It should be a whole lot of fun and hopefully I will see you there!

Robert White

Chilled to the Bone

How many ice ages have there been in Earth’s past? Would you expect Britain to be hot or cold during an ice age? And just how big is a mammoth or a cave bear? With our latest exhibition – Chilled to the Bone – at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery we answer these questions and more.

The exhibition came about through a desire to show more of our archaeological collections as well as presenting some of our natural history collections held at the Booth to a wider audience in the centre of town. A new gallery called the Spotlight Gallery has been built on the upper floor of the Brighton Museum in the area previously occupied by the Body Gallery. This space has been designed to be a flexible space with large scale display cabinets suitable for a wide variety of collections, and used to showcase objects from the Brighton Museum collections.

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An initial plan for a Piltdown Man exhibition to tie in with the 100^th anniversary of the hoax was discounted due to a lack of material and a clash with a similar exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London. The idea was expanded to include an exhibition on ice ages throughout Earth’s history and on the archaeological discoveries resulting from a Victorian desire to learn more about these stages in our planet’s past, and how humans evolved. This Victorian ‘Bone Rush’ would also include the Piltdown fraud as one of the major events of Sussex archaeology. The exhibition also focuses particularly on the environment of Sussex during the most recent ice age, as well as Sussex archaeology and the search for human origins.

The design and construction of the exhibition was carried out by a small team working with a very limited budget. An additional challenge was that for much of the design stage of the exhibition, the cases were yet to be built. So mock ups were laid out in order to get a general idea of the look of each case and how well things fitted into the space.

The layout of the gallery is such that it was required to be as non-linear as possible as visitors can enter from three different directions, negating a start and end point. As such the intro panel is repeated at both ends of the gallery and each cabinet is built around a theme which should not require the visitor to have read text in a different cabinet before hand.

A welcome addition was an interactive program developed as part of a separate digital project. ‘Chilled to the Bone’ worked as a suitable test bed for the quiz program and allowed us to have a large scale projection and digital interactive that was otherwise out of our budget. The AV section sits alongside an activity wall and handling object to provide an uncluttered and entertaining ‘hands on’ area.

Huge thanks to everyone who worked on the design and installation of the gallery.

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences

Caribous, Canada and the Meaning of Life

Following Brighton Writer Squad‘s visit to Brighton Museum, the young writers were asked to write a piece in response to an object (and another piece in response to a costume).

Jad Stacey (13) wrote a response to the caribou fur in the World Stories: Young Voices Gallery,

There was a Caribou. If you don’t know what a Caribou is, its effectively a Reindeer, but from North America. One day, as the Caribou cariboued across the tundra, a thought came into its head. Now, Caribou’s aren’t really known for being the most intelligent of animals, so this was quite a rare occurrence, especially because of what it was thinking. It was thinking, “What is the meaning of life?” Now, that is quite a question. A question that has been asked quite a bit, with many different answers. But all these philosophers, poets and Pythons in the past had been biased or already had expectations or further still, were being silly. But this Caribou, this furry Canadian reindeer had a far clearer perspective on the matter. But it didn’t have the foggiest idea where to start. Should the it start with the things in its life that it enjoys? Or the things that it wishes to do in life? Or further still should it start with the things that great people do? Then it realised that it was a Caribou, didn’t know about any great people and had no real goals in life.

It then realised that the reason why it had no goals in life was because it had achieved them all. It had lived a long life (for a Caribou), had continued its bloodline and had figured out how life began (you don’t want to know that, its boring). So was that it, achieving your goals? Was that the meaning of life? It was a bit broad and vague but it seemed to fit it so much. Putting “achieving your goals” to another side for know, The Caribou mentally flicked through the other options. To find love? Perhaps, but some creatures feel no need for love. To be happy seemed far too close to achieve your goals and most of its ideas branched onto the “be happy, achieve your goals, be good” train of thought. So maybe that is it? Love peace and happiness? And so The Caribou thought long and hard for many days and nights and at the end of this long, hard thought it came to the answer, Upon discovering the meaning of life it achieved the meaning and was happy.
Then a madman with a shotgun ran at it and shot it, dead.

                                                                     The End.