Cultural sector on agenda for Museums Australasia Conference

Cultural sector’s future on the agenda for inaugural Museums Australasia Conference

Forget matching museum programmes to the school curriculum and focus instead on inspiring curiosity in kids and teaching critical thinking.

That’s one of the ideas from a keynote speaker at this week’s MA16 Museums Australasia Conference in Auckland.

Museums Aotearoa Executive Director Phillipa Tocker says MA16 – the first joint conference with Museums Australia – has brought together experts from around the world to share ideas about what is working well in the cultural sector and to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.

“To collect, preserve and protect will always be at the core of what we do but the way we make our content available and the way we interact with our communities is evolving all the time.”

Tocker says advances in technology continue to be adopted to create new and exciting experiences in our museums and galleries but, interestingly, personal interactions and community involvement in exhibitions have been at the centre of some of the most innovative recent programmes.

“We have seen some very original and successful public programmes in the past year that have centred on a hands-on, community-driven approach where the museum or gallery is inviting the public in as a co-curator and asking people to bring their own ideas to the space,” says Tocker.

MA16 keynote speaker Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of American Association of Museums program and Center for the Future of Museums, says the future of the sector should be about building on its strengths and examining and challenging traditional thinking that may no longer be relevant.

For example, Merritt says, museums are very good at ‘informal learning’ which teaches the sorts of skills that are increasingly recognised as vital for our future workforce, such as curiosity, critical thinking and how to work collaboratively.

“Constraints of funding and politics and tradition, and a focus on tests and facts, make it hard for schools to teach these skills but [museums] can knock it out of the park,” says Merritt.

For that reason, museums shouldn’t get too caught up on matching their school programmes to the national curriculum, says Merritt, and instead should use their content and collections to get kids curious, encourage them to ask questions and ‘learn how to learn’.

Merritt says another consideration for the future has to be how museums connect with audiences beyond their walls and share their content more broadly, something made much easier by technology and the option to digitise content and share it online.

Some of the bolder statements from the opening day of the conference, being shared via #MA16 on Twitter, have included keynote Robert Janes’ request for museums to “move beyond neutrality to help address climate change” and Moana Jackson’s comments that museums are dangerous if they fail to tell indigenous stories.

Other MA16 keynote speakers include Dr Dawn Casey, former director of the National Museum of Australia and the Western Australian and Powerhouse Museums, Boon Hui Tan, the former director of the Singapore Art Museum and now Director of the Asian Society Museum in New York, and Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou) co-founder and director of Ngā Kaiwhakamarama i Ngā Ture the Māori Legal Service, and David Garneau Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, Canada, who is part of a five-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded curatorial research project “Creative Conciliation”.

Another challenge likely to be debated at MA16 is looming cuts to funding – in a sector already operating with typically tight budgets. A decline in revenue for the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board means Creative New Zealand will have less to share with the sector and it has warned applicants to budget for a 10% drop in funding.

“Funding is a critical issue right now,” says Tocker. “Museums and galleries in this country rely to a huge extent on lotteries grants, philanthropic funding, and all those other sorts of funding which are not public core government funding.”

Tocker says the nature of funding in New Zealand makes it very hard to plan.

“It’s a huge challenge when the funding is not constant or reliable and when it’s dependent on things like lotteries income where the drivers for that are completely outside the cultural sector.”

Despite the tight budgets Tocker says New Zealand can be very proud of the quality of the exhibitions and programmes on offer around the country. The best of the best will be announced at this year’s New Zealand Museum Awards later this week.

MA16, the Museums Australasia 2016 conference, is running in Auckland from 16-18 May. It is the first joint conference of Museums Aotearoa and Museums Australia and the theme is Facing the Future: Local, Global and Pacific Possibilities. http://ma16.org.nz/ #MA16

The winners of the ServiceIQ 2016 New Zealand Museum Awards will be announced in Auckland on Wednesday 18 May 2016.

Museums Aotearoa
Museums Aotearoa is New Zealand's professional association for public museums and art galleries, and those who work in or with them. New Zealand museums and galleries care for more than 40 million items relating to our history and contribute to our national identity. Generating in excess of 1000 public exhibitions and publications and attracting over 8 million visits each year, museums and galleries are a top attraction for New Zealand's overseas visitors.

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