Curated Conversations Presents: Postwar Museum Storage

Join Johns Hopkins’ Professor Rebecca M. Brown (Department of the History of Art) as she moderates the next installment of Curated Conversations: Shelving the Empire: Performative Change in Postwar Museum Storage.

Brown will host Dr. Claire Wintle, Director of the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton, UK, who will explore the dire state of museum storage in post-war Britain, and the strategies museum practitioners used to meet challenges, including the relationship between collections care, professionalization, moves for cultural and political freedom, and imperial entrenchment.

While museum storage has historically remained a key site for performative change and bound up with disciplinary and professional traditions that seek to control, there is a pressing need for transparency and openness of museum storage in the present moment. Museums across the globe are working to revolutionize public access to their storehouses, aiming to transform them into sites of creativity and community engagement. Museum storage is increasingly on open display, and at the heart of debates around culturally appropriate collections care and restitution. But questions of accessibility, method, and the very validity of museum storage itself have long been at the heart of museum practice. What might be next for museum storage today?

Dr. Claire Wintle teaches museum studies and art history at the University of Brighton, UK, and directs the Centre for Design History. She is author of Colonial Collecting and Display (Berghahn, 2013), Cultures of Decolonization (edited with Craggs, 2016), and Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum (edited with Guy and Williams, 2024). Her current research on museum professionalization in post-war Britain is funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Reception to follow.

Event Location:
Hodson Hall 110
Homewood Campus

This event is co-hosted by the Department of the History of Art and Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Program’s MA in Museum Studies and MA in Cultural Heritage Management graduate degree programs.

Co-sponsored with Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Program in Museums & Society, Global South Humanities Institute, Department of History of Science and Technology, Department of Anthropology, The Baltimore Museum of Art.