About
The pilot of Street Museum took place in 2022, where items from Durham University’s vast collections were 3D scanned, printed and placed in living room windows across Blackhall - a former coalmining village in County Durham - creating a large outdoor exhibition.
Professional museum curators and community curators worked together to select the 25 objects that would make up the exhibition, responding to shared themes, value and whatever got them most excited!
‘Street Museum: Blackhall’ was a close partnership between Durham University, Blackhall Community Centre, East Durham Creates and Eleanor Mathieson, using a collaboration model that created equality across the different sized partners and allowed each to input their specialisms and expertise.
The Street Museum project is easy to describe, but it was developed over several years with the input of a great many people.
During the spring of 2020 Durham University’s museums and galleries had to close their doors (along with the rest the world) and had nowhere to share its own collections or the local art exhibition due to open.
Meanwhile, households were putting rainbows and other artworks in their windows to motivate themselves and passers-by on their single walk 1-hour of the day.
The Durham University team put 2 + 2 together and created... ‘Street Gallery’.
A freelance producer, Eleanor Mathieson, and East Durham Creates, a community arts organisation, came on board and suggested a potential location to launch the first Street Gallery exhibition: former mining village – Dawdon – best known for being a location for the 2000 movie Billy Elliot. Dawdon was not traditionally engaged with museums, galleries and collections and seemed a great place to trial the concept and to connect with new audiences.
Through a rapid collaboration (so common in 2020) across Durham University curators, Eleanor, East Durham Creates’ producers and staff at Dawdon Community Centre, 30 artworks were selected to be included in the outdoor exhibition. They were a combination of prints from the University’s Art Collection and original pieces created by local artists.
The team went door to door to recruit the 30 households across Dawdon. They were surprised at how receptive and excited residents were to host an artwork in their living room windows. Upon reflection, it is not at all surprising as people we starved of stimulation and variation in the long pandemic days. The project proved to be a great success.
Enthusiastic to continue the productive collaboration, the Street Gallery team successfully applied for the Museum Association and UKRI’s new Digital Innovation and Engagement Fund. Durham University’s excellent Museum Learning Team are passionate about how handling 3D objects produces a more tangible connection for people to history and heritage.
Thus the Street Museum idea was born.
Instead of 2D artworks we would 3D scan and print physical objects from our collections. And with more resource and time we designed a much more integrated co-curation plan.
Blackhall became the location for the Street Museum pilot, and the team at Blackhall Community Centre had the expertise and experience to shape the project to be attractive to the people in the village and add benefit to their daily lives.
Through a 7-month long programme of fun engagement events, the partners and the community participants were able to learn about the project, the collections and each other, discovering where they could best pitch in.
The project was purposefully set up to be responsive and pivot easily, and pivot it did (many times!) as the team reacted to new ideas, emerging themes, and the needs of the community.
