INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM DAY 2020: HIGHLIGHTS

Musings Abroad | Chloé Houde

This past May 18th was International Museum Day (IMD), which has been organized by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) every year since 1977. It serves as a way for museums and cultural institutions to participate in the yearly theme, engage with their audiences in various capacities, and raise awareness in regards to museums’ important social and cultural roles. This year’s theme was “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion,” which museums worldwide participated in with panels, discussions, events, and activities. Most organizations had the added challenge of participating in IMD while remaining closed, turning to various digital alternatives to celebrate the day and connect with the public. The ICOM website features an interactive world map with IMD initiatives that I spent quite some time exploring, noticing that the theme of “inclusion” was often interpreted as the inclusion of audiences and communities in museum activities. In this article, I wanted to share a few examples that I found noteworthy in the ways that organizations were able to interact with visitors at home and engage various communities in honour of International Museum Day.

ICOM's 2020 IMD poster (Source)

First up, ICOM partnered with Google Arts and Culture to create “Connected to Culture,” a digital toolkit to assist organizations with online programming. Moreover, in honour of IMD 2020, more than 80 museums from dozens of countries added stories and parts of their collections to Google Arts and Culture, including three new collections highlighting the history and culture of Uzbekistan. Not only does this platform allow cultural organizations to make their content accessible to worldwide audiences, joining over 2000 other organizations on the platform, the toolkit also allows smaller museums that lack resources to share their projects and collections. I think the greatest advantage for users is that it becomes easier to explore and discover different museums, all on one well-designed website.

Google Arts and Culture's IMD 2020 page (Source)

Other museums are taking the initiative to host digital content for the public. La Pedrera in Barcelona, Spain, is a house designed by Antoni Gaudí in the early 1900s that was turned into a museum. They feature a virtual tour of the building on their website. For IMD, they hosted a live tour on Instagram Live with one of their curators, allowing users to choose the part of the house that was to be toured in advance and answering questions live on May 18th. This live tour was a great way to involve the public in choosing what the curator would share and which part of the house would be explored, as well as allowing people from all over the world to participate (in Catalan, of course). The tour was posted on their Instagram and you don’t have to speak Catalan to see some beautiful architecture!

Sílvia Vilarroya, La Pedrera's curator of the permanent exhibition, giving a tour of one of the apartment's inside the house on Instagram on May 18, 2020 (Source)

The Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Sánchez (Juan Sánchez Municipal Museum of Fine Arts) in General Roca, Argentina, is a museum highlighting artists from the Patagonia region. For IMD, they hosted an activity on their Facebook page entitled “¿Crees que algo de tu casa podría estar en el Museo?”, which translates to “Do you think something in your house could be in the museum?” This virtual showcase encouraged local residents at home to interact by sharing their objects with the museum’s community. Through this activity, their Facebook page now features multiple works of art, old personal letters and correspondence, a 90-year old water pump, a crochet chicken, an ocarina, and old family photographs, among many other submissions from community members. These submissions show many historically-significant objects alongside objects with personal meanings of pride and love. Valuing personal and local history is an incredible way for museums to engage their public and have people participate in fostering ideas of local heritage, history, and culture.

IMD's interactive map, showing the initiative hosted by the Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Sánchez in General Roca, Argentina (Source)

In the United Arab Emirates, the Sharjah Museums Authority of the city of Sharjah invited young local artists, aged 16 to 25, to contribute their art to a digital exhibition entitled “Museums for Equality: Diversity in Times of Adversity.” The artworks were encouraged to correspond to IMD’s 2020 theme, “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion.” This initiative aimed to connect with the artistic community in UAE and highlight the importance of the arts during the pandemic, as well as continue to provide access to the museum for the public. Seventeen works of art were chosen for the exhibition, including digital art, paintings, photography, and poetry surrounding themes of the pandemic.

20 Seconds by Aisha Ghubar al Shamsi. Part of the Sharjah Museums "Diversity in Times of Adversity" online exhibition, these drawings were made using continuous lines to show the importance of everyone continuing to follow guidelines to end the global pandemic. Photo courtesy of Aisha Ghubar Al Shamsi and Sharjah Museums (Source)

These initiatives are just a few of the many activities that various communities worldwide engaged in for International Museum Day, showing how many cultural organizations were able to bring people together from a distance. The digital component of this year's activities allowed for even more global participation and sharing, which is what ICOM strives for in fostering an international museum community.