As Birmingham applauds the extraordinary success of the Commonwealth Games, Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah reflect on the role of museums in shaping the city’s future.
What a party it was. As the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games is packed away, the message is the same everywhere we go: Birmingham did a great job as host.
For nearly two weeks, over 6,000 athletes and millions of visitors, not to mention a global TV audience of billions, experienced a full Brummie welcome. The city became a party town, with a palpable festival atmosphere that spilled into parks, shopping centres, pubs and living rooms. So, what kind of story has the world taken away from its visit to Birmingham?
People were surprised at Birmingham’s massive regeneration and impressed with our youthful energy and down-to-earth personality. We have beautiful buildings and outstanding facilities; we are creative, dynamic and hungry for recognition. The city is rich in heritage and alive with change: the youngest and most diverse place to live in the UK, it is fizzing with onward momentum.
Planning for many years of radical answers
As newly appointed co-directors of Birmingham Museums Trust - England’s largest civic museums service - we feel Birmingham’s potential keenly. Against the backdrop of massive redevelopment, what does a civic museum really mean for the people it serves? We are asking ourselves radical questions, and planning for many years of radical answers.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s (BMAG) partial reopening last April allowed us a rare opportunity to test new ideas and reflect on our thinking. Our current exhibitions are Birmingham-focused, elevating everyday people’s stories, developed by and with the people of the city and the wider world.
We wanted to focus on Birmingham’s identities because currently these are missing from so many of our galleries and museums, and what better time to shout about our story than when visitors were flocking to the city in their millions from across the UK and wider Commonwealth?
World cultures are not ‘other’
Blacklash, curated by Birmingham-based artist Mukhtar Dar, examines the city’s anti-racist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, in a vital exhibition that feeds directly into the urgent conversations taking place in the wake of Black Lives Matter.
This moment also gives an opportunity to take a new look at our massive collection of objects from around the globe. Maori artists Rosanna Raymond and Jaimie Waititi worked with us from New Zealand, via Zoom, to curate the Healing Gardens of Bab display - co-created with Fierce - which focuses on gender and sexuality with artefacts from the Pacific region.
Ten years ago, an exhibition of this nature would have been impossible, but now we are shifting away from viewing world cultures with an anthropological lens, seeing them as ‘other’, and instead highlighting living, breathing, creative and contemporary artistic voices.
The exhibition amplifies the strong LGBTQIA+ voice in the city that we witnessed during the Games, foregrounding the issues of gay rights around the Commonwealth.
Major ambitions
This autumn, BMAG will shut its doors again to continue vital electrical work before re-opening in 2024. During that time, we have major ambitions to work towards.
We know that structural inequality is thwarting Birmingham's potential. The city has high levels of deprivation, with over 41% of people living in the most deprived neighbourhoods in England. 42% of the population are of Black, Asian or minority ethnic heritage. Half the population are under the age of 30 and nearly a fifth have some form of disability.
Our challenge is to rethink Birmingham Museums Trust so that it reflects the city back to itself, with all its vibrant, creative, multicultural, self-deprecating Brummie-ness, and contribute to create a better cultural, social and economic future for all.
Our ambition is to develop programmes that attract wide audiences, which means appealing to people who have not visited, or would not normally consider visiting, a museum. We’ll be taking the strong sense of cultural citizenship and civic pride that we saw during the Games to invite the people of Birmingham to re-make their museum service collaboratively.
We plan to shift away from running a ‘core’ programme for traditional museum audiences. Instead, we see a future where audiences and communities – traditional and new - all play a role in shaping Birmingham Museums, where the stories and characters of the people and city are unearthed, explored and debated.
Two sets of shoulders
As with our current displays, we will show well-known aspects of the city’s heritage, from many different perspectives. We will connect the local with the global and tell previously untold stories in rich and accessible ways.
Through partnerships with individuals, families, groups and organisations, we will harness all the people’s connections, heritage and creativity to tell stories that have real meaning for both long-established and more recent citizens. Part of that change begins with how we, as a Trust, organise ourselves. As far as we are aware, we are the only co-leaders of a major museum trust anywhere in the world, and certainly the only Black and Asian co-leaders.
We applied for the CEO role on the condition that it would be as a job share. Our reasons were many, but top of the list was to share the sheer graft that comes from running a large organisation: two sets of shoulders can take more weight than one.
Zak has a commercial background, while Sara’s interests lie in engagement and curation, so our skills are complementary. With both of us working three days a week, we have space to have a life outside of work, for family and for our personal practice. We are certain that this joint, flexible approach leads to better leadership. More than this, it sets the tone for an organisational culture that is open, equitable and reflective of the city it serves.
Birmingham Museums Trust is more than a collection of buildings and objects. Our role is not only that of a guardian of a world-class collection, but of an active contributor to social change; forging links between past, present and future in ways that inspire creativity, hope and trust.
Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah are Joint Chief Executive Officers of Birmingham Museums Trust.
www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag
@BM_AG | @waji35 | @zakmensah
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