Cultural venues make ideal locations for media-savvy campaigners to stage their protests. Geraldine Kendall Adams examines the challenges this presents for museums .
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Earlier this month, a crowd of around 100 people from the activist group Extinction Rebellion lay down “dead” in Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, around the visiting skeleton of Dippy the diplodocus, to highlight the twin emergencies of climate change and mass extinction.
It came not long after a similar die-in at London’s Natural History Museum. Meanwhile, a single protestor – linked to the group but acting on his own behalf – was recently arrested after gluing himself to a statue of Darwin at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
These events mark the first time the high-profile group has chosen to target museums, but they are part of a growing trend for cultural heritage institutions to be used as sites of protest, either to draw public attention to a wider issue or to dissent against the actions of the institution itself... Keep reading on Museums Journal