'126' press

The private view for '126' took place on Thursday 5th and was a huge success. It was great to meet so many of the participants of the project, and we had over 100 people turn up!

There is a little feature about the exhibition on the Exuent blog.

Plus it features in 'Hackney Today'

I'm also really pleased that the exhibition featured in the National Trust members magazine (which apparently has an absurdly high readership of 4.5 million...) a friend of mine pointed out that in his many years as a member of the National Trust, this was the first mention of anything LGBTQ he'd ever seen in the magazine, which isn't hugely surprising, but a great honour to be the first if that is the case. Unfortunately the text for the magazine needed to be done quite early, so it features the artwork from last year's exhibition instead of for '126':

I've written a piece that will be published soon on the Notches blog, which is a great blog about the history of sexuality. I'm also planning to storify the tweets about the exhibition at some point, and will also be sharing some of the feedback gathered in the comment books at the exhibition, my favourite comment so far said 'Beautiful. Made me laugh and cry. Everyone should see this especially younger visitors to Sutton House'. This is particularly interesting as one of the complaints (yes, there have been a few...) was concerned about children seeing the exhibition. A particularly surprising claim, since the complaint arrived before the exhibition had opened...

Journal of Education in Museums

The newest issue of JEM has just come out (No. 33) and its about advocacy, and contains an article by yours truly, in which I make the case for including queer narratives in museums & heritage sites and addressing LGBT audiences.

There are also articles about building relationships with museums and universities, how to evidence the impact of heritage institutions and arguing the value of cultural learning. There is also a summary of the GEM conference from earlier this year.

The front cover of the journal includes one of Paul Harfleet's Pansy pictures, which I mention in my article, I've written briefly about that project on this blog already.

Curran, S (2012). 'The museum through queer eyes', JEM, no.33.

"not meeting the needs of the space" or censorship?

Just a very quick post today, it's my last day of working at the IOE Library, my PhD starts officially next week - it's all very exciting!

I thought I would just flag up this article on the Huffington Post Gay Voices site (which is well worth following, it's great for LGBT news- specifically in the US).

Jeff Larson's 'Men In Living Rooms' Photography Exhibition Pulled From LGBT Stonewall Museum

I suppose I should also prefix this with a "NSFW" (not safe for work) though I don't think it's in any way inappropriate. It's a particularly interesting article in light of what I said about the Hunterian Museum in my last blog post.

I'll post some thoughts about this when I have more time.