Counter-Heritage

Radical Stroud and Pop-up Museums I suppose we ought to start this piece with our own working-definition of a Pop-up Museum: ‘a temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork. We have created such museums in pubs and art spaces and churches before – Rodborough Church, The Prince Albert, Stroud Valley Arts, the Gloucestershire Regimental Museum in Gloucester. We hope to create further pop-up museums in the future: a further Railway Pop-Up Museum (hopefully at the railway station or again at SVA or The Prince Albert) and a series of Stroud community pop-ups (again at SVA or The Prince Albert or in a church or at a closed-down shop or even in the streets). The possible benefits are obvious: attracting people who wouldn’t normally visit museums might be one.  Encouraging people (including some who wouldn’t normally feel that they had anything important to say) to speak in public in a group, or one-to-one with a ‘curator’, could be another.  Encouraging people to visit ‘proper’ museums in Stroud, Gloucester, Cirencester, Cheltenham, Bristol and Bath etc. could be another. Revitalising closed-down shops might be another. But let’s leave our area now; indeed, let’s leave the country, via some perceptive observations from Nora Grant in the USA: ‘Pop Up Museums: Participant-Created Ephemeral Exhibitions’: ‘The term “pop-up” has become...