The overarching aim of museumaker is that the heritage and the contemporary craft sectors understand each others’ rich resources and how they can work together to mutual benefit.
The legacy phase of the programme was designed to identify ways of:
- embedding the learning of museumaker in the two sectors
- encouraging the original and current museum partners to build on their experience and find new ways of working with makers
- stimulating other museums to develop their own programmes and find ways of funding this work
As the project progresses during the coming year, museumaker will update this section of the site, and report on new initiatives as the develop that will take the learning from the programme forward.
Many members of the immediate museumaker ‘family’ – mm’s museum partners and their makers – have plans to take collaborative work forward. A number of the museums are working to put together the funding packages needed to enable them to commission work – including permanent and temporary installations, community engagement activity and retail product either from either the makers they worked with on their mm projects or from makers they have met through museumaker. Members of museumaker’s ‘extended family’ – museums and makers which took part in mm1 and in mm’s capacity building programme and participants in mm’s sibling projects in Forming the Future – Forming Ideas and The Shape of Things - have indicated their enthusiasm for future partnership work.
To support and inspire further partnership working, museumaker has created a suite of tools to help the heritage and craft sectors to work further together, which includes:
- A summary briefing sheet that provides an overview of the programme and celebrates its impact.
- An e- toolkit to provide a distillation of the ‘on the ground’ experience of collaboration. Download
- Video case studies: Art works in their own right, museumaker commissioned a series of seven short documentary films from the Proudfoot company to showcase the some of the activity and outcomes of the programme.
- Retail case Studies Presentations on heritage retail spaces that successfully work with the best of the contemporary craft sector in a range of ways.
These key documents and films have also been published on the Arts Council England website. We hope that, the wealth of material encompassed by the suite of legacy tools, will encourage more museums and historic properties across the country to take collaborative working with makers to the next level.
Brigid Howarth & Susie O’Reilly
museumaker programme directors, June 2011
