Derby Museums first YCPN - The Open Day

Saturday marked our first meeting and open recruitment session. I am aware the museum is involved with some excellent initiatives (i.e the Happy Museum Project) and the lovely, chilled folks running it are genuinely open and enthusiastic in welcoming new ideas.

We successfully signed up a small handful to join YCPN next Saturday. However, it’s difficult to sign up young people when they aren’t even coming in! There’s a distinct lack of appeal for young (13-25) audiences to visit the local museum.

This is exactly why we are trying to establish the YCPN. I’m excited to see the groups expand, although in order to do this a good starting point will be to establish better connections with scenes outside the museum walls; schools, colleges and the university, local music & art festivals, food & drink events, etc.

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Derby University students we met have claimed they’re actively encouraged NOT to bother visiting their own city’s cultural hub. What does this say for the esteem of the city? We’re scaring students away, the next generation of innovators.

We should instead be pitching how here - we’re offering an opportunity to be at the forefront in moulding the creative shape of Derby.

What happens if we start holding events that places the museum in a new light?

It’s generally a quiet space, so louder evening events for local artists/djs to perform, live visuals, spoken word and film would be a great variant.

Workshops from inspiring creatives across various industries, local through to international.

On Saturday I initiated some basic museum ‘hacks’ to break the ice.

Hack #1

Cut-out alphabets

Various papers, scissors

Encourage visitors to re-caption the glass boxes in the Nature collection. This can be through worded captions/speech bubbles, and/or try collaging cartoon eyes and mouths to create personality.

This was a basic exercise to give those looking around a little surprise, a chance to break the silence with a giggle and get chatting to visitors.

This spurred from previous discussion of visitors taking photos of artworks and turning them into their own memes (see Classical Art Memes) which we’d like to develop further in the coming weeks!

This project feeds in well with my current practice and MA study, as I’m looking to explore the use of creative technologies to engage audiences in cultural contexts. I am hoping to gain a deeper understanding of current gaps as the project unfolds and focusing on bringing your (YCPN members) ideas to life!