Exhibition Proposal Instructions

EXHIBITION PROPOSAL (1500 words, 80% of mark)

Imagine a new museum is opening in London. The city already has a Museum of Childhood, a Museum of Design, and a Museum of Zoology. Now it is opening a ‘Museum of Museums’. As an emerging museum specialist, you are proposing an exhibition for this new institution. This assignment is the proposal you will submit to convince the museum’s director to stage your exhibition. Your proposal must therefore be for an exhibition about museums, themselves. Your subject may be any aspect of or stage in museum history, an important problem or issue in museum practice, a case study of an individual museum or group of museums, etc. Whatever you choose, your exhibition should illuminate museums in a new and original way that allows the public to better understand their purpose, operation, and/or history.

Before you start writing, you should plan out the aims, content, and design of your exhibition. You may wish to consider the below questions:

Content

What is the main idea or set of ideas I want people to think about when they see my exhibition?

Why are those ideas important? 

How do those ideas relate to a broader museological context? What is that context and how will I explain that context to visitors?

What do I want people to take away from this exhibition?

Public

What audience am I planning to address? How will I engage them?

How will I encourage and inspire audience participation?

How will my audience interact with the exhibition’s objects/spaces?

 Scale and Design

How big do I want my exhibition to be? How many galleries and objects do I want to incorporate?

In what kind of space do I want my exhibition to take place and why?

How will my exhibition relate to the rest of the museum?

Proposal Format

Your exhibition proposal must include the following sections. Word counts are just guidelines; use as much or as little text as you need for each section within the overall 1500-word wordcount, but please include all of the below sections.

Summary (c. 100 words)

Provide the title and a brief overview of your exhibition. Describe the main theme(s) and why you think it is important that your exhibition should be staged and funded. This is the "elevator pitch"–the place to convince the director of the Museum of Museums that the topic of your exhibition is exciting, urgent, and significant.

Context and rationale (c. 600 words)

Use this section to justify your exhibition topic. This section must include references to academic sources, which should be footnoted. Footnotes are not included in the word count. You may wish to address the following:

What is the significance of this exhibition? What longstanding issues will it address or questions will it answer?

Why hold this exhibition now? Does it link to the present? To an anniversary? What contemporary themes beyond museology does it illuminate? 

What are the precedents? How has this subject been tackled before, either by museums, in historical scholarship, or in any previous exhibitions?

How does your exhibition fit with the Museum of Museums’ overall aims?

Who is this aimed at and why? Who is your public? 

How might you engage new publics? What is your audience engagement strategy? Will you hold workshops, events, conferences, film screenings, etc.?

Introduction to the Exhibition (c. 100 words)

Write the text that your visitors will see on the wall when they first enter your exhibition. It should describe the main theme, give an overview of the content and structure of the exhibition, and explain what is innovative or unusual about the exhibition. What does it offer them that they have never encountered before?

Object List and Accompanying Texts (c. 300 words)

This section should include between three and five objects that you will display in your exhibition along with the texts your visitors will see next to them. This group of objects may represent your whole exhibition or only a small part of it. Please be clear about what proportion your list represents at the start of this section. The objects you choose must be real objects. They may come from other museum collections, but needn’t necessarily. If including a football jersey makes perfect sense for your theme, feel free to include it. 

List the artist/maker, title, date, medium, present location, origin, and catalogue/accession/museum number (if it has one). 

Please provide a picture (if you have one), as well as a link if you found the object in an online collection. 

Write a 50–70 word wall text that would be displayed alongside each object, which should help your audience understand the item within the context of your exhibition. For guidelines, refer to the V&A guide to wall texts you read as homework the week you visited the British Museum.

Display (c. 400 words)

This section outlines how you will stage your exhibition.

How will your objects be displayed? Will they be in cases, online, hung on the wall, projected, touchable/interactive, etc.?

How will your exhibition flow? Is there a particular order in which visitors will experience it? Or not? How will you signal to the public how they should engage with your space?

What sub-sections will your exhibition include and how will these sections relate to one another? What will each section (as well as the juxtapositions between sections) illuminate for viewers? 

Footnotes and Bibliography: 

You must cite the sources in your text with footnotes and include a bibliography. Include a minimum of 4 references beyond the essential readings you did for class. These should be reputable sources like books, academic articles, institutional reports, etc. In addition to these four references, you may also use as many of the class readings as you like. Use any referencing style you like, provided it is appropriate for the humanities and you use it consistently. If in doubt about which referencing style to use, please use Chicago Style (see the linked guide in the Resources tab).

Submission:

Please submit your gallery analysis on QM Plus with an appropriate cover sheet (found in the Assessment Instructions tab) . Your analysis should be no more than 10% above the recommended word length. Essays not meeting this standard will be subject to a penalty of FIVE marks.