These Boots Are Made for Exhibitin'
The Manchester Gallery, Manchester Museum, 2019. © Steve Devine.
"It’s to pull out some of the hidden stories, to connect our collection to the city’s history and for people of the city to take pride and ownership over the collection and, hopefully, to tell the museum’s part in the city’s history."
Andrea Winn on the Manchester Gallery, BBC Manchester, 2009.
In 2005, at the beginning of my museum career, I joined National Museums Liverpool (NML) to work on the curation and design of the International Slavery Museum (ISM), and I was eager to make a good impression. This entailed ensuring that I arrived at the office bright and early every day, despite having to commute from Manchester. The ISM team was housed on the first floor of the Dock Traffic Office, while the Museum of Liverpool (MoL) team was on the ground floor. Since most of the ground floor was never meant to be used as offices, the MoL team had to make do with makeshift walls and minimal soundproofing.
As I was determined to be at my desk by 9am, I had to hurry through this maze of partitions and often let one of the many formidable Victorian wooden doors accidently slam behind me, which would reverberate throughout the cavernous interior. This clearly irritated one of the MoL curators, who, unfortunately, sat near my preferred doorway and was just as committed to arriving early as I was. This resulted in a face-off; at each daybreak, we’d lock eyes and glare at each other, anticipating a slamming door and asserting our workplace punctuality. Without even knowing each other's names, we became sworn organisational adversaries.
By early 2007, I'd left ISM to become Curator of Living Cultures at Manchester Museum, much to the relief of my timekeeping opponent and her ears. Within a few days of starting, I was invited to meet another new starter, the Curator of Community Exhibitions, who I was told had also previously worked at National Museums Liverpool. I was excited to meet them and wracked my brain over who it could possibly be. When we first met, it hit me like a door slamming: it was my old NML silent sparring partner, Andrea Winn, whose full name I learned for the first time, as well as the fact that she lived down the road from me.
Andrea and I would relish telling people our little rivalry anecdote from that point forward, and for 13 years we became as thick as thieves - though perhaps I shouldn't use that phrase in light of recent allegations regarding curators and academics swiping items from collecting institutions. It goes without saying that Andrea and I never pinched anything, but we did spend a lot of time together liberating objects and spaces at Manchester Museum. We did this by taking collections to community venues, opening up collection spaces to communities and creating space in the museum for community collections.
We collaborated together on a number of projects, including Being Black Is, China: Journey to the East and Memories of Partition, in conjunction with the regular community engagement and creative participation events and activities. But it was while working together on the Manchester Gallery that I was inspired and learnt so much from Andrea's expert ability to seamlessly combine social history and encyclopaedic collections while also ensuring that local people and their knowledge, skills and experiences were prioritised, valued and taken care of.
The Manchester Gallery opened in 2009 to address the issue the lack of a place in the museum that extensively linked the collections to the city's history, and local communities neighbouring the museum didn’t see their heritage represented. The gallery broke from the museum's overbearing academic norm by combining an informal mind map graphic identity and community-created content derived from Our City, Andrea's ambitious city-wide community consultation and collections access programme.
Our City included a groundbreaking off-site exhibition at Abbey Hey Primary Academy in Gorton, which was opened by Labour Party grandee and local MP Sir Gerald Kaufman. The fossil footprints on display at the school inspired the children to make plaster casts of their own wellington boots, which took pride of place in the Manchester gallery, instilling a genuine sense of connection to the space and collections. Andrea was so passionate about those boots that when the exhibition team, unbeknown to her, positioned them at a jaunty angle (I believe that's the technical design term), she appeared at my desk with a cheeky grin and a set of display case keys, and a covert repositioning occurred. This rearranging went on for several months, but as with many things, Andrea's perseverance always paid off in the end.
Over the course of our more than ten years as colleagues and friends, we shared many formative experiences, both personally and professionally. Curating together made going to work an absolute pleasure, but the countless cuppas, beers and meal deals to celebrate or commiserate as friends were priceless, as was being part of important life events like birthdays, weddings and other more somber occasions. We even shared an office with doors that had properly calibrated anti-slam devices, thankfully, towards the end of my time at Manchester Museum. Dare I say that finally being office buddies was one of her many career highlights, as it was mine, but I don’t think it could ever compete with the time she spent with another Steve, when she chaperoned naturalist and TV personality Steve Backshall from London to open the newly revamped natural science galleries. Her grin was cheekier than usual that day.
Unlike many celebrities, politicians or even museum directors, it’s highly unlikely that someone like myself or Andrea will have an obituary in a broadsheet newspaper or glossy magazine, let alone our own Wikipedia page. For Andrea, I hope this piece goes some way to redress this, because it's important to remember the profound impact and impression she left on the people she worked with and the museums she worked in. In her nearly twenty years service at Manchester Museum, she laid the groundwork and set the tone for the museum's transformation into a creative community hub, as well as cultivating supportive relationships with colleagues. I'm immensely grateful to her for everything she generously taught me about participatory practice, which is essential to my work as a freelancer, and for being an incredible friend.
Since going freelance in 2000, I hadn't seen Andrea as much as I used to, but we stayed in touch and were able to reconnect soon before she passed. I'll miss her greatly, but I realise how fortunate I was that our connection as colleagues blossomed into a friendship, as it did with the other colleagues we formed a friendship group with, all of whom I know will miss her just as much. I recognise that not everyone has had this experience during their careers, but I’m convinced that Andrea would encourage them to be open to the prospect and persevere, and, like actor and queer icon Kenneth Williams, keep the flame of genuine workplace friendships alive.
"The original dream of working with a group of people whose shared affections counted for more than personal ambition has never quite died. Embers still flicker into flames."
Kenneth Williams, Just Williams: An Autobiography, 1985.