In 2010, ‘Northern Spirit: 300 Years of Art in the North East’ opened in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle as part of a two-year long project led by Rhiannon Mason, along with Chris Whitehead and Helen Graham, and in collaboration with Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums.

Replacing the former ‘Art on Tyneside’ exhibition, which was by then over 17 years old, ‘Northern Spirit’ enhances, and at times challenges, the presentation of visual culture from the North East, and uses cutting-edge exhibition techniques to re-think ideas of place, history and identity. ‘Northern Spirit’ has been hugely successful, attracting thousands of visitors and offering new precedents for exhibition practice.

‘Northern Spirit’ was a £1,100,000 project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, and Newcastle City Council.

_{‘Recruiting participants at Tynemouth Market’. Photograph © Christopher Whitehead}

The research team set out to include the experiences and creativity of people from Newcastle and the surrounding area in the process of developing new material for the display. To do this, they worked alongside the curatorial redevelopment, drawing on contemporary perspectives to explore the North East through the Laing’s collections, and asking the public: ‘how does the North East look to you today?’ Collecting together diverse accounts, the team hoped to complement, and challenge, ideas of visual culture, and to make space for multiple perspectives.

For example, the team ran a number of public stalls, both in places that have traditionally attracted artists, such as the River Tyne, Newcastle City centre and the North Tyneside coast, and other areas which, while integral to the iconography of the North East, were not particularly well represented in the Laing’s fine art collection, such as Wallsend (the former ship building area) and Newcastle’s ethnically and culturally diverse West End. Taking copies of iconic images of the North East, the team hoped to engage members of the public, and to hear about their experiences of place and visual culture.

They also used the Tyne and Wear Archive and Museum’s (TWAM) learning and outreach teams, local youth workers and community learning teams to draw in further participants, including marginalised and disadvantaged groups, making their perspectives visible in the gallery for the first time. Over the two years of the project, 67 individuals worked with the research team to co-produce digital stories for the new gallery, including older people and under-represented groups (e.g. people with disabilities or learning or mobility difficulties, refugee and asylum seekers and young people at risk of exclusion from school), Friends of the Laing, local residents, young people from the Urban Art Crew, and a group for whom English was a second language.

The research team also carried out a series of interviews with regional and national art world figures, offering new perspectives on the significance of North East art and culture. Some of the people interviewed were artist Antony Gormley (who created the Angel of the North), Sir Nicolas Serota (Director of Tate), artist Paul Noble, furniture maker Nick James, John Bewley (Director of visual arts commissioning agency Locus+), Godfrey Worsdale (Director of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead), Graeme Rigby (Side/Amber Collective) and Julie Milne (Curator at the Laing Art Gallery).

The team worked with participants to explore visual understandings of place, peoples’ lived experience of visual culture, and to co-create a range of digital media, which were then integrated into the new display. This included:

• Short films made by young people from the Urban Art Crew based at Scotswood Area Strategy
• Digital storytelling linked to the TWAM-led Culture Shock project
• A Flickr competition ran alongside the gallery redevelopment generating new online participation in the project (84 members joined the Flickr Group contributing over 200 images).
• A story bench (which made contributed oral histories accessible)
• A digital projection (displaying photographs contributed by members of the public)
• A soundscape of the Newcastle Metro recorded by Christian Harrison, a member of the public
• An interactive map
• Six touchscreens

In each case, the digital media were designed to provide diverse audiences with multiple ‘entry points’, or interpretive ‘routes’, into the wide range of material available. As well as giving voice to different communities this was also intended to constructively disrupt the epistemological hierarchy of the art gallery, which conventionally accords primacy to the art object and to the kinds of understanding associated with art history. In the gallery, the community voices heard suggest a different kind of expertise – e.g. an intimate knowledge of place – that offers a counterpoint to conventional forms of interpretation. The exhibition shows that there are multiple ways of engaging with art in and beyond the gallery, generating questions with philosophical and affective resonances: for example, what does it mean to think of a cityscape, or the Tyne Bridge, as ‘art’ and simultaneously as part of one’s life history?

_{Digital projection in the Northern Spirit Gallery. Photograph © Nicola Maxwell}

The exhibition, ‘Northern Spirit: 300 Years of Art in the North East’, continues to be hugely successful, and has attracted thus far nearly 800,000 visitors since its opening in 2010. Directly enhancing the cultural services provided in the North East, ‘Northern Spirit’ further promoted the artistic heritage of the region, expanding the Laing’s collection through commissioned and co-curated content, including, for the first time, photography.

In addition, the gallery provides a valuable resource, used extensively by the Laing learning team for targeted schools workshops and teacher training, by curators for guided tours and by local writing groups as an informal space for meetings and events.

‘Northern Spirit’ also introduced innovative research methods relating to new museology, co-production and the use of digital media. These resulted in a number of workshops and the production of new guidelines and training for gallery staff. For example, Mason spoke at a Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums (TWAM) training event concerning the politics of co-production. Together with her colleagues Iain Watson and Julie Milne, Mason also co-presented the project at the 2010 Museums Association Conference, Manchester, an event attended by 90 UK museum and gallery professionals.

It further resulted in a number of academic publications (see ‘Further Information’ for details of these) that addressed key issues with regards exhibition practices. To give one important example: ‘Northern Spirit’ challenged traditional notions of the museum as having a singular ‘institutional voice’. Instead, the team tested new dynamics of inclusion and found ways to bring multiple voices into the gallery through digital media, new combinations of visual culture, and public engagement activities. This resulted in an engaging final display that made space for different forms of participation, and benefited a diverse range of audiences including artistic and museological communities of practice, local community groups and Laing visitors.

Finally, by incorporating insights from the project into her teaching at the International Centre for Culture and Heritage Studies (ICCHS) at Newcastle University, Mason has been able to offer her students valuable insights that fuse academic research with ‘real-life’ practice.

_{Audiovisual touch screen in the Northern Spirit Gallery. Photograph © Nicola Maxwell}

Following on from ‘Northern Spirit’, Mason worked as the Principal Investigator on an AHRC follow-up project: ‘Intellectual Property and Informed Consent: Partnerships and Participation in Museum and Heritage Projects’. She worked with co-researchers Nigel Nayling (School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, University of Wales, Trinity St David), Helen Graham (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, Leeds University), and staff from Tyne and Wear Archive and Museums and Newport City Museum and Heritage Service.

This project resulted in a free booklet, ‘Earning Legitimacy’: Participation, Intellectual Property and Informed Consent’, which is free to download here: 

Find out more at: http://partnershipandparticipation.wordpress.com/

To find out more about ‘Northern Spirit’, visit: http://artontyneside.wordpress.com

The following publications are also available:

• Mason R, Whitehead C, Graham H. One Voice to Many Voices?: Displaying Polyvocality in an Art Gallery. In: Golding, V., Modest, W, ed. Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2013, pp.163-177.
• Mason R, Whitehead C, Graham H. The Place of Art in the Public Art Gallery: A Visual Sense of Place. In: Davis, P., Corsane, G., Convery, I, ed. Making Sense of Place: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012, pp.133-144.
• Graham, H., Mason, R and Nayling, N (2013) ‘The Personal is still Political: Museums, Participation and Copyright’. In Museum and Society 11 [2] p105-121

It has been argued that one of the effects of contemporary globalization has been to reconfigure the former relationships of societies and territorial spaces by moving power and influence away from national governments and nation-states as actors. In terms of business, finance, travel, environment, migration, communication technology, and media, the volume and intensity of exchange and movement on a global scale is also described as historically unprecedented. This has resulted in the assertion that we now inhabit a postnational age which, in turn, raises an important question about the continued relevance of Europe’s national museums. Do they still have value for contemporary societies and, if so, how do they relate to new configurations of identity and politics?

In this article Rhiannon Mason takes issue with the idea that national museums have become redundant on the grounds that it misunderstands not only how museums work as a cultural phenomenon, but also the ways in which the global, national, and local are always enmeshed and co-constitutive. Drawing on international examples ranging from the Lewis Chessmen to döner kebab signs, Mason demonstrates that national museums are already more than capable of telling stories which resonate with new, contemporary and cosmopolitan ways of being in the world. Mason proposes that theories of cosmopolitanism offer both a way to move beyond the polarized terms of ‘national’ or ‘global’ and to rethink the possibilities museums might offer their visitors for alternative ways of thinking about their own identities, histories and cultures as well as those of other people. To this end Mason proposes a nationally-situated cosmopolitan museology and draws out the possible implications for curatorship and wider museum practice.

Taking issue with the assumption that Europe’s national museums have somehow become ‘out of step’ with contemporary globalised societies, Mason brings the theoretical framework of cosmopolitanism to bear on two museum examples:

• The ‘Kingdom of the Scots’ gallery in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and;
• The ‘Cultural Encounters’ gallery in the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin.

Examining two very different displays from museums pitched at contrasting scales (one national and the other transnational), and in quite different national contexts, Mason asks: what kinds of histories do these exhibitions make available to visitors and what other potentials might they contain? How might museum collections illustrate the complex interweaving of local, national and global heritages and identities? Would this offer new ways for museums to offer opportunities for visitors to see the world through the eyes of others? Should they do so?

Employing theories of cosmopolitanism as a theoretical vantage point from which to think through the political, ethical and practical challenges facing contemporary national museums, Mason offers an alternative way to think about museum practice that goes beyond recent museological debates that simplistically pitch the ‘universal’ against the ‘national’.

In ‘Imagining a Cosmopolitan Museology’ Mason points out that many of the individual objects and collections which have found their way into today’s national museums predate modern European nineteenth-century nationalism, and as such continue to have the potential to illuminate global and cosmopolitan stories. For example, by taking a ‘close-up’ view of the Lewis Chessmen, Mason reveals a powerful story that intertwines European and Islamic relations, at a time when media and political characterizations often pit the two as irreconcilable. In her study of the Museum of European Cultures, Mason also examines how objects originally designed with nationalistic intent have been recontextualised to support a new cosmopolitan perspective.

Given this heterogeneity, Mason suggests that national museums have the potential to demonstrate the contingent and constructed nature of contemporary nations, but only if existing collections are reframed and reinterpreted through a reflexive and cosmopolitan perspective and if the visitor is inclined, enabled and encouraged to ‘read for’ such an account.

Concluding that national museums need to cosmopolitanize from within if they wish to continue to engage visitors with the perennial questions of identity, belonging, sameness and difference, Mason’s article brings a new perspective to current debates about identity and national museums. It advances the field of museum studies by examining the implications of cosmopolitanism and introducing the idea of ‘cosmopolitan museology’. As such, it will contribute to understandings of museum practice and scholarship around the world.

Mason R. National Museums, Globalization, and Postnationalism: Imagining a Cosmopolitan Museology. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 2013, 1(1), 40-64.