The COVID-19 pandemic has closed museums and cultural sites worldwide. Meanwhile, curators are already working hard to preserve the current moment so that future generations may understand it.
Surface detail of the Tomanowos meteorite, showing cavities produced by dissolution of iron.
Eden, Janine and Jim/Wikipedia
Tomanowos, aka the Willamette Meteorite, may be the world’s most interesting rock. Its story includes catastrophic ice age floods, theft of Native American cultural heritage and plenty of human folly.
Galleries and musuems are rapidly moving online in response to social distancing measures, but the digital divide means regional and remote organisations could be left behind.
COVID-19 is dragging some arts institutions into the 21st century. Others are already well down this path. What we win and lose when culture goes online and a bunch of links you can enjoy today.
One of Britain’s great cultural institutions: the British Museum in London.
Claudio Divizia via Shutterstock
Why shouting diversity just doesn’t cut it if the system is designed to keep people out.
Julie Adams (British Museum), Jody Toroa and Kay Robin (left to right) discussing a cloak from the British Museum, collected by Lieutenant James Cook in 1769.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
While both parties are championing the arts and culture sector, after years of swingeing cuts these promises dazzle but offer little hope to struggling institutions
Libraries, archives, museums and galleries have finally been included in South Africa’s contested new proposed copyright bill.
Berry, and other tourist towns, are out of step with modern museum curation which is trying to include Aboriginal communities and their stories.
Shutterstock
Away from the state capitals, small museums are out of step with big city curators - presenting tourists with stories that give a blinkered view of local history.
Museums are starting to present visual art in multisensory ways that audiences can touch and feel.
Richard Harlow of Blind Eye Works
Looking back at Lviv’s Soviet past, there are clues about how to preserve history for everyone – not just the affluent.
The National Museum of Iraq photographed in February 2018. Many of the pieces discovered at the ruins of Ur, arranged and labelled by Ennigaldi-Nanna, can be found here.
Wikimedia Commons
Ennigaldi-Nanna is largely unknown in the modern day. But in 530BC, this Mesopotamian priestess worked to arrange and label various artefacts in the world’s first museum.
Museums’ collections are a priceless resource for scientists, but they’re not easy to access. Digitizing specimens – like the 700 bat skulls the author studied – is a way to let everyone in.
Indigenous Australians must be involved in research around provenance and country. Here, representatives of the Willandra Aboriginal Elders visit the Griffith University ancient DNA laboratory.
Renee Chapman
Museums around the world hold remains of Aboriginal people that were often taken without permission and in the absence of accurate records. New DNA methods may help return these items to country.
A group of men proceeds to an Otobo in an Igbo village.
John Kelechi Ugwuanyi