21 Feb / 22 Feb
Time: All Day
Dean Crowe Theatre and Arts Centre
Our 2020 IMA Annual Conference, Transforming Museums, will be held at the Dean Crowe Theatre and Arts Centre in Athlone on 21 and 22 February, in association with Athlone Arts and Tourism.
Conference location: Athlone
Conference dates: 21 and 22 February 2020
The IMA annual conference is the main gathering of the Irish museum sector. It aims to provide a platform for critical dialogue around the role and purpose of museums and inform sectoral agendas, while assisting museums with their thinking and planning as they realise their full potential.
Conference Theme:
‘The museum of the past must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed from a cemetery of bric-a-brac to a nursery of living thoughts. The museum of the future must stand side by side with the library and the laboratory.’ – Smithsonian curator George Brown Goode, 1889.
In recent decades there has been a major shift towards a user-led philosophy within museum practice. How can we encourage and drive this culture change from within our institutions, and also adapt to the changing cultural context in which our institutions exist? Is it time to reimagine the place of the museum and its functions? Who will shape that vision?
More than ever, museums are directly engaging with topics of social change. Does this signal a shift in museums’ identities and roles? Is it a nimble response to public demand? Or is it a strategic evolution toward a future concept of what museums could and should be?
From high-level strategy to on-the-ground implementation, this conference will seek to explore what are the attitudes, partnerships and collaborations that can drive development and redraw the museum’s boundaries. How we plan to navigate the accelerated levels of change around us while also maintaining our commitment to positive aspects of our historical legacy.
Goode’s call for museums to evolve into a more relevant, approachable, contemporary resource for the public are, to a certain extent, unrealised. By exploring what museums can be and what are the barriers to us achieving this, we pose the question: as we look towards ‘Ireland 2040’, what will museums of twenty years from now look like?
FURTHER INFORMATION
Details of previous IMA conferences are online at http://www.irishmuseums.org/.
The Irish Museums Association gratefully acknowledges the core funding provided by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and The Heritage Council. The 2020 conference is additionally supported by Athlone Arts & Tourism.
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