We can’t wait to ask Jack to share his stories about the wonderful work he does, what’s driving him and what keeps him going, apart from coffee. Hello Jack, it is really nice to see you here with us.

Hi. It's great to be here today. Thank you for inviting me on. I can't wait to answer your questions.

Ok. Thank you for the coffee. Let's get started. So you have a really, really busy life, you have a permanent place of work, but you also manage to do loads of different things at the same time. Can you tell us what exactly you do?

Oh, that's a very, very big question. So what do I do? So during the week, I am acting head of learning at Towner Art Gallery. So as you said, it's an art gallery based in Eastbourne on the south coast. And my role kind of involves looking after every single aspect of that learning programme. So it's making sure that workshops and events happen. It means looking after groups. It means setting up spaces, it means doing all the admin and all the planning work and all the evaluation around that as well. So it's a pretty big job that keeps me busy during the week. I also volunteer at the V&A as part of their LGBTQ tour guide team. So I work with some wonderful people there, including Dan Vo. When I'm not doing that, sometimes I find the time to do some blogging about what I do in museums, I need to update that blog, but you know, a bit busy recently. I also volunteer for kids in museums who do wonderful work to encourage museums, galleries, cultural venues, to be more aware of families, be more family friendly, be more accessible. One of the big projects they do on that is the family friendly museum award, which is the only award of its kind in the UK that is judged by families, by people who use these places. What else do I do? There's also Museum Bums. How can I forget Museum Bums. So I run that with my friend Mark Small, you can follow him on Instagram, he's @thehistoryboyphotography. And with that we go to museums, we go to galleries, and we look for the bums. So it sounds really silly, but it's like a light hearted way of looking at art history and also reminding ourselves that these places are fun. And with that we've been in the news quite a bit recently. So earlier this year, we did a project called the Big Museum Bum Count, where we're trying to find which Museum in the UK has the most bums on display. Currently with nearly 170 bums is the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, which is a tiny little museum full of plaster cast and the team there is absolutely amazing. So that'd be our massive competition from places like the British Museum, the V&A, all these places where you think oh yeah, there'll be loads of bums there, and this tiny museum has way more. So we were able to get loads and loads of press coverage for them, and they saw their visitor numbers just kind of skyrocket, because let’s face it, we all like a good bum, don’t we?

Yeah, that's true.

Why museums? A question I am asking myself a lot recently. Why museums? So I'm sure like most of us, we all have really, really fond memories of visiting museums when we were kids. On a special day out my nan would take me to the big museums in London, we'd go to the V&A quite a lot. I think she quite liked it there. They created some special memories for me, which is what I'm trying to get at. I've always been interested in them. I've always enjoyed visiting them. I've always wanted to work in them and help other people get as much out of them as I have. When I was at Uni and really kind of considered a career, I was thinking, what on earth do I want to do? For a while, I was varying between working in libraries or being a teacher, but there were a lot of changes going on in the curriculum and how schools worked at that time. And it just, I didn't want to do all the paperwork. At the end of the day, it felt like a really, really stressful kind of place to be, so I thought, hang on, what about museum learning? So I started to look into that, I started volunteering, and it really kind of hit all of the points I was trying to work on with my career, it allowed me to use my degree, it allowed me to kind of be that frustrated Blue Peter presented that I am. So I get to be that person who is excited about this, this old stuff, all this contemporary art, and I can tell you why it is exciting. I'm not just saying, look at this, this is important. It's like, look at this, this is really cool and really important, and this is why. I've seen the reaction to it. I've seen the spark in kids and grown-ups' eyes as well, when I'm kind of in full flow, because people respond to that energy. It's like museums are full of treasure. Ah, let's celebrate that. Let's share these stories.

So you chose to work in museum learning, museum education, you're not quite sure about the correct word yet because it's either learning or education, but why did you not consider other spheres of working in museums, like museum collections or marketing or art handling? Have you thought about those areas as well?

Ah, that’s a good question. So I tend to say, learning rather than education, just because for me education has a lot of formal undertones, overtones and everything. What we can do in museums kind of goes beyond those kinds of formal constraints. To me, learning is a much broader term, and what we do is much broader. Why museum learning in particular, it's because I kind of dabbled with the idea of being a teacher. I've always done a lot of work with kids and in schools, and it seemed like a really natural place for me to be. As I said before, I get really excited, talking and presenting and sharing stories and ideas. I think working in other departments wouldn't let me do that in a way that kind of works for me. Like I said, I'm a bit of a frustrated Blue Peter presenter, a little bit of a frustrated teacher as well. Working in museum learning kind of allows me to fulfil those kinds of personal goals, as well as share these stories, share these experiences and help people really get the most out of the objects. It is all about that kind of human contact, that I think really kind of makes it special.

We agree with you. That's why we do the Masters in the same field and hope to develop this in the future too.

So I had a couple of roles at the British Museum. So I started off as a family events facilitator. I've had so many job title changes that it's hard to keep track. So when I started off working there, it involved being on the family hub, or working at the school holiday events. And that was mostly about helping families getting the most out of their visit. So it was about finding out what they wanted to see, helping them see it in a way that worked for them. So it could be trails, it could be backpacks, it could just be showing them where the loos are, and which ones would be the least crowded. All of that stuff like you really need to know. It was probably like coalface front of house work. I also did a lot of work in the Samsung digital Discovery Centre, which was a really, really interesting space to explore the museum's collection and really kind of help people get their teeth into it and find out more about it, respond to it in a creative way, think about it in a slightly different way as well, and develop some digital skills, which was really, really fun to do. So we had lots and lots of tech to play with. We were in such a privileged position with that, because museums and galleries are really underfunded, so being able to play with that kind of tech was a godsend. So as part of that, it was a lot of workshop stuff, and I've got to develop some workshops for them. I have a few particular favourites that I like. So one of them was exploring the Roman Britain, using Minecraft. And that was a lot of fun to put together. So we were kind of exploring ideas of Roman design, Roman expansion, Roman conquest, and particularly how that related to the UK. So we used Hadrian as a kind of starting point, we think about walls, we think about building, we think about all those things you can do in Minecraft and bring them all together. So that initially started off as a two hour workshop. How to change that after the first one because the pilots are always a great way to figure out all those kinks that you just can't quite do in the planning stage. You really need people to do the thing before you realise, ok, this needs to change, this needs to change, this needs to change. So it went from a two hour workshop to a 25 minute design challenge. Big, big change. It was just so oversubscribed, we had to figure out ways that, how can everyone who wants to take part, take part in a way that's still meaningful. So we had that time limit on that because it was one of those things people could just spend ages doing.

So we did it on site, so there was a presentation so you got to introduce Hadrian, we got to introduce Roman history, we got to talk more about what we were getting out and choose what the challenge was. And then boom, people could go off and do the thing in the 20 minutes, they could carry on at home if they wanted to. I always think that learning doesn't just stop as soon as you exit the workshop space, or as soon as you exit the museum. It's something that if we've done our jobs right, it should continue at home. So that was one of the things I was particularly proud of. The other one was looking at the role women played in ancient Greece, particularly around politics and voting. So it was called Ancient Greek Wonder Woman, and that was really fun just to explore, kind of had an active voice, how voices could be heard, and it really kind of picked up on a lot of ideas at the time around democracy. So this was around about the time of the referendum, so people were really thinking about voting, about democracy, about how we can make our voices heard. So we were able to kind of tie the collection into something that was very, very timely, and we had a really really interesting response from that. Most of the reactions were less about ancient Greece and more about what the world is like today, which is, again, what we as educators, as people who facilitate learning, we should be making those connections, because if these things that we are displaying, that we're celebrating, if they're not relevant, why are we talking about them? Why are they special? Why are they here?

Very good question. So Towner Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery. We always have been, and we've always had a long, long history of supporting contemporary artists. So the gallery has its origins back in the 1920s, so we are nearly a 100 years old. Can you believe it? Because a local Councilman, John Chisholm Towner, donated a collection of 20 paintings to the people of Eastbourne and he wanted his paintings to be enjoyed by everyone. And from those 20 paintings, the gallery grew and grew and grew, and we now have a collection of nearly 5000 pieces, that's paintings, that's drawings, that sculpture, that's moving image, all sorts of different art forms. And we've always been a gallery for the people. That is kind of where learning comes in quite a lot. So we've always supported contemporary artists. One of the artists we are most connected with is an artist called Eric Ravilious, who grew up in Eastbourne, has really, really strong local links, he taught in the art school there before it got bombed during the war. We've got the largest collection of his work in the UK, people travel from all over the world, all over the country to come and see it. They think that we just have Ravilious, but we have so much more than that. Sometimes it feels like the impression people have of Towner is that we just have stuff from the 1930s, 1940s. We have stuff all the way up until, you know, until today, we're still collecting contemporary works. At the moment, our kind of slogan, our kind of thinking is counter alive, which to me has wonderful Sci-Fi overtones, I can just see a math professor going it's alive, it's alive. It's going through my head every time I see the posters. That's partly in response to all sorts of things kind of going on around the Eastbourne, partly, because we recently suffered cuts as many, many local authority places did. So it's a way of saying we're still here, we're alive and kicking, and also it's a little bit of a tongue in cheek reference to the reputation Eastbourne has in some circles. So if you don't know it, it’s this lovely little seaside town, it has a bit of a reputation as God's waiting room, it's like Florida off the south coast. But it's a really, really interesting town. It's full of young families, it's full of people who are moving down from London or, you know, moving along from Brighton or from Hastings. It's a real kind of up and coming town. There's a lot of energy going on there, there are a lot of people really working hard to make it a great place to live. It's so much more than what that reputation kind of suggests. So it's a really vibrant town, so Towner Alive is also Eastbourne Alive. There's a lot going on in the town. So we're very much an art gallery for the town, for the wider community, for art lovers. Yeah, there's a lot going on.

So since January this year, we've been thinking about the learning department as more of an art school, than a kind of traditional museum gallery learning department. And as part of that we've done lots and lots of different projects with artists in a new way. A big part of my job there is to support our local artistic community. And by that I mean working with artists, capital artists, small artists, amateur artists, professional artists, anyone who's ever picked up a pencil or some chalk or whatever and made a squiggle, I'm there to support. And over the summer, we've turned our big downstairs space into our Summer School. Previously, this space has been used for exhibitions. So re-working it into a space where people can make and create, instead of just looking at things has been quite a challenge. So with that they are working with different artists each week, so we've had sound artists, we've had sculptors, we've had textile artists, we've had graphic designers. We've been responding to the building, to the galleries, to the collection and in all sorts of different ways. So we've also opened up the space as artist studios. So we've invited anyone who's got a creative practice to book a space, come in and to be there to make, create, talk to the public, to give them a platform to show their work and show the public that “look, this is what goes into making an artwork”. So around that there's all sorts of things that I have to do on a daily basis. There's a kind of logistics. A lot of diary checking, a lot of communications, so many emails, oh my God, no one told me how many emails I'd have to send, all of that stuff. There is also tracking numbers, collecting feedback, because all of that is so, so helpful and making sure that it's in a format that I can go back into and pull out stats for reports. Number one tip, if you are looking for a career in museum learning and museum education, make sure you know Excel, it makes things a lot easier. But there's also working with the other groups that I work with, there's a lot of community groups as well. So there are adults who are struggling with various mental health prescriptions, there is working with older people with memory loss, there's trying to get my earliest programme back up and running, which I was so, so proud of, but due to various funding cuts that had to be put on pause. Yeah, my day often involves a lot of planning and a lot of strategic thinking as well as that face to face interaction with the public and just kind of really being there and showing them why this place is important, why this stuff is really cool. And actually giving them space to say, I think that's a bit rubbish. Why do you think it's a bit rubbish? And just kind of teasing out those questions, because working with contemporary art is a lot different from working with objects and artefacts at the British Museum, for example, because the things that they seem to have gathered in importance with a big eye just through being so old. With contemporary art so often you hear, oh, I could do that, my five year old could do that, or things along those lines. What I quite like doing is really teasing out those thoughts. So it always had a really strong reaction to it, either positive or negative, giving them the space to have that reaction. And then kind of teasing out the why, because the why is the really interesting question there, and also it gives him the space to not have a reaction at all. So if a piece of art doesn't move you, that's ok. So kind of making sure all of that can happen in various spaces, in various ways, hence, on a coffee.

Oh, so the stories I want to share are the ones that we don't have spaces for in the labels, the stories that are there, but for one reason or another just aren't as visible as they need to be. It's not what we'd like to see, it's like this is really integral to this object's story, to this history, to the things that it has to tell us. You know, it's part of the relevance of why it's here in the first place. So I do, as you said, I do a lot of work with the LGBTQ tours and the V&A, which has been really, really fascinating. So we've got 2 million objects there, and we're uncovering a lot of LGBTQ stories. Sometimes the connections are like, you think why aren't these mentioned? Like, we've got lots of text space here, why is it not there? Other times, the connections are a lot more subtle. I'm doing a lot of LGBTQ work at Towner as well. I've been unpacking all of the LGBTQ histories in our collections, there are also 5000 artworks. It's not as big of a challenge as 2 million, but it’s a start, and what's been really nice is that curators are really on board with it as well because it deepens our knowledge of our collection, it allows us to explore new themes, and it just adds a richness to what we can do and to what we can offer our communities as well. So I remember one time my colleague Karen, she was doing some research for an upcoming show, she got really excited, she jumped up, she's like Jack, Jack, I found another LGBTQ artist for you, and she was so excited. And that kind of reaction is priceless, because there is a real value to this. It's not just me saying this is important, it is other members of the team recognising that important thing and are excited about it as well. So with that I've put together tours of the collection, the response to that's been really good. So it initially started for LGBTQ history month, but because that was successful, I was able to have that to kind of really roll it out a lot more. We've also been really big supporters of pride in Eastbourne as well. So Eastbourne pride, bless it, it's so sweet. We've just had our third pride and just down the road, there is a much much bigger celebration in Brighton, the Eastbourne one, it still feels very, very community focused and very much about the people rather than brands or corporations or anything like that. So we march in the parade, we offer experiences and activities that compliment pride. So it's not actually on the day, it's either side, so people can have their own experience they want. So whether it's a little bit more relaxed or we do that, we're not about competition without uplifting.

Would you say, on picking these LGBTQ plus histories, it's mostly for the purpose, For Arts` Sake, for the purpose of the collection and its development and its research, or is it for the people to make them feel included, because loads of museums are still white, British, straight and middle class?

My main driving force for it is because these stories need to be told. It's about the people. It's about the artists, it's about the life they lead. It is not about ousting anyone retrospectively, it's about making sure that their identities are reflected in how we understand their work. And largely, it's for the people who are coming to see the work, to visit our museums and to see themselves reflected and be like, ah, like, I can see myself as a queer artist, I'm a queer person, we are all part of the story as well. And every now and then I hear the old oh, but we don't mention straight people in the label text. Like, actually you do quite a lot. Next time you are in a museum or gallery, read the label text, see if they mention lovers, wives, mistresses, all of that. I bet you they do. And then see if they mentioned any queer relationships. Do they? So it's about representation, it's important historically, and it's also very, very important for people visiting today. So contemporary as well.

I'd like to ask you a question which is semi personal, semi public. So I'm sure that loads of listeners will be extremely inspired by the story you've told us about your work, about yourself, and loads of people want to start their own way in the museum world. So I'm wondering if you can share some interesting useful tips for the youngsters who might want to kick start their career?

Yes, difficult to get started. Yeah, it really is. On a practical level, make sure you can demonstrate that you are interested in this sector. So for me that was writing a blog, as a way that I was able to say, look, I am interested in what's going on, I was able to kind of share thoughts, share opinions and start to get a little bit of a name, a little bit of a reputation. So you become a little bit of a known quantity. Another major point, learn Excel, it is really, really handy for all sorts of things and all sorts of different ways, so keeping track of KPIs, key performance indicators. Have those basic skills, it's not just about the research about all kinds of art humanities, make sure you've got some start knowledge to back yourself up. It comes in really handy. I think on a really practical level, read the job descriptions for what you're applying for. So in my position, I do a lot of hiring. And it's really obvious when people don't read the briefs, don't read the job descriptions. When you're doing the application, make sure you demonstrate how you match the criteria, how you can do this job, read it, answer it, make it really, really clear, because there's so many people applying for these jobs. If we can't see that you've got these skills, we're just going to put you in the no pile because we can't see that you can do the job. So read it, make sure that you say I can do this job because.

I want to ask you a question about the 30 rejections challenge, because you are the rock star of today's podcast and with Museum learning and I'm sure that even though you are, you have some things that don't work out. So how do you deal with it?

Yeah, that came about. So I turned 30 this year, and I'm having a little bit of a crisis about it. I thought, I'm gonna turn this into a positive thing. I've had quite a lot of fear basically, about rejections. There've been a few things where I haven't gone for maybe the dream job or haven’t gone for an exciting opportunity because I've been scared of that no. And I thought you know what, no is nothing to be scared of, I'm just going to put myself out there, see what happens and see what kind of comes about. So I sent myself a little challenge to be rejected 30 times this year, so I've been applying for speaking at conferences, I've been applying for a few jobs just to see what happens, and other little opportunities here and there. So I've applied for the Engage extended leadership programme, also applied to do a Master's in Grey history. All these things, you know, all these kind of dream opportunities, I thought, you know what, I'm gonna go for it. the worst that can happen is a no. And if a no happens, you can ask why the no. So that's come in quite handy with various job applications actually. And getting those No’s and asking, ok, so it's been really good to just build on, it is like, ok, that's actually really, really helpful because so much fear holds us back. And it's like it doesn't, I just want you to kind of get rid of that fear of rejection, be like, ok, cool, that's a no, let's move on to the next thing. But yeah, when you do get that no, ask why. Sometimes that's so much more helpful than getting a yes, because you get to find all these things that maybe you hadn't considered because you're, you know, if you're in your head a lot, if you're applying for lots of things, you don't necessarily have that time to stop and think. But having someone say, you need to do this, this, this and this, it's like, yes, boom, done. And also, this challenge has been really good for my confidence. I was expecting to get 30 no’s quite quickly. So I've gone for about 15-20 opportunities, I've got a list at home, and there's been two No’s actually. What's really kind of come out of it is that actually I've got more skills and knowledge and expertise than I was giving myself credit for and you really learn to become like your own biggest cheerleader with this. It's like Gwendoline Christie with the Emmys, so she plays Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones. And she submitted herself and got an Emmy nod, and it's like, yeah, be your own cheerleader, put yourself out there because no one else is going to do it for you.

Oh, that's a very good question. So I think if I had unlimited funding, I would set about kind of redressing all those things that we see - I don't say wrong, but all those things that we see in museums, galleries, culture institutions, that they just don't do well, alright. So I'd want to make sure that was fully accessible. I’d want to make sure that it was at least carbon neutral. I'd be wanting to position it in a way that does good and not just that, kind of intrinsic cultural good that all museums, art galleries, cultural venues do, but an active force of good in the community. So whether it's providing space for people in need, whether it's providing homeless shelters, or food for people who need feeding, I'd really be wanting to do some social good with this museum. I'd be wanting to display objects and artefacts from underrepresented communities, cultures, peoples, and I would be inviting those peoples to share their own stories, rather than having an invisible curatorial voice say why it's important. I would have the people to whom these objects were important, share why. I would be supporting artistic communities as well. I'd be getting them in, I'd be filling the walls with art, I'd be encouraging artists from very little to very, very, not little to take part as well. It'd be a collaborative space, I’d be an open space, it’d be a creative space, and it'd be a space where people could be heard and listened to.

This was For Arts’ Sake, and we will see you next week.