Our guest this week is one we are really excited about, Liam Wiseman. Liam is a Museum's relationship manager for the Arts Council England and has worked at cultural sites all across the country.

Liam Hello.

Hi, thanks very much for having me here.

Liam, you've had a pretty wide reaching career, you've done lots of stuff. You are currently a self-described museum fellow for the Arts Council England, which is one of the biggest public bodies that provides funding for arts in the UK. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and what that actually entails?

Museum relationship managers, we have them in each region across the country. The idea is that they are the kind of bridge between the Arts Council and the museum sector. So we work with our nationally funded organisations, our national portfolio organisations, which get funding, a significant amount of funding for four years. So we manage the relationship between us and them to make sure they are meeting our expectations, that we're providing the support and resources they need, and that we can, you know, come to an understanding if there are any issues between them. But we also have a wider role than that. So we also try and champion and bring in smaller museums to work with us and get funding from us through our project grants, so I am developing creative practice funds, and other funding streams that we have as well, including capital development. So that really is quite a strategic role as well to make sure that, you know, as many museums as possible can get our funding. But also I have weird extra roles, like we have specific place based initiatives. So despite having more of a history and background with museums, I've also been asked to help develop the artistic infrastructure in the Fenland region of Cambridgeshire. So that is completely, you know, out of your wheelhouse, not something I really had to do before, but it's a really interesting challenge, and something that as an opportunity you wouldn't really get in other organisations I think. That's one of the best things about Arts Council England, is because it covers all sorts of art forms. I'm learning stuff about dance and theatre and things that I haven't really had that much experience with before.

Yes. So the Arts Council is the public body that supports the development of arts and culture across England, specifically student museums. What we do is we have a national portfolio organisation as I mentioned before, which gets an investment of £36.6million per year. That's quite significant sums of money, but then we also have our project grants programmes, which help museums sector to get funding for collections work, interpretation work, outreach work, anything that museums do, we can help fund those projects and bring them to life. So it's quite an interesting organisation that tries to cover all different art forms, and have specialties in all different parts of the sector. But we also, with museums, have the accreditation organisation, so we run the accreditation scheme, which is the national standard for museums to be up, and that's required in order to receive funding and other opportunities. We also run the museum development as well. So we have our network of museum development officers across the country, who are specifically there to help support local museums, make sure that they can get access to the same opportunities as the big national organisations, make sure there's a bit more of a level playing field between them all.

So with the Arts Council providing, you know, grants and other types of funding for arts projects, how does that work? Who's eligible for those grants and that funding?

So one thing that I mentioned is accreditation. So you have to be at an accredited museum before you can get any funding. The accreditation process, I think it varies depending on the size or scale of the organisation that you are a part of. But it's mainly about making sure that your collections and the standards used to preserve and interpret your collections is up to scratch to what we'd like to see. There is a whole team of support out there. So there's a whole accreditation team and a group of advisers that work locally, but also across the country to make sure that you have the support you need, for small museums that might not be accredited, but want to be in the future.

Yeah, they certainly do. I grew up in the southwest, I've spent the vast majority of my life there. I grew up in Cornwall and then kind of travelled around the Southwest a bit with different jobs and opportunities in the university when I was studying as well. The East is a very different region, but you know, they are obviously similar challenges. One of the things I've not got used to yet is how flat it is.

It's really flat. I am from Essex, and it is like just one big flat thing, it’s horrible.

I mean, I'm getting there with it now, but really kind of weirded me out first, I'll be honest, because I'm used to a lot of hills. Bath from Bristol, if you have ever been there, they are quite hilly places, you don't want to be riding a bike around there. Everyone has bikes in Cambridge. But yeah, it's been a really nice challenge and a really nice opportunity to not only get to see a new part of the country, but also a whole different set of museums and organisations that I wouldn't necessarily have gone to otherwise as well, because if I hadn't just naturally been in that part of the country.

So if we can talk about your background, obviously you mentioned, you're originally from the southwest, that's where you grew up. What in, your sort of personal background led you to want to sort of hang out on museums for a living? How did that come about?

That was a job to have.

Absolutely, it was part of a fundraising project, basically, you know, similar to, people have seen that one in Durham is quite a famous one as well. The idea is, if you pay a pound, you could put a brick on the model. And obviously, hopefully get over £300,000, because that's lots of bricks. That was just fun, and that was again, like an example of the kind of variety of roles there are within heritage and museum jobs. Then from there, I moved to work at Stonehenge, and I was the World Heritage partnership officer for about a year. That was really interesting. That was the kind of role that gave me a lot of the stakeholder and partnership skills have become really, really integral to the kinds of work that I do now. Because that was all about how we can solve problems within these historic landscapes, and make sure that everyone that lives, works, or participates in the local area, feels comfortable and happy with how things are progressing. It turns out you get shouted a lot in those roles, local communities, parish councils, they always have a bone to pick with you. Even if you're not actually working for Stonehenge, they just want to yell at someone who has a relation to Stonehenge. I was actually employed by Wiltshire Council, so I wasn't really part of the English Heritage side of the operation. But yeah, people still love if they could yell at someone. From there I managed to get a job as the heritage Engagement Manager at Bristol Old Vic, which is the longest continuously running theatre in the history of the UK.

253 years now.

Yeah, 253 now. Basically, they got some National Lottery Heritage Fund money to deliver this project, which was going alongside a capital redevelopment that they were undergoing. So basically, my role was to then bring in historic interpretation, using their archive material to kind of explore the history of the building, and some of the stories and performances that happened there.

Yeah, I mean, black history, I think is something that is really underrepresented. The issue is we have Black History Month, which is a great initiative, but it's like, ok, well, you only get to be important for a month. It is the same with LGBT history, it's the same with a lot of the protected characteristics. And that, whilst it's a nice idea, it is not working really, because it means that, you know, again, people only really care about you for that period of the year. What I'd like to see is, these types of histories be represented fully throughout the interpretation and exhibitions and material found within museums, and make sure that that could be represented all year round.

Fantastic. I think that would be really good. I mean, I've worked as a teacher previously, and with stuff like Black History Month and Women's History Month, yeah, we do a little bit of something different for that one month, and then it's back to the same old battles and dead white people. So on a kind of similar thread then, the current discourse within museums focuses a lot on decolonization and a decolonial approach to creating museum exhibits. You are quite a vocal supporter of decolonization in museums. Could you please explain for our listeners what decolonization means and why it's so important today?

Decolonization has been a discussion that's been happening for quite a while now in museums. It's one of those discussions that it's been happening, but there has not been a huge amount that's actually come out of it yet. Basically, what it wants to do is to address the historical legacy of Britain's colonial past, which includes reinterpreting items and exhibitions of objects that have been taken from other countries by Britain or other European colonies, or colonial powers, and examining them in a new way to try and understand and unpick the real history of what happened there. Because we always get presented with very one sided view of history, which is, you know, Britain, we don't really talk about our colonial past, we kind of sweep it under the rug. People still have this positive view of the Empire. I mean, listen to things like Raw Britannia, and a lot of our national anthem, things of national importance, are still referencing the empire in a positive light. And for parts of Britain, yeah, that was a good thing. But for the rest of the world, it was a very different story in a very difficult time. But also, in Britain, like you think about what happened with the workhouses during the Victorian period, even British people were treated terribly during that time. So what we're really trying to do is to make sure that those stories are understood with the nuance and complexity that they demand, instead of presenting this positive, good old Britain, wartime spirit sort of attitude, which a lot of museums tend to still have.

Yeah, there are multiple different ways of trying to address this, you can obviously look at and revisit the interpretation that you have in the museums. That's something that Birmingham Museum trusted with their exhibition in the past, is now a couple years ago, that was like the first big exhibition that really sought to try and address the issues we're talking about here. It was delivered by Rachael Minott, Sarah Wajid and a couple of people at Museum Detox, as well as working with community members from different ethnic backgrounds, across Birmingham, to try and make sure that their views and history is represented there. And it got a lot of backlash from newspapers, from like the Sun. But that, to be honest, only helped to highlight the significance, the importance of this work I think, because it really highlighted that there is still this attitude towards museums and museum content and things that, it's a good thing that Britain has all these objects from the rest of the world and that we're able to interpret them in our own way. I don't think that is right, because really, obviously, then our objects in the first place love them, and we shouldn't be able to present this Eurocentric narrative, which doesn't really showcase again, the nuance of these items. And actually, the real uses of a lot of them. There are a lot of African objects particularly, which are displayed as instruments, for example, even though it might have a spiritual connection or deeper understanding of what that object actually does. That's never really referenced in the text.

Ok. For anybody who perhaps is working in a museum, working in a gallery, working in a heritage sector, who is looking to improve their practice in this regard, are there any kind of tips where they should start? What kind of questions should they be asking?

The first thing I think you should do is talk to communities who have relation to these items, or they might have been taken from those communities. There is a lot of work going on around restitution, which is slightly different, the return of artifacts. But I think the most important thing museums can be doing right now is to try to break down the hierarchy of museums and encourage more power sharing. So we need absolutely more community calculations so that there can be a proper understanding of these objects from different groups of people, making sure that those stories are then represented in the text or in the museum. One of the things I tend to see a lot of is museums delivering tours, about untold histories, or colonial, difficult subjects. But that doesn't really work to be honest, because whilst these tours are great and often really thought provoking, the fact is 99% of your audience will never engage with that. It's only going to be people that want to engage with that anyway. So what you really need to do is make sure the people that don't necessarily think this is important, actually see it and experience it, and then they can perhaps understand why it's significant.

I think going back to what you mentioned earlier, kind of rose tinted view of the Empire and the British National spirit, people don't like to be confronted with the idea that things that they are quite attached to could be racist. That can often cause people to become disengaged. How do we address that?

Well, I think that's a really difficult challenge, but I think the most important thing is that we have to start. I know that there's, you know, people will want to figure out and benchmark how successful these things are. But really, we just need to be honest first of all, first and foremost, we need to start getting stories out there. We can have conversations from that point, then it allows people to come in and say, well, oh, I wasn't taught this at school, I didn't know about this. I mean, even for me, my education was really different to my own family's experiences of growing up in Britain. My mom is black, and her family is from Jamaica. My dad is white, and obviously his side is very British. I would go into these history lessons, and I would get a very different understanding of history from this British viewpoint. And then I'd go home and talk to my mom and her side of the family, and it would be like, did it really happen that way, or? We have a very different understanding of it. So I think I was able to be quite lucky to have that understanding of how people approach this. But the most important thing is that we start having the conversations because it can't keep being swept under the rug.

Well with the Arts Council, we have this thing called a Creative Case for Diversity, which is a really useful tool to help any arts organisation try and understand the reasons why diversity and inclusion are really significant factors. That is focused very much on the programme. The reason people focused on that programme is because that's often the thing that gets left out. So people do a lot of work on outreach and audience engagement. There are tons of those dreams across all museums, and those are really useful. Again, they are so significant, so important. But ultimately, if your programme is not representing or representative of multiple groups of people in a positive way, it doesn't matter how many, you know, positive action things you do to bring people into museums, they're still gonna have a rubbish experience, because there's still going to be this no racist, homophobic material, you know, it doesn't solve the problem. It just makes people not feel, you know, it makes people feel more unwelcome in those institutions I think. in a way. So really what we used to do is address the programme, the interpretation, the content first, and then we can again, build on that and make people feel more welcome.

So you've worked with Museum Detox?

Yeah.

Can you talk to us a little bit about Museum Detox and what your involvement was?

Yeah. So I mean, I think the most important thing Museum Detox has helped me with is to have more of a voice there, you know, advocacy group to make sure that the BME voice is represented within the museum sector. I've been part of some of their conferences and events that they've done. I've also run a couple of their white privilege clinics, and I did that when I was in Bath, and I did that with some of the museums there, because as you can imagine, Bath being a very white place, they don't tend to talk about some of these histories and the legacies of enslavement in the area, because there's a lot of that going on in both Bath and Bristol. Bristol is starting to come to terms with that now, but Bath still isn't. So I've done a bit of work with them on that. But really, like I said, they've just helped amplify the voices of museum workers that are BME, and that's hugely important because it is such, it can be such a struggle, sometimes it feels like you're banging your head against a brick wall, telling people these things over and over again. It's been gracious to have them as a kind of sounding board for that. But we're also involved in the Museum Associations Steering Group, which is looking to focus on decolonization and provides hopefully some useful resources for the sector. I said that the decolonization topic has been around for a while. And one of the things that clearly hasn't been there is, ok, we know this is an issue, what can we do about it? What are our actual practical things? I think that's what a lot of museums are struggling with, is what are the next steps? We want to start to do this work, how do we go about it? That's what we're hoping to provide here, some useful resources for the sector, that can be used in museums of hopefully all sizes, that can start to, you know, begin that process.

Yes. So the White Privilege Clinic was set up as a museum association conference a few years ago, as part of the Festival of Change. The Festival of Change is something that's been a few of the conferences, and basically, it's an opportunity for people of diverse backgrounds to bring in some of their stories into the museum work that's being discussed at the conferences. The White Privilege Clinic, the idea of that was to help museum staff understand their own internal, like racial biases basically. It's like a clinic idea. So you go into a clinic, they give you a form to fill out, which is basically a checklist of these questions and helps you figure out, ok, am I likely to support a BME staff member if they were happy having an internal dispute? What would I do to intervene? All those kinds of questions, as well as like how representative you think your work is in museums. So then at the end, tally up your score, you get given a score, which comes in the form of a prescription, and some advice on how you can go about trying to challenge your own behavior, which is something I think everyone needs to do because everyone has their own biases. So that's really, really significant, and quite an interesting way of approaching it.

How well attended was that clinic, because as you said, a lot of people don't necessarily like to confront the things about themselves, which can be a little bit difficult to address?

Yeah, I thought that as well, but actually, it was like the most popular, one of the festival change booths. So people, I think, really quite liked questioning that. I was trying to understand it a bit more. I think, in the museum sector, a lot of people are left leaning, quite liberal, you know, they're also really good people, but they don't always necessarily understand how the work they're doing impacts on others. So I think people are quite open to these discussions, it just helps to get them to figure it out.

So that was a really interesting project to be working on. It was basically a two year project, where we delivered interpretations that went alongside that capital redevelopment, as I mentioned. So there's an opportunity to actually bring into the theater for the first time stories about its history. Considering it was 250 years, it's quite a long time to try and break down what's important. But we had a few different types of interpretation that helped us to do that. We had, you know, your traditional kind of timeline, but we also had some interesting things like augmented reality app, which was called window to the past, which helped tell the story of the theater through the changes in the building, so it's architectural change, but narrated by Kathleen Barker, who was the historian that first wrote about the theater and its history, a lot of the material that we used was based off of her research. So it's great to try and actually include, you know, someone's real voice in that work, but also, it helped people visualise the changes, because obviously the app was used through an iPad, and it was fully kind of mapped to the scale of the building. And you could switch between different time periods, to see the world change around you. That was quite an exciting aspect of the work. But then we also had a lot of outreach and activity work as with any HLF funded programme, and works with schools, work with dementia groups, work with all sorts of different people to try and tell that story. I learned a lot about community engagement through that work, and how important it is, but how also time consuming it is and how having those relationships can really change the experience of being in that space. It's for a lot of people and how important that really is.

Yeah. So I think the real highlight for me was just before the project kind of launched, we did some like user testing, which was really important, especially for the augmented reality app, but also just for all of our different experiences, like the Noises Off corridor as well, which was a corridor that explores the history of sound, it is all interactive and everything. Basically just wanted to make sure it could withstand the punishment of hundreds of kids coming in and trying to bash everything. But basically, we did user testing with a number of groups. One of them was a group from the Rising Arts Agency in Bristol, which is an organisation that helps to support artistic development of young people. So they are all between 16 and 25, and we have a group of them in and give them the opportunity to just test things out and go wild with it. They all really had a great time, and I remember seeing that, and that was the first time with this project that I felt like oh my God, this is actually happening, it's come together, because up until that point, you're so heads down in the actual work and delivery, that you forget to think about, oh my God, but how will people respond to this. But it was really, really positive.

So if we can just chat a little bit about your work, your ongoing work with the Holburne Museum, you have worked with them for a number of years now, you started as a volunteer, as you mentioned earlier, while you're at university, and now you're a trustee. For anyone who's unfamiliar with the Holburne, can you tell us a little bit about what it is and why it's important to you?

Yeah. So I started volunteering at the Holburne when I was a student in university. And obviously, that was whilst I was living in Bath. After I moved away from Bath I wasn't able to carry on doing that, obviously. But the Holburne holds a special place for me, I guess, because it was the first thing that made me really interested in museum work. It was the first place that I felt like I could do something interesting with museums, and I could help, you know, maybe change them or set them on an interesting path. The Holburne Museum is Bath's Art Museum, the kind of art museum for that part of the Southwest, as well as Bath Northeast Somerset. And it's a really significant museum because it's one man's collection, William Holburne. He has a significant collection of European art, which is really fascinating. But then they do a lot of work as well with contemporary art. So making and trying to present a comparison between the two and make sure that new artists are able to be championed in that region. I think that's really important. So then when I was offered the opportunity to come back as a trustee, I thought let's do that, because now I can, again, have more of an impact on what's actually happening with the day to day operations of the museum and provide a strategic overview.

I mean, I think a serious part of the problem is the way that trustees are implemented in a lot of sites and a lot of museums, and not just museums, but, you know, arts organisations, all sorts of organisations. To be a trustee, it tends to mean you've got to have enough disposable income to be able to freely attend trustee board meetings, and give up your time in order to do that. Now, if you are a young person that's in an early career position, you often don't get either the time or resources or the pay to be able to support that. That's a really significant problem, and that's compounded when you look at the BME stats as well, because we know the BME people tend to be paid less than the white counterparts as well, even in similar roles. So there's a lot of talk now about the gender pay gap, but there's also an ethnicity pay gap. And that's not, again, it's Britain where we talk about things, we don't tend to talk about that very much, which is really problematic in itself. So when you look at both of those things combined, it's clear why BME trustees are not representative in those trustee positions. So I think one of the things we need to do to challenge that is obviously to rethink about how trustees work, make sure that there's some sort of further remittance for those positions, not just the expenses of travel, but maybe providing more opportunities or more resorts or platforming for those people to make sure that other people feel like they want to be part of this. When you get to museums as well, obviously, there is the issue of, because BME people are not represented very well within museums, why would they want to come and be on your board? If you are not already engaged with that work, you are not going to feel like you'll be welcome in those spaces necessarily. So I think, again, change the content in museums, provide a new narrative, decolonise the work and maybe it will make a difference.

Slightly changing topic, a little bit of a weird one, doing a little bit of a twitter stalk of you, over the past week or so, I noticed that you retweeted a post about Mondo Museum, which is a video game where you create your own Museum, something like Zoo Tycoon or RollerCoaster Tycoon? Are you a big video game guy in general? Or this just sort of stood out to you?

No, I really love video games. But when I was thinking about what I wanted to actually do with my life, it was either museums or video games. And it came down to the fact that I don't have very good computer skills. So my thought was that I could probably be better served to the museum. But even museums need to up their computer skills game anyway.

Sweet.

Oh, God, yeah. I mean, like, again, I love museums, but a lot of them, most of them are not fun. You go around museums, and they are incredibly educational, they are incredibly interesting, but they're not fun. So really bringing in that kind of gaming element to it, I think, is one way of doing that. I think that that could work in education as well, obviously, because, again, the best way to teach someone is by making them enjoy what they're learning. And if you're presenting it to people in a way that they're not either comfortable or familiar or happy, they are not going to really pay attention and learn something from it. One of the biggest opportunities is VR and AR. So you know, being able to change your experience about being in the site, or being able to overlay with what you're seeing on the interpretation panels with something else, or creatures roaming around, all sorts of things. I mean that really helps to change the experience.

So the University of Cambridge museums have a game called, I think it is called Climate Hack. No, sorry, Operations Survival, it was Operations Survival, which is a series of games across some of their different sites, where you are engaging with the topics of obviously, climate change at the moment, that allows you to do that in a variety of experiences. They are not techie sort of things, but again, it's providing a different experience in those locations.

For anyone who is listening to this, who might be inspired by your work, and maybe wants to get involved, have you got any practical tips of where they could start?

Oh, yes. Again, I think the most important thing you can do if you are working in museums is figure out what people want. Don't assume that they'll want the museum experience. I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of museums are having a hard time at the moment. Obviously there are multiple reasons, but I think the refusal to adapt by some of these organisations is problematic. Some museum services have started doing escape rooms, which is really great. So you know, like, people always say, you know, you don't want to latch on to trends or things like that. But when a trend is successful, you latch on to it, go for it and try and make as much money out of it as possible.

Oh, that's, I guess it would be more confident. It will be about, you know, going with your gut. When you know something is wrong, don't stand down, because there were times early on in my career, because I was in lower positions in the organisations I was working with, there were times when I did not speak up for what I thought was right, because I was either scared of losing my job or scared of what the repercussions might be. And you should never do that. The last few years, I've become much more confident about speaking my mind, telling people when they're wrong, and calling people out on it. That's the most important thing we can do, because, you know, I don't think people are inherently bad, but if you don't call them out for their bad practices, they won't change. We need to all be more confident doing that. That's what I'd say to my younger self, I think.

That's a really fantastic advice that a lot of us could probably apply, regardless of what field we're working in. A general question that we ask literally everybody who comes on this podcast with mixed results, if you had magically unlimited funding, how would you put that to use in a museum setting? What museum would you create?

I think a museum of fun, because like I said, museums don't tend to be fun. But what also doesn't ever get or doesn't usually get talked about is the importance of fun and play. There was a guy who worked for the Bristol Old Vic, who's actually really inspirational to me, who was studying the impact of play on children and how that affected their learning. So that's what really kind of inspired me to rethink the way I approach that kind of work. And what the museums, like I said could do is be fun, and have a museum of fun, and the talks about the history of play, and how people have engaged with different aspects of fun and learning as well over time, could be really interesting for a lot of people.

Yeah, I love that, it sounds brilliant. I’d go there every day.

I guess, don't get defensive when people tell you the way you're working might not be right, because it doesn't benefit anyone for you to just clam up and not be open to talking or being, you know, aware of other approaches or other ideas. Everyone works differently, everyone feels differently about different topics. And museums, when confronted with difficult issues, they tend to hide away from them. All you need to be doing is having a discussion, and then actually having some action, because the discussion has been happening to an extent, but still not seeing a huge amount of action, so we need to take the next step and make sure that we're approaching the work we're doing, to try and make it as inclusive as possible.

Liam, it's been an absolute pleasure having you. Is there anything else you'd like to plug before we let you go? Where can people find you?

If you want to follow me for weird tweets, then yeah, go for it. I'm on @liamthewiseman, on Twitter and Instagram, although it's not really museumy stuff on Instagram as much, but yeah, it's the same on there. But most importantly, don't follow me, look at the Arts Council, look at our website, look at the guidance, go apply for project grants, because museums are very underrepresented in our project grant streams. More museums need funding, and that's where you can find it.

Liam, thank you so much.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you.

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