Launch of Your Icons
The twelve museums, libraries and archives in the West Midlands with collections designated of national
importance announce the launch of Your Icons. This consists of a website www.youricons.org
together with two travelling graphic exhibitions and a series of events
designed to promote iconic items within the collections. Website visitors can
explore items from the collection at random, or search by category, by
organisation, or by simple word search. You can vote for the Icon of the Month,
add comments, and suggest items for future inclusion: the site aims to grow and
develop with the addition of more items from the collections over coming
months. The website is launched with Josiah Wedgwood’s Slave Medallion as
the first featured Icon of the Month, as appropriate to coincide with the
bicentenary of abolition.
The two travelling exhibitions will visit the museums,
libraries and archives with designated collections, as well as community
venues. The exhibitions are designed in part to promote awareness of the
collections, but also to encourage visitors to the website to participate in
online voting and debate.
The events linked to Your Icons include:
- Stoke-on-Trent Museums Service
has been working with a group of young people excluded from school to
develop, record and perform a piece of music inspired by iconic items from
its collections.
- Thinktank, the Birmingham Science Museum
is working with teenagers from Muslim communities on a project similarly
inspired by its iconic collections (and linking these to an exhibition on
Islamic scientific and technological heritage).
- The Barber Institute of Fine
Arts is working with the educational theatre company Annamation to perform
work in schools based around iconic portraits in its collections.
- Birmingham Central Library is
organising a family learning day to raise awareness of its designated
collections with families and children.
Your Icons is supported by the Designation Challenge Fund
and MLA West Midlands. The website, exhibitions and associated leaflet have
been designed by Coventry-based Macrojuice www.macrojuice.com.
For further information, or to enquire about hosting one of
the travelling exhibitions, please contact the Your Icons project manager, Tim
Caulton [log in to unmask].
Tim Caulton
www.museumintelligence.com
