National treasures? | Dr Melanie Polledri (Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales)
Channel: Aberystwyth Art History Research Seminar Series
Date: 2021-11-30

'National treasures? Addressing the legacies of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’s early collection-building policies'

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (AC-NMW) was an institution hard fought for; following a wave of political and cultural Welsh revivals, its Royal Charter was eventually granted in 1907. The new museum proclaimed with nationalist vigour that its aims were “to teach the stranger about Wales and the Welsh about their fatherland” (Ceremony of the laying of the Foundation Stone, (1912) Cardiff: AC-NMW). The initial imperative was to build an art collection of the highest national importance. Yet, despite the best of intentions, this programme was embedded within late nineteenth-century imperial worldviews that rendered the British Empire (and all that that entails) an assumed and invisible norm.

This raises important questions that need addressing. How should museum professionals approach problematised artworks that are the result of these collection-building policies? How can we make them meaningful and accessible to today’s multicultural and diverse audiences? In short, how do we redress this legacy of often inappropriate, offensive, and just plain wrong, imperialist endeavours? In considering these questions, this lecture contributes to ongoing debates that, in an age of renewed activisms, encourages democratic co-curated approaches to reject the entrenched authority of the one (white male) gaze and the one narrative and make way for new interpretations on being Welsh and life in Wales today. 


Dr Melanie Polledri is Curator of Digital Art Collections at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. As part of the wider National Contemporary Art Gallery for Wales initiative, she is working on the digitisation of the collections to form the Virtual Art Collection. Previously, she has worked with the Welsh and international art collections to facilitate their accessibility and management as well as developing knowledge through exhibitions and research such as Imagine a Castle: Paintings from the National Gallery, London (2020) in collaboration with the National Gallery and [un]seen [un]heard (current).
 
Stemming from her PhD on the Welsh sculptor, William Goscombe John, Melanie specialises in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British sculpture as well as Welsh national identity expressed through cultural art objects. She has spoken widely and written on these, including, most recently, the TV programme, Story of Welsh Art, on BBC 4 (2021) and a chapter, “Sacred stones guarded about with dragons” in Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, (Bloomsbury, December 2020).

Organised by: Dr Samuel Raybone (Aberystwyth University).