Museums are made by the works they hold in their collections. Lines spill out of the Louvre because it houses Mona Lisa and staring at Monet’s Water Lilies, apart from the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, could take up a whole afternoon. But ten museums in London are using Instagram to dive into each other’s collections, virtually swapping their fabled works. Using the hashtag #MuseumInstaSwap, the participating museums—British Museum, Design Museum, Horniman Museum, Imperial War Museums, London Transport Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, Science Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Wellcome Collection—have traded over 100 works and shared them on their Instagram accounts.
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“I came up with the idea after seeing Londonist list their ten best London museums on Instagram,” explains Wellcome Collection web editor, Dornan Russell. “Looking at the list, museums of such a wide range of collections, subjects, and sizes were represented, and I thought we should try some kind of cultural exchange; an exciting way to collaborate and share our content in a new way, especially on a platform as dynamic and engaging as Instagram.”
The British Museum has shared a number of The Imperial War Museum’s archive photos from World War II, and the Wellcome Collection has shared a London tube map made out of tickets issued at each station on display at the London Transport Museum, allowing their respective followers to see works that expand beyond the narrow scopes of each participating museum’s missions.
Russell says the aim of the project is to let the public experience the collections in a new way, and to highlight that the museums are more involved with each other than some people might think. “It is also a way for us to look at our themes and subject areas in a way we may not have done before,” he tells The Creators Project. “Visiting a museum that at first seems quite unrelated, but then finding fascinating links and dynamic and unexpected ways to explore common themes has been amazing. For example, looking at a map of London in one museum and ‘seeing’ a brain; or looking at the circulatory system in an educational model and ‘seeing’ the London Underground map. We hoped our audiences would find it interesting too.”
Russell says that he wants other museums and Instagram users to get inspired by the project and share images from the museum’s collections using the hashtag. “Hopefully inspired by our project, they’ll respond to the question, ‘If you started a museum, which of our objects would take pride of place?”
Click here to see more of the ongoing #MuseumInstaSwap.
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