LGBTQ+ Diary Blog 1 – A New Chapter for LGBTQ+ Histories at Hull Museums

Posted: 23rd June 2020

The Hull Museums and Ferens Art Gallery collections hold many amazing objects, some of which tell the wonderful stories of our heritage and illustrate the diversity of our city.

Our shared collections include many objects that reflect the lives of LGBTQ+ people throughout history, whose stories remain untold. As we aim to make our museums inclusive to everyone, we have made the active decision to change this.

Hello, my name is Lauren and I am the Community Curator: Social History at Hull Museums. I also lead on the museum’s LGBTQ+ working group. As a group we are passionate about increasing and improving representation and inclusion of LGBTQ+ narratives across our collections research, interpretation, and programming.

All members of our working group are now working from home due to Covid-19 – spread across the East Yorkshire region, but, not to be defeated, we are using our digital resources to move forward and are working on some exciting things and hope we can continue to share these with you throughout the duration of the lockdown period and beyond.

Focussing on research, we are identifying objects and themes within our collections that tell these overlooked stories. We are looking at objects relating to gender, sexuality, and identity – and this is only the beginning. This research will allow us to provide a much more complete representation of the collections and the communities we live in.

You may have noticed that on Fridays we have been posting on the Hull Museums Twitter page (@Hull_Museums) – a brief taster of the research we have been doing. To date these tweets have highlighted the French animal painter Rosa Bonheur, David Bowie, Queen Anne, and the emperor Hadrian. While continuing to share our research in this way, you can follow us in more detail through a series of research blogs exploring the exciting stories we identify within our collections in much more detail. Keep an eye out for them!

You can also go behind the scenes on our research, hear from our partners and get involved yourselves, so follow us here to find out more about our journey and what we get up to next.

The next post in this series is called ‘Internal Staff Training’ and can be found here – click here!