What’s Your Croydon?
We’ve been busy bees at Museum of Croydon HQ. We closed out our 2019 programme with a heap of great exhibitions including but not limited to; Stormzy ‘Coming Home’ from National Portrait Gallery, Bold by Mark Goldby, 100 years of Council Housing, Tina Crawford’s ‘What a Waste’, Windrush, Saree Unwrapped, Croydon Art Society and #Faves.
We now turn to our even more ambitious 2020 ‘What’s Your Croydon?’ exhibition programme which takes our community led programming to the next level.
In February 2020 we took the bold decision to open up our galleries, our collections and our ways of working to be taken over by local artists, organisations and communities to stage their own 3 month long exhibitions and activities in response to the themes of ‘People’, ‘Place’ or ‘Identity’.
This was an open call through our Cultural Partnership Network to encourage artists and community groups to respond to our collections, delivering something innovative and provide an exhibition aimed at different audiences.
So what type of activiations were we looking for?
Inspired by Museum of Croydon’s collections - we wanted to bring out our collections or in the case of a couple of exhibitions, prove we hadn’t collected it yet!
Culturally beneficial to the community
Highlight Croydon’s diversity and heritage
Create something for everyone
We had an astonishing 31 responses to our call and with only 9 spaces available it was an incredibly hard decision to make. We had a wide range of responses celebrating stories of Croydon’s past through to contemporary installations by Croydon’s most emerging visual arts - the passion to highlight Croydon’s heritage was amazing!
Where do we go from here and how did we determine our programme? Check out our next blog …
