Introduction

As the UK entered lockdown in March 2020, museums and galleries across the country shut their doors. Over the following eighteen months, periods of blanket closure were interspersed with phases of local restrictions. Arts Council England emergency funding, the establishment of the Culture Recovery Fund and the furlough scheme did much to reassure the sector of its immediate safety. However, the long-term closure of gallery spaces, for a sector built around the exhibition form, prompted significant consideration of the role museums and galleries might play during a period of such unprecedented crisis and deviation from norms.

Organisations tended to divert resources towards the more socially oriented, and often unheralded, work that has long been part of the wider remit of much of the museum and gallery sector. Close engagement with local communities became a priority, with existing provision scaled up and new projects established. Exhibition and hospitality spaces were repurposed to social ends, and digital or hybrid technologies used to engage with audiences no longer able to attend in person. Some organisations also contributed considerably to the provision of care and resources to local communities.

This chapter examines these civic functions of museums and galleries in the north-east and north-west of England throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, areas which were disproportionately hit by extended lockdowns and high-tier restrictions for much of 2020 and 2021. Three short case studies serve to illustrate the kind of socially oriented work which took place in the sector during the pandemic. These case studies are then supplemented by insights gleaned from across the thirty-six interviews we conducted with staff from a wide range of institutions, from artist-led spaces and studio/project-space hybrids to major national institutions and regional museums groups. Interviews took place with staff at all levels within these institutions throughout 2020 and 2021. Both case studies and interviewees remain anonymous, given the often-sensitive contexts involved, except when discussion focuses solely on public-facing programming. Based on these interviews, we argue that, far from being a simple by-product of the closure of exhibition spaces, the turn towards civic functions was motivated by a heightened and pervasive sense of civic responsibility on the part of museums and galleries. Here we draw on pre-pandemic discourses surrounding the civic role of arts organisations (Doeser and Vona, 2016) and the idea of the ‘useful museum’ (Hudson, 2018).

Conceptual framework: civic role and useful museums

Since 2016, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has been leading an ‘Inquiry into the Civic Role of Arts Organisations’. In a literature review prepared for the project, James Doeser and Viktoria Vona broadly define civic role as ‘the socio-political impact that organisations make on a place and its people through programmes of activity, or simply their existence’ (Doeser and Vona 2016, p.9). They note the influence of community art and the rise of socially engaged art practices but highlight that thinking around ‘civic role’ has tended towards a greater focus on ‘arts organisations [as opposed to art practices] as vehicles for delivering instrumental civic and social benefits’ (Doeser and Vona, 2016, p.7). This reflects more than two decades of instrumentalising demands placed upon arts organisations by Labour, coalition and Conservative governments alike.

The distinction, often underplayed in the literature, between the civic role of the arts on the one hand and of arts organisations on the other is important and informs our analysis below. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Phase 1 Report on the project maintains this distinction, focusing solely on the latter. It is noted that the civic role of arts organisations might be enacted both ‘through and aside from the production of artistic work’ (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2017, p.11). While museums and galleries are spaces for the production and consumption of artistic activity, this has been, at least since the 1990s, only part of their broader offer to the civic sphere, with new roles (Head of Learning, Head of Outreach and Engagement, etc.) introduced to reflect the expanded remit of arts and cultural organisations.

It is against this backdrop that discussions of the so-called ‘useful museum’ have emerged, led by Alistair Hudson, Director of Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery until 2022, having joined from the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) in 2018. With the appointment of Hudson as its director, the Manchester Art Gallery rebranded itself as ‘the original useful museum’. Founded in 1823 as The Royal Manchester Institution for the Promotion of Literature, Science and the Arts, the gallery was ‘initiated … by artists, as an educational institution to ensure that the city and all its people could grow with creativity, imagination, health and productivity’ (Manchester Art Gallery, 2023b).

Hudson’s thinking on the civic role of the museum is influenced by John Ruskin (Hudson, 2020), whose 1859 lecture on ‘The unity of art’ is cited on the gallery’s website (Manchester Art Gallery, 2023a). As such, the roots of the useful museum or what has sometimes been called ‘Museum 3.0’ lie in a nineteenth-century conception. Museum 3.0 references the idea of ‘usership’ (adopting the language of the internet) – meaning that the gallery is co-created by its users. Hudson takes from Ruskin the idea of a museum as distinct from those that are defined by the market and by capital through becoming useful. This use, as Hudson suggested in a talk delivered while still at MIMA, lies in the idea that art should support the ‘superstructure’ or the state (Hudson, 2015). But, as Larne Abse Gogarty pointed out in her 2017 examination of ‘usefulness’, this refers to only the ‘good’ bits of the state (Gogarty, 2017). Gogarty notes that ‘presumably MIMA is not interested in supporting police, prisons or borders guards’ (2017, p. 122).

Hudson paints the useful museum model as a radical challenge to the orthodoxies of the post-Enlightenment modern museum (the ‘Museum 1.0’), particularly what he sees as a belief in the incompatibility of art and use, inherited from the ‘software engineer of modernity’ Immanuel Kant (Hudson, 2018). He also contrasts the useful museum with the ‘Museum 2.0’, an institution which foregrounds participation in the wake of post-1990s instrumentalising demands, but which works ‘in support of that primary high-art agenda’ (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2023, p.28). Hudson’s model of the useful museum on the other hand asks the museum to ‘join in with what’s happening in the world, and [demonstrate] how art can contribute to some of the main social problems that we have’ (Hudson, 2018).

Through Hudson’s directorship of both Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery between 2017 and 2022, the two institutions operate as part of a network of institutions associated with the Asociación de Arte Útil, led by Hudson and Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. The Whitworth indeed houses an ‘Office of Arte Útil’, which is ‘free for use by local constituents, visitors, students and academics and provides a space to connect with the ideas and processes of “useful art”’ (Whitworth Art Gallery, 2021). The Asociación serves as the focal point for a now established but fairly niche discourse around utility in contemporary art practice, theory and museology. Crucially, through the Asociación, the useful museum model is conjoined with Bruguera’s advocacy for Arte Útil (‘useful art’ or ‘art as a tool’). That is to say that implicit within the useful museum model is not simply a reconsideration of the role of the museum, but a rethinking of the role of art within society in general. Given the ways in which, as we shall see through our case studies, museums and galleries felt increasingly compelled to be ‘useful’ to their communities and constituencies, Hudson’s model is an instructive precedent to call upon.

Case studies

While our interviews covered a wide range of institutions in terms of geography, scale, scope and funding, it is important to preface our observations by acknowledging that a shift in emphasis towards the civic is not uniformly spread across this range. Organisations that did not pivot significantly to the civic included smaller galleries and museums with more precarious funding situations, in smaller urban and rural contexts, and artist-led project spaces and studios. In the latter case it is worth noting that these institutions still felt significant responsibility to a constituency, but rather than the community-driven focus of the organisations we will be focusing on, this responsibility was largely felt towards the constituency of local artists, who were either studio-holders or regular participants in artist professional development programming. Those organisations that most fully pivoted towards their civic functions tended to almost exclusively represent institutions which conform to three broad ‘types’. Our three case studies are representative of each of these ‘types’.

1. Large-scale museums and galleries, often primarily associated with exhibiting contemporary art practice, often reliant on Arts Council England (ACE) funding, and always in large and central urban settings. These often had strong pre-existing outreach and engagement programming and/or histories of exhibiting socially engaged artists.
2. Smaller, consciously socially engaged organisations, often rooted in histories of socially engaged art practice and community art, usually in less central urban locations (either in smaller towns, suburbs or inner city areas). These are usually ACE National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs).
3. Urban museums and museums groups (again usually in larger urban centres), with strong ties to city councils and other urban institutions, drawing the bulk of their funding both from ACE and local councils.

 Case Study A

The first case study is a major art gallery in an urban centre. Heavily reliant on earned income from events, catering and the shop, lockdowns posed a particular threat to the gallery, and its immediate survival was primarily secured through extensive use of the government’s furlough scheme. The gallery has prioritised its social and community functions in recent years, and this was heightened by the pandemic. The director stated that since being in post the gallery has ‘been much more focused on a civic impact agenda’ and that they have prioritised ‘being much more embedded locally’, or even ‘hyperlocally’. They espouse a model of civic impact built not on outreach, but on ‘mutuality’. This profoundly impacted their early response to the pandemic, with one team member asking: ‘[How can we talk about mutuality] if in an emergency we disappear?’ The pandemic also prompted questions as to the identity, value and role of the organisation. In our interview, the gallery’s director stated: ‘What now is the value, what is the relevance? How are we relevant to the needs of our communities and our constituents right here, right now? So forget about this being a centre for contemporary art. I’m thinking about us as being an anchor organisation within a community.’

Some of its community-facing projects pre-existed the pandemic but have increased in scale and scope. They have also been increasingly enacted in partnership with other civic institutions, the council and local community groups. The director acknowledged that this side of the gallery’s work was often ‘less visible’ pre-pandemic, and other civic institutions struggled to take the gallery’s offer to the community seriously. However, during the early months of the pandemic, ‘they’ve finally seen what we’re capable of doing and what we are doing, and we’ve now expanded that provision particularly for the council’. For instance, a creative food provision programme, led by the gallery in partnership with community groups, was delivering to 112 families in November 2021, up from twenty-five pre-pandemic.

This project was emblematic of a common desire to bring the curatorial and learning and engagement activities of the institution into closer contact, with food and care packages that were conceptually tied into the gallery’s artistic programming being distributed to local families, and artists who were scheduled to contribute to in-person programming instead being asked to feed into care provision. The gallery’s long-term goal is to more fully integrate these two activities, with more exhibitions programming being built upon the gallery’s community work. Staff and trustees undertook anti-racism and poverty-proofing training as part of the gallery’s drive to a greater prioritisation of its civic responsibilities to the community.

The gallery suffered the withdrawal of its catering contractors early in the pandemic, which led to the closure of their café space. The director then proposed the reuse of this space as a community asset, offering a free-to-access and ‘non-commercialised’ public space for use by the local community. The gallery used this space, in collaboration with local community groups, for events and activities directed towards marginalised groups, and operated the space the remainder of the time as a ‘pay-what-you-like’ café. The space has been particularly utilised by local families. The director was keen to stress that this kind of repurposing of space would not get past the board of trustees under normal circumstances. COVID-19 offered the opportunity to bypass the ‘economic metrics’ which often guide decision-making, and for the director to ‘win arguments I never would have done before’.

 Case Study B

The second case study is a small embedded local arts organisation with ACE NPO status based in a post-industrial town in a semi-rural location. The institution’s mission has always been community focused and, during the pandemic, the pressure to support the local community increased. This was particularly urgent given that, due to financial pressures and furlough, many local voluntary and grassroots organisations had ‘gone quiet’ at the onset of the first lockdown. Thanks to the relative security afforded by their ACE core founding, they ‘felt like [they] had a responsibility to still function in some format and to be useful to the community that [they] were embedded in’. One staff member believed that, in some ways, their organisation had become ‘more relevant’ than ever before.

Much of their work pivoted to specifically addressing the immediate and real impacts of the pandemic; for example, they organised a Zoom call involving professionals with knowledge and experience of death and dying for those experiencing loss in their communities. The institution hosted a conversation involving an Iman talking about how Muslim burial rituals and practices have been affected by the COVID-19 restrictions. This was one of a number of digitally facilitated projects they ran, largely out of necessity, given the impossibility of enacting the face-to-face work that was at the core of their community-focused programming previously. They found some successes in digital work, but this was predominantly in communities which had strong existing digital access. The organisation ‘knew that just using the digital approach would be limiting’ as many of the communities they worked with had little desire to engage digitally, let alone in some cases the means or digital literacy to do so. Strategies were developed to mitigate this: many constituents were not keen on joining group Zoom events, so the organisation realised that it needed to offer what the community needed ‘right now… if it is just a one-to-one text service that they need, then in my role I can do that’.

This one-to-one digital approach was widely adopted, but put significant and understandable strain on staff members, who, it is important to remember, were also going through the stresses of lockdown. The director commented that ‘there was a point, maybe two months in, where you could see that people were still trying to do [their] job but trying to manage their own home life was getting challenging’. Furthermore, the constant need to adapt and rethink strategies proved ‘really draining’. Furlough was therefore used as means of relieving pressure on staff, although this did to a degree place even greater strain on those staff members who remained at work. For an organisation built upon an ethos of care for its communities, it was important that this care was also imparted to staff.

The organisation also felt a responsibility to the community of local artists and other cultural freelancers with whom they had been working extensively pre-lockdown. Their work with local artists continued and led to the establishment of a support network of around thirty-forty regular members, which met monthly throughout the pandemic. This commitment to art and artists was a key framing principle in their response to the pandemic. The organisation felt a need to ‘respond to some of the things that were happening locally’, but in a way ‘that still felt true to the organisation’ and its focus on art and the value of creativity. The director stated that lockdown had ‘refocused our mindset in terms of the importance of how we are working with artists as a part of the work that we do’. They also argued that, although they felt a compulsion to respond pragmatically to the needs of the local community, ‘there’s a responsibility that we’re not becoming an administrative or a management organisation … that the essence of how we work is not compromised by that’.

 Case Study C

The third case study is a local authority museum that sits on the boundary between an affluent area and one of relative deprivation, made up of families, many of whom have experienced third and fourth-generation unemployment. The manager noted the previous difficulties of reaching the latter hyperlocal community, which were made more difficult with the impact of COVID-19. During the pandemic, the museum faced a much longer closure (fifteen months) due to the redeployment of staff to work in frontline provisions such as food and PPE hubs, running helplines and administering business and hardship grants: something that can be identified as ‘useful’ within the wider society. Preceding difficulties included an ongoing restructure and, as a local authority museum, the lack of financial reserves. Both of these issues were further impacted as the museum had to make savings due to the pandemic, which left gaps in the staffing team including not having a marketeer. Volunteering also stopped.

Prior to the closure, the institution was highly embedded in its local communities and the manager noted that the physical gallery building drove community engagement with regular visitors coming in daily for a coffee. They told us that people missed visiting. However, restrictions placed on visitor numbers during the pandemic and after reopening forced a shift in emphasis to a less locationally defined constituency, driving engagement through innovative (and often digital) use of their collections (daily image posting on social media, for example). The museum is distinct from the other case studies in that it has a collection; as such, the museum benefitted from digitising its collection and ‘battered social media’ to increase engagement. However, the manager acknowledged the limitations of online engagement: visitors or viewers ‘lose something by not having it [the object/collection] in front of them’. From this experience, the museum aspires to make better use of digital technologies around its collections and enhance accessibility, with the goal of creating an online database that has wider relevance for the public.

When the museum doors reopened, it was in a much more limited capacity. The temporary exhibitions did not reopen, visitor numbers were restricted, and they were directed through the museum in a set ‘figure of eight’ formation rather than having freedom of movement to walk around the institution. Another problem arose with the ventilation of the physical space itself, which was deemed ‘not up to standard’. This impacted on how many visitors were allowed in the space at one time. In making these adjustments (i.e. the shift to digital and limited numbers/movement), it was felt that the museum’s community focus had been somewhat lost. It was uncertain whether the ‘strong relationships’ with specific users that the institution had enjoyed before the pandemic (with foster families, children and carers, for example) would return. The manager referred to the museum as a ‘static space’, whereas previously the institution had considered itself a community hub. The long-term plan is for the museum to formalise the ad hoc support work that it previously undertook by tendering for services to provide an alternative to day-care within the gallery space.

Rethinking the museum

 Localism

The pandemic has placed a renewed focus on the local in the museums and galleries sector, as it has more broadly. Several local authorities in the area covered by this research, for example Oldham and North Tyneside, have recently published cultural strategies identifying the local and ‘hyperlocal’ as key points of focus over the coming decade. While COVID-19 has, as one museum group director put it, ‘sharpened focus’ on inequalities generally, this has most viscerally been experienced at the level of the local. They articulated that this had led to an appreciation of the ‘importance of what we do in the places that we operate in’.

Accordingly, and as our case studies demonstrate, the vast majority of the socially oriented work undertaken by museums and galleries during the pandemic has been directed at local or even ‘hyperlocal’ (a term widely used by our interviewees) audiences. A learning and engagement manager at a regional museums group commented that their focus has been ‘in particular on this very local offer … and I would think that is true of all of the cultural organisations, not just ours’. Travel restrictions have dictated that face-to-face encounters be largely limited to communities within easy reach of one another. Even uses of the digital, despite its theoretically international reach, have strived for ‘depth rather than breadth of engagement, seeking to build and sustain meaningful relationships with specific and largely local audiences’ (Child et al., 2021).

Travel restrictions have also had an impact on audiences for exhibition programmes post-lockdown. The reduction in travel and tourism that accompanied even those periods of relatively relaxed Covid restrictions entailed less focus on enticing national and international visitors. Instead, particular attention has been paid to the visitor experience of local visitors, who have constituted a far greater proportion of pandemic and post-pandemic footfall than they had previously, as reported by many of our interviewees, including Case Study A. Venues that were heavily reliant on tourism pre-pandemic are those that have struggled most post-pandemic.

Local lockdowns have also localised experiences of navigating the pandemic, and a number of organisations reported a feeling of increased camaraderie with other local civic institutions as a result, particularly when experiencing more stringent restrictions than neighbouring regions. This has resulted in the enhancement of local networks, sometimes at the expense of participation in international networks (usually in the case of larger institutions), and an increased commitment to local ecologies, cultural or otherwise. Organisations have widely rallied around freelance artists, and many are reflecting this in their post-pandemic programming. Although also a function of financial pressures and travel restrictions, museums and galleries have prioritised platforming local artists, again often at the expense of international artists.

However, as Case Study C attests, the focus on the local has not been uniform. Here, a highly embedded local institution struggled to maintain its connections with local audiences and communities that they were no longer able to encounter face to face as before. Even in this negative example, the question of localism has profoundly shaped the institution’s experience of, and responses to, the pandemic. It is for this reason that we utilise the term ‘civic’ as opposed to the less locationally specific ‘social’ in this chapter.

 Useful museums?

Museums and galleries’ engagements with locality were regularly discussed in our interviews in terms of ‘use’ and ‘necessity’. A director of an urban museums group stated that ‘that sense of being useful to the place was vital during the pandemic in terms of that “what are we here for” kind of thing’. A learning and engagement officer told us that ‘we are really of use now’. This language recalls Hudson’s ‘useful museum’ model, although there was no sense that this model was being consciously invoked by our interviewees. While Hudson promotes an ideological reconsideration of the mission of museums, our interviewees’ references to utility and necessity emerged far more out of pragmatism and their encounter with an unprecedented set of circumstances. A learning and engagement manager at a museums group recounted a particularly successful hybrid digital project with local people with mental health needs. When asked why they thought the project had been such a standout success, they remarked: ‘I think there was a real need and I think we were just responding to that need.’

Furthermore, Hudson’s model is yoked to a broader belief in the usefulness of art in general, through its ties to the Arte Útil movement. The useful museum, in Hudson’s terms, subscribes to a belief in the civic value that art itself might offer, as evidenced in the first exhibition held post-lockdown at the Manchester Art Gallery. This was a show collecting artworks produced as part of the Channel 4 television programme Grayson’s Art Club, in which the British lockdown public began to make art based on weekly prompts set by artist Grayson Perry and psychotherapist Philippa Perry. This represented a firm statement of the gallery’s aspirations and a useful indicator of what the largely theoretical model of the useful museum might look like in practice. Here, art was seen as playing a valuable role in both social wellbeing and community experience in a time of distance and isolation. The accompanying exhibition blurb articulated this as follows:

The use value in this case is deemed to derive from the positive health benefits associated with engagement and participation in art and creative pursuits. This sentiment was echoed in many of our interviews and has been highly discussed in the emerging literature on art and the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. Bradbury et al., 2021). But while Covid may have amplified the significance of art’s value as a means of fostering wellbeing, this already formed the basis of much of the outreach and engagement work of the organisations we studied prior to the pandemic. Crucially, our case studies highlight that this is not the only form of value that institutions have seen themselves as offering through the pandemic. In fact, Case Study A does not articulate a model of value built upon the power of creativity, but one built upon institutions’ capacities to offer the basic services and resources essential to the mere survival of communities. If these could be delivered by ‘creative’ means then all the better, but this was not a priority. Here, it is not art itself which is the source of value, but arts organisations as civic institutions acting, as the director of Case Study A put it, as ‘anchor organisations’ within a broader civic support network. We identify this as the major shift in thinking surrounding value precipitated by the pandemic.

 From role to responsibility

We also characterise the changing nature of organisations’ conceptions of their civic value in terms of a shift from museums and galleries seeing themselves as having a ‘civic role’ to play to their feeling a sense of ‘civic responsibility’. We are here citing the language associated with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s work on the civic role of arts organisations. While the Foundation’s report argues that the ‘civic role has to be a choice and not a mandate’ (Calouste Gulbenkian, 2017, p.54), this does not reflect the sense of duty and obligation felt by our interviewees. We replace ‘role’ in the Foundation’s research with ‘responsibility’ to reflect this. We might also frame this shift as a move from a sense of museums and galleries offering a kind of ‘additive’ civic value – interventions into civic life which might enhance the lives of local residents and communities – to what Larne Abse Gogarty calls ‘subsistence models’ (Gogarty, 2017, p.129) in which museums and galleries have become increasingly viewed as institutions with a remit to contribute to the survival and maintenance of localities and their communities.

Our interviews demonstrate that this responsibility was generated both internally and externally to the institutions we have studied. On the one hand, we have referenced a number of instances where responsibility seems to emerge from a moral imperative on the part of institutions and their staff to divert resources to helping local communities in the face of the existential threats posed by COVID-19. On the other hand, we must not overlook external pressures placed on museums and galleries to fulfil civic functions. Case Study B highlighted the decimation of the civic ecology in their town during the pandemic. They then felt a pressure to act as an overflow for the civic responsibilities of other (often smaller) organisations.

Funding has also been a crucial factor in the production of this sense of civic responsibility. With many of our case study organisations being reliant on earned income prior to the pandemic (one case study reported that 60 per cent of their income came through these avenues), there was an immediate necessity to seek alternative funding to make up this shortfall. It was noted in an interview with a curator at a mid-size gallery that funding available from charitable organisations had been refocused towards projects that undertake civic work, that is, engage with under-represented and/or local communities. An example of this is the Contemporary Art Society’s (CAS) Rapid Response Fund that was launched in spring 2020. While CAS funding typically targets museum and gallery acquisitions, the Rapid Response Fund explicitly stipulates a benefit to the institution’s communities in its description:

 Challenges

The pivot towards enacting civic responsibility has not been without its challenges. Across our interviews, staff told us of the strain that they had been under throughout the pandemic, and this was often exacerbated by their shifting to work in more community-facing ways. Some who were furloughed felt slighted – ‘I felt like I’d got made redundant!’ – and worried about their job security. Those in managerial roles found the process of allocating staff to furlough stressful. And those who remained in post throughout were often made to either fill the voids left by furloughed colleagues or diversify their work into new areas. One director commented that within their organisation ‘some of those divisions between roles have become more fluid’. This diversification of roles was supported by widespread use of the pandemic as a period for the training, upskilling and reskilling of staff. However, working in unfamiliar roles took its toll on many, and only so much training was possible. Many arts workers had to go in feeling underprepared for new challenges and highlighted to us the kinds of training they felt they were lacking (often around mental health issues and digital technology). Those who were tasked with delivering organisations’ community-facing work were also confronted directly with the suffering of those in their immediate localities, This is an emotionally strenuous job to perform, particularly when workers are new to the role and undertrained. A sense of civic responsibility may have driven much of the positive work done by museums and galleries during the pandemic, but this responsibility weighed heavily on the shoulders of staff.

Some, such as in Case Study A, spoke positively of the newfound sense of trust that bodies such as local councils placed in museums and galleries to perform essential civic support work. Others, however, raised concerns about arts organisations serving as an overflow valve for state responsibility or being made to fulfil the civic functions of organisations far more specialised and attuned to these than arts organisations. Although most of our interviewees felt compelled to utilise their resources in any way possible to help in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, there is a widespread sense of unease about the potential long-term sidelining of the cultural functions that define the museums and galleries sector. As one museum director said: ‘the days when the sector and museums thought that they could cure all ills I hope are behind them … that’s not what we do’. Partnerships were regularly cited as a means of working through this dilemma, responding to feelings of civic responsibility while maintaining the specificity of arts organisations. As the director of a regional museums group put it: ‘who do we work with? We’re not social workers. We don’t run night shelters, but we work with the people that do that. That’s often our route in.’ A learning programme manager at large gallery told us that ‘cultural organisations don’t build the solutions. I think they can be part of a process towards those solutions.’ John Byrne’s theorisation of the ‘constituent museum’ as ‘one constituency amongst others’ (2018, pp.98–99) seems apt here.

Looking forward

The unprecedented and unusual situation brought about by the lockdowns, social distancing, isolation, travel restrictions, sickness and death (this should not be forgotten) of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded that museums and galleries swiftly and pragmatically adjusted in terms of both behind-the-scenes working patterns and their programming. We have identified here four key shifts that these conditions have precipitated with regard to museums’ and galleries’ civic work. Firstly, that this work became increasingly important, particularly in larger and more secure organisations, and in organisations with a pre-existing commitment to social engagement. Secondly, that the pandemic fostered a heightened focus on localism and hyperlocalism. Thirdly, that this work has been widely framed in terms of utility (although not quite in the sense that Hudson’s useful museum dictates). Finally, that the underlying impetus behind this shift lies in institutions feeling a sense of civic responsibility (as opposed to a civic role).

In each of these cases, we are only able to identify these as phenomena specific to the particular conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains to be seen to what extent these shifts constitute a more fundamental turning point in terms of the mission, programming and responsibilities of museums and galleries in the future. The pandemic has, though, clearly offered a moment of reflection regarding these questions, and we encountered almost no desire to ‘go back to how things were before’, in contrast to other sectors examined by this research (Walmsley et al., 2022, p.32). In fact, the predominance of sentiment concerning the future of the sector was characterised by a desire to utilise the pandemic as a moment to catalyse long-overdue change. An urban museums group director told us:

Further austerity since 2021 presents yet more challenges for museums and galleries, but in some ways exacerbates the circumstances which brought about the shifts we have identified in this chapter. Although arts organisations are feeling the pinch in terms of funding, so too are other civic institutions, the duties of which many arts organisations took on during the pandemic. While the pandemic brought about significant shifts in the self-perception of museums and galleries, the navigation of these pressures will no doubt determine the degree to which these shifts endure.