Hooray! It’s spring! There’s sunshine and blue sky and flowers…and another night of amazing museum-y fun!

Join us on Tuesday 1st April, downstairs at The Slaughtered Lamb 34-35 Great Sutton Street, EC1V 0DX, where ten brilliant performers will entertain, intrigue and amaze you. Doors open 7pm. Entry is free, but we will be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, the Choir With No Name, which uses music to help homeless people get their lives back on track. We suggest a donation of £5.

Showing off their all round museum-y awesomeness will be:

Steve Cross – your compère for the evening, keeping things to time, mucking about and poking fun at museums.

Tim Dunn – Extreme Trainspotting: why the war-torn country of Sierra Leone really needed a railway museum.

Carla Valentine – It’s What’s Inside That Counts! A humorous look at death by foreign object insertion, using objects from Barts Pathology Museum.

Sam Fieldhouse – Archiving Music Without Any Music: an ex-teacher’s baptism into a world of well-meaning widows, opposing opinions and extensive ephemera.

Stacy Hackner – Postcards were an essential form of communication from the late 19th to mid-20th century. This was also the heyday of anti-Semitism, leading to the formation of this curious collection that’s in need of an appropriate home.

Mary Rose Gunn – I’ll be talking about Two Temple Place, London’s first exhibition venue dedicated to showcasing highlights from regional collections.

Dave O’Brien – What’s the value of museums? I’ll talk about how we value museums in public policy, how we use a range of ideas about value that we possibly shouldn’t and why we do this. There might even be some suggestions of how to make the value of museums a little bit clearer!

Jenni Fewery, Bryony Morgan & Christina Hink – Don’t Lose Your Head! A gruesome glimpse at the plaster cast of a murderer and the pseudoscience of phrenology.

Jon Ablett – Release the Kraken – from mythical monsters to a marvellously modern mollusc! A guide to what we know (and don’t know) about the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, and how museum specimens have increased our knowledge of this and other cephalopod species.

Martin Sach – Museums can be great platforms for artists. The London Canal Museum has considerable experience of hosting art shows, and Martin Sach will draw lessons from this experience from the museum perspective.

We’re back for 2014! It’s going to be ace! We’ve planned loads of gigs so that even more amazing museums people can tell us behind-the-scenes stories and incredible projects. AND we’ve got a fab new venue.

We’re kicking things off on Tuesday 4 February, downstairs at The Slaughtered Lamb  34-35 Great Sutton Street, EC1V 0DX. Doors open 7pm. Entry is free, but we will be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, National Youth Arts Trust, which provides access to the performing arts for young people from non-privileged backgrounds. We suggest a donation of £5.

Lining up to astound, entertain and enlighten you with their tales from the museum world will be:

Steve Cross – a man who eats deep-fried gherkins for kicks.* He is also your compère for the evening: telling jokes, introducing acts and keeping things to time.

Kate Tyte – The totally unorthodox guide to museum archives! Featuring robots, Nicholas Cage, Indiana Jones and beards!

Liberate Tate – A love triangle: Tate, BP and us. What we love, what we hate, and why we want to Liberate Tate.

Nick Booth – I’m a curator at UCL where I look after the corpse of everyone’s favourite moral philosopher: Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon. I’ll be talking about what being his curator is like, some of the work that involves and discussing some of the myths and legends that have grown up around him.

Lowri Jones – A day in the life of a Collections Storage Assistant. I’ll be talking about what moving 26,000 objects into a new building for the British Museum actually entails, and looking at some of the weird and wonderful objects that we have found buried in long-forgotten corners of the stores.

Erica McAlister – My desk is covered in maggots. My post contains maggots. My research often focuses on maggots. So often the focus of revulsion I will chat about what they are and why they’re so important. Fear not, I will bring along some of the NHM maggot collections and show how they have helped answer very important questions.

Phil Loring – Phil Loring, Curator of Psychology at the Science Museum, will describe how two extraordinary larger-than-life models of the brain have pursued, delighted, and tormented him over the past year and a half.

Natasha Powers – I’ll be using my 9 minutes to tell the story of the archaeological excavation which inspired a recent Museum of London exhibition. A tale of 19th century medical and scientific inquiry, and of two Williams, one a respectable clergyman, the other a resurrectionist with a formidable wife.

David Mentiply – We walked, and talked, our way to 26 museums in one day to raise money for Guide Dogs UK. Find out what happened in this whistle-stop talk about the Museum Marathon day!

Sarah Mahood – I’ll be talking about the Horniman Museum’s loans project Object in Focus. We loan to museums, libraries and others – what makes it easy to borrow our objects?

Dave O’Brien – What’s the value of museums? I’ll talk about how we value museums in public policy, how we use a range of ideas about value that we possibly shouldn’t and why we do this. There might even be some suggestions of how to make the value of museums a little bit clearer!

*Do not try this at home. Or anywhere else. Really. They’re disgusting.

Museum fans! Want to escape the winter blues? Keep out of the cold and the rain? Avoid boring office parties and actually have some FUN? You can do all those things by coming to see our INCREDIBLE line up of TOP MUSEUM TALENT who will entertain, intrigue and amaze you.

We’re back at The Black Heart, 3 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP on Monday 2nd December 2013. Doors open at 7pm. Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, Arlington Futures, which aims to break the cycle of homelessness by providing training, employment and creative programmes. Your donations will support the art workshop. We suggest a donation of £5.

Showing off their all round museum-y awesomeness will be:

Steve Cross – your compère for the evening, keeping things to time, mucking about and poking fun at museums.

Nicola Scott & Rachel Harrison – 18 postcards, 6 weeks, 33 people… We’ll be talking about our Community Fieldworkers project at the Horniman Museum.

Subhadra Das – Curator of UCL Pathology Collections, Subhadra will be showing off one of the least show-offable collections in London. She’ll describe how UK law applies to human remains in medical collections, and asking: what does that mean for what you can and cannot see?

Richard Ashcroft – I want to have a little rant about museums which are all tell and too little show. I want to celebrate the austere and the odd, that challenge and confuse the museum’s audience, rather than welcoming and engaging them.

Holly Parsons – Holly, a museum studies graduate, talks about her experiences of volunteering in museums and difficulty getting a paid job. Will she get paid museum work in the end?

Natasha Stephen – How is a comet different from an asteroid and what makes a meteorite a meteorite? Nat Stephen delves into the NHM’s collections to show you something out of this world.

David Morgan – As an ex-Space Crew member and lover of museums, David’s going to talk about his museum frustrations.

Chella Quint – Adventures in Menstruating: Chella Quint takes us on a Period Positive journey through the history of feminine hygiene adverts from the 1920s through today using Duke University’s digital collection of historical ads. After 90 years of analysis in only 9 minutes, you’ll never have felt so fresh and dainty in your life.

Irida Ntalla – who’ll be talking about museums, interactivity and audience participation.

Gregory Akerman – museums are proper good – but what’s the point in them for us visitors? If it’s to learn from history then how can we be sure that what we are learning is history as oppose to the present day’s version of what history should have been (meaning we’re not actually learning history so much as what history should have been), or if every single thing ever led to this point then wouldn’t we kinda almost innately already know the history of all the stuff so render museums pointless? Watch Gregory tie himself in knots talking about this problem, the theory of things and other concepts he really doesn’t understand. But you know, with jokes.

Paolo Viscardi – Paolo Viscardi from the Horniman Museum will present an illustrated alphabetical guide to the 21st Century curator. Or – as he calls it – “How I explain my job to relatives at Christmas”.

 

One mile of London.

Ten museums.

One evening of intriguing insights, amazing projects and behind-the-scenes gossip.

It can only be… MUSEUMS MILE SHOWOFF!

Yes, we’re going to be at the Grant Museum, 21 University Street, WC1E 6DE on Tuesday 15 October as part of the Bloomsbury Festival. All the acts will come from or be about Museums Mile. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm.

Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting donations on the door for our charity of the month ZSL’s EDGE of Existence, which highlights and conserves species on the verge of extinction. We suggest £5.

Taking to the stage for this extravaganza of wit and wisdom, objects and exhibitions are:

Steve Cross – your compère for the evening, he critiques museums through the medium of t-shirts.

Catherine Walker –Wellcome Collection has been on a Curiosity Roadshow to Camden Lock Market in a converted Routemaster bus. See how the Visitor Services team took the Collection out to a new audience, including objects, images and even the shop!

Mark Carnall – Teaspoons through the ages,  every hearing aid every produced, thousands of fossil fish. This is some of the stuff that lurks in the storerooms of museums awaiting some bizarre apocalypse whereby niche esoteric knowledge might save us? The Grant Museum’s Mark Carnall looks at why celebrating otherwise underwhelming museum objects such as the Underwhelming Fossil Fish of the Month blog series is a bit less dishonest than pretending museum collections must save the world to be worth keeping.

Ailsa Forbes – Exit through the Gift Shop: I’m spreading a little merchandise enlightenment as a Retail Consultant and Product Developer for some of London’s illuminating museums, cultural and heritage sights.  From saucy Toulouse-Lautrec to Brains and stark Modernism, there’s a range for them all!

Leonie Hannan – Introducing the 100 Hours Project, which takes 10 researchers and 10 museum objects and puts them together for 100 hours of quality time. In a mere 9 minutes, discover how a dog whistle became the object of an historian’s affections, how a student of design fell for a ten-legged stool, and join the group obsession with UCL’s rare and wonderful collections.

Kath Biggs – ‘Did they have supermarkets in ancient Greece?’ and other tales from the British Museum. I’ll be exposing my own stupidity when faced with some tough questioning from children aged as young as four.

Hayley Kruger – Who was the better collector John Hunter or Henry Wellcome? The father of scientific surgery with a nifty line in experiments, or moustachioed Yank pill-pusher with more money than sense? You get the chance to decide but Hayley will be pulling no punches in round one of this epic collector v collector smackdown – only one will walk away! (Although both are actually dead.) #TeamHunter

Kristin Hussey – Who cares about some old Scottish surgeon with syphilis? Kristin will be fighting the corner of Sir Henry Wellcome (obsessive collector and owner of a world famous moustache) in round two of the epic Collector Throwdown the likes of which has never been seen before. It ends tonight. #TeamHenry

Gregory Akerman – Bloomsbury has held the country’s best museums since Hans Sloane decided to consolidate all his collections into the British Museum, but why did he choose Bloomsbury, and has this choice helped shape the way our museums have grown? Gregory will explore this decision and how it accidentally kicked off a debate about what a museums role should be.

Frances Sands & Cynthia Adobea-Aidoo – How different departments at Sir John Soane’s Museum are communicating the collection to a wider audience.

Summer is over. Boo!

Museums Showoff is back! Hurrah!

We’ll be upstairs at The Black Heart, 3 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP on Tuesday 1st October with more top museum people prepared to divulge the best bits about their work and dish all the inside info. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm. Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, Aston Mansfield, which works to tackle poverty, deprivation and disadvantage in east London. We suggest a donation of £5.

Lining up to strut their museums stuff in a wondrous extravaganza of wit and wisdom will be:

Steve Cross – your compère for the evening: telling jokes, introducing acts and keeping things to time.

Rosie Clarke – “The Picassos are here!” I’ll be telling the inspiring story of how, in an early example of crowdfunding, the Swiss city of Basel came together in 1967 to save their beloved Picasso paintings. Young people begged for donations under the motto “All You Need Is Pablo” … but what did Picasso himself think of these shenanigans?

Miki Webb & Jenna Byers – Museums on the front line: we’ve spent our summer working as visitor assistants at Royal Museums Greenwich. These are our experiences, stories and tips on how not to visit a museum!

Michael Smith – How we named The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge (in Canterbury) and then designed everything from their toilet signs to the detail of their banner brackets.

Eva Amsen – The Museum of Jurassic Technology is possibly the only museum that consistently makes its visitors question reality. I’ll tell you about some of its exhibits, but I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me.

Catherine Jones – Turning a 1920s radio into a 21st century exhibit and showing your love of exhibits through flashing LEDS. Two projects: one official, one a bit less so.

Lucy Carruthers & Abby Coombs – Hear from two myth-busting museum designers, attempting to dismantle a collection of misconceptions and who think that together we can reach a solution for positive creative collaboration.

Claire Reed & Lauryn Etheridge – Lessons learned from an exciting collaboration between UCL and the National Trust to create ‘The Trappings of Trade’ exhibition, which reveals the world of commercial men at Osterley Park House during the eighteenth century and explores global stories in the twenty-first.

Ivo Dawnay – Big Brother and me: a comic unveiling of the Big Brother & National Trust marriage.