A case study in collaboration: displaying Greece and Rome at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK

Abstract

With the decrease in funding for museums, increasingly scarce resources are, of necessity, concentrated on audience engagement. The responsibility for public exhibits is now shared between interpretation and display professionals, and curators and academics, but in practice the balance between scholarly content and accessibility can be precarious. This article considers the redisplay of the permanent gallery of ancient Greece and Rome at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which was a project driven by curators, conservators and university academics working closely with technical and practical specialists. It records the processes and issues that are often encountered in the creation of a gallery but too rarely published, and argues for the complete integration of academic research as central to the creation of museum displays. The success of the Fitzwilliam display demonstrates that subject-specialists can produce exhibits that are at once academically rigorous and visitor-friendly.