Manchester Jewish Museum recently welcomed a new Curator, Josh Jones, who told us all about his plans for the role.
Josh Jones has recently taken over as Manchester Jewish Museum’s (MJM) Curator, replacing Alex Cropper, who held the position for 16 years. Josh joins the staff with a rich museum experience and a degree from Cambridge, including a focus decolonisation, collection management, and community co-creation. He’s excited about sharing the stories with the collection with the community: “History is so important for all the reasons we’re always talking about. It informs the politics of the time. It gives everybody a sense of self and a kind of collective identity. But very quickly, in climbing the ranks of history academia, it seemed to me that you end up doing a bit of research that only four people in the world end up interacting with. That wasn’t what I was interested in.”
Over the past few years, it has come more into public awareness that many museums are a product of colonisation, often displaying relics stolen from other cultures. Decolonisation is a subject which is high on many museums’ lists of priority. Collaborating with communities central to a collection is one way museums tackle this issue, and is something Josh is particularly passionate about due to his own background.
“There’s a mission I have for the sector of making everybody feel like they can come into a museum, can learn things and participate, so that it’s not an unequal exchange. Part of the decolonisation process is recognising that there have been a very select few overseeing collections. I’m not posh, I’m not white,
but I was educated in Cambridge. I don’t know necessarily that I should be the only one dictating everything that goes on display. That’s the power of community consultations, collaboration, and co-creation.”
Having worked previously in large national museums such as the Science and Industry Museum and the National Science and Media Museum, Josh is looking forward to the smaller setting of MJM: “I’m really excited to come to a really small museum where everybody knows each other intimately, and everybody clubs in where they can. You have the Café and Retail Manager screwing things to the wall in the gallery when they need to. Everyone in the senior leadership team also does a duty manager shift at front of house as well.”
Josh certainly isn’t lacking in ideas to take the museum forward: “I was speaking to the CEO yesterday about some of the outside spaces in the museum. Immediately that got me thinking about a pervious idea that I’d had. Manchester Flower Festival did a one- off piece of curation where they invited the people of Manchester to bring something that represented their garden. I thought it wouldbe really cool in a community museum to have a flower bed for all the different areas of Cheetham Hill.” Josh is also hoping to bring is own love of food and cooking to the museum with pickling and fermenting workshops and is even looking into beekeeping on-site, to provide honey for the café and wax for the museum’s candle making workshop. We look forward to seeing how the museum develops under his curatorship!
MJM first opened in 1984, housed in a Grade II* listed 1874 (former) Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Cheetham Hill.
Following a redevelopment and extension in 2019, the museum includes a modern gallery, vegetarian café, shop and learning studio as well as the beautifully restored synagogue, now part of the permanent exhibition. Find out more about our events and exhibitions at Manchesterjewishmuseum.com