Creating the Museum:  exploring the museum impulse in local, regional and national contexts

Conference – The National Gallery and The Museums & Galleries History Group (MGHG) (National Gallery, London, 26th-27th September 2025

 While the birth of the concept of the museum has attracted lots of scholarly attention and the desire to create new museums is now a global phenomenon, the question of how individual museums, their collections, buildings, and personnel, come into being has not been widely considered. As complex organisations, the ways in which particular museums have been created involves a multifaceted set of initiatives, practices and activities – raising money, sourcing or commissioning buildings and storage, assembling, organising and interpreting collections, developing expertise, engaging communities, fulfilling a purpose which some groups were more able to prosecute than others.

Various periods have seen the flourishing of local, regional, national museums, of large or smaller scale, and of different specialisms and audiences, with varying models of governance. Some passionately wished for museums ultimately stalled, and some proposed museums never quite appeared. Some museums were created for particular audiences, at particular moments, while others evolved from earlier forms of collecting; some required particular buildings in order to begin; some have taken up residence like hermit crabs in whichever spaces were available.

To develop our understanding of the reasons for creating museums, and to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the creation of the National Gallery in London, we invite proposals for a conference hosted by the National Gallery and the Museums & Galleries History Group.  The conference will focus on why and how galleries and museums internationally/globally have emerged and evolved. 

The conference will explore the different ways in which museums and public art galleries come into existence and the impulses, rationales and objectives for ‘creating’ museums, foregrounding the wide range and variety of museum creation, and exploring core questions of purpose, meaning and context, whilst also drawing attention to the specificity of the National Gallery, reflecting on the contexts for its founding impulses and exploring the future roles, purpose, and functions of (inter)national galleries.

The MGHG and The National Gallery are very grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for generously supporting the forthcoming conference.