Q&A | ‘Museums fear getting too close to Traveller communities – but they have a role to bridge the gap’

A project to provide a contextual archive for Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum’s collection of Romani vardoes (caravans), believed to be the largest in the UK, has led to a new exhibition opening this month featuring major works by Gainsborough, Munnings, Turner and Dame Laura Knight, alongside new works commissioned from contemporary artists.

The exhibition has been curated by members of local Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities – and the curator, Georgina Stevens, is of GRT heritage.

Museums Journal spoke to Stevens to find out more about the project and hear why this exhibition aims to break down barriers between the museum and the much-marginalised GRT communities.

Can you tell us a bit more about the vardo collection?

We have nine vardoes in the collection gathered from across Worcestershire, but a few of them previously belonged to local Romani families. The project was initially about bringing the collection to life – they are such fantastic vehicles but they are just sat stationary with very little context and no oral histories or objects around them to tell their stories.

Over the past three years, I’ve gone out meeting with families to hear their stories, gather oral histories and collect traditional objects to build our collection at Hartlebury. It’s been great but the next big challenge is obtaining permissions to use that information and share it with the wider world.

Why is that a challenge?

The GRT community is historically the largest ethnic minority in Worcestershire but they are incredibly segregated and marginalised. There’s a self-consciousness within the community about how people are going to view them, and how they might be judged.

There is also this sense that people won’t be interested in their culture and heritage. On the flip side, I think some people in the community quite like quite like being elusive because that's where our magic is. As my auntie would say, the more people that know about us, the less mystery there is. And the magic is something that is ours, we want to keep it for us.

Another challenge is that it’s not just one community – there are Roma, Irish Travellers, Canal folk and New Age Travellers too. We’re all travellers, but we are all very different. There is concern that we’ll all get lumped together.

How did your identity help support the project?

The key thing that Museums Worcestershire has done differently with this project is recruit me, someone from the GRT community. That has been absolutely key to everything, because it’s so important to have acceptance from the community from the get go.

Even with me, it’s taken months to build up trust and get to the point where I’m sat around chatting and having cups of tea and pea and ham soup with [members of the community]. I was accepted into the fold relatively quickly because I'm familiar with their way of living and traditions; I knew what questions to ask, which was so important in terms of collecting accurate information that counters prejudice.

I didn’t openly identify as GRT until embarking on this project. It’s always been a part of me and how I live, but I've never really spoken about it. My dad always said “stay quiet, don't say where you come from”, because for him, growing up in the 1950s, [being open] meant no work. It’s ingrained in us that we say nothing and trust no one.

Why an art exhibition?

I think many people from the GRT community find it difficult to communicate what they are all about or how they feel about a certain thing. It became apparent to me early on that a starting point with families was to ask them to show me what they are all about.

And there were so many people that were happy to show me their craft – there are Romanies that are still hand building traditional bow top wagons using traditional techniques, but other crafts like basket weaving and embroidery is still very much alive.

I found that watching them work and seeing their passion said so much more than just hearing words, and also very gently highlights the issues that many people in the community have with wider society.

The exhibition displays this work alongside historical depictions on gypsies by artists like Turner and Gainsborough. There are also artworks by the Romani illustrator Beshlie Heron (Clarissa Newman) and Juliet Jeffrey, whose husband Peter Ingram was very well-known himself amongst Romani communities as painter of wagons but also a collector of artworks during the mid-20^th century.

So the idea of the exhibition is to show rather than tell the public what we're all about through how we work and what we produce. It’s a way to let people form their own views, and to address stereotypes, prejudice and racism.

How can museums engage with the GRT community? 

Museums, like many other organisations, have a fear about getting too close to the GRT community. There have been exhibitions about us in the past, and outreach projects, but they never seem to go anywhere long-term. I think part of that's because they don't involve the Romani community directly but also because they don’t know how to engage with us.

In Worcestershire, our next steps are to continue to work with local families on oral histories and deciding how we might use these. We also want to run health and wellbeing workshops to support people to access vital services like health provision – but also raise awareness among other professionals about how to work with this community.

We know that members of the GRT community don’t access even very basic health provision and mental health awareness is very low.

The role of museums, and this exhibition, I think is trying to bridge the gap between professionals in other sectors and GRT families. 

Atchin Tan; Travelling Through Time opens at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum on 26 October and runs until 5 January 2025. Museums Worcestershire’s Vardo Project is funded by the John Ellerman Foundation and the Elmley Foundation