Building a City Museum without walls through community collaboration

As part of Myseum’s participation at MuseumNext’s 2018 London Conference, Myseum executive director Karen Carter, along with public programs officer Jess Pridham and collaborator Sergei Petrov, presented a lecture entitled “Building a City Museum without walls through community collaboration”.

The presentation followed Myseum’s inception from an idea to a full-fledged “museum without walls”. But for Karen Carter, bringing Myseum to life was not without its challenges. “This can’t be the typical thing,” says Carter in the presentation, “because I’ve been through the typical thing where you’re focussed on the building and the collection.”

Lacking the typical ingredients for a traditional museum, Myseum needed to think beyond the conventional. What if, instead of having enclosed exhibit space, the city itself was the exhibit? What if community groups could enshrine their own mythologies without relying on traditional historical narratives? For Carter, Toronto is the perfect testing ground for these hypotheses.