Icon in Conversation: With Sara Wajid MBE, Co-CEO of Birmingham Museums Trust

Icon’s CEO, Emma Jhita, speaks to Sara about reaching new audiences and making the Trust’s collections more relevant to the people of Birmingham. 

Emma: Hello Sara. My first question is one that’s been intriguing me – when you and Zak Mensah were announced as Co-CEOs of Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT) five years ago, it was a first in the museum sector. Can I ask how this came about?

Sara: When we applied for the role, I had not seen myself as a CEO candidate. I was 47 and felt I was probably not as senior as I ought to be, given what I hoped to achieve. However, for a myriad of reasons – including that the role was with Birmingham Museums, the fact that I’m Pakistani myself and 20% of the population in Birmingham is – this particular post looked a good fit. I can’t remember how the idea of job sharing came to me, but Zak was the most obvious choice – first and foremost for his skills, but also because he’s a black working-class man. At the time, as ever, there were very few global majority leaders in the sector, but I always thought of Birmingham Museums as one of the most likely large museums to appoint nonwhite leaders because it had done so in the past. And if we split the role, an additional benefit was that the sector would get two new leaders rather than one.

Emma: Had you and Zak worked together previously?

Sara: No, not at all. We met once, briefly, at the Museums Association conference in Belfast the previous year, but I’d read Zak’s blogs over the years and basically there are so very few global majority leaders in sector roles across the country. Through Museum Detox, you build up an awareness of all of them.

Emma: That makes so much sense, especially in Birmingham, as a diverse city with a rich history of immigration. Since you’ve both been in post, you’ve led the museum and art gallery through a dynamic transformation. It would be really interesting to hear about the inspiration behind this.

Sara: I knew the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery quite well as I’d curated a show here in 2017, but I couldn’t understand the connection between the museum’s collections and the West Midlands. What would the people who I saw walking around outside this building make of the historical European fine art collections on the inside, hung in a quite traditional way?

he previous Director set me a challenge, saying: “Well, you’re here for a year – bring me something that makes the Pre-Raphaelites relevant to this audience.” In the end, the scope of the project was too wide, and I ended up focusing on one gallery and collections relating more directly to empire and decolonisation. But I had started the initial research, thinking about the fine art collection and the challenge of making it relevant and representative, so that had always been the enticement to come back.

There are a million other things to do, but the core of this collection needs to speak to the people of Birmingham and that requires a really big jump. Birmingham has the youngest, most ethnically diverse population of any city in Europe and the museum has a traditional Victorian collection.

Emma: Can I move onto the introduction of a Citizens’ Jury for Birmingham Museums. Was this idea already in train, or has it been part of yours and Zak’s response?

Sara: When I was Head of Engagement at the Museum of London, my job was to involve the people of London in re-imagining the new museum. It was there that my colleague Mark O’Neill, former Director of Kelvingrove, suggested the idea of the Citizens’ Jury model. I immediately recognised it as a way of scaling up in-depth community group conversations, to make them meaningful and representative of an entire city. If that could work for London, with a population of more than nine million, it could work for Birmingham.

Mark has been working closely with Zak and I these last five years to realise this vision for a more democratic, representative, exciting 21st-century museum. To achieve that, you have to do what you can, as boldly as you can, with the space, curators, teams and community engagement that you have. So, when we reopened after Covid, we did it bit by bit, in a very atypical way. It has to come from your ability and commitment to reach new audiences with exhibitions such as Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero. To reach non-visitors, we have to set out our stable clearly and bear the complaints from visitors waiting for the Pre-Raphaelites, Ancient Egyptian galleries and the Staffordshire Hoard to return, which they will. But you only get the opportunity to re-open once.

Emma: That makes a lot of sense. Following on, in the current climate where the culture and heritage sector is facing huge financial challenges – and Birmingham City Council has recently been declared bankrupt – what do you see as the role for the museum and the difference it can make?

Sara: My background before museums was in journalism. I’ve always seen culture as the fourth estate which, like journalism, speaks truth to power and provides that space where democratic conversations need to happen. We often think about politics in terms of what happens in parliament, but politics is just a texture of our everyday lives – who we love, how much we earn, what food we eat, whether we have health, security and space to imagine. I see those all as part of the same thing – the culture that is part of the public sector, funded by our taxes. It’s an incredible thing to be proud of in our society. Growing up here, I had access to London’s museums and a local library that was tiny but brilliant, and so that’s part of my citizenship.

When you come to England as an immigrant, where everybody else is different to your family and there’s racial inequality all around you, those things are how you balance that out, stay sane and thrive. Culture really is books, television, museums and all the stuff that connects us to each other.

So, back to your point about museums in these polarised times, that’s why I feel so committed to our work in Birmingham. It goes right to the centre of asking what kind of Britain do we want to be, and what kind of story do we tell?

Emma: And through initiatives such as the Citizens’ Jury, your work with local schools and community groups, you’re putting the museum in the hands of local people – I’m really interested in how that will take shape and where The Elephant in the Room fits in?

Sara: We opened this exhibition a couple of months ago. It focuses on objects from our existing collections but in a new way as the gallery team was largely comprised of people with a background in community engagement and visitor experience. They wanted to tell a more honest story about how these objects came to the museum.

Visitors keep asking us, where does this come from? Is it looted? Should it be here? So rather than the story starting from a traditional, curatorial, scholarly understanding of the collection, it started from a very audience-centered point of view, drawing on curatorial knowledge. We don’t want to disappear these collections, but some perhaps do need to be restituted and others reframed in a different way. 

Emma: I love the title and I think the exhibition is refreshingly honest, both in terms of the narrative and installation, with the use of wooden transport crates. I imagine it has connected with new and different audiences. 

Sara: It has, along with the Ozzy Osbourne exhibition, which is next to The Elephant in the Room. I never get tired of walking between the two, watching visitors’ reactions and the incredibly visceral responses that people have to Ozzy, especially since he died. I regularly see burly 50-year-old men welling up in the museum, just standing in front of those exhibits and people literally stopping me in the street saying, “thank you so much for honouring Ozzy properly. He means so much to us!” And having this in the museum does seem to have helped people with the mourning process and especially those who feel like outsiders, because I think Ozzy really represents that. He was speaking to and for people who were living in deep-seated poverty in a part of the country that was almost considered a lost cause.

And so, at this time, when the City Council is bankrupt and we are in the headlines for uncollected rubbish, tensions between communities and frankly on the receiving end of a lot of Islamophobia – with all of that, to see people feeling proud of their city, proud of Ozzy, and connecting that with the museum, which might be considered quite posh and elite, that’s what it means to do civic repair. That’s what it means to be part of enriching a social fabric. It’s not rocket science or particularly innovative. It’s just good solid cultural practice.

Emma: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is a logical home for the Ozzy Ozbourne exhibition and hosting a book of condolence really gave people an opportunity to be part of that collective mourning process. Returning to our earlier conversation and Museum Detox, which was founded to support people of colour in the heritage sector. What progress has been achieved through this network and what are the ongoing challenges?

Sara: Museum Detox has been one of the great joys of my working life in this sector, because it’s a self-sustaining network of solidarity that’s resulted in some incredible collaborations, research and exhibitions, and also supported career progression. Since it was launched, it has grown from a London-based group of about 15 people to a UK-wide network of around 700 people. 

However, from a leadership perspective, in the five years since I’ve been part of the National Museum Directors’ Council, no new people of colour have joined. In the English Civic Museums network, the picture is a bit better, but there hasn’t been very much shift. If anything, I suspect things have gone a bit backwards. You would always hope a network like Museum Detox shouldn’t be needed in the long term but, 10 years on, it feels like it’s needed more than ever.

What I’m currently looking for is a way to speak to government agencies and others to say that we really need to act now, in terms of this bottom-up energy. We need to see some movement and investment to create positive change across the sector, because when I look around the table at the National Museum Directors’ Council and there’s not a single other global majority person among us, it’s not good enough. It’s not the country that we are anymore.

Emma: Absolutely. You champion the value of Museum Detox as a network which is fundamentally what’s needed in terms of career development – having access to networks and genuine support to grow and achieve.

Sara: Yes. I was recently talking to someone at a Detox social meet-up who’s not currently working in a conservation role but is trained as a conservator in another country and wants to move in that direction. Because the network is non-hierarchical, she was sitting alongside some of the most powerful people in our sector. We just shouted around the table: “This person needs a mentor in conservation, can anybody help?” and someone said, “Yes, I know somebody.”

Emma: Amazing! To move onto a collections question, at BMT you talk about ‘unlocking thousands of stories from an international city’. It would be great to hear more about this.

Sara: It’s about finding new ways to engage, open up and share the collections. One of our most interesting innovations has been an online volunteering project we started during lockdown called Documentation Detectives, where we invited people to digitally transcribe object records from our paper accession registers, using a platform called Zooniverse.

At the time, we didn’t know if anyone would be interested, but we’ve just hit 3,000 instances of participation, which is brilliant. Suddenly, there’s this massive engagement and support to help jump us forward in building an accessible collections database. 

Emma: That really is exciting work and a great way of engaging people not just on a local level, but globally. One final question from me – what’s next for BMT?

Sara: How to boil that down… I mean it really is an existential battle at the moment for civic museums! It’s about looking at how we can deliver cultural value and develop a way of being financially sustainable when we have a bigger asset responsibility than we have the public funds to support. There’s only so much you can do to offset that by innovations, commercial enterprise, philanthropy and fundraising.

At the core of what we do is public value, like the NHS and schools. It’s not designed to make money because we are trying to create value for people who shouldn’t be charged for that value. There’s an irreducible core which will always have to be publicly financed.

The only option is to have the boldest and most ambitious vision for the museum since its inception in 1885, at a time when we are facing the most severe financial challenges. How we square that circle is what I spend 95% of my time thinking about and that comes down to making the argument to the decision makers, alongside trying to be smarter, more enterprising, efficient and streamlined. Everything else has to follow from that.

Emma: A huge challenge but powerful ambition. Thank you for spending time with me today, it’s been incredibly insightful and inspirational.

Sara: Thank you very much for having us in Iconnect Magazine. 

To learn more about Birmingham Museum's Trust, please visit their website at www.birminghammuseums.org.uk.