In 2020, the Presidential Committee on Ghana's Museums and Cultural Heritage was appointed to propose new policies for the governance and organisation of The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board responsible for Ghana’s museums and cultural heritage. As the designer for this project, I was responsible for creating the final report, its website, and social media communication. At the start of the project, my collaborator and I also designed a workshop bringing together all the members of the committee to define a vision for the report. The workshop featured some speculative design activities to imagine what the museum of the future might look like in Ghana.
As Nana Oforiatta Ayim remarks in her article ‘Could 2021 be the year of the African Museum’ for the Art Newspaper, institutions around Africa are creating more expansive models to celebrate art. In line with these efforts, Ghana announced in November 2020 the Presidential Committee on Ghana's Museums and Cultural Heritage, a Committee appointed to propose new policies for the governance and organisation of The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, (GMMB) responsible for Ghana’s museums and cultural heritage.
The remit of the Committee was to investigate radical new ways of presenting narratives, as well as engaging communities from across social divides in Ghana, so that they might see themselves properly represented in their museums. The Committee was run on behalf of the Ghanaian Government by ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge based in Accra.
The report by this committee outlines new curatorial, architectural, financial, structural possibilities for our museums, monuments and national parks. The next step for the committee is a competition for a new kind of museum building, the design of which will be announced later in 2021.
The report can be found here.