Wellcome museum cancels its own collection for racism
THE Wellcome Collection in London appears to be having an identity crisis, announcing the closure of one of its key exhibitions, branding it “racist, sexist and ableist” on Twitter, and asking “What’s the point of museums?”
The free museum, part of the Wellcome Trust, holds more than a million objects amassed by its founder, Sir Henry Wellcome, a 19th-century American pharmaceutical entrepreneur, who sought to “enable a better understanding of the art and science of healing throughout the ages”.
Medicine Man, a permanent display, which has ran for 15 years, was closed yesterday.
The exhibition showcased objects relating to sex, birth and death and included anatomical models of the human body in wood, ivory and wax dating back to the 17th century.
On Twitter the museum explained that its exhibition was “problematic” as it told a story “in which disabled people, Black people, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited – or even missed out altogether”. This is not the first time that the institution has tried to undo the self-identified wrongs of its founder.
The Wellcome Collection previously introduced “artist interventions” in the Medicine Man display to “give voice” to those who “have been silenced, erased and ignored”.
But this, too, it says, has failed, “by exhibiting these items together – the very fact that they’ve ended up in one place – the story we told was that of a man with enormous wealth, power and privilege”.
The announcement was welcomed by some Twitter followers but attacked by others who viewed it as unnecessary “self-flagellation” and even “cultural vandalism”.
“Is this the prelude to whole museums closing because their collections aren’t woke enough?” asked one Twitter user.
One painting, of a black African kneeling in front of an idealised white missionary, called A Medical Missionary Attending to a Sick African (1916) by Harold Copping, has been put in storage on the grounds that it risked “perpetuating racial stereotypes and hierarchies”.