Engaging with communities

Leicester Museums & Galleries hold events in partnership with communities at museum sites, to celebrate festivals such as Refugee Week at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery and Leicester Guildhall, as well as Black History Month at Newarke Houses.

We hold events to celebrate festivals such as Diwali or Eid, both in the community and also at our museums and galleries. Sometimes we take part in events in community venues, such as International Women’s Day at the African Caribbean Centre and support key community dates such as Windrush Day.

At all of these we bring out museum objects to handle and explore and we provide inspiring and creative activities for children, families and adults. We aim to encourage people to engage with their own and others’ heritage and to discover the similarities between our different cultures and traditions. We aim to create understanding and awareness between different communities.

Quilting Conversations - Leicester Global City Quilt

Throughout 2022 people all over Leicester came together in a series of “Quilting Conversations” workshops in local community venues. Each participant chose their own theme around which to create a square to represent themselves. These squares were sewn together to make eight different themed quilts to present a rich picture of the people of our city.

The Global City Quilts will tour community venues in Leicester during 2023.

An online exhibition shows all the squares made by participants, along with their comments and design inspirations for the project:

• View the Leicester Global City Quilts Online Exhibition

Black History Event

Over the past four years Leicester Museums & Galleries have worked in partnership with ‘Listen to Africa’ and The Nelson Mandela Community Programme to run Black History events at Newarke Houses Museum. These have included exhibitions of objects from Africa and around the world, craft activities, performances and talks and debates. In 2019 the theme of the event was ‘Our World, We Care’.

This event aimed to involve young people in exploring the state of the world today and the actions they could take to make a difference. The objects exhibited were either recycled or made from natural materials by craftspeople, the crafts all used recycled materials and the youth led discussion was around empowering young people to make a difference. One activity invited young people to identify parts of the world where their families originated and to add their own message to make the world a better place.

Holocaust Memorial Commemoration

In 2020 a Holocaust Memorial Commemoration event was held at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery. This event, supported by the Neve Shalom community included four moving speakers. One speaker recounted her experiences as a child on the Kindertransport escaping from Nazi Germany, another talked about the German Expressionist works at the museum and shared her own artwork commemorating her uncle who was murdered in a concentration camp. A klezmer musician and an exhibition from the Weiner Library added to the event and thoughtful family crafts helped children to explore the themes in a gentle way. Over 300 people attended the talks and expressed how important they felt that the lessons of the past are remembered to help prevent genocide today and in the future.