Rotherham Museums, Arts and Heritage delighted to announce the launch of Collecting Rotherham, a major new temporary exhibition now open at Clifton Park Museum. Running to Spring 2027, this ambitious exhibition invites visitors to travel through 130 years of collecting, showcasing everything from the museum’s very oldest acquisitions to its most recent additions – including items that have never been displayed before.
Clifton Park Museum has been collecting since 1893 and now cares for over 75,000 objects. The size of its collections means they can’t display everything at once; Collecting Rotherham has been specifically designed to spotlight these lesser-seen treasures. Spanning six galleries, the exhibition features items from all of the museum’s diverse collections, including Natural Sciences, Fine and Applied Arts, Archaeology, Social and Industrial History, and the York and Lancaster Regimental collection.
Far from a traditional display, the exhibition highlights the odd and eccentric, provoking ideas about the key role museum collections play in producing knowledge and histories, and how the act of collecting reflects our attempt to make sense of our world. To bring these concepts to life, the exhibition features a thought-provoking, immersive experience created by Urban Projections, aka Rebecca Smith.
Georgia Lingwood, Collections and Exhibitions Manager said: “With over 75,000 objects in our care, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to pull back the curtain on 130 years of collecting, and to interrogate why we’ve collected what we have, and to think about what stories may be missing. We are asking our visitors to help us to write our next chapter and decide what we should collect next, for the future.”
Collecting Rotherham explores where the museum’s first collections came from and invites the public to actively participate in shaping the social value of future collections.