My Art History

Child poverty in Malmö has been about 2,5 times higher than the average in Sweden during the 2000’s. The focus for My Art History are schools in the areas in Malmö where child poverty is palpable and where many of the children usually don’t have an obvious access to culture.

Moderna Museet Malmö’s goal is to reflect the reality of the city and its inhabitants. Since the beginning of 2016 the government decided to revoke the entrance fee to state-owned museums, this decision was made with the ambition to make art available for as many people as possible.

The museum’s regular visitors are acquainted with such institutions and take their participation in cultural life for granted. In order to make sure access to art takes place, outreach is necessary. With the aim to enrich art history as well as to mediate the importance of visual culture, the museum’s art educators have toured around the schools and shown what we do at the museum: in workshops held at the schools, the children created stories based on images, and in the workshops held at the museum, they created the self-portraits here exhibited.

It is the first time Moderna Museet Malmö carries out such a project and we have learned a great deal about Malmö and its inhabitants during the process. The decision to eliminate the entrance fee to the museum gave us the chance to show what we mean when we say that the museum is open. But now we know that it is not enough to claim the door is open, it is necessary to show the way to it as well as to initiate a dialogue that ensures the door remains open.