Top Cambridge museum provides recovery rooms for guests triggered by factual black history displays
A top Cambridge museum now provides recovery rooms for guests who are triggered by black history displays.
A top Cambridge museum now provides recovery rooms for guests who are triggered by black history displays.
The slavery exhibition at the universitys Fitzwilliam Museum has a reflection room for anyone who may feel overwhelmed or triggered by this subject matter.
The exhibition Rise Up Resistance, Revolution, Abolition looks at the battle to end slavery and features a content warning.
It also has pamphlets for visitors to guide them to well-being material and other resources if needed.
These include mental health charity websites, including specialists with the Black African and Asian Therapists Network.
The leaflets point to curriculum material covering black history and how to get in touch with Citizens Advice, The Telegraph reported.
The exhibition documents the history of black and white abolitionists, especially those linked to Cambridge.
It looks at what life would have looked like on plantations and the move toward abolition.
Pictured is the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge
Pictured is a gallery at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, with works including Zipporah on display
Curator Dr Rebecca Birrell views works by Claude Monet at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge
An accompanying catalogue to the exhibition claims that men including Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwins scientist son George, and physicist Arthur Eddington benefited indirectly from the slave trade.
The book exhibition terms this as links to dark finance.
But this has disputed by experts including Cambridge professor Robert Tombs.
Prof Tombs criticised historical guilt, saying that we are sadly accustomed to seeing our great institutions damaging themselves and the country that supports them.
This case is doubly dispiriting as a great university institution shows itself resistant to argument and indifferent to evidence.
A spokesman for the museum said: The Rise Up reflection space gives the opportunity for visitors to explore, create, read, learn and reflect after viewing the exhibition.
The Fitzwilliam website states: All live with the consequences of transatlantic slavery, and we cannot understand todays world or the legacies of structural racism and inequalities without knowledge of it.
Gallery technician Niall Fall inspects An 18th-Century Family by Joy Labinjo at the Fitzwilliam Museum
Curator Dr Rebecca Birrell views The Dream II (mae) by Pamela Phatismo Sunstrum at the Fitzwilliam Museum
In 2019, an art piece loaned from the museum was removed from a Cambridge college dining hall because it offended vegans.
Hughes Hall received complaints from students who said the painting, depicting a pile of dead animals, was putting them off their food.
The Fowl Market, from the studio of Flemish artist Frans Snyders, features a striking collection of animals, including a boar and deer, caged hens and game birds strung up on hooks.
It had been on long-term loan from the universitys Fitzwilliam Museum.
A source close to the universitys Fitzwilliam Museum, which had loaned out the painting, said at the time that the college wanted to show sensitivity to those that do not enjoy eating meat.
They said there was no agitated situation but simply the college had realised it was not the most appropriate painting for the hall.
The painting was returned to the museum last year for conservation treatment and now features in an exhibition about the art of food.
A museum spokesman told the Daily Telegraph: Some diners felt unable to eat because it was on the wall. People who dont eat meat found it slightly repulsive. They asked for it to come down.
The Fowl Market, from the studio of Flemish artist Frans Snyders, features a striking collection of animals, including a boar and deer, caged hens and game birds strung up on hooks
This exhibition makes the points that the debate about vegetarianism, about veganism, is nothing new. It dates back to the 1500s.
The exhibition curators, Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu, said in a joint statement: Many people are turning to vegetarianism and veganism as a political choice as much as a dietary one, as we rethink our relationship with animals and their treatment in an industrialised world.
Food choices are not only determined by political concerns about what we eat but also compounded by the moral anxieties which resonate around diet, self-image, over-consumption and our bodies.
As Feast & Fast demonstrates, many of these contemporary concerns about our relationship with food are not new.
The canvas was a mid-17th century copy by an unknown artist in the Antwerp workshop of Snyders, who is renowned for his still-life and animal subjects.
The original is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.