Building relationships with museums

More thoughts from the swimming pool (1750m this morning)

I was thinking about my trip to Edinburgh today, to attend the Modern Scottish Women seminar tomorrow, and the trip to New York next week, to go to the Brooklyn Museum.  I have discovered museums are the places to find people who really know their stuff about the objects therein.  So I want to take my theme to a higher level of study, it might be worth building relationships with the staff.  I always talk to staff in museums, and have been given contact details for a specialist textile curator at the Burrell in Glasgow.  If I want to do detailed object analysis, it would help to have the contacts.  A key purpose of textile art, according to Peter Dormer in The Culture of Craft, is to convey political messages, because of the context of the material.  It would be interesting to contrast how museums use textile, in the UK, the USA and other countries that have a positive view of women, e.g. Sweden, Finland etc.  So this seminar tomorrow at the Scottish National Gallery might be worthwhile for networking purposes.  I wonder who else I might meet there?

Hmm, I wonder how far I could travel if I take my studies in this field to Phd level!