Output details

Money Gallery and numismatic displays in 25 other galleries

Howgego was Lead Curator for the Ashmolean’s new Money Gallery (opened 2009). He was simultaneously organizer of, and contributor to, numismatic displays in 25 other galleries in the Museum.

The approach of the Money Gallery may be summarized as:

Money is common to most cultures but comes in many forms. We use it to buy and sell, save, and compare values. It also says a lot about what we think of ourselves as a society, and shows how states and their rulers choose to present themselves. Studying the money they used helps us to understand past cultures and to trace their histories.

The gallery is subtitled ‘The Value of the Past’. The intention was to explore in the displays the relationship of coins to history, developing the approach of Ancient History From Coins. A single wall explores a cultural approach to coinage across 9 cultures, again developing work on identity (Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces). A key aim was to embed and explore such research on Greece and Rome in a global context.

The creation of the Money Gallery was an intellectual endeavour in itself, as can be seen from the fact that it was the subject of a successful PhD at UCL (E. Nomikou, A museological approach to numismatic exhibitions. An ethnography of exhibition-making in the Ashmolean Museum). It was based on rigorous process and audience research (documented in the dossier). The new galleries have driven a spectacular increase in visitor numbers to the Ashmolean, peaking at 1.1 million p.a., and settling between 750,000 and 800,000, roughly treble the number before the redevelopment. A visitor survey in 2012 recorded the Money Gallery as the fourth most popular gallery or group of galleries. This demonstrates the value of a research-based approach to the particular challenge of numismatic display.