A relational museum and its network: mapping the connections of the LYC museum and art gallery, 1972-1983

Dr Mark Liebenrood, Early Career Fellowship 2022-23

Mark’s project aims to extend existing understandings of smaller museums through the individual case of the LYC museum and its founder Li Yuan-Chia, whose archive is held at the Rylands. Drawing upon ideas of the relational museum, Mark will develop a historical account of how Li Yuan-Chia formed and used networks of artists, volunteers, and institutions to run the museum between 1972 and 1983.

Using the collection of exhibition catalogues, correspondence, manuscripts and ephemera in the archive, Mark will map the network of personal and institutional connections that centred upon Li and the LYC. In the process this project will trace the factors that sustained and challenged the museum, examining questions of finance, labour, and mutual support, and understand more fully the LYC’s contribution to social and cultural life in Cumbria, the UK, and beyond.