V&A Provenance Research Seminar: Sloane Lab

Event Details

In 1753, the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his collection to the British nation, and it was a catalyst for the creation of the British Museum. Today, that collection is dispersed across three national institutions. As part of UKRI’s Towards a National Collection programme, the ‘Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections’ (led by University College London in partnership with the British Museum and Natural History Museum) sought to digitally reconnect this fragmented collection and address the global entangled historical contexts in which it was formed. 

 

In this talk, Dr Alicia Hughes will explore new provenance and collecting histories that have emerged from the project. These range from high-level study of data absences, including contributions by Indigenous actors, to object-centred provenance work that questions how we approach objects that have limited or fragmented historical documentation. The talk will share new findings on the complex provenance of an Akan drum—one of the oldest African-American objects extant. It will address critical gaps in understanding the drum's acquisition history in North America by an unidentified man and challenge existing narratives of early colonial collecting practices.

Speaker Biography

Dr Alicia Hughes is an interdisciplinary art historian, who specialises in histories of collecting and collaborative artistic practices between art and science in the eighteenth century. As Sloane Lab Project Curator at the British Museum, she developed cross-collection provenance research that addressed histories of colonialism. This included the development of the touring exhibition ‘For the curious and interested’ (2024) with partners and community groups in Northern Ireland and Wales, and a new permanent display on Hans Sloane in the Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery (Sept 2024).  

Alicia received her PhD in History of Art from University of Glasgow as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded programme ‘Collections: an Enlightenment pedagogy for the 21st century.’ Her writing has been published widely in journals, including The British Art Journal, Art, Antiquity & Law, and the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants by the Max-Planck Society and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art among others. She previously served on the Association for Art History DECR Project Board and, prior to this, she was Collections & Exhibition Manager at Salsali Private Museum in Dubai and a Curatorial Assistant at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.