ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a specific intervention into museum collections and a university gallery that aimed to question the identity and function of the gallery and museum exhibition today. As artists and educators our engagement with museums takes many guises: as visitors, exhibitors and as those commissioned to explore collections and institutions. Art education provides society's newest professional cultural producers who will contribute to the future museum's holdings. The museum is a vital site for learning, yet a visit with students can have little impact on them, its success heavily dependent on mediation. Formal educational processes are only a small, and not always very effective, part of those learning processes that are necessary throughout life, and which involve both the acquisition of new knowledge and experience, and also the use of existing skills and knowledge. The normal conventions of gallery and museum sites are increasingly open to interrogation and intervention by contemporary artists, acting as makers, curators, directors and sleuths.
