The Fitzwilliam Museum is widely considered the world’s outstanding university art collection. We care for works of art and material culture from Europe, Egypt and Asia of exceptional international importance, works that connect people across cultures and time. Founded in 1816 ‘for the increase of learning’, the Fitzwilliam has long been both a great public cultural asset and an extraordinary scholarly resource – local, regional, national and global.
It is our mission to:
- touch people’s lives by engaging powerfully, thoughtfully and
pleasurably with as wide a public as possible
- produce and promote innovative, relevant, and interdisciplinary
research of the highest quality around our collection
We will achieve our aims by
- providing a place, physical and virtual, that takes people out of their daily lives and gives space to think, wonder, find inspiration and question the world around them
- promoting dialogues around works of art and material culture, and the many cultural, political and social issues they represent and embody
- exploring and developing our collection collaboratively, placing objects in their historical, artistic and cultural contexts, and demonstrating why they matter today
- building, preserving and documenting our collection for the future, ensuring it is fully accessible now and for centuries to come.
Our Values
The Museum and our projects will always be inclusive, thoughtful, distinctive, welcoming, rigorous, challenging, unexpected, uplifting and entertaining.
Our decision-making will be guided by these values
Our Strategic Priorities
- Developing our methods for ensuring access to culture for all
- Ensuring a multiplicity of voices and approaches in our research
- Embracing a global history of art and material culture
- Creating immersive and interactive exhibitions and displays
- Providing a distinctive, sector-leading digital museum experience
- Fully supporting the collective ambitions of the University of CambridgeMuseums (UCM)
- Building, maintaining and improving the care of the collection
- Developing an extraordinary building that unites and realises these aims
To ensure our success, we will need:
- A work and management culture for the Fitzwilliam that fulfils our mission
- An organisational structure that sustains our priorities
- A happy, diverse, inclusive and open-minded working community
- Appropriate and sustainable resourcing and revenue