JaMM Prioritising Youth Engagement To Strengthen Museum Culture In Jamaica

The Jamaica Music Museum (JaMM), a division of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), is prioritising youth engagement as a strategic approach to cultivating a vibrant museum-going culture among young Jamaicans.

Director and Curator of JaMM, Herbie Miller, told JIS News that the museum is exploring innovative ways to transform how young people engage with and appreciate Jamaica’s rich musical heritage.

“Any serious museum will have a dedicated section for the youth. I’m working on a project I call ‘Bang on a Pan’, where anything can be used to make music, to engage youngsters to come to museums, to provide them with the sort of resources to just have fun; but also to allow them to develop what we do not really have in Jamaica, which is a museum culture,” he explained.

Mr. Miller emphasised the importance of engaging young people with museums in ways that cultivate lifelong appreciation and sustained support for cultural institutions.

“Not just bringing them here from school for a day, for an outing, but how they engage with museums so that when they become successful in life, the sort of ‘give back’, as is done by endowments, and so on, in other countries, will be second nature to them here,” he stated.

Meanwhile, Mr. Miller encourages young people to visit the museum’s current exhibition, titled: ‘From African to Jamaican: Music and Creolised Black Culture’, which explores the deep-rooted connections between Jamaican music and West African traditions and practices.

“It’s looking through a history book. How do we get to a Jonkonnu masquerade without understanding the Savannahs and the masquerades in West African cultures? When we came here, we didn’t bring those with us, we brought it inside of us. We didn’t bring the same material culture, we had to find stuff here and make it become what we left there,” he explained.

“So, you get Jonkonnu, you get Gerreh, you get Bruckins, you get Kumina, you get Revival, and at the root of all of these expressions, the very foundation comes out of African sensibilities. That’s what we try and show throughout this particular exhibition,” Mr. Miller added.

The Jamaica Music Museum is located at 10-16 East Street in downtown Kingston.