Shaniqua Benjamin will be facilitating her first residency as Poet Laureate to look at the diversity within the Museum of Croydon’s permanent collections, working directly with young people from Croydon Music and Arts (CMA) culminating in an online exhibition exploring Croydon’s identity from their perspective.

The aim of the project is to reinterpret aspects of our collection to ensure they are representative and relevant to young BAME audiences in Croydon and to identify crucially gaps in our collection to ensure our future collecting policy is representative of the diverse voices in Croydon.

If you’re a young BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) adult (18-25) and want to respond creatively the museum’s collection as part of Shaniqua’s virtual exhibition, please take part in the tutorials below and submit your response. The tutorials can also help to develop your skills in poetry writing and responding creatively.

This project has been supported by a Diversity Matters grant with the Museum Development London

Shaniqua is a spoken word poet, writer, creative workshop facilitator and Croydon’s first Poet Laureate. She draws inspiration from her life experiences to create meaningful pieces of writing.

Shaniqua wrote the lyrics for the London Mozart Players' Anthem for Peace, wrote and performed a specially commissioned poem for the reopening of South London’s biggest arts centre, Fairfield Halls and she also wrote poems for both of Croydon's bids for London Borough of Culture.

She has performed at the Thornton Heath Lights Festival, Field Day Festival and as part of Apples & Snakes' immersive spoken word show, Rallying Cry. Shaniqua is also part of the organising team behind the Living in Poetry Festival.

Follow Shaniqua on Twitter.

This project enables us to understand better the BAME voices in our collection. The Museum of Croydon was one of the original museums which led the co-curation approach when it was established in 1994 – displaying objects loaned and donated by multiple communities to represent the ethnicity of Croydon and its diversity. This was then re-displayed in mid-2000s in a chronological approach taking us from the 1800s up to 2011. We hope this project will start to identify whose voices we are missing, especially from 2011 onwards from the perspective of young people. This will ensure the museum continues to collect relevant stories.

The project will enable us to go back to the primary approach of co-curation and to focus on the significance of authenticity. Through Shaniqua’s work as poet laureate not only can she approach this in a curatorial sense but also in a creative way – producing poetry to add to the significant canon of poetry and spoken word in the Borough as well as contributing to the museum collection overall.

Voices of Croydon

Workshop 1: Responding to the Croydon Art Collection

Workshop 2: Your History

Workshop 3: Biographical Files