In this blog post, Mark Liebenrood discusses the LYC Museum and what it might be able to tell us about the categories of amateur and professional in museum work. Mark has most recently been  Visiting Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, in 2022–23, and in October 2023 he will take up a role as Post Doctoral Researcher on the project Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025, based at Birkbeck, University of London and Kings College London, and led by Professor Fiona Candlin. It is funded by the AHRC and you can find out more here.

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I’m going to explore some of the distinctions that might be made between amateur and professional museum work using the example of the LYC Museum in Cumbria, which was open between 1972 and 1983. The boundaries between amateur and professional are not always clearly defined, and the LYC can show how this happens in practice.

The LYC Museum was established by the Chinese artist Li Yuan-Chia. He trained as an artist in Taiwan, lived for five years in Bologna, and moved to the UK in 1966. Li was establishing himself as a professional artist, showing at the 1957 São Paolo Biennial, and in London at Signals Gallery and the Lisson gallery in the 1960s.

By the late sixties Li had moved to Cumbria. In 1971 he bought a disused farmhouse in the village of Banks from the painter Winifred Nicholson, and converted the building into a museum. Although the LYC had a small permanent collection from early on, its main activity was an exhibition programme of contemporary art and craft. Exhibitions changed almost every month and by July 1982 there had been 100 exhibitions, including the work of more than 300 artists.

Many of the artists were local, but there were a significant number from mainland Europe, America, and Taiwan. Some well-known British artists such as David Nash and Andy Goldsworthy had their first shows at the LYC.

Li had no training in museum or gallery work, beyond whatever he learned in his experience as an exhibiting artist, so should we simply consider him as an amateur curator? I’ll briefly explore this question using some ideas borrowed from Morgan Meyer, who has suggested that we can think of the distinction between amateurs and professionals using the criteria of time and space. These cover questions of where work takes place, and who pays for the time that work occupies.

The LYC was unusual, because it was not only a museum but also Li’s home. The blurring of the boundary between public space and domestic space in small museums has been addressed by Fiona Candlin in her book Micromuseology, and to her examples we can add Li’s museum. Li had a flat or room of his own in the building, and he extended hospitality to exhibiting artists while they were installing exhibitions. The museum also had a public kitchen where visitors could make themselves tea. The LYC did not have strict divisions between public space – a space which is not usually domestic – and private space, and this raises a question. If a professional curator works at the museum, and the amateur works at home, what is the status of a curator if their museum is also their home?

Then there is the question of time, and the related question of money. The LYC was a private museum, which nonetheless received funding from public and charitable sources including the English Tourist Board, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Arts Council. Those organisations funded two extensions to the building, and Northern Arts, which distributed Arts Council funding across the North of England, provided the museum with an annual subsidy. The LYC received a tiny income from a friends scheme, and some art and craft work was for sale. There were no admission charges, and catalogues for each exhibition were given away for free.

Li appears to have devoted most of his time to running the museum, and his activities included building work, designing and printing exhibition catalogues on his own press, curating, and assisting artists with installation. There are no accounts in the museum’s archives and it isn’t clear how much Li paid himself. Given that the museum’s annual subsidy from Northern Arts was in the region of £12,000 (less than £50,000 in today’s money), and Li’s living costs reportedly came from gallery commission, we can probably conclude that he was not earning very much for his time. In 1982, the year before the museum closed, he told a journalist that he was cutting back on food to reduce his costs.

How might we view this rather stark situation in the light of distinctions between amateur and professional? Public funding implies a degree of professionalism, but Li’s own circumstances might seem to lie more in the realm of the struggling amateur.

Li’s approach to his museum may not easily fit within these categories, partly because he had his own distinctive ethos for the museum. That ethos stemmed from his ideas about art and the roles of artists and audiences. Li was an advocate of participatory art, in which the audience were intended to play an active role in interacting directly with artworks. He showed in exhibitions of participatory art in the UK, and many of his own artworks used movable magnetic pieces that a viewer could move into any arrangement they wished.

His museum ethos can probably be summed up in the phrases printed in an early catalogue:

Li identified himself with the museum, but he also saw the museum as being its community. This played out in practice. Despite the myth which seems to have grown around him as a man who did everything by himself, Li collaborated with many others to develop the museum into a thriving community hub that hosted numerous workshops and community events in addition to its exhibition programme.

The museum’s annual calendars, which also served as annual reports, also offer a clear sense of dialogue taking place between Li and the museum’s community. He repeatedly asks what people would like from the museum, writes short essays trying to help viewers understand contemporary art, and responds to criticisms that have evidently been made by visitors.

In identifying with the museum, and identifying the museum with its community, Li Yuan-Chia appears to be blurring the boundaries between the personal, the institutional, and the public. Although he had no museum training, and in that sense could be seen as an amateur, I’ve also suggested that his activities blur distinctions that we could make between amateur and professional. That raises questions about the applicability of those categories to the LYC – and probably to many other small museums as well.