Neil Handley
Neil Handley is the current Curator of the BOA Museum and the first full-time museum professional to hold the post. He joined the College in August 1998, the year after its move to 42 Craven Street and inherited a museum in boxes with only a minimal number of items (almost exclusively pictorial) on display. Appointed originally as 'Museum Documentation Assistant' he ran the BOA Museum Documentation Project which produced the first full inventory of the collection since 1932. In 2000 he was appointed 'Curator' and went on to open the first display of the museum for six years (in the Sutcliffe Room, November 2003). He was also responsible, with Carol Hayward, for setting up the Museum's first website after the College site was brought in-house in 1999, having previously been hosted on its behalf by the University of Bradford. The 'MusEYEum' a virtual museum website-within-a-website was established at Neil's instigation in 2003 and has now been fully integrated into this website.
Neil worked previously at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester on a project to plan the future for museum-quality collections within the various scientific and medical departments. The collections in the Stopford Building included some spectacles! Prior to this he was Exhibition Officer at the John Rylands Library. He also worked for shorter spells at other museums in Manchester, Salford and the Isle of Man as well as for an interactive exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, just a few hundred yards from Craven Street.
Neil was awarded the Associateship of the Museums Association in 2002 and was one of the first 17 museum professionals in the country to gain the AMA+ qualification in May 2007. He now serves as a Museums Association Mentor for younger curators.
The Curator is available for lectures and informal talks off-site as well as guided tours of the museum gallery and College Meeting Rooms. Considered to be an authority on ophthalmic history he can also advise on items on optical and optometric heritage including their identification and dating.
Neil has recently written a great book entitled 'Cult Eyewear' published by Merrell, here is the link to it:
Saturday, 20 August 2011
I approached Neil at the British Optical Association Museum after my show at Galerie Brigitte Schenk in 2007, we got on well and managed to intigrate a smaller version of the MoO into the BOA museum next to Trafalgar Square. The Micromuseum was an exact copy of my previous show in Cologne, we toyed with the idea of it being the smallest museum in the world. The idea of a space within another space seen in ‘The chamber’, the miniaturized copy of the world held within the eye.