The Chester Beatty – as Ireland’s only museum with a primary focus on global artistic heritage – explores themes around how its collections and programmes reflect contemporary cultural diversity and identity.
Community Ambassadors
The Chester Beatty seeks to engage multi-lingual speaking tour guides to promote its exhibitions to local culturally diverse communities. Community Ambassadors are native speakers, sensitive to cultural nuances and aware of religious and social traditions. As a result, they represent the museum and the community at the same time. Our ambassadors have the unique ability to excite, inspire and connect with the culturally diverse communities in Ireland. Free public tours in Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin are scheduled on a regular basis.
The Chester Beatty recognises the need to engage and foster community-led creative and artistic activities. We provide opportunities for training and collaboration in the development of artistic projects led by the community for the community, while celebrating cultural diversity.
To see past Creative Communities projects please click on the links below
Family friendly events take place annually and explore cultural festivals; from Chinese New Year Festival, Dublin Arabic Film Festival to Diwali and Norouz the Chester Beatty engages diverse communities as represented through our vast collections.
The Chester Beatty offers a dynamic learning programme for all age-groups. Museums can have a positive impact on our health and well-being, and in response to this Chester Beatty introduced Qi Gong and drop-in drawing for visitors. We commenced our first dementia-friendly programme Conversations on Art in May 2017 in recognition of the annual Bealtaine Festival – celebrating the arts and creativity as we age.
The Chester Beatty celebrated a 6-week project with Dublin Culture Connects bringing people living with dementia and their family members, staff and volunteers together with design professionals and gardeners to partake in an adventurous tour of city centre parks, investigating new potential and ideas for Chester Beatty’s Roof Garden.
These site visits included St Stephen’s Green Park, Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and Richmond Barracks.
Gardens can inspire personal stories, ideas, as well as connections to plants and motifs in the Chester Beatty’s collections. Download and follow a specially designed Garden Trail for our Roof Garden.
