Obituary of Shireen Akbar MBE

Shireen Akbar (1944–97) came to the UK from Bangladesh to study and stayed on to teach. She was a pioneer in the concept of community education in London and in 1991 she joined the Victoria &Albert Museum as the first Education Officer in charge of multi-cultural education. She later became Head of Adult and Community education at the Museum.

From The Times, 19 March 1997

Shireen Akbar, MBE, head of adult and community education at the Victoria and Albert Museum, died of cancer on March 8 aged 52. She was born on July 13, 1944.

Shireen Akbar was a courageous and innovative arts and community educator, whose work earned her not just an MBE but an international reputation. Through her own example she encouraged two generations of South Asian women - many of them lacking confidence and opportunities, and with English as their second language - to aspire to improve their lives.

She also persuaded major museums to open their doors to the South Asian community. She developed arts education programmes which enabled thousands of women to join the threads of their personal experience in order to create works of art of extraordinary beauty and power.

Born Shireen Hasib in Calcutta, she grew up in an influential Bengali family which moved alter Partition to what was to become Bangladesh. She was educated at Viqarunisa School and Holy Cross College in Dhaka and at Cambridge University, remaining in Britain to become a teacher in London.

In 1979 she took up a post at Bethnal Green Adult Institute as a language tutor for Asian girls and women. Always quick to perceive people's needs, she recognised that the racial abuse experienced by Asian women outside their homes - and the restrictions placed upon them by their own communities - necessarily meant that language teaching should be only one aspect of her work.

She established links for Bangladeshi children between home and school and became an interpreter for families who did not have an English speaker. She collected children from school so that their parents would not worry about their safety, and took them to visit places they would not otherwise have seen. At that time she was virtually alone in this kind of work, and her initiatives redefined community education in London.

They also led directly to 'Our Exhibition', an exhibition in 1982 at the Commonwealth Institute of art work done by Bangladeshi children. Two years later, by now working for the Inner London Education Authority, she travelled to India and Bangladesh to collect resource material to support multicultural work undertaken by teachers. In 1986 she helped to organise the exhibition 'Crafts of Bangladesh' at the Crafts Council which travelled to Birmingham and Bradford. She then raised £5,000 to purchase the exhibition as a permanent resource for schools, adult education institutions and community centres in east London. These collections are still in use today.

The success of 'Crafts of Bangladesh' persuaded the Whitechapel Art Gallery to employ her in 1988 to help to organise 'Woven Air', an exhibition of Bangladeshi textiles, for which she also developed an acclaimed education programme. This proved to be a milestone in her work and was swiftly followed by a commission from the Museum of Mankind to create the exhibition 'Traffic Art', a collection of rickshaw paintings. Through all of these exhibitions Shireen sought to show the continuing beauty and depth of the arts of Bangladesh.

In 1991 she joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum as the first Education Officer in charge of multi-cultural education and the period of her greatest achievement began. Building on her earlier experience in Tower Hamlets, and inspired by the great South Asian collections in the museum, she developed a remarkable educational experiment which will endure as a pioneering example of the way in which museums can, and must, communicate the magic and excitement of their collections to people of all ages and different cultural backgrounds.

Supported by the generosity of the Hamlyn Foundation she conceived and brought to fruition 'The Mughal Tent Project' using the tent as a symbol of home, of refuge, of dispossession and of art she travelled the length and breadth of England inspiring groups of South Asian women to visit the alien environment of the museum galleries and to rediscover their heritage, their creativity and their self-esteem.

From this initial contact with the V&A, often the first time the participants had ever visited a museum, she formed groups to work together in making a tent hanging which would express their aspirations and release their creativity. To her surprise, a project primarily developed for Asian women became a source of inspiration for women from many other communities as widely separated as Los Angeles and South Africa. Using a diversity of techniques, embroidery, collage and paint, they created a sequence of brilliant panels which will go on display in the museum in the summer in the exhibition 'Shamiana, The Mughal Tent'.

The success of this project was an example of the power of simple actions to communicate across the divide of religion, education and culture. The power and beauty of these tent panels will be an abiding monument to Shireen Akbar's indomitable spirit.

She was divorced from her husband and is survived by a daughter.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
©Times Newspapers Limited