History On Display

I cannot speak for all, but for me few experiences are as enjoyable as a visit to a good museum exhibit and few are as tedious as viewing a bad one.  What goes in to the production of an engaging exhibit?  What characteristics do good museums share?  These are among the questions addressed by Tammy Gordon in Private History In Public and by Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet Kamien in Creating Exhibitions.  Gordon’s book provides a window on to the world of small, private museums with an eye to what large, professional museums can learn from them.  McKenna-Cress and Kamien provide a detailed model for the conception creation of museum exhibits through collaboration.

           

Everyone who has lived in the United States for a long period has been to one.  With things old and odd scattered haphazardly about, much of it potentially for sale, small, private museums are a feature of many American landscapes.  Blurring the boundary between museum and private collection and between treasure and trash these small historical exhibitions deserve scholarly attention, argues Tammy Gordon in Private History In Public.  Toward that end Gordon devises a “new typology of historical exhibition in the United States,” identifying five types: academic, corporate, community, entrepreneurial, and vernacular (a helpful chart of the five types and their characteristics is provided on p. 17).  Since scholars have already studied academic and corporate exhibition Gordon spends the remainder of her book discussing the latter three types. 

           

Community exhibitions are what might be conventionally called local museums.  They are created by members of a community or locality and document the history of that community from the perspective of its members.  Entrepreneurial exhibitions are those that document the history of trades, professions, and small business, often with an emphasis on their “craft”-like character and their relation to the American ideal of the independent craftsman or businessman.  Finally, vernacular exhibitions are those that are in the context of everyday activities, in particular commercial activities, and are intended not so much to teach a history as to make visitors “feel a part of” the exhibited history (think sports-bars with framed jerseys).

What these three “private” types of historical exhibition share, beyond their usually small size, is an intimacy with the exhibited objects and the curators who assembled them, and who are often contributors to the exhibited history.  As we learned a few weeks ago from Rosenzweig and Thelen in The Presence of the Past, Americans are particularly drawn to history when they can get up close and personal to historical objects and historical actors and private historical exhibitions are often good at providing such apparently “unmediated experience.”  However, Gordon notes that private historical exhibitions also employ “hybrid epistemologies” which at once endows them with a democratic potential, while placing them beyond the bounds of what academics would deep appropriate.  Gordon is not very specific regarding what these “hybrid epistemologies” entail.  It is conceivable that an epistemology could be so hybridized as to hardly count as a method for determining any widely agreed upon truth at all.  (Of course academics, historians in particular, employ hybrid epistemologies as well…) If there is one criticism that can be laid at Gordon’s door it is that she does not go far enough in interrogating how private exhibitors go about determining what is worthy of exhibition.  Presumably this method varies from museum to museum, but there are also, presumably, commonalities, but more of sense of these would have been a welcome addition to Gordon’s book. 

To academic historians collaboration is often a four-letter word.  They just don’t do it.  Unfortunately, this translates in to trainee-historians like myself having no idea what collaboration is, or even that valuable work can be accomplished by means other than going solo.  To people like me Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet Kamien have provided a guide to the process of creating museum exhibitions that doubles as a primer on collaborative process more generally. 

While the authors of Creating Exhibitions clearly hail from the world of prestigious professional museums, they have taken pains to create a book that will be useful to a wide range of museum professionals, indicating how their suggestions could be scaled up or down.  McKenna-Cress and Kamien organize their model of collaboration around five advocacy positions that they feel should be represented on any team planning an exhibition.  By ensuring advocates for the Institution, Subject Matter, Visitor Experience, Design, and the Project team, the resulting exhibition should fulfill the needs of its various stakeholders.  As McKenna-Cress and Kamien often remind the reader, exhibitions are for someone, not just about something.

Until Next Week!

J