Houston, we have a problem!

Apparently everything I've posted since July isn't showing up on the public view of the blog, though I still see it on my end.  WEIRD!  I'm not sure what I did to make this happen or when everything disappeared, but I'm on the case and hoping to make my missing musings on museums reappear shortly.

Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities - Intermission (continued)

I started to write this post several times, but always stopped, since the situation in Detroit is still developing in a way that the other examples we've looked at weren't.  Rather than jump the gun and write out a whole treatise which I then have to revise the next time the news is on, I think I'm going to let this one simmer for a little bit and come back to it in a couple of weeks when there's more information and less speculation.

In the meantime, here's some suggested reading:

• Howdy Doody's not for sale, according to NPR

• Bloomberg makes the case for moving Detroit's art to other museums

• Bloomberg's got it wrong, says the New Republic

• The New Yorker talks about tourist impact and trickle-down economics

I'll see you back here in a few weeks to recap these articles and whatever else comes up in the meantime. Same bat time, same bat place!

Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities - Intermission

Oooh, we're going to have to have to leave our discussion of de-accessioning and selling artifacts as a cliffhanger this week! 

Oh, come on.  This is the best possible picture to illustrate a paused
discussion of museum artifacts and you know it. 
(c) TriStar Pictures

 I wasn't able to get the post to a place I was happy with, and rather and slap together some half-baked arguments I think I'll ponder more over the weekend and get back to discussion later next week.

You can find Part I here and Part II here, and I'll see you here next week to wrap things up.

Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities Part II

I listen to NPR every day on my way to work, and heard two stories that really got me thinking about what it means to de-accession and sell items from a museum collection.  It's topic I thought about a lot in 2008-2009 when the going got tough for the Field Museum, which we discussed yesterday.  but yesterday we talked about a museum saving itself through de-accessioning and selling items.  Today we're moving on to how a museum could help its community.

The story more of you might be familiar with is this piece from Morning Edition talking about the possibility of selling off the original Howdy Doody puppet to help pay for Detroit's debt.  The second piece aired last week and discussed how the town of Harrisburg, PA was in the process of selling off a warehouse full of items originally intended to be the founding collection of museum that never opened.

The Harrisburg case is much more black-and-white to my mind, but there are a lot of facets. A previous mayor spent something like $8 million purchase artifacts with which to build a Wild West museum. On the East Coast. When the mayor was voted out of office all the artifacts were packed into a warehouse on the edge of town and just left there.  With the city of Harrisburg facing some $300 million in debt, the new city leadership decided to auction off the items to pay off as much of that as they could. In the end, the auction raised somewhere between $2.5 and $4 million dollars (estimates seem to vary from source to source) which will cover about 0.7% of the city's debt.

photo (c) Paul Chaplin, Pennlive.com

There are a few different angles from which to look at this, but let's start at the beginning: why the items were purchased in the first place.  According to MSN, the former mayor wanted to open 5 museums in Harrisburg to draw tourists in: a firefighter's museum, a Civil War museum, an African American museum, the Wild West museum, and another that isn't mentioned.  In theory, I support this. I think museums tend to be a good investment for a community, and have a longer legacy than shopping centers and residential development. BUT, and this is a big BUT, there needs to be a demonstrated audience for that museum before you start collecting objects.  There also needs to be a plan for preservation, storage, and display.  It doesn't sound like Harrisburg had any of those things.  So when the administration in the city changed, the unused Wild West artifacts were stacked "in messy piles inside a public works building with a leaky ceiling and no climate control, where they sat for years" according to the NPR piece.

So in this case, there are artifacts that aren't being preserved, with no facilities or staff to care for them, basically not doing anyone any good.  I have exactly zero problems with this collection being auctioned off.  Since having the artifacts wasn't helping Harrisburg (and since it sounds like the original museum plan was a unilateral decision by the former mayor and not a citywide initiative), they might as well sell them and use the money to cover a small portion of the town's debt.  To me this is like re-homing an abandoned pet - the old situation was so bad that pretty much any other option will be a better one.

Detroit's story is a totally different one: in that case, authorities are investigating the possibility of selling off the collections of an existing museum to cover the city's debts.  And that, to me is a totally different situation.  Instead of "rescuing" unseen items from a damp warehouse you're talking about taking art that had been publicly accessible and selling it into private collections.  To my mind, that act would culturally impoverish a city that's already seen its share of losses.  But...would it be better to have Howdy Doody on display, or police that can get to your house less than 58 minutes after you call 911?  That context can certainly diminish the importance of an art collection, and we'll discuss how to balance those differing priorities tomorrow.

Selling museum collections to save cities - Part I

I heard two interesting news pieces on selling museum collections this week that have gotten me thinking about de-accessioning and a museum's responsibility to its community again.  And after writing this all out, I think it's clear that it needs a multi-day discussion and not just a giant brain dump, so we're starting with some background and getting on to Detroit and Harrisburg tomorrow.

So.  Selling museum objects: yes, or no?

It's a topic that I spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing (at length, and frequently over drinks) with my colleagues back when I worked at the Field Museum in Chicago.  I left in 2011, before the most recent restructuring, but I was there throughout 2008 and 2009, when we went through some tight times and lost a lot of staff to attrition, early retirement, and layoffs.  It was a tough time for everyone at the Field, and one topic that came up frequently - sometimes jokingly and sometimes deadly serious - was the sale of artifacts to save jobs.  Why keep a statue in storage unseen by the public, but fire the people who care for those collections?  Are the objects more important than the staff who cares for them?  (No seriously.  Think about that question, because it's at the heart of all of this.)  We joked about a giant yard sale on the lakefront and wondered about how many jobs such a sale might save, even as we argued about the ethics of ever selling anything out of a collection at all.

The Field sold several major paintings in 2004, declaring that the works weren't central to the museum's mission and that the money from the sale would go towards collections care and new objects.  There was a huge controversy, which may be why the Field has been very wary of discussing such a sale again.  A recent article by the Chicago Tribune claims that the Museum was investigating the sale of collections as far back as 2010, but they never breathed a word of that to the staff.  The article discusses one of the major difficulties of selling collection items: what to do with the money.  Many people feel that if you're selling an object you should purchase other objects.  Staffing is transitory and non-tangible, and I'm sure it's hard for a Board to say, "We're selling this painting so we can pay for our curators."  I would hope that they also consider that firing the curators (and preparators and registrars and housekeeping staff and security and ticketing staff and scientists etc...) to keep the artifacts is a similar problem.  It's like The Gift of the Magi, but with museums instead of hair and watches.

So it's a difficult choice.  Do you preserve the collections for future generations and hope that they won't be too damaged by the inadequate staffing, or do you sell items to maintain a staff that can preserve the items that remain?  Is a museum's duty to its objects and future, or its staff and the present?   I love a compromise, so I'd try to choose the middle ground - sell a few items that are no longer central to the institution's mission and use that money to maintain the remaining collection, but that's not a perfect solution either, as the Field Museum learned in 2004.

And what happens to this argument when you're not selling objects to benefit the institution, but to benefit the larger community? That discussion starts tomorrow.

Scotch-Taping the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So last week I mentioned in passing the idea that older museums are, in some ways, a museum of museuming.  I thought it was something I'd discussed beyond a casual mention, but as I flip through the archives, it appears that it was in one of those posts that I only ever wrote in my head.  So unless you have access to Lucien's library you never read that.

I think this all ties back to the fact that my formative museum experiences both as a patron and an employee were at the Field Museum, which is an older institution with items that were prepped for the Chicago World's Fair still on display.  The Hall of Animals on the main level has been refreshed from time to time, but the bulk of the dioramas there are unchanged from the day the Field opened its doors in 1921.  There are a lot of older institutions like this - while some halls are renovated and updated, there are niches and corners and entire wings that remain largely the same as they were when the museum was conceived.

Photo CSGEO012695: Details of Ordovician brachiopod display from the Field Columbian Museum. The name of the fossil, its age, and the formation and location where it was collected were provided for each fossil, but little in the way of interpretation was provided for Museum visitors.  [Photo and caption cribbed directly from the Field Museum's website]

The thing is, a lot has changed in museuming (yes, it's a verb now.  "What do you do?" "Oh, I museum.").  Back in the day we stole native American remains and burned dodo skeletons to make room in collections and taped the Dead Sea Scrolls together with cellophane tape, because that was the best we could manage.  We sent expeditions to Africa to harvest their wildlife for our museum halls, and preserved their hides with arsenic, because that was the thing that was done.  Conservators and curators would (and do) blanch at these processes now, and many many staff hours spent are spent undoing old repairs and repatriating items that don't truly belong in museum collections.  But there's only so much that museums can do at any given time, which is why a visitor can find those untouched niches and halls with the out-of-date labels and dated mounting techniques.

And as much as I would love to see those halls updated in a way that would allow the beautiful artifacts there to speak to visitors more than they do now, I sort of love how they serve as a time capsule.  It's recursive: the exhibit in the museum showing, unintentionally, how exhibits in museums used to be made.  Older museums are, by default, a museum of museums.  They show what museums were, how they have changed, and point to what they can become.

Some people ignore those old halls and dated displays, and others wander through and imagine how great they could be if they were updated.  I've been guilty of both mindsets, but lately I've been making concerted effort to think about these older displays with a little more charity.  I try to imagine the excitement museum visitors in 1921 felt when they looked at that bear or that headdress, and I try to remember that one day, probably not as far away as I'd like, someone will look at the exhibits I am blown away by today and think, "Wow, I can't believe people ever thought this was a good exhibit."

For another, really nicely thought-out take on this general idea, check out this blog entry from the Field Museum's Fossil Invertebrates Division.  I stumbled across it while looking for pictures of some of the Field's early displays, and it's a great portrait of the evolution of museum displays.  And as proof that old doesn't always mean forgotten, I counted at least 5 specimens from the pre-WWII exhibits that are still on display at the Field Museum today.  That makes me pretty happy.

Adam Savage talks objects and stories and I love it.

I'm pausing briefly from my deeper ponderings re: artifacts and artifice to look at the issue from another angle.  And to be honest, life has kept me from reading The Same Ax, Twice, and I think I'll be able to continue my thoughts much more eloquently once I’ve got a little more grist for my mental mill.

So, in the course of mucking about on the internet recently I stumbled across this TED talk that Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave back in 2008.  (Yes, I am once again really late to the party.) I sort of love Mythbusters, and have always been taken with Adam’s outright enthusiasm for everything that he does.  He’s certainly skilled and intelligent, but I am most drawn to the way that he seems to be generally delighted with everything he learns and does.  (As he should be – the man gets to both do awesome in-depth period research and blow things up on the regular.)  I find him to be a very engaging speaker, largely because his enthusiasm is completely contagious.  This talk is a great example of it, and I encourage you to take 15 minutes and watch the whole thing.

Can’t watch the video?  The transcript is available on the TED site.

So this is different take on replicas, for sure – these are replicas for art’s sake, for personal pleasure, and the sense of accomplishment.  Adam’s attention to detail and commitment to his projects is both endearing and admirable.  But what I find even more compelling about this talk is the overarching theme: the stories that objects tell.  Go back and listen to the first section again, where he first talks about the dodo:  “I became obsessed with the object -- not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together -- there's an entire story here.”

That phrase clicked in my head as soon as I heard it, and was reinforced by everything else he said.  That, right there, is why museums are important, and why original objects are important.  I'm learning that there’s definitely a place for replicas in the museum world, but with the original object, you can see the story.  Not just the story of the dodo bird or the T.rex or the rare book, but of the many hands that preserved that object, the scientists and historians that studied it.  Each museum artifact actually tells two stories – the story of the artifact itself, and its inherent significance, and the story of the people who took that artifact, excavated it, preserved it, and put it on display.  Much like older museums are both museums that preserve the history of their collections and the history of museums as a thing in its own right, an artifact on display is many things at once.

Adam Savage is right: an object is many things to many people, but each one of those things is a story.  Adam’s dodo skeleton and Maltese Falcon are wonderful objects, and his efforts give them a story that is worth telling—but it’s not the story of the dodo or the Maltese Falcon, it’s the story of Adam Savage trying really hard to make something.  Those stories are important, in their own way, but I still believe that the original object captures stories in a way that no replica ever will.

Oh, and by the way...

...I haven't forgotten about that long list of practical "front-facing" museum issues that I wanted to dive into a few weeks back.  I'm still pondering a lot of those ideas, but I got caught up a bit  in the theoretical side of museums (again!) and I'm going to ride this wave out before switching back to the practical side of things.

Time to Define

So we left off on Friday talking about living history and riffing off the “realness” of sites and artifacts that must be constantly replaced to be maintained. It’s a facet of museum work that I hadn't dedicated much thought to in the past, but it’s fertile ground for discussion.

While I've argued a few times that there is an inherent value in an original versus a copy, I haven't ever taken into account the fact that some of those “originals” are in fact, by some definitions, copies. Okay, I mentioned it in passing regarding Ford’s Theater, but only to support the idea that the contagion of that location was the key to the rebuilt theater not being terribly grotesque. And honestly, I would classify a theater rebuilt on the same site much differently than a ship rebuilt plank by plank. I think that it's important in this discussion that we differentiate between "replicas" and "restoration".  Frankly, it's something I should have done much earlier in this discussion.

For my purposes, I'm considering a "replica" to be something that is built or created from scratch from new materials to closely resemble an object, either because the original is too fragile, rare, expensive, or otherwise unfeasible (is that a word?) to display.  A replica may be made with period tools or with period materials, but it is a modern creation.  For me, Ford's Theater as it stands now is a replica - it is built to mimic the original interior of the same building, but it's made with modern materials.  The same thing stands for replica skeletons and hands-on models that mimic actual artifacts.

A restoration, on the other hand, is what I would consider the USS Constitution - new materials and tools (or new materials and old tools, old materials and new tools, etc) are used to repair an existing historic artifact.  Now, this does get a bit tricky, as Howard Manfield touches on in that chapter excerpt, because at some point in a long restoration, the original materials used to create the object will be wholly replaced by the newer elements meant to maintain it.  So does an item that has been repeatedly restored like that remain a restored item?  Or does the act of constant replacement turn an original artifact into a replica of itself?

I'm sure that Manfield will discuss this at greater length in The Same Ax, Twice, and since the copy I put on hold just arrived at my local library I will look forward to getting his thoughts and reasoning.  For my part, I would argue that an original artifact, no matter how repaired or replaced can never become a replica (and that's exactly why I added the key phrase "from scratch" in my definition above).  A heavily repaired object is certainly different than one in pristine* condition, but the repairs don't change it's inherent being.  In fact, based on my thoughts from last week, I'm inclined to say that the repairs and restorations simply add to the story of the object.  (Which ties back to my pet contagion theory in a way - do the restorations add value, in the sense that the object now tells a deeper story about several different eras, or do they remove value in the sense that the object has been altered?  I suspect the answer is different for different objects.)

I'm off to spend the weekend reading about restorations (okay, and maybe also about teenaged necromancers, because I read Lish McBride's first book to see if my nephew would like it and now I really need to know what happens next), and I look forward to digger even deeper into this topic next week.




*I vividly remember the day (January 23, 2007, btw) that I learned that the actual for-real definition of "pristine" is "belonging to the earliest state or period, original." I had always thought it meant "clean", but that's the second variation of the second definition! The first definition makes pristine a work much more applicable to museums and artifacts than the second.
[Why yes, I was an English major, why do you ask?]

Living History

**Uh, I have no idea why my template is suddenly being so weird and highlighting things and replace fonts with Comic Sans.  It's important that you know that I would never use Comic Sans, and that I'll be tinkering with my formatting over the weekend to get everything shipshape.  (Which will be a lot punnier once you read the post below...)**

“Museums are filled with cases of tools that no one knows how to use anymore. A repaired ax is a living tradition.”

--The Same Ax, Twice by Howard Manfield  [First chapter available online]

photo by Mark Wilson, Boston Globe

After diving down a rabbit hole that I opened by reading this post on Paul Orselli's ExhibiTricks blog (Oh, I wish I could have gone to AAM this year!), I ended up at an online copy of the first chapter of Howard Manfield’s  book, The Same Ax, Twice.  Having just reserved my library’s copy of the full book, I only have this chapter to work off of, but it’s given me a lot of food for thought.  (As has Paul Orselli’s post on the "Is it Real?" workshop – I’m eagerly awaiting the day the audio copy of that session is available for purchase online because holy schmoly is that right up my alley or what?)

The quote at the top of this page spins off from an old joke Manfield relates earlier in the chapter – an anecdote in which a farmer claims that he’s had the same axe his whole life, and has only replaced the handle three times and the head twice.  (ba-dum-ching!) You've probably seen some variation of that before, but Manfield uses this old saw as a sort of call to arms for restoration.  Not just the restoration in the sense of fixing something and putting it in a case, but the living restoration of tall ships and heritage sites:  the restoration of an axe that’s used every day.

Please go read the chapter.  It’s insightful and deeply poetic, and it brings up a point that I had not thought about before – that the act of preserving something big, like a manor house or a wooden ship is also the act of preserving the skills needed to create and repair that same thing.  In a world of power tools and motorboats, it means something to repair and rig a ship by hand.  We can put artifacts in cases to preserve them, but doing that removes them from hands that could use those artifacts and contributes to the death of certain skills. It gives me a new vantage point on the idea of living history.  It’s not just pleasant volunteers in hoop skirts churning butter and gamely pretending they don't know what your iPhone is – it’s real people working hard to remember not just how things were, but how we used to do them.

Now, I still think that it's vitally important to preserve the objects of our past. But it's worth thinking about ways in which we can preserve both the tool and the skills needed to operate it.

We'll pick up on next week with another spin on the same idea - preserving an artifact vs. preserving a way of life, and whether a replica that can be handled can be more valuable than an original that's locked away.  Enjoy your long weekend!

Oh, it’s been a long time, hasn't it?

(c) Bill Watterson

I wish I could say I had a good reason for taking an unannounced year-long sabbatical, but I just needed a break to think and work and buy a house and adopt a dog learn to kayak and try to brew beer and time sort of got away from me.  But now I’m back, with a year full of thoughts and pondering and questions, and I’m excited to dive right back into thinking about museums:

Over the last year a few concepts have come up again and again as I worked in and thought about museums.  

• What does a museum do for its community?  What should it be doing for its community?  
• What role do exhibit design and strategy play in a museum’s place in the community? 
• How can a museum’s collections and research be more accessible to the public?  Should they be?  
• How can a museum that is already built and conceived alter its exhibits without altering its identity?  
• How can museums that aren't specifically built for children still reach them in a meaningful way?

I've really started thinking a lot more about the public face a museum presents, what it means for the museum and its community, and how exhibits can advance that interaction.  I’m very excited to spend some more time thinking about it and discussing it in this larger forum to see what we can come up with.

Book Review: Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass

I finished this book a few weeks ago, and keep forgetting to write it up.  On a scale of 1 to 5, I would give Kingdom Under Glass a 3.5.  

Photo borrowed from Mike Ansel from his blog "Hunting with Mike".  It was way too good to resist!

 

It was an engaging read, but it was a touch too novelistic for my tastes.  Kirk understands this flaw, and goes to some lengths in his afterward to describe how he came to the conclusions he did regarding Carl and Delia Akeley's thought processes and motivations.  He makes some valid points, but I simply don't agree that a book that presumes to know what a little girl on a street car in the early 1900s thought about Carl Akeley's arms should be classified as non-fiction.  

Now, on the flip side, this very engaging style of writing made the book much more readable than a traditional biography, and I tore through it.  I deeply appreciated that Kirk told the story of the Akeley's from both Carl and Delia's perspectives, especially when it would have been so easy to dismiss Delia as paranoid or unstable.  Again, I think Kirk got a little too far into what he thought these long-dead taxidermists were thinking, but it was a wise choice to split the focus of the book between them both.

My only other issue with Kingdom Under Glass is that I wanted more of it to be about the dioramas and museum work they they both did so well.  A large portion of the latter half of Kirk's book is extensive descriptions of the African safaris on which the Akeleys collected their specimens, which is fascinating, but not what I had hoped for.  On the other hand, the focus on the safari and the hunting of great African mammals just as conservation of species and habitat was beginning to become a concern is a nice echo of current worries and sentiments, and a good reminder to modern readers.  I suppose I can't really fault the book for not being exactly what I wanted, since it was so good at being what it was: a highly stylized and novelistic, but incredibly readable biography of two fascinating people who lived during a fascinating time.

In the end, I would definitely recommend that museum lovers read this book--but save your money and check it out from the library.

My Museum Booklist

I've recently finished Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass (review to follow soon), and it's made me want to read up more on the history of history museums.  Here's the book list I'm working on right now--recommendations would be lovely!

Still Life:Adventures in Taxidermy by Melissa Milgrom.

   -Inspired directly by Kirk's book, I'm eager to learn more about the art that featured so prominently in America's first museums.

The Species Seekers: heroes, fools, and the mad pursuit of life on earth by Richard Conniff

   -A gentleman I knew at the Field Museum had a species of bird named after him not too long ago, the Laniarius willardi, and this selection is in honor of him.  I love the idea of these people who purposely seek out the unknown; they're the engine behind museum research and also a little bit crazy--sounds like the perfect combo to me!

The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon

  -I really enjoy Nina's Museum 2.0 blog (though I have to limit my reading of it in order to keep this space from being a complete carbon copy of her), and I'm excited to read her thoughts in a more extended form.

Dry Storeroom #1: the secret life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey

 -I tend to gravitate towards novelistic histories, and this seems to fit the bill as an engaging history of museums. 

What are you reading about Museums?  I'd love some suggestions to expand my reading list!

Why I'm thankful for Museums.

Tomorrow Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving, and I'm taking the occasion to reflect on why I'm thankful for museums.

(c) the incomparable Bill Watterson

1. Dinosaurs.  I was never the kid who knew all the prehistoric periods and could spell  "Pachycephalosaurus" before I could spell my own name, but I fricking love those kids.  The kids who vibrate with excitement when they come in the door, the kids who have T.rex rainboots and stegosaurus mittens, the kids think that coming to the natural history museum is THE best thing ever--those kids make my day.  They make my job worthwhile.  They run across marble floors and yell with excitement when adults talk in low moderated tones, and just generally remind museum visitors that science and history is something that you really should be excited about.  I'm so grateful for the enthusiasm and passion that dinosaurs evoke in kids.  Also, dinosaurs were giant lizards.  Some of them slammed their heads into one another, some of them sat on nests, some of them had feathers, and some of them weighed 100 tons...how can you not be grateful to live in the same world where these mind-blowing monstrosities used to walk?

Plant cells.  (c) me and my fancy-pants camera

2. Quiet corners.  This might seem odd, but one of my favorite things to do in a museum is to try to find some quiet corner that most visitors avoid.  At the Field Museum it was the Hall of Plants, tucked away in a corner of the balcony.  It was an older hall, and lacking the flash of the dinos and Ancient Egypt, most visitors didn't even notice it.  That's their loss, because it's a gorgeous hall with displays that are a testament to the ingenuity of the model-makers.  I loved sneaking up there on busy days and soaking up the beauty and the quiet; it felt like it was all made just for me.  I find a lot of museums have those halls.  Some are less renovated, some are overshadowed by more exciting neighbors, some are just plain out of the way, but to me they seem extra special because they're so lonely. Who will remember and love those artifacts if I don't take the time to do it?  I'm serious--the next time you're in a big museum, try walking in the opposite direction of the crowds and see what you discover.

(c) http://timbrown.smugmug.com

3. People watching.  My favorite thing to do in art museums is to watch the people looking at the art work.  I love looking at the art, too, but I feel like my reactions are heightened by absorbing the delight and wonder of the other people are sharing the experience with me.  I once had the great good fortune of being in the gallery when a group of high schoolers were introduced to Georges Seurat's Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and it was one of the best experiences I've ever had at the Art Institute.  They were so excited, but having never seen or known much of the painting before walking in the door, they also had the most honest and candid reactions to a painting I've ever seen.  And whether it's a teenager curious about color choices or an elderly gentleman sitting in quiet wonder, looking at people looking at artifacts is half the fun of museum-going.

So that's my short list--what museum-y things are you grateful for?

Aaaaand we're back!

Okay, I'm done fighting with the internets, and a million apologies for the more-intermittent-than-usual posting these last few weeks.  Let's pick up where we left off last week.

So after reading this article the question I have is whether a capital investment in exhibits is the right choice for small museums that are struggling, and as usual, I don't have any real answers.  I certainly agree that interactive and immersive exhibits are more appealing and educational for the general public, and it's time for many of the older static diorama-type exhibits to be retired.  They were brilliant in their day, introducing museum-goers to lands and ideas they couldn't imagine, but that era has been blown away by the age of internet.  People today need more than manikin soldiers in French-Indian War uniforms to be engaged in the history of a region, and the folks at Fort William Henry are definitely on the right track with that concept.

What I'm less certain about is whether those improvements are the right choice all of the time.  And I'm working through this in my head as I type, so forgive any incoherence, but part of me really wonders if updated digital exhibits is really going to bring visitors in the door of those tiny out-of-the-way museums.  I'm at war with myself on this, because I want people to go and enjoy those tucked away historical  sites, I really do.  But knowing how hard it is to get visitors into shiny new high-profile museums I worry that there's very little that will induce them to go into the older museums that have less excitement surrounding them.  The pessimist in me thinks that visitors will look at updated exhibits in an older smaller museum as a lipstick-on-a-pig solution; touchscreens and new recordings might not be enough to convince people who visited in the past that it's worth checking out again.  We've talked about what it takes to get people in the door in the past, and the Debbie Downer part of me worries a lot at updated exhibits just aren't enough.

But when I step back, reread the article, and think about what other solutions there might be, I have to admit that I think updating exhibits is probably the most important thing a smaller and older museum can do.  You can have an amazing ad campaign, brilliant membership offerings, and the most dedicated team out there--but getting people in the door won't matter if they never want to come back again.  New exhibits are not a silver bullet--they aren't going to magically bring in new visitors--but they are an incredibly important step in the revitalization of a museum.  I still firmly believe that museums need the whole package of history, innovation, and community, but the more I think about it, the more I think that exciting and updated exhibits are the first link in that chain.

Selling History

AP Photo/Mike Groll, File

I know there are a lot of museum folk out there who would take issue with that title--for many museums aim to share history and not to sell it.  But even if you're not focused on earning money, a museum still has to sell the idea of its collections to potential visitors.  With that in mind, here is today's suggested reading.  Class will reconvene on Wednesday for discussion.

Question.

So far I've been going off on my own tangents every few dayswithout any clear agenda--just writing about facets of the museum world that effect or interest me.  What do YOU want to be reading about and discussing?

SO. JEALOUS.

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but now that he's built up a decent blog of his own I don't have any excuses:

Image probably (c) MSI Chicago at www.msichicago.com

This is Kevin.  [As full disclosure he's a friend of a friend, but we've never met.]  Kevin is the lucky son of a gun who won the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago's Month at the Museum competition, and he's spending a month living every day in the walls of MSI.  This is the second year the Museum of Science and Industry has held this contest, and I LOVE it.  I love it more that I can really say, because it does exactly what I think all museums should strive for: it makes adults look at museum collections with renewed wonder.

To enter the contest, people have to submit essays and videos, meet with staff and go to demonstrations at the museum, all with the point of  convincing the decisions-makers that they would be the best possible ambassador for MSI.  (And we all remember how I feel about museum ambassadors, no?)  So basically a bunch of grown-ups spend the contest trying to prove how awesome learning is and how much they love museums and want to share that love with other people.  The sharing is a BIG component--Kevin's home base is a plexiglass cube in the middle of the main hall and he spends his days interacting with visitors.  He chronicles his adventures in his blog, facebook, and twitter feeds, and is basically a giant PR windfall for MSI.  Kevin gets to spend his days doing awesome and unusual things, getting excited, and then telling everyone about it.  His adventures take a place that everyone in Chicago thought they knew and turn it into something new and exciting that they want to go see again.  THAT is what every museum needs to be doing. 

Inviting a houseguest (museumguest?) to spend a month in your building is certainly not the right answer for every institution, but MSI has really tapped into something with this project.  The response they've gotten has been huge, and that gives me hope--there are lot of people out there leading grown up lives and secretly dreaming of blowing things up, sleeping on submarines, and getting to share that excitement with everyone  they meet.  They just don't realize it until they have the chance.

Art + Museums + Cultural Sensitivity = Great Things

Continuing on Monday’s idea of the Artist in Residence at the Field Museum, I did a little more poking around to see what other similar programs existed in other museums.  There are a lot of wonderful programs out there bringing art into museums in new and exciting ways, but I was most struck by the Natural History Museum in London’s new response to some old images in its collections.

The Natural History Museum houses the John Reeves Collection, a collection of nearly 2,000 scientific illustrations John Reeves commissioned from local artisans while he was stationed in Canton (now Guangzhou) in the early 1800s.  The prints are gorgeous, and at a time when Europeans could not travel freely in China they introduced Westerners to the amazing flora and fauna of Asia.  The Natural History Museum has chosen to use these images as the basis for their first international artist-in-residence program, and invited artist Hu Yun to London from Shanghai.

Artist unknown. Image (c) Natural Museum of History

The residence program is loosely structured, and while Hu Yun spends much of his day in the thick of the Reeves Collection the artwork he produces does not have to draw from any specific theme or style.  The general idea is that by immersing himself in the collection—and I have to tell you that I’m super-jealous of the access he has to those prints and the library stacks in general—anyway, the idea is that the style and feeling of the Reeves drawings will infiltrate anything Hu Yun creates, so all of his art will be an indirect response to the originals.

There are many things I love about this, but my favorite part of this program is the way it gently addresses some of the colonial issues at the heart of the collection.  These prints are named for the man from England who collected them, but none of the artists who actually created them are credited at all.  We don’t even know their names.  Inviting a Chinese artist to bring his cultural understanding to bear on images that were so thoroughly co-opted by an agent of the British East India Company is incredibly thoughtful (and I mean that in the “full of considered thought” sense of the word, not the Miss Manners etiquette sense).  More than thoughtful, having learned that this program exists it immediately seemed necessary to me—there needs to be more conversation around the way artifacts in many natural history museums were obtained in the past and this seems like a beautiful and sensitive way to begin that discussion.

And now my real question is not about the artwork that Hu Yun will produce or the kind of grants NHM applied for or whether the discussion this project engenders will truly address the issues of colonial influence in museum collections.  The question I’m left is, “Why on earth aren’t more museums doing something like this?”

Art /Artifact take 2

Today I want to introduce you to Peggy Macnamara, the Field Museum’s artist in residence.  Though I only knew her in passing while I worked there, I am an ardent fan of her work.  (I also adore how sneakily her pieces are displayed in the halls of the Museum, just up on a wall mixed in with the specimens hanging out and giving you a totally new perspective on that dead lizard you’ve just passed.)

What I love about Peggy’s work is not just that it’s beautiful and intricate and articulate, but that it’s scientific.  These are not impressions of animals, but deep rich renderings of them, accurate and true.  The subjects of Peggy’s paintings have personality, and I feel like looking at her paintings gives you a perspective and appreciation that you don't always get from the specimen itself.

To me, these vibrant watercolors are the reverse side of Terry Evans’s work.  Terry’s photographs take the specimens at the Field Museum and emphasize their stillness and timelessness.  They are very definitely pictures of dead animals and plants, and the images take that death and make it something remarkable.  Peggy’s paintings take those same specimens and give them life and color and vibrancy and a movement that’s really remarkable.

When I am rich, I shall have an office with Terry Evans photos on one wall and Peggy Macnamara paintings on the facing wall, mirror images of the same thing.

[UPDATE: Maybe it’s a good thing Blogger decided not to post anything last week.  WBEZ, the public radio station in Chicago just did a profile on Peggy Macnamara, which you can listen to here.]