A brief history of my history with history museums

My history with history museums starts with this guy:

My dad bought this figurine for me when I was six years old.  I picked it out from all of the other glass animals in the small little gift shop that is still on the ground floor of the Field Museum several hours before it opened to other patrons after one of the best nights of my life.

My family had always been a museum-going one, and my parents made it a point to take my sister and I to a big museum every time we were in the city.  So I was primed and ready when my dad told us that we--along with a hundred or so other folks--were going to spend the night at the Field Museum.  It was a part of a program called "Dozin' with the Dinos," where parents and children come in to the museum after it closes with sleeping bags and pajamas and do crafts, take tours, and explore the museum late into the night.  Basically it is a little kid's dream come true.

It was almost twenty-five years ago, so a lot of the details a blurry.  I remember going to orientation in the big theater and having a security guard tell me that I wasn't allowed to touch the bronze statue I was touching.  But more than just yelling at me, she took a moment to explain that the reason I couldn't was because the oils on my little hands would damage the metal.  I haven't touched a statue since, scout's honor.  I remember trying to pick the very best spot to lay out my threadbare green sleeping bag, and ending up next to this guy:

At that time the Pawnee Earth Lodge was still in this hall, but it's otherwise unchanged. One of my favorite things when I worked at the Field was when an errand would take me through this hall and I could walk past the same spot I'd set up my sleeping bag so many years ago.  My family set up with a few other families we knew and a bunch of other people we didn't, and then set out to explore the museum.

Looking at the program now, we must have had some workshops, there was dinner and a midnight snack at some point, and we probably made some crafts, but I don't remember any of that.  What I remember was that some time around midnight (an inconceivable time to my tiny mind) they turned off the lights and told us any further exploring would have to be done by flashlight.  My dad armed Sister and I with flashlights and we set off to go through Ancient Egypt.

I don't think I will ever be closer to the feeling a scientist on the verge of a discovery has than I did that night.  It didn't matter that we'd been through that exhibit dozens of times in the well-lit day--every artifact was newly-discovered in the wavering beam of my flashlight.  It was the most terrifying and exhilarating night of my life to that point, and while the details have faded over the years, that thrill of discovery and excitement lingers.  And I've been lost to history museums ever since.

The next morning Dad let me pick out a figurine, and I've kept that little leopard with me ever since.  Every time I look at it on my desk I'm reminded of that night, and it makes me excited to try to bring that same feeling to other little kids.  And while I'm sure that art museums and science centers bring the same joy to others, for me it's always going to be the history museums.  They've been blowing my mind for as long as I can remember.  Seriously: dinosaurs.  mummies.  life-sized adobe pueblos and honest-to-goodness meteorites. lions and tigers and bears and little glass leopards. Oh, my indeed.

I'm always late to the party...

So I was listening to this past weekend's podcast of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and there was a passing reference to a 'dinosaur skull' for which Nicholas Cage outbid Leonardo DiCaprio.  And this got me thinking about the strange double-standard in how we think about people who own artifacts versus people who own art.

The news of Mr Cage's dinosaur skull broke in 2009 in conjunction with stories about his troubles with the IRS.  At the time it was presented as evidence of his out-of-control spending, and it's referenced in a number of pop-culture stories.  That Nic Cage, he's so crazy!  Except that if he had spent that $276,000 on a painting, or a sculpture, no one would think twice.  He wouldn't be crazy, he'd be an art lover, which is much more acceptable.

"Beech Forest" by Gustav Klimt

I have already revealed that I have a bias towards history museums, so I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that I would absolutely love to have my very own dinosaur skull.  I actually cannot come up with adequate words to explain how much I would love that.  But I don't think I would buy one, even if I had the money.  I wouldn't buy a Klimt if I had the money, either, and not because I wouldn't love to have it on my wall.  It's because (kind of unsurprisingly, given my museum background), I think things like fossils and paintings belong in the public realm.  I think they should be stared at by school kids and studied by scientists and kept in the public domain as much as possible.

I don't think Nicholas Cage is crazy for buying a dinosaur skull--I think all the other rich people out there are crazy for NOT buying dinosaur skulls.  All the same, I'm glad that more of them are ending up in public museums than private collections.

Relocating

After a long drive through the rain, we've finally made it to the Sunshine State.  (And we've figured out our internet connection, which was pretty dicey for a while.)

As big a project as moving felt for us, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what happens when an institution needs to pull up stakes, which happens more frequently than I'd realized.  The Field Museum in Chicago moved five miles north in 1921, from its original location at the site of the 1893 World's Fair to its current home in the South Loop.  The Dali Museum, now in St Petersburg, Florida has moved three times--from its original location in Cleveland in 1982, and to an updated facility in St Pete earlier this year.

Thinking about all of that, I'm pondering the ties between museums and the communities they serve after reading this article in the AAM archives.  It covers a number of different scenarios, but the majority of the article talks about museums dealing with the decision to (and the ramifications of) changing their location and moving out of their original communities.  In some cases, like the Berkely Art Museum, the choice is obvious and the impact fairly minimal.  The original building wasn't seismically sound in a region of the country known for earthquakes and the museum is staying on the U of C campus...nothing is lost.  In other cases, like the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum or the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, moving the physical location of the museum will have a lasting effect on the communities they leave behind.  The town of Mt Horeb apparently depended on the Mustard Museum for tourism dollars (that's one of those sentences that just looks odd when you take the time to re-read it, no?), but the location was making it hard for the museum to survive.  The Mustard Museum chose its own survival, and no one can blame them for that, but it had a large impact on the town that it left.  Their survival was linked, but not balanced--the museum had to leave to survive and the town needed the revenue that came with the museum staying.

So what does a museum owe to its community?  If the collection brings visitors to an out-of-the way place, there's an intangible sense of obligation, but it isn't necessarily fair to ask an attraction to go down with the ship, so to speak, when a location ceases to be viable for its collection.  Having just packed up and hit the road on myself I'm a a little biased--as much as I value loyalty, there's no use in staying put if it means your collections and displays would go unseen.  Which brings us right back to the Chernobyl Question again...there's no escaping the dichotomy of collections and visitorship around here.

a worn spot on stone stairs.

The building I work in is nearly 100 years old.  This causes some issues (the Facilities crew tells me that 100-year-old plumbing all kinds of not fun), but mostly I think it's wonderful.  Not only do our collections preserve history for future generations, our very building is a record of how museums have grown and changed since the early 20th century.  One side of our main hall houses taxidermy animal dioramas that haven't changed since we opened our doors in 1921 while the other side of the hall boast exhibits with time lapse photography, touch screen technology, and virtual cave-painting.  It's kind of amazing.

And of all the amazing things in this building that's been absorbing history for over 90 years, my favorite spot is a side stairwell with a worn spot on the second landing.

The stairwell in question is outside my office, and I walk up and down it several times a day to meet visitors, get the mail, or grab lunch.  It doesn't lead anywhere too special, and it's not a central route to anywhere in the museum.  The fact that it's not particularly well-travelled makes the worn spot even more special to me.  The stairs are original to the building, and carved from a dense grey stone.  (I'll have to find a docent tomorrow to ask exactly what type of stone it is.  The docents will know, they know everything.)  [ed. According to Dennis, it's limestone, local to the Chicago region. I knew the docents would know!] Right near the railing on the second landing there's a slight depression in the stone right where your foot hits as you turn to continue down the final flight of stairs.  It's not deep--in fact, you can only see it when the lighting hits it just right and reveals that shallow bowl in the stone--but I love it.  I love it because that spot has been worn away by thousands of people walking down these stairs over the last century.  No single person created it, but it's a reminder of our collective existence--a record of our time here at the museum.  This little depression has been caused by the minute scraping of governesses in high boots in the early part of the century, and by shuffling school kids in their shoes that light up when they run.  Folks who came to this museum once left a tiny mark when they went down that stairway, and it's a part of the same mark made by a curator who walked that route every day for 43 years.  Each of us who takes that stairway wears the stone down the tiniest fraction.  Each of us leaves just a little reminder that we were here.

In a building as vast as this one, a building designed to house and explain artifacts from the earliest days of this planet, I take comfort in the fact that there's a tiny record of me here.  When I leave, that worn little scuff will remain, and it will grow minutely as others shuffle down the side stairway.  Most of the people who contribute to it won't notice, but together we've all left a little bit of ourselves behind.  That makes me happy.

And knowing that I'll be leaving here sooner rather than later, I maybe drag my feet a little more than necessary turning 'round that banister...just to leave that tiny fraction more of myself here in this building that's seen so much.