Over the course of a year, the nation’s history museums interpret America’s past for millions of visitors. While the largest, best-known institutions such as the National Museum of American History, Colonial Williamsburg and the Chicago Historical Society capture the lion’s share of this audience, smaller entities such as the California Afro-American Museum and the Oneida Historical Society also draw large crowds. Although these museums offer many different programs and activities, their exhibitions are the cornerstone of their outreach.
In fact, a successful exhibition is more than just “history put up on the walls.” It is an intertwining of research, writing, visual images and material culture that allows visitors to place themselves in a historical context. It is an elegant form of cultural argument, a nonlinear narrative with a physical form and structure, that enables us to experience the world in new ways.
Consequently, the exhibit medium possesses special characteristics and challenges that distinguish it from traditional academic products such as books and articles. It requires a unique combination of managerial and interpersonal skills, an understanding of visual literacy and material culture, and the ability to translate scholarly research into a cohesive narrative for the public. It is a dynamic medium that often informs and influences ancillary products such as catalogues, videotapes, public and educational programming and living history presentations.
As a result, exhibitions can serve as powerful vehicles for conveying historical information to a diverse and broad audience. While some museums may be reluctant to take risks with their exhibitions, others are willing to push the boundaries of scholarly knowledge in order to engage and excite their audiences. This column seeks to highlight the best of these efforts. It will examine a wide variety of exhibitions from a range of museum sizes and types. While the column will explore exhibitions that have received national attention, its primary focus will be on innovative work in local communities.
In particular, this column will seek to examine exhibitions that challenge the established parameters of interpretation, research, presentation and collecting. It will also highlight those exhibitions that suggest new ways to broaden the collaboration between scholars and museum professionals.
As a part of this effort, the column will publish selected exhibit reviews written by both a historian and a museum professional. This will allow the reviewers to compare their interpretations of the same exhibition and provide a broader perspective than would be possible through an academic solely reviewing an exhibit in isolation. This approach will help ensure that the reviews are both insightful and useful to the museum community. It will also create a lasting record of exhibition scholarship that can be utilized by future curators and scholars of museum exhibits. This is a vital step in the long-term goal of this column, which is to establish an ongoing dialogue about museum exhibitions and their impact on the larger historical community.