Whether at the National Museum of American History, Colonial Williamsburg, or one of the many smaller institutions across the country, every year museums interpret America’s past for millions of visitors. Museum exhibitions are unique among forms of historical scholarship because they combine research and interpretation with visual images and material culture. This unique medium demands a diverse set of skills from curators. They must draw upon management and interpersonal skills, knowledge of material culture, a sense of visual literacy, as well as an advanced degree in history to create successful exhibits. Moreover, their success depends on the active involvement of museum educators, designers, and production staff as well as their intended audience.
Aside from being a vehicle for conveying complex histories to broad audiences, exhibitions are also important in stimulating research in history and introducing new areas of inquiry. The emergence of the “blockbuster” museum exhibition, with its long queues and large illustrated catalogs, is generally agreed to have stimulated the study of art history in the late 19th century; the exhibitions of Egyptian treasures at the Royal Academy in London and at the Bruges International Exhibition of Early Netherlandish Painting had similar impacts on the field.
In addition to bringing research and history to wide public attention, exhibitions can provide windows into the dense scholarship that goes into the composition of a history. They can challenge our assumptions, complicate the history of a place or era, and reveal how the past continues to shape and influence the lives of people today. They can also introduce important new perspectives on a subject by addressing how it is perceived from different viewpoints and by examining the controversies surrounding it.
Historians are eager to review exhibits in order to evaluate the quality of their research, but we need to consider how the exhibition reaches its intended audience. This column seeks to highlight exhibits that successfully bridge the gap between academic scholarship and museum exhibitions. The reviews will examine not only the intellectual underpinnings of an exhibition but will also explore how the design and layout help convey that research to the visitor.
Ideally, the reviews will also serve as an ongoing dialog between academic historians and museum professionals. By publishing these reviews in Perspectives, we hope to build a literature on the work of museum scholars and contribute to a shared vocabulary and method for reviewing exhibitions. While these reviews will not attempt to address all the thousands of exhibitions mounted each year, they will seek to highlight innovative and creative work that stretches the established parameters of museum research, presentation, and interpretation. Examples include exhibitions that explore a theme such as home, freedom, faith, democracy, social justice, or mobility and demonstrate ways in which they engage non-traditional or underserved audiences.