Historical exhibits often challenge common assumptions, memorialize tragedy and injustice, or promote a particular point of view. Museums should encourage the informed discussion of such subjects and provide the opportunity for the public to consider the broader issues of historical significance raised by an exhibit’s content.
A museum exhibition is a three-dimensional physical and visual form of cultural argument, research evidence, and interpretation. It is a metaphor–a visual poetics and imagination that sparks curiosity rather than limits it. Exhibits are a window into the dense research required when composing a history, but they must be complex enough to offer authentic insight and simple enough to avoid being “books on a wall.” The best museums use artifacts to tell inclusive visual stories about their topics, creating drama and enabling people to connect, in some way, with the bigger ideas being explored. Exhibits that feature a human component, whether they focus on a rite of passage (birth, death, marriage/union, or coming of age), a theme (food or drink, clothing and adornment, or race and religion) or an abstract idea like home, freedom, faith, democracy, or mobility, are especially powerful.