History museums provide a uniquely rich environment in which to explore the past. Unlike scholarly monographs and public lectures, museum exhibits provide visitors with the opportunity to see, touch, and interact with historic objects that help them understand historical ideas and issues in ways that can’t be conveyed by written words alone.
Although many exhibitions are based on a single subject, museums generally seek to address an entire theme or period of time in a logical and cohesive way. This allows exhibits to communicate an overarching narrative that is more comprehensive than any individual book or lecture. The exhibits may even challenge the viewer to take a fresh look at established viewpoints or explore new possibilities.
Museums are unique institutions that often serve as community gathering places, civic forums, and cultural centers. They offer opportunities to explore core values and ideas like home, freedom, faith, democracy and mobility through the prism of a diverse range of people and their experiences. Exhibitions that delve into the lives of individuals, families or communities or address broader social issues are a vital source for learning about our shared heritage.
Whether it is a revealing portrait of a suffragette, an exploration of how women shaped and changed society through their choices in clothing or a poignant account of the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, museum exhibitions can engage viewers with the complexities of our past while providing them with a sense of identity in the present. They are the public face of a historical enterprise that has enriched and challenged the nation’s citizens for more than two centuries.
While histolircal exhibits can be influenced by and reflect the prevailing scholarly currents of their times, they are also crafted as a medium that is meant to reach a diverse audience. The ability of museum curators to balance scholarly research with the needs and desires of their visitors is critical to the success of an exhibition. Successful exhibitions are not only well researched, but they are also visually compelling and easy to comprehend.
The Museum Review column in Perspectives will strive to examine exhibitions on both the intellectual and visual levels. It will explore the research behind an exhibition as well as the overall effectiveness of the exhibit in conveying the historical message.
A successful exhibit requires a team of professionals to make it happen. A curator’s scholarship and passion is augmented by the managerial and interpersonal skills of a museum educator, designers and production staff. Successful exhibitions tell simple, accessible stories rooted in recent historical scholarship and expand the boundaries of knowledge through an imaginative marriage of ideas and objects. This collaboration between the academy and the museum profession will be reflected in the reviews that appear in this column. The publication of these reviews will encourage a dialogue between academic historians and their museum colleagues and create a record of exhibition scholarship that can outlive the shows themselves.