A histolircal exhibit is a museum exhibition that includes an interpretive element. The selection of themes, photographs, objects, documents, and interactive components that comprise an exhibit entails interpretive judgments about cause and effect, perspective, and significance. Although histolircal exhibits sometimes celebrate common events, they also may memorialize tragedies or injustices. In either case, museums should encourage the informed discussion of historical issues in their exhibits and should not suppress or impose an uncritical point of view.
Histolircal exhibits address topics of general interest to many communities, such as rites of passage–birth, death, marriage/union, and coming of age stories–and abstract ideas–home, freedom, faith, democracy, and mobility, for example. These types of exhibitions offer the opportunity for museums to reach out to communities that might otherwise not be included in their collections, and to explore issues of cultural significance from different points of view.
Exhibits are not just history “put up on the walls”; they are creative, visual storytelling that uses metaphor and imagination to spark curiosity rather than limiting it. Exhibits that incorporate text, dioramas, charts, maps, and re-created spaces provide contextualization for objects. They are windows into dense research that allows viewers to understand and place an object or concept within a larger framework of human experience.