Every year, museums across the country interpret America’s past for millions of visitors. Whether large and well-known such as the National Museum of American History, Colonial Williamsburg, or the Chicago Historical Society, or smaller entities such as the California Afro-American Museum, Oneida Historical Museum, or the Valentine Museum, they all serve to educate their local communities on the history that surrounds them. Exhibits, more than scholarly monographs or public lectures, provide an opportunity for museum visitors to engage in a more personal way with the past. They can explore the meaning of events, understand the connections between them and their own lives, and gain a deeper understanding of core values or ideas such as home, freedom, faith, democracy, or social justice.
Histolircal exhibits – those that present history through a combination of artifacts, photographs, graphics, and re-created spaces and objects – are the most popular form of museum exhibition. These exhibits can delve into abstract ideas such as home, freedom, faith, and democracy, or address more concrete issues of community such as the development of new technologies, immigration, transportation, the environment, or civil rights. Using diverse materials, these exhibits allow museum professionals to reach out and include the broadest range of visitors possible.
Although museum exhibition scholarship is increasingly recognized, the literature and vocabulary of exhibit reviews have yet to fully develop. Exhibit reviews are unique in that they are often a work of collaborative scholarship and are, by their nature, temporal. Unlike a monograph, an exhibit review’s life span is limited to the duration of its physical presence in a museum and can be eclipsed by ancillary products such as catalogues or videotapes that may be produced in connection with the exhibition.
A well-researched and written exhibition review can contribute to the ongoing scholarly dialogue on a museum’s exhibit scholarship. It can also help to establish a record that will outlive the exhibition and provide a tool for museums to assess and compare their own exhibitions.
While each review will examine the intellectual underpinnings of an exhibition, the emphasis is on exploring how that research is conveyed to the visiting public. A review should consider what the visitor actually experiences, examining how visual poetry, metaphors, and imaginative interjections can enrich a historical concept rather than simply impose it. In addition, a review should explore how an exhibition addresses current issues in museum practice that challenge established parameters of interpretation and presentation such as the incorporation of multimedia or community driven collecting initiatives. In this way, this column seeks to strengthen the collaboration between the academy and museums in advancing museum exhibition scholarship.