The exhibition medium has a unique capacity to communicate historical ideas and perspectives. Exhibits can challenge traditional academic interpretations, stimulate dialogue about controversial issues, and encourage the public to consider multiple points of view. Exhibits are the heart of museum programs and serve as touchstones that keep history alive for many visitors. This is a significant responsibility. The work of interpreting the past through exhibitions requires not only knowledge and passion, but also management and interpersonal skills, expertise in materials culture, an understanding of the nature of historical research, a sense of visual literacy, and the ability to marry complex scholarship with human narratives that reach beyond objects and facts into larger ideas and questions.
A well-designed exhibit is more than history “put up on the wall.” It is a visual poem and a creative interjection of art, design, and imagination. It is a form of cultural argument with both its own distinct rigor and challenges. In a museum, an exhibit is a three-dimensional physical and visual representation of an historical argument that blends research evidence with interpretation and a compelling visual presentation.
Museums, like their collections, are diverse entities, but they are all dedicated to preserving and sharing the past. Each year, history museums interpret America’s past for millions of visitors. Larger institutions such as the National Museum of American History and Colonial Williamsburg draw a sizable share of this audience, but smaller entities like the Oneida Historical Society or the California Afro-American Museum also play an important role in bringing historic stories to their local communities.
Exhibits have the power to connect with people in ways that scholarly monographs, popular books, and public lectures cannot. This is especially true for exhibits that explore abstract ideas like home, freedom, faith, democracy, and mobility. Moreover, museum exhibits can explore these concepts by tapping into the unique resources of a community’s diverse backgrounds and histories.
The aim of this column is to bring to the attention of Perspectives readers the range of innovative exhibition projects that are being accomplished in historic museums throughout the country. The focus will be on projects that stretch the established parameters of interpretation, presentation, and collecting. This may include innovative projects that suggest new ways to improve collaboration between the academy and museums; projects that address the need to expand or redefine a small museum’s relationship with its community; or projects that seek to engage a new generation of historians in museum practice.
Each review will examine the intellectual underpinnings of an exhibition—its underlying research, its scholarly currents, and its approach to interpretation. It will then examine how the exhibition conveys this information at a level accessible to a non-expert public and explore whether the exhibition accomplishes its intended goals.