Whether they are designed to celebrate an individual or collective accomplishment, memorialize a tragedy or injustice, or explore abstract ideas, historical exhibits play an important role in conveying history to the public. They do this through a combination of scholarship, research, interpretation, visual images, and material culture. They also involve the active participation of visitors whose own knowledge and understanding of the past they contribute to the exhibition’s broader meaning.
Museums that want to stay relevant in the twenty-first century must go beyond telling the old histories of their towns and communities, and engage those people whose stories have been overlooked. They must do this by using new sources and exploring the connections between past events and contemporary issues of importance to those communities. They must also demonstrate that they are worthy of their tax-exempt status by proving that museums provide a valuable service to the people who live within their borders.
Exhibits offer a medium to do all of these things, and are unique among historical products because they allow museum audiences to experience the interplay of history, interpretation, and objects in ways that scholarly monographs, popular books, and public lectures cannot. They also give museum audiences a chance to connect with the history of their own lives, communities, and families through objects that speak to them.
The creation of a good museum exhibit requires the skills of a historian and a museum professional working together. A good exhibit review will not only examine the intellectual underpinnings of the show – does it reflect prevailing scholarly trends? Does it break new ground? – but will also look at how the show is presented to museum audiences.
In addition to their scholarship, historians and museum professionals must be able to work well with designers, exhibition technicians, and public programs staff. They must be able to communicate their research and interpretive conclusions in a language that is accessible to a wide variety of museum visitors. Moreover, they must have a strong grasp of the visual languages that help them bring their subjects to life for museum audiences.
Unlike traditional academic products, exhibitions are highly collaborative; they require both management and interpersonal skills as well as the ability to understand the historical context of the subject they present. A good exhibit is an elegant metaphor, a nonlinear form of cultural argument with physical form and structure. It is a marriage of ideas and objects, and like a poem, it should appeal to the senses as well as to the intellect.
A good museum exhibition is inclusive, allowing visitors to see themselves in the past through objects that connect with their own personal history and to learn about more universal themes such as family, community, freedom, and faith. The themes of rituaal passage, such as birth and death, marriage/joining, and coming of age are excellent examples of this inclusivity. Other themes, such as the history of food or a particular industry, or abstract ideas such as home, democracy, freedom, faith, and mobility, are also good choices for a history museum to explore.