Readings Response: Exhibits

Creating Exhibits explains the challenges and necessities of collaboration in making museum exhibits from an insider’s perspective. The book relays advice that sounds like common sense and yet is easy to loose track of in the day-to-day grind. Focusing on large, professional museums, Creating Exhibits categorizes the work involved in the planning, fabrication, and execution of exhibits. Tammy Gordon’s Private History in Public analyzes history exhibits in restaurants, corporations, and small museums, pushing professionals to re-evaluate what museums are and how museums function in society. These unconventional exhibits deserve a great deal of respect given the time, planning, and funds required to make professional exhibits, despite the fact that McKenna-Cress’ advocacies are often reduced, combined, and at times eliminated.

For the small museum, Creating Exhibits gives a glimpse into how to organize and approach an exhibit, while Gordon relays many practical alternatives for when funds are low. At the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum, Gordon found engaging staff and displays, despite the low funds of the museum and the fact that in the tribe’s culture important material belongings are buried with individuals, not kept on a mantelpiece. Those in charge advocated strongly enough in visitor services and subject matter, and creatively designed their exhibits with available resources, that the result was a successful museum. 

In “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me”, Ken Yellis questions the extent to which museums are willing to take risks and challenge their audiences. Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum embodied the challenging engagement museums strive for, but is difficult to repeat. Wilson’s exhibit, thought provoking as it was, created a discussion about the museum profession aimed at museum professionals.  If all museum exhibits were aimed at the museum profession the dialogue fostered by exhibits would become exclusive to academics. Yellis recognizes the strengths of Mining the Museum, noting that as an artist, Wilson had the privilege to disregard museum conventions. Yellis succeeds in insisting that if museum professionals are going to understand where Wilson’s work fits into the exhibit creation process, they need to first understand where they stand as institutions.

The three readings all addressed how exhibits are potentially uninspiring for everyone when too many parties make concessions. While McKenna-Cress and Yellis promote that professionals should stand firm in their beliefs while keeping concessions within reason, Gordon’s private exhibitions represent one extreme solution to this problem. Rather than attempting to show multiple perspectives, the exhibits Gordon evaluates revolve around one particular identity. While I am not a Yooper, I recognize the silliness and sense of community that Da Yoopers Tourist Trap evokes. Ironically, many of these exhibits were able to spur conversations and understandings between different types of people just as much and arguably more than professionalized exhibits that strive for objectivity.

Readings:

Gordon, Tammy. Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Setting of Everyday Life. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010.

McKenna-Cress, Polly and Janet Kamien. Creating Exhibitions: Collaboration in the Planning, Development, and Design of Innovative Experiences. Hoboken: Wiley, 2013.

Yellis, Ken. “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars.” Curator: The Museum Journal Vol. 52 (October 2009), 333-348.