The Future of Museums

Throughout the course of the semester, I have become acutely aware of my own tastes. Particularly with the past few readings, notably Stanton and Tyson, I have discovered that I have minimal tolerance for academic writing that values criticism over construction. This may be why this weeks readings felt so refreshing. Not only are they realistic and practical, but also they do not shy away from compromise and the occasional concession. Perhaps multiple authors force multiple perspectives. Perhaps the administrative quality of reports and assessments causes them to be more aware of the logistics of their own advice. Whatever the reason, this week’s readings encouraged putting problem-solving skills to work.

"Coming soon: The Future: The Shape of Museums to Come" by James Chung, Susie Wilkening and Sally Johnstone, presented a speculative vision of what museums may be in the year 2034. Using comparisons of how museums have changed in the past two decades and projections about demographics and economics, the authors concluded that museums will both face great challenges and have opportunities to engage wider audiences in new ways. The points about baby boomers and travel were the most grounded of the predictions, and the ones that are the most immediate to museums today. 

            Imperiled Promise documented the concerns among history workers in the National Park Service and suggests actions, policies and programs that could help the field of history within NPS. While I appreciated the suggestions and the case studies, parts of the report seemed vague. The report would benefit from a few case studies that dealt specifically with things like funding, scheduling and programming. 

            The Philadelphia Cultural Alliance portfolio does not offer much in terms of policy, instead, it plays a crucial political role: proving the importance of the cultural sector to the economy. While the numbers deserve some scrutiny (all I remember from Statistics is that I learned how to lie with numbers), the message is clear. Valuable to the economy according to the numbers, it would be beneficial to get data about the impact of the cultural sector on other city institutions like education and development. Regardless, it is a good starting point to lobby for financial support of the types of initiatives that Imperiled Promise would like to implement.

Readings:

Chung, James et al., "Coming soon: The Future: The Shape of Museums to Come," Museum 88 (May/June 2009): 38-43.

Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, “Arts, Culture, and Economic Prosperity in Greater Philadelphia.” 2011 Portfolio.

Whisnant, et al., Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service (Part I). 

Readings Response: Tyson

In The Wages of History Amy Tyson sheds light on the misunderstood world of living history museum workers, and connects their emotional labor to growing, often disturbing trends in the non-profit realm. Having worked at a non-profit, I connected with many of Tyson’s observations. Though I genuinely respect Tyson’s motivations and many of her conclusions, certain aspects of the book detracted from Tyson’s more meaningful treatment of labor. I have pointed out three specific grievances that I feel should have been addressed in order to provide constructive criticism of The Wages of History.  

1.  Who is the audience? This book is aimed at academics, public historians, and museum professionals, the overwhelming majority of whom are intimately familiar with working for non-profits (and by extension the troubles that go along with it). While Tyson described the specific troubling aspects of being a living history worker, her complaints extend to most jobs in the public or private sectors. As such, the book could have benefited from a more constructive analysis of the workplace: one that criticizes but also aims to resolve the problems.

2.  Who gets a name? This is a book about the frontline workers, but not only is there no personalization of management, only certain perspectives are personalized among the interpreters at Fort Snelling. One survey respondent reasonably noted that many employees used the seasonal nature of the job to supplement other incomes and did not want permanent status. Tyson’s retort was that the response “conforms to the tenets of neoliberalism,” instead of having an honest dialogue with the respondent’s ideas. Tyson herself used her position to supplement her income and research while in graduate school. Cathy Stanton’s The Lowell Experiment comes across similar issues when the author is troubled by her reliance on the capitalistic system that she is trying to criticize. The Wages of History could have benefited from some honest self-reflection about why certain perspectives should be dismissed before going ahead and dismissing them.

3.  What should interpreters do? Tyson spends the most time on gender, class and race issues between interpreters and the content they must present to the public. The Native American history of the site is not give nearly as much space as race or gender, though, I would argue, for this particular site it is far more important. Much of the book felt as if Tyson were projecting her own interests rather than working at a specific historical site. Fort Snelling was and is still largely a military site and yet there is surprisingly little in the book about the interpreters’ relationship with the military. Researching between 2001 and 2006, if Amy Tyson wanted interpreters at Fort Snelling to be critical and interpretive, how could she not address the question of playing soldier when the real US military is actively engaged in warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Earlier in the semester the Historical Methods course assigned Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. While I believe Tyson’s objectives were noble, I also believe that she unintentionally silences people and ideas in order to come to those conclusions.

Reading:

Tyson, Amy M. The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.  

Readings Response: Stanton

In The Lowell Experiment Cathy Stanton explores how historical sites are constructed. Lowell, Massachusetts, once an expansive industrial city, was hit hard by de-industrialization and has since attempted to revitalize its economy through culture-led redevelopment. An anthropologist by training, Stanton turns her critical inquiry onto the historians, staff, politicians and visitors who have determined what happens at Lowell. Stanton’s aspiration is that Lowell’s historical sites be used to foster “a fuller consideration of capitalism in our lives.” (57)

I have two primary criticisms of The Lowell Experiment. The first is that Stanton denies any meaningful discussion about the potential uses and interpretations of the Lowell sites by assuming that the conversation necessarily will revolve around a critique of capitalism. Capitalism has played an integral role in Lowell’s past and there is certainly room for discussion about working conditions, gendered jobs, and organized labor. However, the type of focus that Stanton would like requires that the visitors have a firm grasp on what capitalism is opposed to other systems of economics (a feat that I am not convinced the American education system has handled well, if at all) and possibly detracts from some of the more intimate, human elements of the past that makes places like Lowell attractive to visitors.

The second critique is that though she provided some poignant criticisms of the Lowell sites and clearly explicated what she would like to see for the future, Stanton is vague about how to realistically apply criticism in practice. This became clear when Stanton discussed the Acres tours. The Acres neighborhood was historically and is presently inhabited by poorer, blue collar, immigrant workers. Stanton uses the tours to criticize the manner in which the parks anachronistically emphasizes the positive precisely because tours of this neighborhood illustrate the level of disconnect between the present immigrant population and the park’s staff and visitors. While Stanton is right that both history and the present have not always been positive, she dismisses a comment by one of the tour guides that I wish she had addressed. Namely, that the guide felt it would be disrespectful to Acre locals to go into their neighborhood and remind them (and a group of strangers) of all the problems they face on a daily basis. Where and when sensitive topics are brought up is essential to the dialogue that Stanton wants to create. Questions of how to start the dialogue, how to reach out to the community, and how to involve local civic organizations are not discussed.

This critique of Stanton is ironically a critique of critical history in a broad sense and encourages me to turn to David Blight’s article “It You Don’t Tell it Like It Was, It Can Never Be as It Ought to Be.” Blight makes a clever allusion to One Hundred Years of Solitude that questions if we, as historians, have become so obsessed with our past failures that we feel the need to over-compensate by reading critique into everything. Slavery and Public History shares a collection of thoughts, yet one common thread is that the practical side of presenting sensitive and at times controversial topics is just as arduous and time consuming as it is rewarding. As a result, I tend to view The Lowell Experiment as a foundation from which to start to think about, not just critique, but how critique can transform into something more tangible.

Readings:

Horton, James Oliver & Lois E. Horton, ed. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Stanton, Cathy. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.

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.

Crumbling Castle Given New Life

When I opened my browser after getting home from class tonight the BBC told me about an awesome renovation project. Though it's not a history project it is perfect for thinking about adaptive reuse of structures that have become deteriorated beyond repair, especially in Philadelphia.

Astley Castle Restoration

Readings Response: Public History and Place

Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation argues that grass roots public involvement is necessary for historic preservation in urban communities. Both enlightening and encouraging, the book highlights practical issues faced by history projects in St. Louis. The tendency to want to tell a positive story can lead to an avalanche of problems including estranging the community, isolating social problems and selective or revisionist history.

The case of Scott Joplin’s toilet became a pivotal point in the book where historical accuracy and community desires collided. Scott Joplin did not have indoor plumbing. By accepting this fact and not allowing it to affect Joplin’s legacy, Hurley shows a dynamic between heritage and history that is often ignored. Historical research can make people question race, class, immigration and abandonment, but at the end of the day heritage is how people chose to identify themselves. Community history projects require more consideration than work that will never leave the academe because people have to live with the results.

Dolores Hayden opens The Power of Place with a circular dialogue between a sociologist and an architectural critic. Neither understands the others language and neither tries to step outside of their own disciplinary foundations. This excerpt is particularly poignant for anyone involved in Funeral for a Home, a project that is attempting to bring together artists, historians, and community members of the past and present. Hayden portrays herself as being the bridge in the divides of public history and art projects. Her writing successfully manages to bring together public art, murals, community gardening, and preservation under the umbrella of understanding space through place memory and social memory.  

Both authors stress inclusivity as being paramount, yet the limits of inclusivity are debated. Hayden explicitly stated that suburban infringement on urban environments is just as important in the consideration of place as the crowded row homes commonly thought symbolic of city life. While Hurley preaches inclusivity there is a bias against development, which, while grounded in very real sins of developers in the past, refuses to acknowledge many problems of the present. The cost and time constraints of adaptive reuse is never discussed in relation to the scale and severity of dilapidation in many inner cities. Addressing this question is arguably the prime objective of Funeral for a Home, which will hopefully provide a meaningful neighborhood history and preserve a sense of place while simultaneously preparing said place for advantageous future use.

Hurley’s most inspired statement comes when he stated that the purpose of their work was to show that “the fate of the built environment rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.” For the ordinary citizens this thought is empowering, yet it is imperative to look at public history and preservation projects and see how many of them originated within an outside organization. Though believing this statement is noble, reality seems much more muddled.

Readings:

Hayden, Dolores. “I: Claiming Urban Landscapes as Public History.” The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History. 1-78. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.

Hurley, Andrew. Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010.

Readings Response: Communities and Their Pasts

Michael Frisch in the introduction to his collection A Shared Authority tackles questions of authorship and the divide between both traditional historians and public historians as well as between public communities and historians. Public history shines through as a way to “redefine and redistribute intellectual authority.” (xx) Intellectual authority is a central issue in both oral history and community history projects.

The Oral History Manual provides a straightforward instructional guide for students and professionals about to embark on an oral history project. The authors are clear about everything with the exception of the origins of oral history, at which the writing’s tone becomes defensive. They dismiss the Federal Writers Project and resulting slave narratives, instead focusing on the more journalistic post-WWII soldier interviews as a precursor to oral history as an established research methodology. Though limited by the technologies and social structures of the time, the goal of the slave narratives is in line with that of oral history, as defined by the authors. It is as if admitting that oral history has roots in the traditions of folklorists would somehow discredit the methodology today.

            “When Community Comes Home to Roost” by Leon Fink, is a troublesome piece from beginning to end. It tells of a northern historian’s failed collaboration with the Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA) in North Carolina. The CHA, led by Jim and Lynn Rumley, clearly cares more about preserving a fabricated, romanticized version of the town’s heritage rather than thought provoking historical work. What is worse is that the organization becomes involved in politics with a blatant conservative bias. Worst is the fact Mr. Fink only became disenchanted with the project when the people he thought were left-leaning activists turn out to be conservative. His aversion is not to self-interested activists, but to activists with whom he disagrees.

Fink would best do to take the advice of Michael Frisch. Frisch claims, “It is history, not memory, that can provide the basis for shared reimagination of how the past connects to the present.” (xxiii) The shared part is integral: Fink makes no effort to understand the culture of the white southerners he is dealing with. Fink correlates Civil War reenactments with “sentimentalizing a Jim-Crow ordered social world,” (125) and never goes beyond his initial reaction to understand the meaning of reenactments to the community. In a racially volatile environment the CHA is not doing the community any favors. Neither is Fink.

The conclusion of this article says all the right things. Historians need to be aware of what happens outside of the academe and how academic work can be construed. Likewise, communities need to be aware of the way constructing a positive sense of heritage can manipulate the past. Unfortunately, the self-reflection Fink talks about never extends to his own actions and biases.  

Readings:

Fink, Leon. “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause.” Journal of Social History Vol. 40, No. 1 (Autumn 2006), 119-145.

Frisch, Michael. “Introduction.” A Shared Authority. SUNY Press, 1990.

Sommer, Barbara W. & Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual. 2^nd ed. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2009.