Sharing Authority

In artist Fred Wilson’s conversation with numerous museum curators, he reveals that he was ultimately drawn to the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore for his Mining the Museum project because it made him uncomfortable. “I’m a black man, and I went to an institution about the 19^th century where they had basically nothing (on display) about black people in a city that was majority African-American.” [1] As public institutions whose exhibitions presumably change over time, historical museums have an important opportunity not only to cultivate interest in history among visitors, but to right past institutional wrongs. By sharing authority with local communities, artists, and others without public history backgrounds, museums can create exhibitions that truly feel public in their representation and involvement of potential visitors. As the edited collection Letting Go: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World shows, there are numerous ways of completing such a task.

In the example of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum exhibit, museum curators invited in a local artist – untrained in the skills of museum curation – to use the Maryland Historical Society’s collection in creating an exhibit that addressed historical themes and topics lacking presence in museum displays. In the displays, Wilson placed slave shackles next to ornate silverwork, communicating American opulence as derivative of the upper-class’ use of slave labor.[2] Wilson’s displays ultimately resulted in mixed reviews. Some positive and some utterly appalled. Yet, this exhibit – in an extremely visceral sense – filled in the narrative gaps missing from the Maryland Historical Society for decades. Through the act of shared authority, Mining the Museum moved beyond representations of white bourgeois identity and showed the darker flipside that had provided for such comfortable lifestyles in Maryland’s nineteenth century past – slave labor.

Another example of shared authority once again enabling more inclusive exhibit is seen in the Oakland Museum of California’s section on Native California in the museum’s Gallery of California History. In this exhibit, Native Californians themselves structured the exhibit’s content, determining the focus of the content, editing video commentary, and selecting cultural objects that would be displayed in the exhibit.[3] Museums are often seen unfavorably in Native communities. Considering such institutions’ past as repositories of sacred cultural objects and occasionally human remains taken without tribal permission by anthropologists, such inclusions remain incredibly important.

When OMCA unveiled this exhibition, I remember it being a really big deal. I was in a Native California class at San Francisco State at the time and the teacher insisted that our class go to visit the exhibit. For a large portion of the semester, we had discussed the manner in which Californian anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber and others had looted Native grave sites and cultural ceremonies, storing such objects and human remains for preservation purposes in museums. The fact that the OMCA had consulted many Native Californians including my teacher Kathy Wallace – she is pictured on page 74 - to structure the exhibit around their communities’ historical interpretations and needs represented significant progress including Native communities in their representation. Through sharing authority with the communities that they represent, museums and other cultural institutions, curators gain the ability to correct the institutional wrongs committed by museums in the past.

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[1]Fred Wilson and Paula Marincola, et al, “Mining the Museum Revisited: A Conversation with Fred Wilson, Paula Marincola, and Marjorie Schwarzer” in Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair et al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 231-2.

[2] Melissa Rachleff, “Peering Behind the Curtain: Artists and Questioning Historical Authority” Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair et al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 218.

[3] Kathleen McLean, “Whose Questions, Whose Conversations?” Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair et al. (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 74.

Controversial Topics in Public History

When Ta-Nehisi Coates came and spoke with the History Department a few weeks ago, he remarked on the ways that historians consistently dispute each other’s portrayals of the past in order to understand history’s many complexities. Oftentimes, such portrayals challenge the ways that nations, communities, and individuals conceive of themselves in uncomfortable and inconvenient ways. “You guys have conversations that most people aren’t ready to have,” he said. In a way, this week’s readings speak to a similar dynamic. In the last forty years, Public Historians have sought to engage the public in such conversations through curated exhibits with varying results. While Museums have often functioned as monuments to the past in a commemoratory fashion, Public Historians in recent years have sought to use an exhibit’s display of the past to address community concerns and provoke larger conversations around controversial topics.

Andrea A. Burns’ 2013 book From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement examined the development of black history museums around the country during the 1970s and onwards. Responding to a lack of coverage of black histories in nationalistic history museums, black curators applied the black nationalist politics of the late 60s that demanded black community control over its institutions and resources to museum curation. These Public Historians sought to create exhibits that addressed black pasts and engaged with the community issues of the present. For example, in 1969, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, DC featured an exhibit called “The Rat” that addressed rat infestations in the community. While the exhibit eventually proved to be a success, some museum officials argued against “The Rat’s” honest portrayal of urban life. These officials worried that the exhibit would depict the community in a negative light and thus, be rejected by its visitors.[1] In this sense, while museum exhibits can be used as a tool with which to inspire public discussion of difficult topics, those same topics nearly always invite controversy.

A similar case is seen in the National Air and Space Museum’s (NASM) proposed Enola Gay exhibit of the early 1990s. In its coverage of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the exhibit aimed to not present any one particular point of view, but present a variety of interpretations that accounted for the varying experiences affected by the bomb’s destruction.[2] Yet, conservatives and veterans’ groups pushed back against this attempt at wider conversation condemning it as revisionist and anti-American.[3] Ultimately, the intense controversy around the Enola Gay exhibit resulted in its dissolution. Unlike “The Rat” exhibit, the Enola Gay exhibit’s open interpretation of the Atomic Bomb dropping proved too controversial for public acceptance.

While exhibits can provoke important conversations around sensitive issues, unlike academic texts, they must grapple with the issue of public acceptance. The wider audience that an exhibit attracts can certainly be rewarding, Public Historians must straddle a fine line of acceptance between causing contemplation of new historical interpretations and alienating their audiences all together.

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[1] Andrea A. Burns, From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 95.

[2] Edward Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy” in History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, ed. Edward T. Linenthal et al. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 18.

[3] Ibid, 21.

Historians as Activists?: A Greater Purpose or a Tired Old Trope

I feel very emotional today. After Donald Trump won the election last night, I’ve been reeling for answers as to how to approach the next four years. I don’t really have any that are too solid. In times like these, I struggle with the idea of academic or public history as potentially being labeled as a form of activism. In my most pessimistic moments, I can’t help but think that an academic study or a curated exhibit won’t do much to ameliorate the harms of a Trump Presidency. Perhaps, in the long-term, such projects can provoke deeper understandings of important issues that impact our present. Yet, in the immediate sense, it seems less apparent that such projects actually make a difference. In times like these, it seems like if academic and public historians want to be activists, they have to be out in the streets protesting with everyone else. Otherwise, these projects we involve ourselves in simply become barriers between our work – often labeled as a type of public service – and meaningful grassroots change. I can’t help but wish that I saw more historians at protests. We talk so passionately about the ways that political issues and systemic inequalities affect the past in our classes, writings, and exhibits. But, when opportunities present themselves to actually viscerally confront these issues in public space, historians are often too busy writing papers or curating exhibits to participate. I find this disappointing.

As I grappled with these questions, it was helpful to read Jill Ogline’s 2004 article “Creating Dissonance for the Visitor: The Heart of the Liberty Bell Controversy” and Cathy Stanton’s 2006 book The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Both works address the use of public history as a means of helping the public to grapple with important issues that both shape and clearly connect with the experiences of our present. In Ogline’s article, she addresses the exhibit constructed next to the Libery Bell that marks the site of George Washington’s slaves’ quarters. As Ogline argues, placed next to a symbol of nationalistic freedom and liberty, this exhibit viscerally addresses how African slavery made notions of American freedom and capitalist prosperity possible. Ogline argues that such a site forces museum goers to physically confront conflicting interpretations on similar issues and ultimately create their own understandings of the past based on these experiences.[1] It’s all quite similar to the ways that a historian interrogates a primary source. In the context of what the Liberty Bell represents, I find the existence of such a site to be a radical act. In terms of its disruption of nationalism and reckoning with systemic inequality, this exhibit ultimately serves an important activist purpose.

Similarly, in her research on the establishment of a National Historic Park in the post-industrial, former mill town Lowell, Massachusetts, Cathy Stanton illustrates the ways that Lowell’s historical interpretation seeks to connect the city’s nineteenth labor struggles to modern-day protest for workers’ rights. Writing about her experiences in a tour called “Workers On The Line,” Stanton shows a workshop leader addressed the group, mostly consisting of students, by asking if labor struggles still persisted into the present day. Such a question provoked a larger discussion spearheaded by students’ teachers that illuminated their work in the teachers’ union. By illustrating this connection, this tour illustrated that oppression does not end but simply takes on new forms and adapts to changing times. Thus, the Lowell Historic Park also takes on an important activist purpose.[2] The question of activism as a component of historical work is one with which I will continue to struggle. However, these examples provide examples of important political work approached through public history. More projects like these are needed in these dark times.

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[1] Jill Ogline, “Creating Dissonance for the Visitor:” The Heart of the Liberty Bell Controversy.” The Public Historian 26 (2004): 55.

[2] Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 183.

Oral Histories & Museum Education

Last week, after our class discussed numerous readings relating to Oral History, we got to conduct one of our own. In order to relate to our larger class project, our discussion consisted of public health concerns. I spoke with my classmate, John Smith. My oral history with John covered a lot of ground. We talked about health insurance, going to the doctor’s office, and writing end-of-the-semester historiography papers. However, one of the most interesting things John mentioned was how his awareness of health concerns has really changed since moving to a larger city like Philadelphia:

I come from the suburbs, you know, the Poconos Mountains where it’s really rural and spread out. So, we don’t really talk about health concerns. But, now that I’ve moved to the city – I moved here a few weeks ago, like at the beginning of the semester – I’m constantly thinking about where my hands are, what I’m touching, viruses and diseases. You know, flu season is coming up. It’s always in the back of my mind that I should be more conscious about health concerns.

I later asked followed up on this response and asked if being in an urban environment has changed his health concerns:

I don’t think my health concerns have changed, but I’m maybe more aware. Like I said earlier, just always being in a large group of people, I’m always thinking, ‘what’s their health like?’ ‘I just saw them touching this and now, I’m touching this.’ So, it’s a sense of awareness.

John’s comments really shed light on the ways that the environments that one finds themselves in can affect health concerns. This knowledge is quite useful in considering ways to approach a public history project that seeks to cultivate a broader conversation around public health concerns within an urban environment.

Also, this week, we read numerous works relating to museum education. Many of the works stressed the importance of making exhibits accessible to family members of all ages. The Museum Educator’s Manual stressed the use of family activities that used hands-on learning in exhibits as a way involve visitors of all learning abilities.[1] On this subject, I found Judy Rand’s article “Write and Design with the Family in Mind” most helpful.

Rand’s work focuses on making exhibits accessible to children in a way that stimulates learning and takes developing cognitive abilities into account. This article encourages curators to create labels that communicate main points in a minimalistic fashion.[2]  I was particularly impressed with the label relating to Chicago’s industrial past aimed at connecting with children. The exhibit label evokes the way that industrial Chicago smelled, catching the eye with evocative statement “History Stinks!” The label also personalizes this story by asking the visitor, “What does Chicago Smell Like To You?”[3] This is a question that both adults and children can answer and connect the industrial city’s past to their present experiences within it. Such a question makes historical analysis approachable to a wide range of experiences and learning abilities.

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[1] Anna Johnson et al., The Museum Educator’s Manual: Educators Share Successful Techniques (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009), 79.

[2] Judy Rand, “Write and Design with Family in Mind,” in Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, ed. D. Lynn McRainey et al. (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010),258.

[3] Ibid, 262.