This week, our Managing History class read the book Creating Exhibitions: Collaboration in the
Planning and Design of Innovative Experiences by Polly McKenna-Cress and
Janet Kamien. Like Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit
Labels: An Interpretative Approach, Creating
Exhibitions is a tell-all, step-by-step guide detailing how Museum
Professionals create successful, engaging exhibitions. In this sense, McKenna-Cress and Kamien’s work functions more as
a textbook than an academic work with an over-arching argument. The book
details everything from how to make sure one’s exhibit team is functioning in a
collaborative and productive manner to creating exhibit budgets that account
for possible expenditures. McKenna-Cress and Kamien’s insightful analysis
remains helpful to anyone taking on the task of creating an exhibit.
I found the section on exhibit experiences to be
particularly helpful. In an age where information and virtual experiences
remain so readily accessible, museum exhibits must strive to offer visitors
experiences that they might not obtain in other learning environments. Creating Exhibitions identifies three
manners in which Museum Professionals can engage diverse publics through their
exhibitions: possessing objects that pertain to the exhibit’s theme, creating
an authentic experience, and making the exhibit a social environment in which
visitors can have a dialogue with the exhibit itself and other visitors regarding
the exhibit’s topic.[1] In
the text, the authors write about how having an exhibit in an authentic space
in which the event or exhibit theme actually occurred can help to engage
visitors with the exhibit’s theme and provide them with an experience
uncommonly found in everyday life. It is the curators’ job to encourage these
experiences through their exhibit and provide designs or activities that
stimulate a deeper contemplation of a particular place in its historical
context.[2]
When I was in elementary school, my favorite historical
museum was, without a doubt, the National Park Service’s Alcatraz Island
Federal Penitentiary site. I probably went on the site tour seven or eight
times. As an eight year old boy, the experience of being inside a prison cell
or walking down the corridor where the State once imprisoned Al Capone really
immersed me in the history of the site. This seems voyeuristic and ethically
questionable now (I was eight), but the site’s headset tour with its voices of
actual prisoners and sounds of people clanking silverware against steel bars
made me feel like I was personally experiencing what being imprisoned on an
island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay was actually like. Place is a
really powerful tool for an exhibit if an exhibit design’s can bring out those
emotions that the historicity of a site evokes.
When planning what our ideal “1918 Influenza Outbreak”
exhibit would look like, Chelsea suggested that the exhibit should incorporate
Philadelphia’s industrial character in some way. Accounting for the ways in
which industry drove immigrants to Philadelphia and later, in part, provided
quarters in which Influenza would spread, an exhibit on the outbreak might be
most effective if housed in a former industrial site in Kensington or South
Philly. After reading Creating
Exhibitions and further contemplating the power of place in an exhibit, I
like this idea even more. It would just be our job to excavate the emotions that
place potentially evokes through the craft of our design.
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