Search Results

Finally, Chapter 7 traces the diminution of audiences as the medical museum ceased to be such a prestigious site for the construction and reception of pathology. In part an epilogue, it traces the largely unknown fate of anatomical pathology in the twentieth century, and the function and fate of collections from their rude health in the inter-war period to the regulatory changes of the twenty-first century, including a contrast between the use of pathological specimens in Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds and the impact of the Human Tissue Act on (more formal) pathology museums. The conclusion concludes by considering the construction of material abnormality on display and the key features of the pathological specimen.

Jorge Duany examines the shifting cultural ties between Cuba and the United States since 1959, and how they have reframed relations between Cubans on and off the island. Duany argues that the cultural politics of Miami’s Cuban community have changed substantially because of demographic and generational transitions over the last three decades. Until the 1980s, Cuban artists and other intellectuals in the United States had limited contact with their island counterparts. However, it is now customary for U.S. museums and galleries to collect and exhibit artworks produced in post-1959 Cuba without much protest or opposition from Cuban Americans. Although some exile artists and critics still believe that U.S. cultural institutions should not display such artworks, the fault lines between Cubans residing on the island and abroad seem more porous than in the past. The author concludes that the visual arts may serve as cultural bridges across the Florida Straits.

If you are standing on the shores of the Ottawa River looking at the Canadian Museum of History, the national library and archives and other national repositories of Aboriginal heritage, you might well despair at the comprehensive losses of curatorial expertise, programs of research, and will to work collaboratively with Aboriginal people which befell these institutions under the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Looking harder, however, neither the shifting political ideologies nor the era of financial constraint that began with the global financial crisis of 2008 seems to have thrown processes of decolonisation and pluralist representation that began to take root in Canada during the 1990s into reverse. Two exhibition projects that unfolded during that same period provide evidence of that the changes in historical consciousness of settler-indigenous relationships and the acceptance of cultural pluralism have provided a counterweight to the intentions of a right wing government to restore old historical narratives. This chapter discusses them as evidence of this deep and, seemingly, irreversible shift in Canadian public’s expectation s of museum representation. The first involves plans for the new exhibition of Canadian history being developed for the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation in 2017, specifically a fishing boat named the Nisga’a Girl which was presented by a west coast First Nation to mark the successful resolution of its land claim. The second is the Sakahan exhibition of global indigenous art shown in 2013 at the National Gallery of Canada and which marked a notable departure from its past scope. While utopia has by no means been achieved, neither, surprisingly, was dystopia realised during the years of conservative reaction.

Curation is increasingly recognised as a profession of high standing which requires extensive higher education. However, the proliferation of community engagement since the 1980s has placed new pressures and expectations on curators, thus complicating their role. This is particularly evident in the case of ethnographic curators working with indigenous communities. This chapter explores these issues by considering the ways that working with Blackfoot First Nations communities have affected the role and work of curators at three key museums, two in Canada and one in the UK. Historically museums, and de facto their curators, were often seen as an enemy by many indigenous communities as they appeared as a physical manifestation of colonialism. The historical practice of collecting sacred cultural material, and even the bones and bodies of indigenous people, have made museums synonymous with sites of death, both physical and cultural. Yet, nowadays they also present an exceptional resource and opportunity to revive and re-invigorate pre-colonial cultural knowledge and practice through their collections. Consequently, curators often find themselves in the dubious position of being both potential foe and ally. This is complicated further when curators work cross-culturally and try to embrace both indigenous and western ways of working, as this chapter explores. It has been argued that curators have moved from the position of ‘expert’ to that of ‘facilitator’ but this oversimplifies the complexities of voice, accountability and power in the representation of culture. There is a need for a more nuanced understandings of the pressures community engagement places on the role of curatorship, especially in this current time of increasing expectations on engagement and decreasing resources to support museological work.

Current ontological critiques point to how discourses of diversity like multiculturalism help domesticate difference by making it fit into pre-determined categories, such as those we are accustomed to thinking of as cultures. These ways of conceiving relations within and between groups of people—common to anthropology and museums, as well as to liberal democratic regimes of governance—assert that differences between peoples are relatively superficial in that our cultures overlay a fundamental and universal sameness. Museums showcasing cultural artefacts have thus helped domesticate difference by promoting world-making visions of (natural) unity in (cultural) diversity. Yet some artefacts exceed the categories designed to contain them; they oblige thought and handling beyond the usual requirements of curatorial practice. This chapter considers the challenges of ‘curating the uncommons’ in relation to work carried out by and with the Māori tribal arts management group Toi Hauiti and their ancestor figure, Paikea, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Australia’s first Migration Museum in Adelaide recognised from its inception in 1986, that representing migration history could not be done without acknowledging its intimate association with colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people. Their first move therefore, was to create a distinction between all migrants, a category that included British ‘settlers’, and Indigenous Australians. This was significant not only because it implicated colonisation within migration history but because it made all non-Indigenous Australians migrants. The move though, was not easy to establish, largely because, in the public imagination, migrants were the other to mainstream or ‘British Australia’. In the mid-1990s, however, it seemed to work as Australia was indeed seen as a country that was relatively successful in integrating various waves of migration into its historical narratives while valuing cultural diversity and recognising the prior occupation of the land by Aboriginal people. The ‘War on terror’, the arrival of asylum seekers and the threat of internal terrorist attacks, along with changes in immigration policy and a general climate of fear has changed that, and migration museums are now working to combat a new wave of racism. To do so, I argue, they have developed a new set of curatorial strategies that aim to facilitate an exploration of the complexity of contemporary forms of identity. This chapter provides a history of the development of curatorial strategies that have helped to change the ways in which relations between ‘us and them’ have changed over the years in response to changes in the wider public discourse. My focus will be on both collecting and display practices, from changes to what is collected and how it is displayed, to the changing role of personal stories, the relationship between curators and the communities they work with, and the role of exhibition design in structuring the visitor experience.

Although I am a strong advocate for access to collections in museums and although I see new technologies as a necessary part of this goal, I do not think that technology and its associated impacts and benefits should be the end goal. Rather, they should exist collaboratively with physical museums that mirror the robust developments in digital technology. The physical museum needs to be transformed so that their material collections can stimulate cultural production by living artists and cultural practitioners. This juxtaposition of the past and the present, the dead and the living, ensures that museums remain vibrant and vital spaces for the multicultural communities around them.

Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found in museums, historical societies, and state archives; they are also mentioned frequently in the manuscripts. People who lived through the war used objects to convey a host of powerful cultural messages about their experiences.

This chapter examines the historical relic’s role in the memorial activities of the defeated South. It discusses the establishment at the turn of the twentieth century of museums that enshrined the ideology of the Lost Cause and the way those museums were structured around the metaphor of a collective memory cabinet whose objects could facilitate their viewers’ grief and mourning not only for the lives lost in the war but for the loss of the Confederacy’s military and political sovereignty. It further describes the ways that relics were deployed in public commemorations and rituals not only as a means of mourning white Southerners’ losses but as a means of reworking and transforming defeat’s legacy of shame and humiliation.

The prologue reflects on the relationship of conventional museum curatorial practice to Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial practices. In particular, it examines the multiple mediations in which Festival curators are involved and the process of “presenting” artists and participants to the public. It raises questions about the perils of objectification of artists within these “living exhibitions” and argues for dialogic approaches to developing Festival programs that incorporate participatory or community curation.

This chapter uses the 2008 Bhutan program to examine visitor experience and the role of curators in crafting these experiences. Using the suggestive possibilities of a portable Buddhist shrine featured in the program and basing the analysis on 20 years of experience working with the Festival and its evaluation, the author lays out a framework for analyzing four levels of Festival visitor engagement: Level 1—Sensory Cultural Enlightenment/Being Present; Level 2—Choosing a Route/Moving Through; Level 3—Viewing and Taking part in the Live Performance/Active Experiencing; and Level 4—Revealing the Deeper Layers/Discovering More. The chapter concludes with observations about visitor studies relevant to museums as well as festivals.

The book closes with an examination of the contemporary period, with brief discussion of several prison museums and current media access in Sing Sing prison, the subject of Chapter Four. The prison museum is a fascinating simulacrum, a semiotic frenzy that is haunting and, by public reputation, often haunted. Visitors manifestly seem to love imagining what it must be like to be incarcerated, and in many ways prisons have always functioned as de facto museums, given the large number of visitors allowed to tour facilities in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The conclusion also adumbrates some features of contemporary media use at Sing Sing prison, less an attempt to construct an exhaustive history of media use in prisons than to offer a snapshot of some recent changes, including the introduction of in-cell television at Sing Sing in April 2015.

Between the 1890s and the 1910s, a young generation of reformers inspired by a transnational movement known as “the New Museum Idea” agreed that natural history museums had a social responsibility to reach and teach all citizens about nature and biology. Convinced that museum displays could and should become powerful pedagogical tools, reformers persuaded their colleagues to build collections and displays that would appeal to both scientists and the lay public. A small but influential group of reformers, known as “museum men,” led effort to realize exhibits’ educational potential and to establish museums as major forces in American science education. Though many argued over the shape and extent of museum reform, by the mid-1910s, reformers had persuaded most staff members to rally behind their tripartite vision of the museum as a place for the preservation of specimens, the production of scientific knowledge, and an institution of popular education.

This chapter examines the Red Era series at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a privately-owned complex of museums not far from Chengdu. Denton analyzes the curatorial techniques used in the exhibits and the ways they negotiate commercial interests, a sense of intellectual integrity to be true to the past, and state imposed limits on how the Cultural Revolution can be remembered in China.