Museums of history — whether national, regional or local — draw millions of visitors each year. While well known institutions like the National Museum of American History and Colonial Williamsburg receive a significant portion of this audience, other smaller entities such as the California Afro-American Historical Museum and the Valentine Museum also play an important role in exploring America’s past for diverse audiences.
As the only visual medium, exhibitions can convey historical information in ways that scholarly monographs and popular books cannot. The success of an exhibition depends upon the ability to present complex research and ideas in a nonlinear form that engages and expands the viewer’s understanding of the world around them. This is especially challenging for exhibitions that explore interdisciplinary and scientific topics that often require extensive use of text, dioramas and charts to explain their content.
While a curator’s scholarship is the driving force behind an exhibit, successful shows also draw on their management and interpersonal skills, knowledge of material culture and a sense of visual literacy to create inclusive, visually told stories about the past. Moreover, the process of creating an exhibition is collaborative; curators work in close partnership with designers, researchers and other museum professionals who are equally invested in the success of their projects.
As such, a review of an exhibition requires consideration of all the people who contributed to its development. This column examines exhibitions with the goal of broadening the dialogue between academy and museum and highlighting innovative work that stretches established parameters of research, presentation, and interpretation.
Each exhibition review will address the intellectual underpinnings of a show, how it relates to prevailing scholarly trends and how its claims are supported by evidence. Equally important, a review will explore what the viewer sees and experiences when viewing an exhibition. Does the design and layout help convey the exhibition’s content in an effective manner?
The first exhibition reviewed, a Museum traveling exhibit, focuses on five small prehistoric ivory carvings created by the Ipiutak people, forerunners of today’s Alaskan Eskimo. The exhibit highlights the continuity of artistic tradition in this region through a range of media, from etchings and sculpture to clothing and footwear. The exhibit’s display of these cultural objects demonstrates how Arctic peoples continue to honor the whale, a keystone species in their lives.
This exhibition traces the long relationship between human beings and whales through an array of art, ethnography, natural history and archaeological objects. The overlapping themes of whales and humans are explored, from the traditions of New Zealand Maori whale riders and Kwakwaka’wakw peoples in the Pacific Northwest to the impact of whaling on global cultures, and laws that protect marine mammals. The show also features the voices of contemporary indigenous communities in their own words as they share their views on the future of whales and their place in human lives.