Museums – public, nonprofit, and for-profit – across the country present history exhibits to millions of visitors each year. Hundreds of these shows are carefully crafted and shaped by the best of current historical scholarship, yet their life span is often short, and they leave behind no permanent record beyond the photographs and texts that are included in a museum’s catalogue and other supplemental materials. In the past, exhibition reviews were few and far between, and those that did exist did not adequately reflect the complex intellectual underpinnings of an exhibition.
While historians’ scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for any exhibition, successful museum show results from a dynamic and collaborative process among curators, academic colleagues, museum educators, interpretive staff, designers, and the public. It demands managerial and interpersonal skills, a knowledge of material culture, and an awareness of the limits of visual literacy. Its goal is to marry ideas and objects to tell a compelling and authentic story that expands the boundaries of our knowledge.
An important part of this mission is to ensure that the information conveyed in an exhibit is accessible to a diverse audience. This is especially true for exhibitions that tackle topics of broad interest, such as rituals (birth, death, marriage/joining, and coming of age), the arts, food and drink, race and religion, and abstract ideas such as home, freedom, and democracy.
Ultimately, museum exhibitions should serve as a window into the dense research that is required when writing a history and an elegant metaphor of the past: one that takes a subject, lays out its intellectual and physical structure, and, through imaginative interjections of images and artifacts, presents it in an engaging way that enables a visitor to connect with the larger themes of that subject.
This column will focus on exhibitions that showcase innovative approaches to historical research, interpretation, and presentation. We will also pay attention to other museum work that is noteworthy or suggests new directions in collaboration between museums and scholars, community driven collecting initiatives that redefine the roles of small museums and their local communities, and exhibitions that use new techniques of exhibit design to reach non-traditional audiences. Although we will try to cover every important new museum exhibition, space constraints and the need to balance a range of topics make that a difficult task. We therefore hope that this column will contribute to a growing literature of exhibition reviews that will help to expand the dialogue between the academy and the museum profession, and help to foster more effective and informed collaboration in future.