Each year hundreds of major history exhibitions open across the country. Although these shows are often shaped by the best in current scholarship, they seldom receive the attention or scrutiny of scholars that museum curators do. In this column, Perspectives seeks to broaden the collaboration between scholars and museums by examining exhibition reviews that have been written jointly by academic historians and museum professionals.
Each exhibit review will examine the intellectual underpinnings of a particular exhibition. In addition to assessing the quality of the research that went into the show and its prevailing scholarly trends, a review will also consider how effectively the show conveys historical information to visitors. This is a particularly difficult task given the limitations of space and the fact that an exhibition is not a book. It must be engaging and immersive while enabling the audience to grasp the complexity of the subject matter.
Successful visual storytelling entails finding the right window into dense research and expanding the parameters of knowledge through an imaginative marriage of ideas and objects. It is also about ensuring that the story remains accessible to visitors and avoids being a “book on the wall.” Museum exhibitions are uniquely situated to tell these stories because they can incorporate human narratives, which engage the eyes as well as the mind, and allow visitors to connect with bigger ideas. Concepts such as rites of passage, food or drink, art or fashion and abstract ideas such as freedom, democracy, justice or public memory provide excellent fodder for these inclusive visual stories.
A museum may be a historical society, university art gallery, science center, natural history museum, archaeological site or any number of other types of institutions that focus on the collection and interpretation of objects or records of past events. Some are non-profits, which means they pay no taxes but use income from admission fees and donations to support their mission of preserving and sharing local, regional or national histories. Others are private, for-profit enterprises that primarily earn their money by renting space to commercial tenants or selling products and services to the community. Occasionally, these museums collaborate with historic sites or private collections to create on-site exhibits.