Museum exhibitions are a unique medium for teaching history. They are three dimensional, visual representations of historical arguments and research that require the work of curators with many different skillsets. Successful exhibits tell simple, accessible stories rooted in recent historical scholarship and expand the parameters of our knowledge through an imaginative marriage of ideas and objects.
While the work of the historian shapes and frames an exhibition, it is also shaped by the curator’s management and interpersonal skills, his or her knowledge of material culture, a sense of visual literacy and an understanding of how the intended audience interprets the content. Consequently, an exhibit is not a book but a complex cultural and historical experience that must be presented in ways that are engaging and authentic for the museum visitor.
Achieving this goal requires the curator to work with museum educators, designers and production staff to bring a vision to life. The exhibition review process is therefore highly collaborative, creating a body of scholarship that records and evaluates the content and form of an exhibition over time. By publishing these reviews, we hope that Perspectives will contribute to this growing literature of historical presentations in museums and help foster exchanges between scholars in museums and those in academic institutions.
Our reviewers look for innovative work that stretches the established parameters of museum exhibition and interpretation. We seek exhibitions that explore new ways to improve collaboration between the academy and museums, community driven collecting initiatives, shows that redefine a small museum’s relationship with its local residents, or utilize new techniques of exhibitry to engage non-traditional audiences.
The fall season at the New-York Historical Society will feature three such exhibitions that intersect diverse histories and explore new narratives in our ever more polarized society: Real Clothes, Real Lives, Robert Caro and three centuries of New Yorkers and their furry friends.
The exhibition examines how women have influenced, adapted, and defied societal expectations through the clothes they choose to make, purchase, wear and alter. From a Depression era house dress and college student’s psychedelic micro mini to a war uniform bought off-the-rack in NYC in 1917 and remade into a Relief uniform worn behind enemy lines in France, the artifacts and images on display show how women have used clothing as an expression of their identities and experiences.