Each year, hundreds of major history exhibitions are mounted in museums nationwide. Carefully crafted and shaped by the latest scholarship, these exhibitions contribute mightily to expanding our knowledge and understanding of the past. However, unlike scholarly monographs, the exhibition’s life is usually short and its legacy through catalogues, videotapes, or other media may be even shorter. Thus, museum exhibits deserve more effective evaluation than they are often given. This column, jointly written by academic and museum professionals, will explore the intellectual underpinnings of exhibits and examine their ability to convey historical information at a level that is accessible to general audiences. While this column will occasionally look at noted accomplishments by individuals or institutions, innovative programs, and important collecting initiatives, its main focus will be on reviewing exhibitions.
Many of today’s most popular museum experiences are not exhibitions with a lot of artifacts; they are immersive cultural arguments and visual metaphors that help visitors to connect, in some way, with bigger ideas through the materials shown. These include science centers, botanical gardens, and zoological parks with their displays of plants, animals, and fossils; natural history museums that present the evolutionary story of our planet; and other “non-museum” exhibitions that are designed to stimulate thought or discussion.
As a medium, exhibitions are powerful because they allow museum visitors to participate in the creation of historical interpretation and to see how the past has affected our own lives. These exhibitions can also inspire a desire to discover more about the past and an understanding of the nature of historical knowledge itself. As such, they can enrich the public’s understanding of their cultural heritage in ways that scholarly monographs and other forms of traditional presentation cannot.
This exhibition explored the history of women’s clothing, from a Depression-era house dress to a college student’s psychedelic micro mini and an Abercrombie & Fitch wool suit bought off-the-rack in NYC in 1917 that was remade into a Relief uniform worn behind enemy lines in France. The show emphasized how fashion helped women adapt to or defy societal expectations and how clothing was a vehicle for the advancement of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation. It also introduced Boston’s 1863 Emancipation Jubilee events – a celebration hosted by upper class whites and a protest orchestrated by Black Bostonians. This exhibition also highlighted the role of the Third County Courthouse as the center of civic life on Staten Island.