Museum Archipelago

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107. Crypto and Museums Part 1 Sep 23, 2024

In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology.

While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust.

Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Auction of the U.S. Constitution
00:43 Constitution DAO
01:36 The Role of Governance Tokens
02:02 Nik Honeysett
02:45 Balboa Park Online Collaborative
04:29 Museums and Crypto
05:24 Blockchain and Provenance
07:40 Smart Contracts and Museum Governance
09:56 The Outcome of the Auction
11:58 Museums as Trustworthy
14:00 Museum Archipelago Ep. 39. Hans Sloane And The Origins Of The British Museum With James Delbourgo
16:41 Conclusion and Future of Crypto in Museums
17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 107. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

In November 2021 an extremely rare, first printing of the U.S. Constitution was available to buy at auction. While the item was special – only 13 copies existed according to the auction house – the bidders were the usual assortment of wealthy individuals.

Auctioneer: “And now let's begin the auction. Lot 1787. The United States Constitution. We’ll start the bidding here at 10 million dollars. 11 million.12 million ”

Except for one. Among the individuals trying to buy the Constitution was not an individual at all. It was a new kind of organization – a decentralized autonomous organization better known as a DAO. This organization, ConstitutionDAO, had formed just a few weeks earlier for this exact purpose – to buy the Constitution.

I remember the memes – backers of the project posted images of Nicolas Cage in 2004’s National Treasure, drawing parallels between his character’s fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and this real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

In the weeks leading up to the auction, thousands of people contributed money to ConstitutionDAO using the cryptocurrency Ether. That money funded the bid – the amount ConstitutionDAO could pay to try to acquire the constitution. What the contributors were actually buying was a so-called governance token: governance rights, the ability to vote on what to do with the Constitution, specifically, which museum to send it to, and what text would be displayed next to the document in the gallery.

Nik Honeysett: The ConstitutionDAO is an interesting example of the public claiming back ownership of a document that, you know, really should be owned by the public. And I think, you know, that's the challenge for museums.

This Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, California.

Nik Honeysett: Hello, my name is Nick Honeysett. I'm CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, known as BPOC. We are a nonprofit, technology and strategy company located in San Diego's Balboa Park, which is a cultural park of about 30 institutions. And we provide a range of services on a shared service model. And we also work with museums across the U. S. and outside the U.S. largely providing digital strategy, to help organizations figure out what they should be trying to figure out as we enter a more prevalent digital world.

The genesis of BPOC came in the early 2000s. Because there’s such a high density of museum institutions in San Diego’s Balboa Park, museums realized they could pool their resources and they wouldn't need to start from scratch to build each individual institution’s technology stack,

Nik Honeysett: It's a very dense cultural environment. Some of the institutions are actually physically in the same building. There has to be an opportunity for us to do this collaboratively. To create a team of IT professionals that would provide IT support. So essentially a kind of separate IT service department that would serve the institutions. That they would pay for those services. So you were gaining the economy of scale. And so we did a lot of, in the early days, a lot of digitization, kind of collaborative digitization projects. We have a couple of collaborative infrastructure applications like digital asset management. And really the benefit is there's an altruistic need. So the larger institutions are offsetting the costs for some things for the smaller institutions. And we do serve some volunteer-only institutions and they have access to the same level of IT service and support that the larger ones do.

While BPOC’s shared service model pools resources from lots of different museums, it still operates as a normal organization with a board of directors and a CEO making decisions and some sort of legal counsel and a sustained collaborative relationship with museums. The focus is technology, but the methods are more traditional.

ConstitutionDAO, by contrast, was a spontaneous, decentralized effort to acquire a historical document that probably wouldn’t have been possible without crypto technology.

I’ve been working on this episode about crypto in museums for years: I recorded this interview with Honeysett in March of 2022, two and a half years ago. Most museum people I know are reluctant to talk about crypto for various reasons: concerns about the massive energy use of some blockchains, how from the outside, it looks like speculative hype cycle, and – maybe most importantly – there’s a wide cultural gap between the centralization of museum power and the decentralized ideals of blockchain culture. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t sound too appealing if your job is to make sure the ancient vases don’t shatter.

But I will argue that museums and crypto have some interesting overlaps. Museums and crypto both address the same fundamental issue: trust, and they seek to answer the same question: what happened?

Blockchains keep an unchangeable record of what happened, stored not in a warehouse or a datacenter, but distributed without a point of control or a single point of failure. The first and most famous use for these blockchains is to power cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they can do a lot of things, like, for example, provenance.

Provenance is the record of ownership and history of an item, tracking where it has been and who has owned it over time. Right now institutions like museums and auction houses handle provenance but maybe there are better ways.

Nik Honeysett: Provenance is extremely important in the museum world and I think provenance seems to be the ideal application for blockchain. Here is the irrefutable, definitive, provenance of this work. And we saw a huge issue with provenance, which is the Nazi era provenance issue, you know, when a lot of works of art disappeared from the record because they were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. And there's been a lot of research to reestablish the true provenance of works of art and repatriate them, in certain circumstances. Collections held in the public trust need to be presented to the public. If you look at what really engages audiences, there are some emerging strategies that think about collection objects, as a sequence of experiences. The first experience is it was created. A painting was painted. The second experience is maybe shown in a show. The third is that it was sold to its first owner. And then it was transported and then it was acquired by a museum or whatever it is. So you have these sequences of experiences and the painting interacting with a whole set of things, again, all which happened in a particular sequence.

Of course, somebody still has to write these experiences onto the blockchain as they happen and museums might be well positioned to do this.

But if a future fascist regime steals an object, they would never be able to delete or destroy the record of who previously owned the object the way they can destroy a museum or its records.

We have one more crypto concept to dive into before we can get back to the story of ConstitutionDAO. When ConstitutionDAO pooled resources, the money raised to buy a U.S. Constitution, the idea was to govern the organization using a set of smart contracts, code that runs on a blockchain. And that's why it's different from asking a whole bunch of people to contribute to a bank account that one single person owns. Sure, the owner of that bank account might feel that they must listen to the community of contributors, but nothing is technically stopping them from spending the money however they feel like. Legally, they could face consequences for misusing funds, but the money could still be spent before any legal action takes place.

This is much different from a smart contract. You could set up a smart contract that ensures – technically – that the money cannot be spent unless 50% of governance tokens have voted in a certain way.

The reason to have this code on a blockchain instead of just somebody’s computer is that there’s a much greater degree of certainty that the smart contract will be executed correctly when spread across thousands of computers: someone can’t just unplug their computer and the smart contract fails to execute.

Nik Honeysett: I can see parallels in the museum world. A group of museums could come together to purchase a seminal work of art that would guarantee attendance at the blockbuster level and they would come together, they would purchase it and then they would share it. So it would be a work of art that would travel. The ConstitutionDAO, ultimately somebody has to receive that thing. So, this group comes together, they pool their resources, they secure ownership of this object. But then, someone is responsible for doing something with it. Yes, there's, it's kind of by proxy. So the group will vote on what they want to have with it. But at some point, you know, it translates to a physical series of actions.

The organizers of ConstitutionDAO said they had interested museums lined up with various proposals on how to store and display the Constitution, including the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library.

But they never got the chance. ConstitutionDAO got outbid, rather dramatically, by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

Nik Honeysett: And so part of me wonders. It would have been, as fascinating as it was, it would have been much more fascinating. And I don't know whether the folks behind it were experienced enough to receive something as important as that and what they would be able to do with it.

Ian Elsner: Right. I think at some point though, we will actually see that play out. I don't know if it's sometime this year, some other ConstitutionDAO will pop up for a different historical object, Someone would have to decide, okay, how do we ensure it during transport? And instead of that being a decision made by museums or other institutions familiar with historical stewardship, that might be put to a governance mechanism in the DAO. And, then all of a sudden it would be asking a huge number of people to decide together, to come to a consensus about what the best insurance policy is to take out during transport of the object, or however that works.

Nik Honeysett: But, you know, and the challenge with that is that, that group, you know, that governance group needs to be informed. There's a danger of damaging the object if you don't understand what is required in transportation of an extremely valuable work of art, you run the risk of losing it.

Ian Elsner: I'm kind of curious about, about how you feel, if you were to walk up to, to an object like a copy of the Constitution and, you saw that, okay, this is owned by a collection of people, not necessarily all Americans, but people who are united in their interest in owning a piece of this. But that's the only loose connection. How does that make you feel as a museum visitor?

Nik Honeysett: That, you know, that's a really good question because if the public hold museums in the highest regard in terms of trust. They are one of the most trustworthy entities. And if that wasn’t the case, if you're looking at an object. I guess it's, you know, as I'm thinking about it, it's no different than a donor who has lent a valuable work of art to the museum. Your interaction with that piece is in the context of the museum with which you hold high trust and high regard for. So I guess the, the fact that that governing body had determined that the museum was the best place to, albeit temporarily, house that object, would make me feel comfortable, to know that something of such foundational historical value is actually in an institution that I know has the highest practices to preserve it.

Ian Elsner: I'm glad you brought up trust because that's one of the applications of blockchain in general is that it allows for various systems to happen in a trustless environment. if the two of us enter into a smart contract, we don't have to trust each other. That the money will be distributed according to the terms of the smart contract, we just have to trust that the smart contract itself is trustworthy, And there's this sort of interesting tension between, between very trustworthy institutions and then this system which is designed for actors that don't trust each other.

Nik Honeysett: It's interesting to noodle down on that. And so, Inherently, you know, people trust museums because, A, because museums tell them that they're trustworthy but B, you know, you can experience something and, and connect with your culture and your past and there's an implicit understanding that the museum is custodians of this thing and it's in his, you know, taking care of them and they'll see an object that might be hundreds of years old in pristine condition or something like that.

My theory is that museums have had two overarching eras: the power era and trust era. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes of Museum Archipelago, the first public museum that we would recognise as a museum was The British Museum in London, which opened in 1759. The point of the museum was to showcase the power of the British Empire, to indicate that anyone in London could see treasures owned by the most powerful people in faraway places. Slowly and over centuries, perhaps much more recently than we’re comfortable with, museums have entered their trust era.

Perhaps, museums are enjoying peak trust right now – scandals like museums naming buildings and wings after donations by the Sackler family, as well as the continuing holdover horrors from the time that museums were in their pure power era like decolonization and repatriation will slowly erode this trust. And the crypto world has so many scandals and general confusion that it’s certainly not trustworthy.

Nik Honeysett: I think partly for the public to generally accept the trustworthiness of the blockchain, they need to more tangibly experience it. So right now it's just, it's a couple of words and people don't really understand it

But the difference I think is that crypto technologies are built for a trustless world. Maybe, if we do start to see declining trust in museums, there’s some crossover appeal to bringing these crypto tools like blockchain-based provenance and smart contracts to the museum world.

Nik Honeysett: Museums they hold collections in the public trust. They are duty bound to be transparent in what they do, but they are clearly not. There is a lot of behind closed doors things going on. That would be a fantastically interesting governance model where everything is completely transparent if you translate you know, mission to smart contract right?

Nik Honeysett: So your mission is actually a smart contract with your community. What is the obligation that you set up in that smart contract that then , the public can hold you accountable for? We used to do this exercise, with museums and say, demonstrate unequivocally how your mission. Is being interpreted. Put some hyperlinks on your mission statement to where you've actually done what you said you did. But if that was open and transparent, that your mission was a series of smart contract statements that would be fascinating.

Immediately after Ken Griffin won the auction, it was announced that this U.S. Constitution would be temporarily loaned to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was put on display as part of the We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy exhibit in July 2022. Since ConstitutionDAO would have also displayed the document in a museum, not much is different from the outside. ConstitutionDAO made the refunds available for all contributors to claim and disbanded. Sometimes an organization only needs to exist for a short time and just serve a single purpose.

Museums should prepare for a world where a group of individuals, leveraging crypto technology, can plausibly – and maybe preferably – do things that were once only possible with museum institutions.

There’s still a lot of crypto to talk about and in part two I’ll dive deeper into projects that overlap with museums. Until then, this has been Museum Archipelago.

106. Last Call on 'The Streets of Old Milwaukee' Jul 29, 2024

I remember visiting – and loving – The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) as a child. Opened in 1965, it’s an immersive space with cobblestone streets and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering into a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures.

And I’m not the only one with fond memories. When the museum announced that the exhibit would not move over to the planned new museum down the street, the public reacted negatively. Dr. Ellen Censky, president and CEO of the MPM, describes the reasons why the museum can’t – and most interestingly shouldn’t – move The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. It’s a story involving cherished memories, the distinction between collections and exhibits which isn’t always at the top of visitors’ minds, and public trust.

In this episode, we explore why the Milwaukee Public Museum decided to move (it’s the fourth relocation in its history) and Milwaukee Revealed, the planned new immersive gallery that will be the spiritual successor to The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which will cover a much larger swath of the city’s history. Plus, we get into the meta question of whether museums are outside of the history they are tasked with preserving.

Image: Bartender in Streets of Old Milwaukee at Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Flickr user JeffChristiansen

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s 2015 Renovation
01:17 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s Visitor Experience
03:40 Dr. Ellen Censky, President and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum
04:10 The Decision to Move the Museum
04:45 AAM Accreditation
06:21 The Current Museum
07:42 Funding the New Museum
08:55 Milwaukee Revealed
11:14 Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11th, 2023
11:40 The distinction between collections and exhibits
12:45 “We owe future museum goers the opportunity to see something different”
13:44 Local Talk Radio Coverage
14:07 Museum Designers
15:29 Closing Thoughts and the “Next Best Thing”
17:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️

Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month.

Join Club Archipelago

Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.
🎟️Archipelago at the Movies a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.
✨A warm feeling, knowing you're helping make this show possible.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 106. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

I first learned about the impending closure of the popular The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum, or MPM, back in 2015. The news came in the form of an email from a family member who had lived in the Milwaukee area her whole life. It was only a year after I started working in the museum world, and she was eager to talk to me – then a newly-minted museum professional! -- about what a colleague had told her: that Streets of Old Milwaukee, which had been there quote "forever", was about to close.

She wrote, "I was upset since this was always one of my favorite exhibits (along with the bison hunt/rattlesnake diorama, of course)."

A little later in the email she expresses a sense of relief learning that the exhibit wasn't closing permanently. The confusion turned out to be a renovation that would temporarily close the exhibit for about six months and reopen in December 2015. The panic faded a bit.

The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which opened in 1965, is beloved for good reason: it’s an immersive space with cobblestone roads and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering through a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures. Visitors go in and out of inviting storefronts, old-timey police boxes, and a candy shop.

I used to visit as a kid and I loved how it transported me. I couldn’t say exactly where it transported me, but it was exciting. I remember staring at a figure of a grandma – who everyone just called granny – in a rocking chair on a front porch and trying to figure out the mechanism by which she was rocking.

Today’s guest, Dr. Ellen Censky, told me in 2015 when she was academic dean of the Milwaukee Public Museum, the MPM, on one of the first episodes of Museum Archipelago, that this attention to detail was one of the reasons why the museum punches above its weight.

Dr. Ellen Censky: It's an experience that you get when you're here. It's this immersive experience. And so we really need to understand that as we move forward to make sure that as we enhance things, that we don't take away what people love.

That skittishness over a beloved exhibit closing, or even changing, was apparent in the way that the museum presented their 2015 renovation plans. Listen to Al Muchka, then Curator of History Collections at the MPM, describe the renovation in an official video:

Al Muchka: “Don't you change my streets of old Milwaukee. That ownership came through and we understood that. I mean, many of the people here in the museum that work here, we, we grew up here, so we understand the idea of this is our place. These are our things. So when people would call us to say, don't change my exhibit, we get it.”

But that was 2015. Now, almost 10 years later, that fear has come true.

In a few years, The Streets of Old Milwaukee will close for good – not just for a temporary refurbishment.

And, predictably, the reaction has not been good.

Dr. Ellen Censky: Hi, my name is Ellen Censky and I am president and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Today, Dr. Censky is president and CEO of the MPM. The Streets of Old Milwaukee is closing for good because the museum itself is moving to a new building and the museum says it can’t move the exhibit as it is since it’s literally built into the old building – and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t.

So let’s explore each in turn.

Dr. Censky says that the decision to move the museum was triggered by the American Alliance of Museums, or AAM’s accreditation process. AAM’s accreditation process is a set of industry standards that is effectively shorthand for institutional credibility. The MPM first gained accreditation in 1972 and the accreditation process should be done about every ten years. If a museum is not accredited, it might have difficulty winning grants or handling loan agreements for traveling exhibits.

Dr. Ellen Censky: Back in 2016, as we were approaching reaccreditation for the museum, we were reflecting back on the past reaccreditation and in that reaccreditation, they had cautioned us that the condition of the building was not adequate for housing the collections. It was deteriorating to the extent that it could be causing harm to the collections. And, of course, That's what we are, is a collections based museum. And they said you need to do something about this. And, of course when we were thinking about reaccreditation which was coming up in 2020.

The building continued to deteriorate. It had not gotten better. And it had built up a significant amount of deferred maintenance. The building is not owned by the museum. The building is owned by the county. And the county has financial challenges as they own many, many buildings and have lots of things that they need to take care of.

And so building maintenance for the museum was just not a high priority for them. So we headed into this study to see what we could do should we invest in money. Putting money into this building to bring it up to AAM standards and thereby receive accreditation, or should we build a new building?

The museum decided to build a new building. This annoyed me at first. Surely any maintenance fixes would be cheaper and – well – less wasteful than building a new building?

I’m fond of the current building, on 800 W Wells St in Milwaukee. In addition to trying to figure out how the granny rocked, one of my formative museum experiences was noticing how the floor ramped down in the Living Oceans exhibit as we went deeper underwater. I remember feeling nervous as the lighting changed and I descended the depths. It’s all very cool and effective.

But you can find videos online highlighting the poor shape of the building itself. Not so much on the exhibit floors, which again, are awesome, right down to the rattlesnake button on the Bosion Hunt diorama. But down in the basement collections storage area there’s an actual leaking wastewater sewage pipe running right through the room, artifacts wrapped in plastic to try and save them from the humidity, and stalactites growing from the ceiling due to moisture.

I think a big part of the answer to ‘the why move to a new building’ question is in the ownership structure. MPM is a private, nonprofit company. Milwaukee County owns the building. Building something new is a much sexier donor pitch than maintaining something – particularly something you don’t own and particularly when there’s no guarantee of that maintenance continuing.

Dr. Ellen Censky: We also reached out to donors, doing a study to see if donors would support putting their money into a county-owned facility. The end result of those studies was that donors were not interested to put money into a county owned facility because there was no guarantee that it would then be taken care of, given that it hadn't been up to this point.

And they were also interested in supporting the project. a new building project. So at that point we headed down the road of building a new museum.

And that new museum will be right down the road, on a site about a 12 minute walk away, on Sixth and McKinley Streets. Critically for the future, the new building will be owned by the museum itself. Milwaukee County will continue to own the museum’s collections but will no longer be responsible for the building costs, though it will still provide some annual funding for collections care. Any additional collections will be stored at a separate offsite storage facility that presumably won’t have the same issues.

So now we get to why not pack up The Streets of Old Milwaukee and move it to the new location?

Dr. Ellen Censky: The Streets of Old Milwaukee are built in. They're poured into… the concrete in the buildings is poured into the building. The cobblestones are set in place. We cannot pick up and move the exhibits. They are so built into this building that it's impossible to do that. And really, we shouldn't.

It’s this ‘we shouldn’t’ that interests me the most – and honestly, I’m inclined to agree.

Dr. Ellen Censky: The streets covers a tiny part of history in Milwaukee. It is a seven year period, 1898 to 1905. Our collections are much more expansive than that, and so what we are doing is we are having an exhibit in the new museum called Milwaukee Revealed, which is set in a similar kind of streetscape where you can walk through, but it is timeless, in that it is, it will have old buildings, it'll have new buildings, and we'll be able to share many more stories , in the museum in the new exhibit.

The new exhibit, Milwaukee Revealed, will cover a much larger swath of Milwaukee's history, from the late 1700s to the present day. More people visit the MPM, and probably The Streets of Old Milwaukee, each year than the total number of people who lived in Milwaukee in 1900, which is one of the years the exhibit is set in. That kind of nostalgia really builds up. The exhibit, built in 1965, is about as distant from us in 2024 as 1905 was from those in 1965.

But that’s the fundamental point: the layout of The Streets of Old Milwaukee was never a real street, it was an imagined street. What visitors love about it, what I love about it, is that it’s designed for present-day visitors, it’s designed to evoke a reaction.

And oh boy has it.

Here’s an interview on local news station Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11, 2023 responding to a MPM Facebook post that The Streets of Old Milwaukee wouldn't be moving over to the new museum.

Steve Chamraz: This is Milwaukee.

Susan Kim: We don't like change.

Steve Chamraz: We don't like change in Milwaukee. Um, were you prepared? I mean, this started as a line in a newspaper story the other day and it just kind of snowballed into is Granny going to wind up in a dumpster when they demolish the old museum?

Susan Kim: Aw, poor Granny!

Steve Chamraz: Well, that's what some people thought.

I think a lot of museum people, like me, draw a huge distinction between the collections (or the artifacts) and the exhibits (or display of those artifacts). I think of artifacts like Lego bricks. Artifacts are arranged in such a way to create exhibits. The models created from those bricks are the stories told. But we can make a lot of different models – we can tell a lot of different stories – out of the same Lego bricks. Gluing the model together forever so the artifacts can’t be re-interrogated or the story can’t be retold is not what a museum should be – and it’s also not how storytelling works. The same sets of story points can, the same initial artifacts can – and I would argue should – be told differently.

Maybe it’s an arbitrary distinction to see the museum as outside of history, as somehow not subject to the same preservation as museums themselves are tasked with. But a museum is just a story.

Dr. Ellen Censky: We are at a different time than we were in the 1960s. And we owe the future museum goers the opportunity to see something different and new.

We've done workshops, we've done surveys, we've done, and we've been doing them, getting feedback so that we really could tailor things to what people were interested in.

My goal is that when you come into the new museum, that you see things that are familiar, but they are reimagined in a new way. And so if you had a favorite object, your favorite object you'll find, but it will be interpreted and imagined in a different way, a new way.

On the YouTube clip of that local news interview the least angry comments talk about the need to visit the current exhibits before it all disappears. It really doesn't seem like many people who cherish the current exhibit trust that the new exhibit will be good or will be worth the cost to the state to replace. These comments are echoed through the Change.org petitions to save the The Streets of Old Milwaukee, through the Facebook groups organizing to express their anger, and through local talk radio hosts like Dan O’Donnell that I’ve listened to while researching this podcast.

Dan O'Donnell: Now, I guess a lot of people sort of naively believed that a lot of the old favorite exhibits would in some form migrate over, Things like the Streets of Old Milwaukee, which is probably the flagship exhibit. the Milwaukee record, which is a local website. Did an excellent job in sort of digging into this and looking at the museum's own frequently asked questions about the upcoming move to conclude definitively no.

And you know what? We don’t know if Milwaukee Revealed will be any good, if it will be a worthy replacement for The Streets of Old Milwaukee. The museum has released renderings of the new gallery and descriptions of feelings it will evoke in visitors. These renderings are familiar to me, not because I’ve seen them before, but because I usually join a museum project when it’s at this stage.

My day job is producing exhibits for various museums, many times new versions of what has come before. The vocal backlash to The Streets of Old Milwaukee closing reminds me that I need to think about my work in the context of that bigger picture. When I'm in a meeting where exhibit designers are talking about how to best serve the visitor experience, I have to remember that museum-goers might have already soured on the process and on the changes long ago.

Even the official messaging, on the MPM’s Facebook page responding to a question about whether the museum would move The Streets of Old Milwaukee, focused on this museum insider excitement that I don’t think translates well outside the museum walls. It said, quote, “As you can imagine, making something new and refreshed, yet familiar and cozy is a fun challenge for our design team!”

But there’s always change. The current museum on 800 W Wells St is the fourth location of the museum. The first was in 1882 in rooms of the old German Academy building, the second a few years later in the Industrial Exposition Building, and the third in what is still Milwaukee Central Library. And the new building was built in 1963.

Dr. Ellen Censky: And when you look back at the, in the 1960s, at the newspaper articles, you, you would think you were reading what was going on today. “They can't move!”

It is really nice to see how meaningful these museums are to my Wisconsin family, and to the general public. And it’s true that we can only look back like this because the new versions were good. I'll let Dr. Censky have the final word on this.

Dr. Ellen Censky: A lot of people early on would say to me what are you bringing to the new museum?

What are you bringing? And early on, before we had done any of our planning, I couldn't say, and all I could say is that we are bringing the ingenuity that is the history of this museum. forward to that new museum. And that is the way we honor our past, is by continuing to strive to do the next best thing.

Because that's what people who did this, they were doing the next best thing. And it's our obligation to honor that and carry that forward.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

105. Building a Better Visitor Experience with Open Source Software Apr 15, 2024

While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera, a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had.

Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions.

Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums.

Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Computer Interactives in Museums
01:00 Dr. Morgan Rehnberg
01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini
02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville
03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums
05:00 Solving Your Own Problems
06:30 Exhibitera
07:45 “A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit”
08:30 Built-In Multi-Language Support
09:30 Open Source Exhibit Management
10:30 Why Open Source?
12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

I’ve spent most of my career building interactive exhibits for museums. These are all visitor-facing: touchscreens for pulling up information or playing games based on the science content, projection walls for displaying moving infographics, and digital signage for rotating through ticket prices or special events.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Well I think most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad. And I don't think that's because they were necessarily bad when they were first installed, but major exhibitions can last for 10, 15, 50 years, and it's often quite difficult to go back and retrofit and improve something like technology as time goes on.

This is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. Rehnberg offers that long-term maintenance is the reason most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad – and that is kindly letting us programmers off the hook for the other reasons why computer interactives can be bad. But I agree with him. When I build an interactive exhibit for a museum, I’m optimizing for opening day, and generally leave it up to the museum to maintain it for years after.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Hello, my name is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg and I'm the Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville.

I actually started my journey in science. I did my PhD work in astronomy. And I worked as part of NASA's Cassini mission, which studied Saturn for many years. And it got to a point where we sort of dramatically crashed the spacecraft into Saturn. And I realized at that point that I was going to need to find something else to do. And kind of thinking back,I realized that I had been having more fun when talking about the work that we were doing than actually doing it.

So I started to look and see how I could turn that into a career, and I ended up in Texas at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and spent five lovely years there, including the time during the pandemic. And as the world started coming back,, I felt like it was time for a change of scenery and made the switch to Nashville. And I've been thrilled to be here at the Science Center for just under two years now.

Like many science museums, we focus on families with young kids, full of hands-on exhibits, exploring all the areas of STEM. And we serve the public, we do field trips, we run summer camps, all the things that science museums do. But we do it with a team that's maybe a little bit smaller than you would have at some of the big museums, in cities like New York or San Francisco or Chicago.

And that team size becomes relevant to the long-term maintenance of computer interactives.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Here in Nashville. We have touch screens that we installed in 2008 that still do everything that they did then, but what the world around them has done since 2008 has changed a lot. And so while the experience is the same as it always was, the expectations of visitors coming in are quite a bit different.

On the back end, most of the computers running in museum galleries are general purpose computers, normal PCs running Linux or Windows. Similarly, the interactive exhibit software running on them are often built using game development engines like Adobe Flash or Unity.

There are advantages and disadvantages to building on top of these platforms. On the one hand, museums get to benefit from the rapid iteration of consumer technology. On the other hand, these tools that were not designed for the museum environment, so there are all sorts of situations where you end up working at cross-purposes with your tools.

A good example: any general purpose computing environment needs to have an easy way, in fact many easy ways, for a user to close an app. However, in a museum's touchscreen setup, you wouldn't want visitors to be able to close the exhibits, so you have to invent ways to prevent that .And every time Windows updates, you might have to do it all over again in a different way.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a museum server room, satisfied with a job well-done, only to notice that a smart kid on the gallery floor has figured out how to close my interactive software and has pulled up a game of solitaire. And let me tell you – solitaire is the best case scenario. If that computer is connected to the internet, things can get a lot worse.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I think a lot of us who work in medium or larger museums forget that by number, the vast majority of museums in this country or anywhere in the world have staffs of one or two or three and have budgets measured in, you know, thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars.

Those places are never going to be able to afford the sorts of bespoke custom software that you might see at Boston Museum of Science. They're just never going to have that. But they shouldn't be left in the 20th century of all we've learned about the value of interactivity in museums.

So while working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the covid pandemic, Rehnberg started looking for a solution.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: As I was looking at sort of this big idea of what could be a piece of software that would solve all my problems.I started looking at that and sort of subdividing those problems. And one category of problem was wanting to have new touch sensitive, visitor facing things. And I didn't have the money during the pandemic to hire a vendor to redo all the things everywhere. The second piece of it was how can I, with greatly reduced exhibit technician staff, manage all of these things with the least amount of effort. Because I know if I have one tech who needs to cover the whole building, they can't spend a bunch of time debugging a thing after a visitor has smashed the screen 50,000 times and frozen the computer. Those two parallel ideas have lent themselves to the structure of Constellation.

Constellation is the name of the free and open source exhibit control software that Rehnberg developed. Today, he calls it Exhibitera, but you still might catch him referring to it by its old name. And those two parallel ideas have turned into a suite of tools that a museum can use to build their own interactive exhibit software, and the control server, which is how museums can control the apps within the exhibit.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: All that guest facing stuff, you can use that all on its own. You basically install it on a computer, start configuring what you want your content to be, and then you can just set your computer to boot that every time the computer boots.

So instead of building interactive exhibits using engines designed for game development, museums can build interactive exhibits using tools designed with the museum’s needs in mind. Exhibitera has several common exhibit types built into it, like an info station, a media browser, and a timeline.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: One of the big focuses has been that it shouldn't just be technical people who can produce these things. And so a big focus has been creating ways for people to use apps they already know to create apps that are guest facing. For example, with our timeline application, the way you make a timeline is you just open up Excel and you make a spreadsheet. You make a column of dates, you make a column of event names, you make a column of file names for a picture, and then Constellation just ingests that and makes this beautiful touchscreen timeline. A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit. An educator we have here on staff should be able to have an idea and create at least a prototype, if not a complete exhibit, just using Word and Excel and those sorts of things. And they get turned into these beautiful guest facing experiences that at first glance, a visitor is not going to know the difference between that and something that a science center might've paid a hundred thousand dollars for.

Too often when building bespoke custom interactive media, accessibility is something that gets tacked on at the end. But for museums using Exhibitera, accessibility features are automatically built in.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: One of the things I'm really proud about is we've built in just a tremendous amount of accessibility at the core. So any one of the apps that uses language allows you to set up your language in an arbitrary number of languages. So it's not just English. You can say, I want English and Spanish and Arabic and Chinese and German.

And if that's your audience, it'll support all of those simultaneously. And it provides a nice little dropdown to switch languages. And then it also provides variable text size support by default in those applications. And those are things that I think we all agree are key aspects of professional practice to make our exhibitions as accessible as possible. It shouldn't be like a thing you have to remember to add on when you're building something. It should just be built in at the core and that's what we've tried to do with Constellation.

But then there's this thing called Constellation Control Server. And the idea here is, let's have a central server that communicates with all of the other Constellation components in the exhibit. And can help me remotely diagnose and remotely repair these things. So if one of those exhibit pieces has stopped checking in, I get an, I can see that on my dashboard and I can easily press a button from my desk to reboot that computer, cause maybe the app is still running, but I got a call in from somebody in guest services saying a kid's playing solitaire on the computer.

Without this software, a smaller museum might have a staff member walk around every morning to turn on each computer one by one.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: When I come in in the morning, the building basically just turns itself on in the morning and shuts itself down at the end of the day. And Constellation provides this really powerful scheduling system that allows you to set these schedules that vary day to day. So every Monday, you know, we close at three and every Saturday we close at five and so forth.

Exhibitera was built to support as many devices as possible, from the touchscreens from 2008 to Android tablets to mini pcs. There was never any doubt for Rehnberg that he would release this system as open source, for free – the problems that Rehnberg faced mirrors the problems faced at many other museums.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: My background, having come from the world of science, was just really informed by the culture, this wonderful cultural open source that exists in science. I was working on studying Saturn and analyzing data, the code that I was using to do that had legacies of decades. I could go back and look at the changelog and see, you know, NASA engineers who were working on the same code in the 1980s. And that's what allowed me as a 20 something kid starting out in science to do these things that otherwise I would have had to reinvent from scratch. And I just got such an appreciation for the value of having something supported by the community as a way of opening more doors to that community.

If we all agree, and I think most people would, that having digital elements in installed exhibitions is just like a standard professional practice, then you shouldn't have to fork over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what is standard professional practice. It still might be the right thing to do to hire a third party company, and I've had great experiences working with those companies before, but it shouldn't be the only option.

Today, Exhibitera is being used in Fort Worth and in Nashville and several other museums But anyone can use it. I set up a little exhibit in my office on an old PC and just marveled at how many museum-specific features are just built-in .

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I really think long term, the biggest opportunity is to bring this level of digital interactivity to places that haven't been able to afford it before. And so I'm excited about this podcast because I think there is just this huge sea of places that want to be able to be the modern museums they are in thought also in physicality. And so far, just haven't had a good way to connect with those folks. Because I think, big museums, this will always be, at best, one thing in the play of many solutions that they've integrated together. But for a lot of smaller places, I think there's an opportunity for Constellation to really become a standard for the way in which they are engaging digitally, with their audience inside the building.

This has been Museum Archipelago. I have two quick announcements about Club Archipelago, our bonus podcast. I've been having a lot of fun making Club Archipelago, which is kind of a mirror image of Museum Archipelago. While the main show examines the landscape of real museums, Club Archipelago is the podcast that examines museums through the lens of popular culture, like movies and video games.

We've built up quite the collection of episodes from the Night at the Museum series to Toy Story 2. And honestly, I think more people should listen. So I've just added a seven day free trial to the Patreon. You can sign up, listen to as many episodes as you can and cancel before the trial is up completely absolved of any guilt.

Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club.

And finally I'm discontinuing the sticker rewards of the Club Archipelago membership. It's just too much of a logistical challenge to ship things from Bulgaria. And I want to focus all my time on the much more scalable podcast production. But if you're interested, regardless of whether you're a club member or not, just send me an email and I'll let you know where the closest museum is, where I've left a pile of stickers for you to collect.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com.

Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.

104. What Large Institutions Can Learn From Small Museums Feb 26, 2024

The Murney Tower Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits.

Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee.

In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones.

Image: Murney Tower Museum

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Understanding the Landscape of Small Museums
02:38 Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor
03:00 Murney Tower Museum
08:29 Overcoming Challenges with Digital Solutions
09:46 What Big Institutions Can Learn from Small Museums
09:54 The Power of Local Connections in Small Museums
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 104. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.

Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Let’s say you sorted every museum on earth in order by the number of yearly visitors.

At one end, with yearly visitor numbers in the millions, would be large, recognizable institutions – places like the British Museum in London. There’s a cluster of these big institutions, but as you go further along the ordered list of museums, the visitor numbers start to drop.

At some point during these declining visitor numbers, you reach small museums. Exactly where in the order you first reach a small museum doesn’t really matter – one definition of small museums from the American Association of State and Local History is simply: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.” You could do the same sort by number of staff members or by operating budget – the effect would be more or less the same. The point is that once you reach the threshold where small museums begin, you still have the vast, vast majority of museums to go.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: You just realize how many small museums are there in the world. Unbelievable numbers, right? They're everywhere and they hold such an important space in local cultural landscapes. Even if I dare to say more than large institutions.

The sorting exercise illustrates a long tail effect – each small museum, while attracting fewer visitors individually, collectively hosts an enormous number of visitors. There’s just so many of them. The long tail effect was coined in 2004 to describe economics on the internet: the new ability to serve a large number of niches in relatively small quantities, as opposed to only being able to serve a small number of very popular niches.

But unlike the economics of the internet, where distribution costs are minimal, small museums face the challenge of fulfilling nearly all the responsibilities of larger museums without any of the benefits of scale.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What fascinates me most about small museums is despite being so small, they offer almost everything you can find in a large museum, Ian. So do they have collections and do collection management and care? Yes. Do they curate exhibitions? Yes. Do they offer public programs? Yes. Do they organize special events and do marketing and digital engagements? Yes. They make these things happen.

This is Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor, who studies small museums in her academic practice, and works at one.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Hello, my name is Simge Erdogan-O'Connor. I am a museum scholar and professional, currently working as museum manager at a local history museum called the Murney Tower Museum located in Kingston, Canada.

Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a city of about 150,000 people and the Murney Tower Museum is Kingston’s oldest museum.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: It will turn 100 years old next year. The museum itself is based in a 19th century military fortification, which was built by the British government as a response to a territorial dispute between England at the time and the United States. And the building itself is called Murney Tower. So the museum, taking its name from that building, but also being based in this building, is very much about that history. Why this building was constructed, what's its relationship to broader Canadian, British, American relationships in the 19th century, but at the same time, the museum is very much about the local history of Kingston as well so we are very local in our focus.

No matter how you define a small museum, Murney Tower is a small museum.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: We hold about 1300 objects in our collection and we are seasonal. We are only open to the public from the end of May through September. And I'm the only full time staff member that the museum has, which can also show, I think, many people what small museums are in terms of operational capacity. And then we almost entirely rely on volunteers, interns, and seasonal staff members that we hire in the summer.

Ian Elsner: Right, I was going to make a joke about your, your staff meetings being super quick, but I guess you do have to have meetings nevertheless.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: But sometimes I make a joke about that too Ian, meaning, yes, of course, we have board meetings, I constantly have interns, every semester through universities, and in the summer I have three full time staff members. Regardless, sometimes I'm like, I'm the gatekeeper, I am the security guard, I clean the museum, I run the museum, right? I do all of these cool things, like I write the strategic plan, but then there are times that I'm on call waiting for a maintenance person to come to the museum and I just need to be there to open doors to him.

Ian Elsner: I can already see the challenge of having one person do all of those things that you described, but what are some of the other challenges of a small institution or your small institution specifically?

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Simply because a big part of Ian, my professional, academic, personal life is concerned with this question of challenges, right? Whether understanding those challenges or finding solutions to those challenges. All my colleagues mention in any conversation that are very common to museums worldwide, big or small, and these challenges certainly affect my own institution as well, like the challenges of colonial and elitist legacies of museums, issues of reconciliation, repatriation, or funding limitations, or reliance on government funding, or contemporary challenges like COVID 19.

So all of these challenges that are very much common in the museum world. But then when I look at his lens of small museums a little bit further, I identify in two major challenges that are much more specific to small museums.

The first one is limited staff resources. I know I already mentioned that, but I still want to explain that a little bit further.

While you have 40, 50, or hundreds of people doing these things in a large museum, you have only, like in my case, one or two people carrying out very similar activities in a small museum. This is a huge challenge because, yes, you can maybe carry these out in some form and capacity, with several people.

But how can you make these activities really effective and impactful, with only a few people? This is a very important challenge that does not exist in large institutions.

And there is a second challenge related to this, is what I refer in my own practice as this incapability mindset. And I found myself in this mindset when I started my work in a small museum four and a half years ago, it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. This limitation creates a mindset both in the institution as an institutional mindset but a mindset also in staff members and team members that's very much based on incapability.

So you find yourself being almost conditioned, Ian, inherently to think small. Right? And this way of small thinking poses such a huge challenge to actual capacity of these small museums to grow and to make something meaningful. And, for example, you want to create a new website. You have the idea. You're excited.

And what's the first thing you think? Oh. But I cannot hire a webmaster. I don't know coding and I cannot hire a website designer. I will never be able to make that happen. Or you want to create new exhibits, new exhibitions, nicer panels. And then you're like, but I cannot hire a graphic designer or exhibit designer. I don't know graphic design.

And this kind of, this creates a chicken and egg situation where an idea comes and instantly a door closes. , this is another huge problem, Ian, simply because it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. And then the moment I did, I realized a huge potential.

Small museums could do the things they want to do. They can do it, right? Maybe not in a big scale, but you can still make these things happen. You can find a way to make these things happen, but it starts with that mindset. And that's, I think, a huge challenge that exists.

The manifesto writes itself – small museums, not small ideas.

Having only one staff member or not being able to hire somebody to make a website are downstream of not having enough resources. And it’s not obvious how a small museum could take advantage of internet economics because there’s no way to get enough scale such that the marginal cost of each visitor approaches zero. But there is a way to take advantage of internet economics on the production side.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What you said about the internet or digital world is actually, it's a solution to these two problems in a way that I mentioned meaning there's so so many digital resources out there that you can really run a museum on a budget. Of course you cannot hire a webmaster, but there's so many custom made website platforms that allow you to build your own website at a very low cost and quite easily.

There are digital design platforms like Canva graphic design, which has free subscriptions to non profits and they allow you to create really beautiful designs and two platforms, quite frankly, that I'm using in my work. You can leverage that digital world, take advantage of it and then make these things happen at such a low cost.

And then on the flip side, it also opens all of this range of audience engagement, allowing these museums to go out of their localities and becomes something bigger, like you said, at no cost. This is what we have been doing, like using social media, internet, and YouTube. Last summer, we were visited by 12,000 visitors, which was very impressive for us. And 7,000 of those visitors were local or international tourists. And they got to know us through the internet.

So I'm now curious, what, what can big institutions learn from small institutions?

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: I'm so glad you brought that up. The first thing, Ian, that I really believe, and I'm really, really, really passionate about this, when it comes to small museums, is local connections. I think the biggest impact of small museums is their local connections. How they leverage these local connections to create local impact, but potentially global impact. And I think this is something that larger museums can really learn from them. These museums, they already hold a very important place in the local landscape, local memories, and local stories.

So they have a greater potential to connect with local audiences in a much more efficient and quicker way. And the way they connect with their local audiences is something I think large institutions could really learn from small museums. Because I know large museums that I work with on different capacities, they of course have local initiatives, community initiatives, of course they do, but I think that really understanding local connections and local concerns and histories, it's much different in a small museum, the way the small museums work that out.

And I will give you an example again because I know what I mean could be a little bit vague sometimes. Back in 2020, COVID time for all of us. At the Murney Tower Museum, we really wanted to do something to address the needs of people living in Kingston during the global pandemic, especially find a way to address their issues of social exclusion and isolation and foster connections in our community.

So we launched a local photo contest. We placed ads on local newspaper, TV, and basically we asked people living in Kingston to go back to their cameras, check their photo albums, and then check their childhood albums, and then check their family albums to see if they could find Murney Tower Museum, anywhere, right? And if they did we ask them to find the story behind it and send those pictures to us. So over the course of three months, I think we collected about 120 Incredible, Ian. Photos from 1920s, photos from, yeah, like 1940s,

It also speaks to the advantage of the scale that small museums are operating on, because it's so much less interesting to have that same idea with a big institution. If the British Museum says, everybody send us your images, I'm sure you'll find some great images, but the scale actually isn't meaningful because of course people were going to the British Museum 50 years ago. But having it be that local connection of actually we have 120 pictures and like, I really see that point. The bigger the institution is, the less interesting that exercise is.

It's, yes, absolutely, and the connection part of it becomes much stronger, and it in a way becomes much more intimate. It allowed us to leverage this local connection and I think large museums can really take that local focus from small museums. I think sometimes they can be lost in their big ideas and big collections and big audiences, which are equally important, I get that. But I think sometimes it starts with their neighborhood. Look at your region first, to create something global and bigger, go from there, much more focused perspective, rather than coming from something global or large and big into small.

Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com.

Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.

103. How Computers Transformed Museums and Created A New Type of Professional Nov 13, 2023

Computing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main reasons to start the Oral Histories of Museum Computing project.

The first museum technology conference was hosted in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prescient event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums” was mostly focused on the cutting edge: better inventory management systems using computers instead of paper methods. However, it also foresaw the transformative impact of computers on museums—from digital artifacts to creating interactive exhibits to expanding audience reach beyond physical boundaries. Most of all, speakers understood that museum technologists would need to “join forces” with each other to learn and experiment better ways to use computers in museum settings.

The Oral Histories of Museum Computing project collects the stories of what happened since that first museum technology conference, identifying the key historical themes, trends, and people behind the machines behind the museums. In this episode, Paul Marty and Kathy Jones describe their experience as museum technology professionals, the importance of conferences like the Museum Computer Network, and the benefits of compiling and sharing these oral histories.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums
00:43 Thomas P. F. Hoving Closing Statements
01:41 Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University
02:11 Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School
02:18 Museum Computing from There to Here
04:08 The First Steps of Museum Computing
04:52 Early Challenges in Museum Databases Like GRIPHOS
07:00 Changing Field, Changing Profession
08:48 The Oral Histories of Museum Computing Project
11:32 Reflecting on the Journey of Museum Technology
14:12 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 103. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

On April 17th, 1968, less than two weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the first computer museum conference was coming to a close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

This conference was hosted by the recently-formed Museum Computer Network, and had a hopeful, descriptive title: A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums.

At the closing dinner, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving acknowledged that “for some these three days have an unsettling effect” and that “these machines are going to put us on our toes as never before” but summarized, “the whole idea of a computer network is generating momentum, and is forcing upon museums the necessity of joining forces, pooling talents, individual resources, and strengths.”

Paul Marty: When I tell students that there is a group that has been meeting annually since 1968 to discuss problems related to the use of computers and museums, they find that hard to believe. That seems like a long time ago, and I guess it is a long time ago. But museums were always on the cutting edge of trying to figure out how to use this technology. Maybe not everybody was on board, but there was always somebody who was pushing that story forward.

This is Paul Marty, whose work focuses on the interactions that take place between people, information, and technology in museums.

Paul Marty: Hello, I'm Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University.

Professor Marty, along with his colleague Kathy Jones, are collecting stories of the people behind the computers behind the museums as part of their Oral Histories of Museum Computing project. A selection of stories from the project will be published as a book.

Kathy Jones: Hello, my name is Kathy Jones, and I'm the Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School.

The key question that both Jones and Marty want to answer is how did we go from there to here?

Paul Marty: How did we go from a world where curators were saying there will never be a computer screen in our galleries, to a world where when you're setting up a new exhibit the first thing you ask is where should we put the iPads? How do we go from a world where we will never share digital images of our collection on the internet to a world where there are hundreds of millions of open access images in the public domain on the internet by museums?

To answer that question, Jones and Marty looked to their own experiences going to the many museum computer conferences that came after. But they both underscore how remarkably prescient that first meeting proved to be.

Kathy Jones: That first Museum Computer Network meeting I just want to emphasize the importance of meetings, even that early and now of bringing new ideas to the field. everything evolved based on the technologies that we had at hand. And museums weren't the first to adopt something like a scanner or to do multimedia, but as soon as we saw the possibilities, we certainly began to do that.

Paul Marty: I actually just pulled up the table of contents for the conference proceedings for the very first Museum Computer Network Conference. And, there were a lot of papers in there sort of predicting what the future of computers in museums were going to be. And of course most of them were focused on inventory control and this. But there were also people talking about computer graphics and what that was like at the time. J. C. R. Licklider who is the the founder of ARPANET, which is , the original backbone of the internet, was there and spoke about the current state of computer graphics technology in the late 1960s, and , he was predicting a world where there would be digital images of museum artifacts, where people could have an interactive art museum where you would use digital computer images of artifacts. And it took a while for us to get there, but it's wonderful that people were thinking that far ahead in the 1960s.

Computers first entered museums as a form of inventory management. Edward F. Fry summarizes in his 1970 review of that first conference, “the rapid increase in the size of museum collections in the United States has in fact reached such a point in many instances that a more efficient means of cataloging than that of the standard index card file has become a desperate necessity.”

Paul Marty: Remember the final scene at the end of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? So many of the Smithsonian warehouses look exactly like that and it's really easy to see how things could get lost there for a very long period of time. You have more stuff than you have staff and time to deal with.

The early inventory management systems were limited to only a few variables and lots of manual work, as Kathy Jones learned when she started her career at the Florida Department of State.

Kathy Jones: I worked on a mainframe computer to be what they called the keeper of the Florida master site file. That was a large database, or is, that keeps track of all of the archaeological sites and historical properties in the state of Florida.

Kathy Jones: It was a database called GRIPHOS, and it was used by archaeological groups, the State Historic Preservation Office. There was nothing visual about it, not even images or things like that. It was hardly relational, and every field was just about 80 characters. I mean, this is so long ago, Ian, that we had to use punch cards to do the data entry and then have them read per computer in batch form. Pretty archaic.

GRIPHOS stood for General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies – I can’t get enough of the direct naming conventions of this early computer history – and it was actually published by the Museum Computer Network, the organization that hosted that first conference in 1968.

Paul Marty: So GRIPHOS was the database system that ran on mainframe computers developed in the 1960s and disseminated by the Museum Computer Network. And part of the goal of the Museum Computer Network was to help museums learn how to use GRIPHOS to organize information about their collections. Kathy, I don’t know if you wanna talk about what it was like at the conferences…

Kathy Jones: It was the first attempt at standardizing information, and that was because we had limited fields and limited values, but it did lead to a profession-wide attempt to standardize how we describe all types of information. So not just the art world, but also the history world or the object world.

The early systems for cataloging collections were rather rigid, which meant that the museum staff had to get inventive to bridge the shortcomings. This process would repeat itself.

Kathy Jones: As the field changed we were looking at what the public needs were, we began to discuss early on where we would fit in the museum. What was our role now? Initially, it was a behind the scenes type of thing with registrars, museum registrars mainly, having to learn a new skill set. Having to be somewhat digitally based, and doing their job now with new technology. Then in the mid-1990s and later we could add imaging to that set. And we had to learn about scanners and what they might do to the art, or how we could use them safely and efficiently to process the image, because we're a visual field. And then we got into multimedia, and both, , in the gallery and online, and another skill set emerged.

Paul Marty: You went from physically plugging in computers and wires to figuring out how to present information in a way that can be used by people inside the museum, that suddenly people realize, “hey, there's people outside the museum with all this information as well.” And then this can also become used in exhibits in the galleries and then eventually online.

Paul Marty: It's just been a constant process of the museum technology professional having to keep up with those changing technologies, keep up with the increasing demands that keep getting put on them. They have to figure out how to use new technology to accomplish new goals. I think that this entire profession has evolved over the years to tackle these problems. Because when museums started doing this, there, there wasn't, you couldn't go to school for this.There wasn't a job title for this. Kathy talked about registrars. You were organizing the information on paper files behind the scenes and somebody said, “hey, look, we can do this better and faster if we start using a computer here.” And you're the one who had to figure out how to do it.

As museum technology professionals themselves, Marty and Jones realized that shining a light on this type of work would be a good basis for their next project.

Paul Marty: Kathy and I have worked together on a number of projects in the past. We published a book together back in 2008. We had been meeting to work together on another book for a long time and we had been meeting regularly once a week or so and chatting about different project ideas and I guess it was 2019 when we first started talking about an oral history project because among other things, we were inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Museum Computer Network, and they had done some work trying to capture some voices from the field and some of that history there, and we realized that there was a great need for that particular work.

Paul Marty: We were also very interested in the question of how do we shine a light on the behind the scenes activities of museum technology workers? Most of the people who do this job, you don't see their work. You see the end product of their work. You see the database, you see the website. You don't see what they're doing behind the scenes. Like most information technology workers writ large, not only is your work invisible in the sense that if you see me working, I'm probably doing something wrong, but the system that you built is also supposed to be invisible, right? It's supposed to be like plumbing. It’s difficult to work a job where if your work is visible, that means something has gone wrong. And so we were really trying to help both preserve the history and shine a light on that behind the scenes work that so many people don't see.

When I’m not doing Museum Archipelago, I work as a computer programmer making interactive exhibits in museums. That should put me neatly into the category of museum technology professional — but I have to admit that I made it to this part of the interview before realizing Marty and Jones include people like me.

Maybe it’s just a slight aversion to the term “museum technology professional” which has the clunkiness of those direct naming conventions of early computer history. Maybe it’s actually the perfect term.

Marty and Jones invited about 120 professionals to participate in their oral history project, successfully compiling 54 oral histories from individuals whose careers focused on bringing technology into museums.

Listening to the stories in this collection, which feature some past guests on Museum Archipelago, I’m struck that the types of problems museum technology professionals solve mirror my own experiences: computers in tight places on the gallery floor that nobody realized needed to be manually rebooted every few days, custom software running long after any who remembered what its for left the museum, and the wire that isn’t long enough to run from the exhibit floor to the server room.

Kathy Jones: “What we're doing also lends credibility to that invisible work and really does shine a light on it, bringing it out for the field, but also Paul and I both teach. So it brings it right to our students in a way that I think is important. I, in my museums and technology class, post podcasts for different topics so that my students can hear from Jane Alexander or other people in the field about what they're doing. And I mentioned Jane Alexander because she has been able to really raise the visibility of what she doesfrom the server room to the boardroom. And I think it's so important to see that we can have a voice, that we could be, if not part of th e C suite, that we're getting pretty close to being there so that other people understand what it means to be digital in the museum world now and not take it for granted.“

Paul Marty: We captured stories that people never heard before. These were the people who were making the magic happen behind the scenes. To get their perspective on that was just absolutely amazing. We didn't want to tell a chronological history of the field. That's been done. We are at center identifying the key historical themes and trends that cut across the past 60 years and really drove the field forward. And then telling that story, using examples. In the words of the very people who who did that work.

Which is remarkably similar to what Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving predicted back in 1968 – that the only way to roll with the momentum that computers in museums generate is to get all the humans together, sharing resources and expertise. After all, no museum is an island.

Paul Marty: One of the things that I think surprised me as we went through and gathered these stories, analyzed these stories, was how positive and enthusiastic everybody was about the work that was done. Because you know, in a technology profession, it's easy to be negative. It's easy to say, well, we don't have enough resources. We don't have enough money. We don't have enough time. This is always the perennial problem. Of course, but when you step back and you take the 30,000 foot view and you look at what's been done over the past 60 years. And I think we heard this from every one of our participants. When you look at that, it's amazing how far we've come. And it's hard not to look at that scope and not come away with a positive perspective on what we've accomplished. And our hope with the book that we're writing is to convey that sense of enthusiasm to help inspire the next generation of people who are doing this technology work in museums

Kathy Jones: “Ian, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about something that we love.”

This has been Museum Archipelago.

102. Copies in Museums Jul 31, 2023

On Berlin’s Museum Island, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago.

Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ, and their role in repatriation or restitution cases.

In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums.

Image: Reconstructed Lion Sculpture Sam'al near modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey 10th-8th century BCE by Mary Harrsch

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Sam’al/Zincirli Lions
01:09 Pinar Durgun
01:22 Museum Island
01:40 Find Divison
02:28 Gipsformerei
03:12 Replicas Jump-Started Museum Collections
04:35 Trending Away from Copies
05:27 When Visitors Feel Tricked
06:00 When Visitors Are Okay With Copies
07:28 Ancient Cultural Contexts About Copies
08:07 Hokusai’s Great Wave
08:35 “Immersive Experiences” Made Up of Digital Copies
09:08 Digital Copies
12:39 Museum Archipelago 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does.
13:32 How Should Museums Present Copies in Their Collections?
14:36 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 102. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

On the Museum Island in Berlin, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE. And one is a plaster copy carved a bit over 100 years ago.

Pinar Durgun: When you see these lions, you cannot tell the difference which one is a copy, which one is original.

And lately, curator Pinar Durgun has been wondering how visitors feel about that copy.

Pinar Durgun: But when I tell visitors, this one is a copy. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about a copy being here? Do you feel like you've been tricked?

Pinar Durgun: And if I ask a question like this, they say yes. They say, I don't like copies.

Durgun works at the Pergamon Museum, where those Gate lions from Samʼal are now perched -- well, some of them.

Pinar Durgun: My name is Pinar Durgun. I'm an archeologist and art historian, currently working at the Pergamon Museum as a curator.

Pinar Durgun: We're on the Museum Island. And it's funny because you always say museums are not islands, but we are literally on the Museum Island, one of the five museums on the museum island, but they're all kind of interconnected, I would say.

Ian Elsner: That's terrific. They're in their own little archipelago.

Pinar Durgun: Yeah, exactly.

The Gate lions from Sam’al, also known as Zincirli in Southern Turkey, were excavated in the early 1890s and came to Berlin through a colonial-era practice called Find Division, which was a system to divide up ownership of excavated artifacts.

Pinar Durgun: So during the Ottoman period when excavations were happening, so for instance, Germans or other foreigners were excavating in the Ottoman Empire, there were some agreements between the Sultan and the Kaiser here in Germany. So they were basically dividing objects that they were finding, and half of them would come here and half of them would stay in Istanbul.

Of course, the extent to which this division was carefully adhered to depended on the local and international power dynamics, so in many cases it was more than half. But when an original artifact was to remain in the Ottoman Empire, the excavators would use a molding shop to make a copy.

Pinar Durgun: The Berlin State Museums has its own plaster workshop called Gipsformerei. And this is a very old institution. I think it's one of the oldest in the world. It's 200 years old and the people who work at the Gipsformerei create these copies that look almost exactly like the originals.

Pinar Durgun: And they take pride in creating copies that are skillfully made, skillfully prepared. So it is difficult to distinguish between originals and copies.

The late 19th century was a time when the modern museum was taking shape, and institutions all around the world were seeking to fill collections. And copies, particularly paster copies from skilled molding shops like Gipsformerei made that possible.

Pinar Durgun: So this interest in having ancient objects in museums or in university collections was growing as an idea based on education basically. So you would acquire a copy for your art school, let's say, and then people who could draw these Roman or Greek statues that they would otherwise never see. Now we can travel and see these statues, but think about a time when you could not do that, where you could not go see the statue of David whenever you wanted to, or you couldn't Google a picture of it. Canonical highlights or quote unquote masterpieces were being distributed around the world in universities, museums, and schools.

Pinar Durgun: And this is a time where museums were basically coming to being, right? They were being formed. So a lot of the collections were built through these copies. The Metropolitan Museum, for instance, bought a lot of copies.

The idea behind acquiring these copies was to allow museums like the MET to showcase a “survey of art history” for the interested public, more like a textbook. And many museums still follow this model.

Pinar Durgun: Science museums, natural history museums we're so used to seeing reconstructions or copies of things or for instance, things that are like blown out of scale. It's a copy. It's not an original, but it communicates information that you cannot otherwise communicate. So people are on board with those things.

But during the 20th century, many history museums trended away from showcasing copies. Museums that built up collections based on copies started giving the copies away to smaller collections or smaller universities as the perceived value of a copy waned and the cultural aura around an original increased.

As Durgun says, the visitor's attitude of feeling tricked when presented with a copy might have something to do with the shift – but even that is not clear.

Pinar Durgun: There was a recent survey, I think it was 2020 that they did in maybe nine German museums to see how visitors react to copies. And it was very mixed. There was no solid conclusion that people don't like copies or people like copies. It's very much context dependent and how you present information.

Pinar Durgun: The only thing that they don't like is being tricked, and I think that's also a challenge for us curators. How do you make people feel like they're not being tricked, and how do you signal that this is a copy?

But it’s not like the lion is trying to hide the fact that’s it's a copy. The label on the plaster copy clearly indicates that it is a copy. So if a visitor is feeling tricked, that feeling might be based on a visitor's expectations of what they might see when they enter a museum. Of course, museums are responsible for setting those expectations.

Pinar Durgun: When I say for instance, think about a copy of an object that is lost during the war. Because this also happened, right? Some of the Berlin museums got destroyed during World War II. Some of the objects got lost. So what if we only had a copy of this object, and then we have that in the museum. Then their approach changes a little bit. Or if I say, let's say, we have an object in this collection, but it is requested from the country of origin, and it's returned, and we keep a copy of that object in the galleries and talk about this whole process of restitution, then they're like, yes, you know, that makes sense. That would make sense. Or for instance, if we have a copy and then you can go touch this copy. Recently one of our conservators here created a copy of one of these dragon figures from the Ishtar Gate as a touchable copy. The label encourages you to go touch it. And in this case, everyone loves it. Everyone loves to touch things in museums, as you know. So if there's a copy that you can touch, everyone is on board with copies. So it really depends on how you present the copy to the visitors.

Here, Durgun is focused on archaeological objects, and underscores that coping indigenous objects or ethnographic collections is a completely different issue. In those cases, the indigenous groups need to be involved in the decision to make copies at all.

But even with archaeological objects, the challenge of presenting copies to museum visitors includes understanding different cultural attitudes about the perceived value of copies.

Pinar Durgun: The other cultural context is the Mesopotamian, the ancient cultural context. How did people perceive or think about copying in ancient Mesopotamia? So I'm kind of looking into that as well, because in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, an image of a person, or a God or a king is not just an image, it's not just a copy of that thing, it's the thing.

Pinar Durgun: It stands in for the thing. So when you make a statue of a king there are all these rituals that go around it, and then the statue becomes the king. So there's a different way of thinking about images and objects in ancient Mesopotamia. So how do I bring in that while presenting these copies.

Pinar Durgun: We also treat some of the artworks in the same way. For instance, if you think about the Hokusai Great Wave, right? There are multiple copies of this because it's a wood block print that was produced, in multiple versions.

Pinar Durgun: So the British Museum has multiples of them. But when you see the Great Wave in a museum, you treat it as this is an original object, even though you can think of it as like a photocopy in some ways, right? But you don't treat it that way.

There’s even a whole industry of immersive exhibitions of famous artists whose work is in the public domain, all displayed as digital copies.

Pinar Durgun: If you think about these more commercial, immersive exhibits that are popping up everywhere, like the Monet's Garden or Van Gogh's World or something like this. And then you just go to this exhibit and there's not a single original painting. Everything around you is a copy, is a digital copy. You're looking at screens, and people don't mind paying 20, 25 euros to go see copies.

The perceived value of a copy also looks different in a computer. Copying is the native function of digital systems – and a digital copy is a perfect replica. The computer doesn’t have a way to know what is an original file, and I’m not sure what that would even mean. Even the concept of moving a file from one location to another in a computer system, which has a clear physical-world analog, is actually achieved on many systems by copying the file to another location, confirming that the two files are identical, and deleting the first.

There seem to be two ways that the digital world intersects copies in museums. The first is translating something in the real world to digital information and back again. A process achieved by digital photographs, by 3D scans and 3D printers. Here the marginal cost of storing, distributing, and copying approaches zero.

Pinar Durgun: I feel like with 3D scanning and copying, because it was such an amazing opportunity to create copies and make things more accessible or documenting things, we all jumped on it really fast before even thinking about what are the ethical implications of copying? If the purpose is we are scanning this building, or this, let's say, open air relief because we wanna preserve this information for the future because it's exposed to the weather and the rain and everything. So it may not preserve in let's say 20, 30 years. Then you need to think differently. It is probably good to have some sort of documentation of these objects because, Wars always happen, catastrophes always happen. The National Museum in Brazil had a big fire a couple of years ago, and a lot of objects no longer exist. So if there was a digital scan of them, maybe that could have been good.

Pinar Durgun: So it has benefits obviously, but then we have to figure out do the benefits justify the fact that there are all these problematic ways of using copies. As a museum, you legally have the right to scan something. You don't really have to ask anybody.But then some of the objects that are in museums come from other places. And then who is the owner of the scan or the copy or who gets to have a saying on what can be and cannot be copied is also I think a question that we haven't really figured out, both like ethically and legally.

Pinar Durgun: You see these replicas in museum shops that basically copy the original objects on display, and I am guilty of this as well. I love buying little replicas of museum objects. But in the museum, it makes money out of this, so what is the ethical implication of this is another question. Do you actually own these things? And do you own the rights to replicate these things, even if it's for education, even if it's not commercial. I find that a difficult question to answer.

The second way that the digital world intersects copies in museums is the increasing amount of culture that’s digital-only. The historical record contained in online forum posts or art that was made and distributed digitally doesn’t really have an original.

There are now digital tools that recreate scarcity in the digital world, that reintroduce the concept of an original to a digital system.

There’s no question who owns a bitcoin for example, and there’s no way to copy your bitcoin and end up with two bitcoins, like you could with any other digital file. NFTs are a way to apply that same scarcity to an arbitrary artwork or piece of information.

Pinar Durgun: Ten years ago were we this much obsessed with authenticity? is a question that I'm trying to ask myself, I'm trying to find more writings about it because I feel like this whole, like NFT or this, AI or the deep fakes, I think you wrote about this as well.

Pinar Durgun: There is this anxiety around things not being authentic and original. So is that the reason why we feel a little bit anxious about copies? It seems like there has always been some sort of anxiety around copies. Maybe not in these early years of the establishment of the museum collections because then they didn't have original objects, so the only thing they had was the copies. But again, like even from like 20 years ago, there are these writings about original objects having their own aura or you having some sort of like genuine experience with the original, whereas you don't have that with the copy.

So where does this leave museums? How should museums present copies in their collections? For Durgun, it might mean actually highlighting the history of the copy itself – how it came to be, what was the reason for making the copies. In other words, valuing the copy as an object with its own history, puncturing the common expectation of museums as public treasure boxes filled with priceless artifacts.

Pinar Durgun: I feel like one of the best ways to open up museums and make them a little bit more welcoming is the possibility that the museum would acknowledge the fact that they're not the sole authority. And saying that we don't know what to do with copies. We have these now in our collection and we're trying to find a way to make them useful. But what do you think about them?

Pinar Durgun: I think this is a better way of moving forward. Maybe some people hate it, but we should also say that for some people,copies may not have any kind of value. But here are maybe some ways that they can be valuable and useful. So showing these different kind of perspectives on the issue of copies, I think is also a good step forward.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

101. Buzludzha Always Centered Visitor Experience. Dora Ivanova is Using Its Structure to Create a New One. Jan 23, 2023

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.

But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation.

But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.

In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform.

Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.
01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains”
02:40 The Original Visitor Experience
03:02 Dora Ivanova
03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47
03:35 Entering the Building
04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof
05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves
06:25 The Inner Mosaics
07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show
08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation
09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation
10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform
11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built
12:30 Acting before memory becomes history
13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary
14:05 The Panoramic Corridor
15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society
16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum
17:20 The preservation as proof of change
18:05 “Buzludzha is about change”
19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 101. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.

Opened in 1981 to celebrate the grandeur of the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha is an imposing building, an enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria. Rising out of the back of the disk is a tower, 70 meters high, and flanked by two red stars.

Dora Ivanova: It was built to impress. It was built as part of the political propaganda and education as they called it during this time. Its shape looks like a UFO, actually. This is also on purpose because it had to show how the socialist idea is contemporary, it’s the future.

Visiting the site, you can still see the care that went into the sightlines – the approach from a winding mountain road, the drama the first time the building comes into view, the photo opportunities of the still-distant building flanked by smaller sculptures. There’s an eerie similarity to some well-designed corners of Disney theme parks, using scale and space and sightlines to transport the visitor – a Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains.

But the original visitor experience didn’t end outside the building. In those first years during communism, the building received tour groups by bus every four hours. Visitors entered Buzludzha through the front doors underneath the cantilever of the disk. Once inside, they were led up the stairs and into the belly of the building, which makes up an impressive amphitheater surrounded by colorful mosaics of Marx and Lenin, and a variety of Bulgarian communist leaders. At the center of the domed ceiling is a hammer and sickle mosaic whose tiles spell out the words, “Workers of all nations, unite!”

But visitors haven’t been able to officially enter Buzludzha for many years. Those front doors are locked and grated with metal bars – the worn concrete covered and covered again in graffiti, like the words “Enjoy Communism” written in the style of the Coca Cola logo and the all caps motto “forget your past”. I’ve visited Buzludzha many times over the past few years, but I’ve never been inside. Until now.

Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was open to everybody, but we had to register in before. So it was not open to individual tourism. It was open just to groups who had registered before like a school was coming to visit or the local factories coming and seeing the monument. People will come here and then , they'll go first down the staircase to leave their coats and bags, so you cannot go with them up. And then you'll put something on your shoes because you cannot go on the bright, perfect white marble with your dirty shoes from outside.

This is Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova, founder of the Buzludzha Project. When I first met her in 2018 – and presented her story on episode 47 of Museum Archipelago – she was working on a proposal to save this monumental building. But since then, the scope of her work has increased significantly.

Today, after more than three years of work recruiting international conservators, stabilizing the building, and basically running a fundraising and PR campaign for the monument, Ivanova hands me a hardhat, unlocks the grate, and leads me inside.

Dora Ivanova: click “And be very careful with the staircase and that you don't fall somewhere.”

Because there’s no perfect bright white marble underneath visitors' feet anymore. After communism collapsed in Bulgaria in 1989, Buzludzha just sat there, exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures. The regime changed, Bulgaria headed towards a democratic form of government, and people started stealing anything they could from Buzludzha – the glass from the windows and from the red stars, the copper roof and marble sculptures which were sold for scrap, and the perfect white marble perhaps used in a bathroom remodel.

Ian Elsner: Buzludzha bathroom!

Dora Ivanova: Yeah, many people have it, I’m sure.

Buzludzha has been a ruin way longer than it was a functional building and that’s why Ivanova and her team's efforts have been focused on stabilization.

Dora Ivanova: As I was walking on the roof, I was thinking, it's like a very ill person who can still get better. And can still be saved and it can still function. And I think if we started this whole initiative like five years later or 10 years later, there'll be very little less of the building to protect.

Protecting the building is a complex process, which requires a lot of coordination between technicians, and a deep understanding of the structure. Ivanova jokes that she used to think saving Buzludzha would take just a month of hard work.

Dora Ivanova: At the beginning I was thinking, okay, this month I didn't manage to save the building, but next month I'll save it! laughs

Today, the blue sky is clearly visible through the roof of the amphitheater, sunlight streaming through the scaffolding erected to preserve the hammer and sickle mosaic on the ceiling. It’s only now that we can safely walk around with hard hats.

Dora Ivanova: So metal sheets like this will fall down and a big pieces of wood like, like this there and bigger will fall. And this is why, on the first place, this building is not safe for visitors because anytime something can fall down, and that's why our task was to, we're thinking could take down only what is needed, but it turned out that everything is unstable and you can just touch it and everything's moving. and also this is like not stopping the water in any way. It's not helping the building because we have just like a metal sheet here, but it, the water falls from the three sides of the metal sheet, so you're not stopping kind thing.

Dora Ivanova: We had a ceiling out of aluminum, with rings, many rings, which are missing, which was completely stolen from the very beginning. And the top covering was this copper sheet, which was also stolen in the nineties in a very professional way, by the way. This is absolutely hard work. Now we know it.

Ian Elsner: You have new respect.

Dora Ivanova: Well, I'm very respectful to the thieves. It was very hard!

Surrounding the amphitheater are colorful mosaics– this is the inner mosaic circle, we’ll get to the outer mosaics a little later. Yes, here we see Marx and Lenin, but there’s also a mural called The Victory of September 9th, 1944 – when the new Bulgarian communist state was declared, and another called The Fight depicting workers with pitchforks defeating a fire-breathing beast.

Dora Ivanova: There was a partisan fight, anti-fascist. And then the idea is that three generations are gathering at Buzludzha and that the fathers were working or fighting for freedom. And then the sons were fighting for socialist freedom. And so they wanted, that's absolutely propaganda stuff. So they connect to the history, which is very well acknowledged and which is very well perceived by the public and show that communism is the final best stage of the entire Bulgarian human history.

Dora Ivanova: So something like this. So that they were using everything on the way to make their point.

Visitors to Buzludzha in the 1980s would have stood in the amphitheater and watched a narrated light and sound show projected onto the inner mosaics, lighting up certain figures at dramatic moments in the story.

Dora Ivanova: So the people will be watching this show of light and sound. They were standing, they were just watching from here, the mosaics. They were also not going to the mosaics to see them up close. So this was the place to experience the building. So there was a voice and there was lightning on the different spots and they were telling for different images.

Ian Elsner: And the computer equipment to play this recording. That was all stolen soon after?

Dora Ivanova: Yes, absolutely everything, yes. we don't have the video and we don't have the text as well.

But Ivanova thinks that it’s only a matter of time until these types of details surface. Up until now, ensuring that the mosaics don’t fall any further and the ceiling won’t collapse has been her team’s main concern.

Dora Ivanova: I'm sure over the time we may might get to this information as well. But this is again connected to the topic of interpretation. Until now we are very focused on the structural integrity of the building if it stands and if the music falls. And we had all our attention on those first topics, and I'm sure that's when we dig deeper into the story that we can find information like this.

Dora Ivanova: I'm not sure we'll find all of them but we had a lot of archives, mainly drawings and mainly construction papers. So not really a lot about the mosaics or the artwork because it was a private archive and not so much about the visitors' experience.

Dora Ivanova: There are three tour guides, who were working here who are telling the stories. And one of the lady who wrote down everything, she knew it until today. Like, all the words and how it was and what. So we have a little bit from that.

These tour guides, using the building as intended, would have been reading from a script that the communist party approved – that version of history where communist bulgaria was the end of history.

But Ivanova and her team realized that the preserved building could host the stories of the people in the audience, presenting as many narratives about communism as there were lived experiences.

Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was different. In the beginning I was thinking, so now we go there and we preserve this building and it'll go very nice and I'll be very happy because the building will be preserved. But with the time I realized it's actually not the motivation line and the purpose line a nd the idea of the whole thing.

Dora Ivanova: Of course, we want to preserve this building. But the goal is not the entire purpose of the journey. So the journey is the purpose.

Now she recognizes that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.

Dora Ivanova: What we really want is a storytelling platform and that's the building tells stories and this is the best place to tell these stories and to allow the different views, to allow the criticism to allow different points of view.

Dora Ivanova: I mean, for some it was the labor of their life, and of course they're touched in some way to it. For others it was the most terrible time. And that's okay. And both things are okay and they can live simultaneously in the same world. So we don't, doesn't need to destroy the one or the other narrative.

Collecting stories from all over Bulgaria conjures an interesting symmetry with Buzludzha’s original intent – as a celebration of Bulgarian communism, the idea was that all of Bulgaria would contribute to the construction.

Dora Ivanova: There are so many different actions that they did in order to make it a national big initiative. So first it was funded by the people. So it could be funded by the party.

Dora Ivanova: This was not a problem for the party, but they decided everybody should participate. Not everybody can work on site, so everybody should donate. So it was not really a choice, but I think everything back then was working more or less like this. Yeah. So it was from the one side ordinary thing, but from the other side. Yes, it was, mandatory donation or just taken out from the people. And I even know that some children were collecting paper and selling it for reuse, like to recycle paper so that they can get the money and donated for Buzludzha.

Dora Ivanova: And the second thing is that there were 6,000 people working and out of them 500 were the, solders so there were military forces which constructed it., there were many people who were craftsman. But there were also a lot of volunteers. Again, “volunteers.” laughs

Of course, the critical difference is that this time, while anyone can contribute, nobody has to. Ivanova and her team have been gathering interviews, oral histories, and anything that could be presented in a future interpretive center. And like stabilizing the roof of the building, the team feels an urgency to act before memory becomes history.

Dora Ivanova: We have to take the stories before the people are gone. And do have this entire big project, I'm sure with this interpretation and analysis and historical research. But we don't have the time because we have to take the stories now. That's why we are doing this oral history campaign and those will be major stories that we are going to tell inside of the future building.

But it’s critical that the storytelling platform provided by the future interpretive center doesn’t end with the collapse of communism in Bulgaria – because that narrows the focus and complicates the politics of preserving Buzludzha in the Bulgarian context. Before Ivanova started the project, the building’s fate was presented as a binary: destroy it as a symbol of the collapsed communist government, or restore it to its former glory as a rallying cry to reinstate the system that built it. Charting a different path means acknowledging the decades since the collapse and the need for a space to reflect on the communist period. That’s why the team is also carefully documenting what happened since – including the graffiti.

Dora Ivanova: The general idea is definitely that the graffiti will be saved. And if all the graffiti or not, it's a matter of further discussions. But I think this is also something nice on the way that we don't have like a super fixed idea. This is how it's going to be. And this is exactly the target. Is exactly the function. This is exactly the way it's going to look like. But this is, again, a process and it develops according to needs, ideas, functions, people,partners, and interests.

After the original visitors watched the narrated light show, they would have climbed stairs to the outer walkway around the amphitheater, called The Panoramic Corridor. Here, with giant windows facing the rest of Bulgaria, visitors would have contemplated what they just watched and connected it to the familiar landscape. It’s windy out here since there’s no glass anymore, but the views of the surrounding mountains and valleys are beautiful – almost like a real life background to a propaganda poster. Opposite the windows are the outer mosaics. Unlike the inner mosaics of Communist figures and dramatic battles which were dyed with artificial paints to make them colorful – there’s a lot of red as you might imagine – the outer mosaics are made of natural colors from Bulgaria’s rivers – they have a grayscale dignity to them. Here the titles of the murals are things like The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society.

Dora Ivanova: So not only the people had to donate their time and money, "voluntarily" but also the nature. So the mosaic stones from the outside mosaic ring are from all the different rivers in Bulgaria, so that the nature gives it's gift and participate in this project. So this is The Care For Next Generation. This is the name of the mosaic and it's actually even the name of the entire, project for preserving the mosaics because this is the also our idea care for the next generation. So we have the mothers and the children. There's one very pretty chicken there.

Dora Ivanova: Yeah, so this is one of the unpolitical mosaics: this is The Role of The Women in Our Society – a very nice mosaic. So we have the woman with many hands because she has many roles and has to do many things. So she's concerned. The woman lover and the woman caretaker. And the woman everything possible.The woman who wants to run from all this stuff cuz it's too much.

It’s so easy for me to imagine this Panoramic Corridor as part of a future museum at Buzludzha. The connection between the past inside the building and the future of the country, spread out beyond the windows, makes me shiver – not just because of the wind. Even though I didn’t choose to become a Bulgarian citizen until a few years ago, I can feel the potential standing in front of the open windows pointing in all directions.

My mom is Bulgarian, but I was raised in America. My choice to connect with Bulgaria was future-looking – I’m interested in where Bulgaria is going and I want to help where I can. But I’ve been struck by the general cultural unwillingness to talk about the communist period that defined the country until fairly recently. The physical remains of that era and ideology are scattered around the country, but for many Bulgarians, they remain in the background – overgrown and unmovable – a kind of cynical proof that not much will change.

Which is why what Ivanova and her team have done is so impressive. She says that the visible signs of recent preservation has actually gotten people to pay attention for the first time – to think that there is movement, and this physical proof has made people more likely to come forward with stories or offer to help.

Dora Ivanova: You change people's ideas and you involve people and people find motivation and inspiration and, and they multiply, multiply the, the effect. So, I think that the building is the tool to create this impactful processes in this site. But I think this is also the only thing that can keep you motivated

While there is a brutal finality in what Buzluzdha was built for, a way to present the final triumphant stage of history – a finality that turned out to be brittle, the way that Ivaona and her team are approaching it gives it the flexibility to mean whatever Bulgarians will find important.

Dora Ivanova: And so at the end of the story, I think, it's about values, it's about change. I think even mostly about change. It's about the changing nature of everything which is related to humans and to humans, beliefs and human understandings. It's such a powerful place to tell these stories. And also with the traces of time, with the traces of, if you want to religious somehow communist ideology, but with all the graffiti with all the comments of the people, with the time, with all the artwork, which was created already here, which will be created here in the future. When you have this visibility and the, especially, this is a very visible thing. We cannot deny it. Yeah. And I think somewhere that is the motivation and the meaning for me.

Thanks to the efforts of Ivanova and her Buzludzha Foundation, you’ll soon be able to go inside Buzludzha. Exactly what you’ll find inside is still being worked on, but it will all be in a future episode of this show.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

100. The Archipelago Museum Nov 28, 2022

In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum.

As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name?

And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview.

So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs
Archipelago Museum.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Why is Ian in Finland?
00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days
01:30 Same Name
03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum
04:05 Naomi Nordstedti
04:30 Life on the Archipelago
06:04 Opening the Museum
06:54 Boats
07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition
08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes
10:40 Thanks For Listening
10:54 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 100. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum.

Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”.

Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland”

But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago.

Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…”

When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands?

And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck.

Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland.

Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ”

Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left”

For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, instead of my podcast.

It didn’t really bother me – well maybe a little – but no, it didn’t really bother me. Archipelago is a great word, and the museum was all the way in Finland, and it certainly was around for longer.

But as my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. I would wonder what they were up to. I wondered if they had heard of my podcast. Maybe they came across it one day? Maybe I was annoying them with my similar name. Every few months, I would think to contact the museum, to highlight the similarity and hopefully make a new friend – only to remember that they didn’t have an email address. An old email address, from an archived version of their website, bounced back with an undeliverable error.

The more I thought about it, the more it sank in: the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview.

A few years later, with help from those of you who have supported the show through Club Archipelago, visiting the museum finally became possible.

I decided to hop on two planes, book a rental car, spend a night in an airport hotel in Helsinki, drive down the coast, and visit the Archipelago Museum in person.

Even if there was nobody there willing to talk to me, it would still make for an interesting 100th episode.

Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left. Then your destination will be on the right.”

Field Audio - Ian: All right. This is the Archipelago Museum.

Field Audio - GPS: “Your destination is on the right.”

Field Audio - Ian: “ Wow. I think it's open and I see a WC sign! Okay, I'm gonna park where it says parking.

The Archipelago Museum is a long, old stone barn on the Gulf of Finland that’s packed full of boats.

Field Audio - Ian : *walking over stones”

Field Audio - Ian: “How are you?”

Field Audio - Naomi: I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Welcome.

Field Audio - Ian: “I’m very good, thank you! I would love to visit the museum. One ticket, please.”

Field Audio - Naomi: Yes, you are welcome. That’s 5 euros. With card or cash?

This is Naomi.

Naomi Nordstedt: “Hi, my name is Naomi and I work at the Skärgårdsmuseet Rönnäs [Rönnäs Archipelago Museum]. So as the cashier, guide, whatever.”

Naomi told me that the museum usually gets one or two visitors from the US every summer.

Naomi Nordstedti: How did you find us? Or like how did you, how did you come to Finland of all places?

Field Audio - Ian: “Well, to visit this museum!”

Naomi Nordstedti: Oh wow!

The Archipelago Museum tells the human story of life on the archipelago off the coast of Finland. The main area of the exhibition underscores the centrality of surviving among the remote islands by fishing, seal hunting, and cattle breeding. The main idea is

Naomi Nordstedti: To see how people lived within the archipelago and like how the archipelago has sustained the people, while the people sustain the archipelago. The sea is very important. That's the most important thing. And it, since it's very like the people who live here live very scattered cuz it's a bit remote. We have couple neighbors, but then to one side there's nothing but forest for like kilometers. So you become closer with the people who live close by. Sometimes you have to go a bit further to meet. And that becomes also part of like, you meet up with bigger groups of people a couple times a year because you know, you might not see them that much otherwise.

And also just as a side point, most people here have a boat. Most people sail. That's just a thing. You do that here.

People have been making this part of the archipelago their home for 500 years, and the reasons always come back to geography.

Naomi Nordstedti: We know there's been a medieval village here since the 13th century. Over here, there used to be an inland lake. This is all, there's no water over here now. And so like the water line is over here. Which means that there used to be back in 1414 or 1421, there have been records that people used to live here and this used to be like a bigger, for that time, bigger town, because this made it possible for commerce to happen way more since this led to the sea.

The medieval village disappeared and over the centuries, various families lived in the area, surviving, using boats, and building barns. By the mid 1970s, the stone barn we’re in now sat abandoned.

Naomi Nordstedti: This building was left and it was like, nobody owns it. Nobody was like, just kind of living in it. It's a beautiful building. So then it was just decided that a lot of people like around here were like, well, what should we do with this building? It's a beautiful building. It's a shame to just let it go to waste. So this is the guy who was like, hey, should we start a museum? Cuz he made boats. And they were like, yeah. There was a lot of, support from the local community and from the other people. 1985 is when we opened. There's a lot of beautiful things there and so much history that isn't really known about.It's only known about like from families and within families, and they tell the stories. So it's nice that other people get to see too.

As the museum’s brochure says, “the boat occupies the central position in being the prime tool of the population.”

Naomi Nordstedti: There is information about how to build boats, how boats have been built throughout the centuries, and our collection of the working boats that have been used here in the archipelago.

Most of the stories that the local community tells about the archipelago are indeed told through boats – school boats, the differences between the boats that year-rounders used compared with the people who built summer cottages, the engine development and design through the 20th century, and the way that boats were used to used to smuggle alcohol during the period of Finish prohibition 1919 to 1932.

Naomi Nordstedti: People in Finland have never drunk as much alcohol as they did during the prohibition. So it did not work, but it was interesting. This is how they smuggled alcohol. They filled these canisters with pure alcohol. Most of them from Estonia or some from Germany as well. You can fit about 10 liters in one of those. Then they filled those canisters, this whole thing, filled them up like that and then they took the rope, attached it to the boat, and then went, and then if they got caught by the authorities. Like you can see over there on that picture they'd cut the rope and then this thing would fall to the bottom. And then they have this little thing. So this is a buoy. It's attached to , a bag of salt or sugar, which means that they would go to to bottom. And then the sugar or salt would dissolve in a couple days. So jump up again and they could recover. Yeah, they had a lot of clever ideas.

The Archipelago Museum is only about 500 meters from the coast, so I ended my long journey by walking over to see the archipelago for myself.

Field Audio - Ian: *walking over stones”

Field Audio - Ian: So here I am on the Gulf of Finland, overlooking the archipelago overlooking some islands. Extending out into the distance, some boats and people in them, some islands that are not much more than just rocks… it’s a good place to think about 100 episodes.

Doing museum archipelago has helped me expand my understanding of museums – far more than I expected when I started work on episode one. It allowed me to have conversations with people at tiny museums – museums so small they haven’t been built yet – and giant museums where change seems impossible. It enabled a new relationship with guides, exhibit designers, and the visiting public.

Walking through almost 100 museums for this project, it’s still tempting to see each museum as an island – every episode, it’s easy to focus on just one museum, to examine their unique collection or an updated exhibit.

But zooming out helps too and is useful in its own way. Anyone’s local museum can be a beloved fixture, but museums as an institution have a centuries-long history undergirding white supremacist, colonialist, and racist ideologies and helping them flourish. Interrogating museums as a whole hopefully allows us to better recognize colonial structures embedded within an individual one.

We can’t forget the power that museums hold. And by examining the larger forces acting on this rocky landscape of museums, we have the chance, if we’re careful, to wield that power for better uses than the ones that created museums in the first place.

Thanks for joining me on the journey so far. I’m so excited for where we get to voyage to next.

Thanks for listening to 100 episodes of Museum Archipelago!

99. Museums in Video Games Aug 08, 2022

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players.

But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting.

Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process.

In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside.

Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0)

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin
01:23 Joe Kalicki
02:06 Namco Museum
03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games
04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith
05:25 Occupy White Walls
07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins
10:11 Animal Crossing
11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums
12:44 Joe Kalicki’s new podcast, Panoply
13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
13:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 99. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games. The central interpretive throughline, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry through 50 individual games: from Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT to the latest console and PC games.

But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with original controllers.

The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games their year of their release: games like Asteroids or Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment, early home computer games like Oregon Trail live inside your parents home office, while the home-console classics like Super Mario Bothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early 90s suburban home in the U.S.

So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum — but what about putting a museum in a video game?

Joe Kalicki: I think we're in a very important place right now where we need to assess the value of fully digital educational experiences in the context of the museum. But particularly I also wanna explore the value for educating everyday people on how to appreciate and interact with brick and mortar museums as well.

This is interaction designer Joe Kalicki.

Joe Kalicki: Hello, my name is Joe Kalicki. I'm an interaction designer, musician, and podcaster.

Kalicki remembers the first time he encountered a museum-like space in a video game.

Joe Kalicki: In the late nineties, the Namco company published a series of games called Namco Museum, and this was earnestly the first attempt to create mainstream historical documentation for video games and it’s a very pivotal example for me in thinking about digital museum spaces.

Namco Museum was a digital version of the Computer Games Museum, but all the video games presented in the collection, like PacMan and Dig Dug, were originally made for Namco arcades.

Joe Kalicki: They actually had a fully 3D-rendered museum space. You would walk into the front, into the atrium where a receptionist would greet you. And then you would walk into the main hall and go into the specific wing of the gallery for a particular game. And you would walk around this space and you could do things like view concept art for the game or view documents and artifacts related to the game.

Joe Kalicki: And then of course you could go on and you could play the game. There was theming in each of the wings to represent something about the game itself. And as a, I guess I was probably six or seven when I played this, this was mind blowing to me. Not only was this game taking the time to put me into a place and contextualize these games that I was playing, it provided so much more value and actually frankly, kickstarted me really deeply caring about the history of video games and the history of these things that I was interacting with rather than just hopping in and playing a round of Dig Dug, and then turning it off.

Playing Namco Museum today, it’s easy to see the match between a museum space and the video game technology of the 1990s. White gallery walls are easy to render, and navigating through sparse 3D rooms and hallways is a prerequisite for any first-person shooter game.

And white walls with the occasional object is all it takes to read as “museum” and – as we talk a lot about on this show – “museum” conjures up a whole lot of cultural signifiers about how we should treat the information and objects presented.

The fact that Namco Museum decided to present its games in a virtual gallery space was a way to signal that these video games were important – a statement that these games were worth engaging with like historic or artistic object.

A 2021 project by game designer and programming instructor Kate Smith called Museum of Memories delibrary employs a gallery space to signal important objects.

Joe Kalicki: Kate Smith and a couple other developers created Museum of Memories as a project for a game jam. She had an open invitation to send in an item that people cared about. Send in an audio recording of yourself saying why you care about it. And then she put together a very straightforward museum space: classic pedestals and wall mounts and whatnot.

Joe Kalicki: And somebody would send in a reference photo or, so a cookbook, for example, and Kate and her team would create a 3D version of that item, put it on display and you can listen to why these objects are meaningful to the people that submitted them.

Then there are experiences that invite the player to create their own museum space – not just contributing objects and stories. Kalicki points to Occupy White Walls, where people construct a museum and fill it with art – then invite other players to come inside.

Joe Kalicki: It's a free-to-play game that was released a couple years ago and essentially you are dropped onto a plot of land and you have a building and it's kind of a rinky dink little art gallery, and you can essentially remodel it and take art that either people have uploaded into the game or exists in the public domain. And you can essentially decorate and design your space. And you could totally build a bunch of white walls and throw things up that you like.

Joe Kalicki: You can do it as densely or sparsely as you like. You can create sort of fantastical spaces and then present the work that you're placing into the 3D space in a way that pleases you, or maybe you want to create some sort of lack of harmony, and dissonance and you know, freak people out. And the really cool thing about the game is that you can hop into other people's galleries and you can go take a look.

Joe Kalicki: And I checked it out last night, for example, and I teleported to somebody's gallery and there were five or six other real people walking around and looking at things and chatting about the art. And the cool thing about it too, is there would be,something that I would've formally a piece of art that I would've associated with a Tumblr or a Deviant Art back in the day next to a Caravaggio or other Renaissance classics and whatnot.

In the same way that Roller Coaster Tycoon – a video game from the late 90s – encouraged players to think deeply about the logistics of designing a theme park, Occupy White Walls gives players control over a museum gallery in a way that’s really difficult to achieve in real life. But by doing so, it asks players to think critically about museums in the real world.

At a certain point, the cultural signifier of a museum space could become limiting – if designers and developers can make anything at all, why make white walls and display cases?

The latest versions of the Assassin's Creed series of video games feature something called a Discovery Tour. In the Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins, which takes place just before the Roman occupation of Egypt in about 40 BCE, the video game’s players – free from their assenination duties – walk around the crowded ancient cities of Alexandria or Memphis on a guided tour.

Joe Kalicki: And this era, which the game has built out for the purpose of you running around and, you know, killing people just to put it simply – they stripped away all of that and your avatar, your character could walk around the world and basically take a guided tour of basically every nook and cranny of Egyptian society at that time.

Joe Kalicki: So you could walk into a city and a nice, documentary style narrator would talk to you about the city and what the various classes of people would do in the city. You'd walk through the markets and observe that. But as you reach certain locatio ns, if you would go into a tomb for example, and there would be a sarcophagus, well, an image viewer would pop up and you'd be able to look through some of the high resolution photos that were used for reference modeling or other purposes.

In the Discovery Tour, the cultural signifier of a museum is replaced with the cultural signifier of a narrated guided tour. The level of detail – both in terms of historical research and digital recreation – is the primary selling point of the main game. But since studios had to put in all this work anyway, it’s not too much of a stretch to build an educational module on that same foundation.

Joe Kalicki: Every game that's created there's something called a like a content bible or development bible, or, there's various names for it. But the idea is it's kind of like the master guide for the world. And it helps when you're basing your game in an area of the world that's been heavily researched and documented and actually existed that can become very fleshed out very quickly. Especially these triple A where there's many, many, many millions of dollars, budgets, exceeding massive blockbuster films going into these games.

Joe Kalicki: So, why not create some additional value out of it? Personally, I would love if companies like this could release modes like that either for free or in some context where, yeah, you're not getting to do the thing where you're running around and, jumping off of ledges and assassinating people, but you can access this big, beautiful world that all this work went into.

We’re probably already at a place where museums in video games are easier to access than museums themselves. Since its initial series release in 2001, the popular video game Animal Crossing has featured a village museum where players can place culturally or aesthetically valuable items that they find in the world of anthropomorphic animal.

Joe Kalicki: for a child thinking about this in a, in a real, ground level situation where you are not a person that has the lifetime and historical context of what museums are.

Joe Kalicki: It's the early 2000s, and you're playing one of the first Animal Crossing games: you may or may not have even been to a museum yet. And you're going around the world and you're finding precious items that you care about. You’re excited that you caught the butterfly or you dug up a fossil or a rhinoceros gave you a painting or whatever it is.

Joe Kalicki: And when you donate those to the museum and then you see them represented and you see them respected and displayed proudly there's that may be a formative experience for someone even knowing what a museum is. And so that person then goes on a field trip or they travel with their family or whatever, and they're gonna go to a museum and they're gonna say, somebody had to find all this stuff. Somebody had to bring it here. And they had to decide that this belonged in a museum rather than keeping it in their house.

And one final point blurring the line between visitor and player. All of these games rely on video game engines – the foundational code on top of which these games are built. Occupy White Walls uses the Unreal Engine, while Kate Smith used Unity to render realistic museum spaces in Museum of Memories.

These engines, designed and tweaked for video games, are also the fastest and cheapest ways to develop interactive exhibits for museums. I use Unity for exhibits I develop because that gives me access to a whole toolbox of solved problems (like realistic lighting, 3D model support, and a stable tech stack) meaning I don’t need to worry about making a custom solution from the ground up.

At the Computer Games Museum in Berlin, even the interactives that aren’t the video game artifacts – interactives displaying information like text and images – are built on a game engine. And the interactives at your local museum probably are too.

I wasn't able to find a game in the Computer Games Museum that featured a museum-like space: so I could have the delightful recursion of being in a museum in a video game in a museum. But with more and more museum-like spaces popping up in video games, it’s only a matter of time.

Joe Kalicki is starting a podcast called Panoply – the first episode releases on August 15. The podcast is about learning through oblique strategies and will feature interviews with musicians, academics, and historians and is not afraid to be obscure and esoteric. You can subscribe now and listen to the trailer by visiting the awesome URL: panoply.space.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

The next episode of Museum Archipelago is episode 100. To celebrate this milestone, I want to hear from you! I’ve set up a place on the internet where you can send a voice memo to be included in the very special 100th episode.

There, you’ll be presented with two questions: one, where do you listen to Museum Archipelago, and two what museum would you like to hear about on a future episode of the podcast. You can answer by recording yourself, or just writing in a text field.

Visit museumarchieplago.com/party to join the celebration. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks for listening!

Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast, guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Thanks so much to everyone who supports the show by being a member of Club Archipelago. You can join them by going to http://jointhemuseum.club. Thanks again for helping make this show possible.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.

98. At the Panama Canal Museum, Ana Elizabeth González Creates a Global Connection Point Feb 14, 2022

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal’s construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal.

Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she’s determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered around Panama as a point of connection from pre-Colonial times to the present day.

In this episode, González describes the geographic destiny of the Isthmus of Panama, how America’s ownership of the Canal physically divided the country, and how her team is developing galleries covering Panama’s recent history.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 The Panama Canal's Politically Sensitive History
01:20 Ana Elizabeth González, Executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum
01:35 Opening of the Panama Canal Museum in 1997
02:44 Making the Museum About Panama, Not Just The Canal
03:10 Geography is Destiny
03:30 The Isthmus of Panama as a Point of Connection
04:20 A Brief History
04:50 French Attempt at a Canal
05:10 Treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla
06:30 Construction of the Canal
07:00 "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll"
08:00 Martyrs' Day
08:50 Work In Progress: Galleries of Panama's Recent History
09:10 Panama's Recent History, Briefly
11:10 The Museum's Future
11:15 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
12:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 98. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned in school about the Panama Canal told a narrow story.

Ana Elizabeth González: The history of the canal that was told here was told in a way that was very politically sensitive at the time. So it didn't want to ruffle any feathers.. it's mentioned in schools, but not in depth.

Up until 1979, the United States fully controlled the Panama Canal and a 5 mile zone on either side, and until 1999, the United States jointly controlled the Canal with Panama. The presence of the United States, and the politics of the Canal, meant that the safest story to tell was one that was mostly focused on the technological feat of building it.

Ana Elizabeth González: The history was very carefully constructed so that it praised the engineering feat of the United States, but it completely ignored the fact that Panama was home to people from 97 different countries to build this Canal, which causes such a diversity in our country.

Ana Elizabeth González is now Executive director of the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City, Panama.

Ana Elizabeth: Hello. My name is Ana Elizabeth González and I'm executive director of the Panama canal museum, El Museo Del Canal.

González became director in 2020, but the Panama Canal Museum itself opened in 1997, two years before control of the Canal was returned to Panama. The museum – a non-profit which is not government funded – was created out of a hope that, among all the changes, Pamana’s complex relationship to the Canal would not be forgotten.

Ana Elizabeth González: I was in school at the time, but, I remember it was, I think the then President of Panama and the Mayor and a lot of other people that created the board of trustees and I think it was the idea that this history of this struggle to gain our land and to find our sovereignty and the generational struggle that had been going on. There was a fear that it would have gotten lost in memory or forgotten. So I think that the museum back then was created to preserve and study and research everything surrounding the Canal history and promoting the education of what an impact it had.

So for González, the Panama Canal Museum is really a museum about Panama.

Ana Elizabeth González: I think people come with the preconception that the museum is just going to be about how the Canal works and how the locks open fill with water. And we don't really have that in-depth here. That's why the Canal has a visitor center that explains how it works in terms of technology and engineering. But it's something we just brush over here because we deep dive into the history of Panama as a point of connection. And as this route that changed the world.

The first gallery of the museum begins long before the Canal and highlights the unique features of Panama’s geography: a small isthmus that’s both the only way to travel between the North and South American continents by land and also the narrowest land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Ana Elizabeth González: We've been a trade route or over a route of connection. Ever since Panama – well, the territory sort of resurfaced from, from the oceans, because we were always a bridge between north and south America for animal species and then indigenous peoples. So we've always sort of been a point of trade and contact both culturally and commercially. You enter, the first exhibition space, which is the sort of emergence of Panama as a land in this sort of Omni globe that we have, and you see how it connects both landmasses of North and South America. And you go through the exhibition towards the pre-colonial living traditions, and what Panama was like before the Spanish colonization, then the importance of Panama as part of the Spanish crown and monarchy until 1821.

After three hundred years as part of the Spanish monarchy, the isthmus’s geography started to look even more useful to outside interests during the 19th century, as global trade started to pick up. Here, goods and passengers could bypass a much longer and much more dangerous journey around the Strait of Magellan on the southern tip of South America. In 1855, a railway was built across the Isthmus, facilitating the movement of people and goods in time for a wave of the California gold rush.

Ana Elizabeth González: And then in 1881, if I'm correct, the French after the success of the Suez Canal, the French chose to build a canal through Panama. Unfortunately, due to yellow fever and other diseases and badly managed funds, the enterprise did not succeed, but it was bought from the French by the United States through the treaty of, Hay–Bunau-Varilla, which we signed upon getting our independence as a country.

The 1903 treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla granted the United States complete ownership over a 50 mile long slice of land that was to be the Canal. In the gallery, visitors walk through a hallway that’s completely covered in words from that treaty. Powerful words like “perpetuity” and “authority” look down on them.

Ana Elizabeth González: The United States had rights for… well for forever it wasn't even a question of whether or not they owned it. They owned the land where it was going to be built and the land where they had to operate and the land where they had to create their offices and their ports. Back then the country was completely divided, through a gap that was considered the canal zone. And that was United States territory and Panimanians were not free to wander into it, and it did separate the country in a massive way. And that treaty, which no Panamanian negotiated or signed, was actually the seed of our struggle with international relations during the whole 20th century until the CanalI was transferred back to Panama in 1999.

But first the massive task of actually constructing the Canal through that slice of land. The project required enormous numbers of people, and Canal administrators tried to entice workers from all over the world to take part in the project – yet another way that this isthmus was at the forefront of a more globalized world.

Ana Elizabeth González: We had people obviously from the Caribbean, we had people from Europe. We had people from Asia. So there's a big mix and such a big diversity that came with the construction of the Canal.And many of them remained in the country after the Canal was built and they made their life here, but what is also not known is the amount of racism and discrimination that these people faced. Because in order to work in the Panama Canal construction, you were assigned either a gold roll or a silver roll.

So the payroll was either you were paid in American gold or in Panamanian silver and the American gold was reserved for white Americans. And sometimes there were some exceptions with some Europeans, but the remainder of the population whether you were Asian, Caribbean, European, or even Panamanian, you were paid in Panamanian silver. The living standards for silver roll were appalling. The law even, because I'm assuming some of it was important from the Jim Crow laws at the time, they had segregated entrances for silver roll and gold roll. The schools were segregated. And this is a history that not many people in Panama or elsewhere know. And I think a lot of that ripples into certain racial tendencies and racism that permeates through our society today.

After taking people through the construction of the Canal, the museum’s exhibits end abruptly in 1964, with an event known as Martyrs' Day in Panama.

Ana Elizabeth González: And it ends in 1964 because we had a very significant moment in history at the time where students from a high school in Panama peacefully protested with their flag towards the Canal Zone. And there was a scuffle, there were a lot of tensions and in the end, many of the students died, shot by Canal Zone police, or otherwise, and the flag was torn. And at that moment, Panama became the first country to break diplomatic relations with the United States. And we still commemorate that day as the day of the Martyrs' that day. And that was a turning point in the negotiations of a new treaty. For the Canal and that's where we are at the moment, because the next exhibition rooms are completely empty at the moment. We're continuing to renovation plans for those.

González and her team are developing the galleries that feature the rest of the story, up until the present day – this includes the Torrijos–Carter Treaties in 1977 which defined the handover of the Canal at the end of the 20th century, and the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. When the new galleries open, it will be the first time much of this history has been presented in a Panamanian museum.

Ana Elizabeth González: Yeah, it's our next challenge. Many people may not know this, in 1968 we had a coup d'état. the government was deposed and we had a military regime and it's a history that not many Panimanians talk about till this day. There's still a lot of sensibilities I think that could be hurt, from it because there are still people around that were part of both the military regime and families of the victims it disappeared. But it was a big part of our history and it was a big part of the negotiations for the canal because, general Omar Torrijos who signed the Canal treaty with president Carter from the United States was in fact that a dictator and not many, not everybody agrees on that terminology, but, he eliminated political parties. He eliminated media that was not government controlled. We had another dictator until 89 when the United States following a clause from the treaty from 1903, and also 77, which said, they can invade Panama at any point where they, when they think that Canal is being endangered, invaded the country to a lot of human losses, but managed to successfully arrest our dictator.

All of that is a very difficult history to share. And I think that's why maybe in 97 when the museum was created. It was still too soon. But it's something that we're definitely going to tell now. And I think it's going to be a really important dialogue with the people's Panama to remember maybe parts of history that are hurtful to remember, maybe embarrassing to remember, but that need to be remembered in order not to be repeated. So that's our next step.

González says that the new galleries featuring recent history will be open in September 2022. In the century since the Canal was built, the globe has only become more connected – and the Canal remains the world’s biggest trade route. González is sure that Panama’s place as a global point of connection will only grow – and wants to make sure there’s a museum that tells that story.

Ana Elizabeth González: I think it's important for people to know the Canal is not just a recent history. To know that Panama has been a link between peoples and. cultures and points of trade since we've existed is quite important. We've been geographically blessed and such a small country plays such a big impact in the world that it's an honor for me to direct the museum that tells that story.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

Museum Archipelago is turning 100 and you’re invited! Whether this is your first episode or your 98th, I’m so happy you’re listening. How I want to celebrate is by hearing from you. To do that, I’ve set up a place on the internet where you can send a voice memo to be included in the 100th episode.

Visit museumarchieplago.com/party to join the celebration. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks for listening!

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.

97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does. Jan 17, 2022

As the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn’t make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered.

But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Nixon somberly reciting those words. It looks like real historic footage, but it’s fake. Artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund used the text of the original address and media manipulation techniques like machine learning to create the synthetic Nixon for a film called In Event of Moon Disaster. It anchors an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen.

In this episode, Panetta and Burgund discuss how they created In Event of Moon Disaster as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 July 18th, 1969
00:40 The Safire Memo
01:38 Clip From In Event of Moon Disaster
02:30 Nixon’s Telephone Call
03:00 What is Deepfake?
03:30 Halsey Burgund
04:06 Francesca Panetta
04:30 How They Did It
04:50 Why This Speech?
06:02 Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City
07:05 Misinformation By Editing
09:53 Misinformation and Medium
10:23 Museums as Trustworthy Institutions
11:27 What Would a “Deepfake Museum Gallery” Look Like?
13:43 In Event of Moon Disaster
14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 97. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

On July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the Apollo 11 astronauts who were hurtling towards the moon, on their way to be the first humans to land on its surface, didn’t make it to the moon – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Nixon would have to address the nation.

So Nixon’s speech writer, William Safire wrote an address titled “In Event of Moon Disaster.” It’s a short, haunting speech – the first time that billions of people on earth would learn about the failed Apollo 11 mission. Safire notes that before delivering the speech, Nixon “should telephone each of the widows-to-be.” Widows-to-be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t be dead yet, just stranded on the moon with no hope of recovery.

Halsey Burgund: The astronauts are still alive. I mean that – every time I even think of that, I just get these sort of chills. They not only would have been alive when the speech was delivered, but they could have actually heard it.

Then, back on earth, Nixon would have soberly walked up to a television camera, adjusted the speech written on his stack of papers, looked right at the camera lens and said.

Richard Nixon: “Good evening my fellow Americans. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there's no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

But Nixon never said these words. On July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar lander successfully touched down, intact on the surface of the moon with enough fuel to get safely back to earth. So instead of addressing the nation in a sobering speech, Nixon called the astronauts directly in a more awkward but definitely preferable phone call.

Richard Nixon: “Hello Neil and Buzz, I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, And there certainly has to be the most historic telephone call I've ever made. I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have – every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.”

The reason why it’s so hard to tell these two Nixons apart – the real one and the fake one – is because of a technology known today as deepfake.

Halsey Burgund: Deepfake comes from the combination of deep, which is short for deep learning in this case, which is an artificial intelligence technique, and then fake, of course, meaning, you know, something not true. So deepfake is a representation through audio and video of an event, of a person, doing or saying something that never actually happened in reality. And the addendum to that is that it almost always happens without the consent of the individual who is depicted.

The first Nixon, the fake one, was created by Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta as part of a film they titled In Event of Moon Disaster. In Event of Moon Disaster is the centerpiece of a new exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.

Halsey Burgund: Hello. My name is Halsy Burgund. I am an artist and a creative technologist, and one of my most recent projects is called In Event of Moon Disaster, which looks at a deepfake synthetic media technology. And it uses the Apollo 11 moon landing mission as a vehicle to explore this new technology.

Francesca Panetta: Hello, my name is Francesca Panetta. I am an immersive director, artist and journalist, and I am the co-director of In Event of Moon Disaster, a film and an installation about misinformation and deep fakes and an alternative history of the moon landing.

Panetta and Burgund made In the Event of Moon Disaster by combining footage of Richard Nixon giving an unrelated speech and employing video techniques to replicate the movement of Nixon’s mouth and lips. Combined with the contributions of a voice actor and some deep learning techniques to synthetically make the audio sound more like Nixon, the whole video is quite believable and striking.

Halsey Burgund: We've thought a lot about how our project needs to create misinformation to a certain extent, but then it needs to identify what it has done. We need to wrap the whole project in a context, which does the best we can to ensure that people don't leave the experience thinking that two astronauts were stranded on the moon and their bodies are still there and they, and they died. That is the context of our piece. And that is what the speech that Nixon delivers – fake Nixon, synthetic Nixon delivers.

The directors choose to use this particular speech by Nixon for the project in part because it relates to moon landings – already a deep well of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and because the speech is non-political.

Francesca Panetta: When you are face swapping someone onto a video where they haven't consented. Yeah. It is a deepfake. In terms of putting words into someone's mouth it felt like these were words that he could well have ended up speaking. And so it kind of didn't feel so, so morally problematic. And we weren't trying to deceive the public that the moon landing never happened. Again, these were ethical questions we had around not wanting to see more misinformation about the moon landing of which there is a considerable amount already.

In Event of Moon Disaster appears in the middle of the Deepfake Exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image. After visitors have seen historical context about media manipulation, they walk into what appears to be a 1960s living room.

Halsey Burgund: There's a vintage television from 1960 something. And on that TV is playing our film and it's an old CRT TV, and there's a couch in front of it that you can sit down on. There’s a carpet, a shaggy carpet. And then you can sit there and watch the whole film as though you have been invited over to a friend's house to view this historic event. It's as though you're sort of stepping back in time to 1969 and watching this for the first time. But of course things go wrong and it doesn't turn out the way that we all know it actually did. And then you come out on the far side of our installation and then you start to do the demystification process if you will, which is, helping people to understand what they just saw and how it was made and other examples, et cetera.

The actual speech is short – it only takes about 2 minutes for Nixon to deliver it. But the movie doesn’t begin with Nixon walking up to the camera – it actually begins with real footage of the CBS broadcast from that mission.

CBS News Voiceover: “This is CBS News color coverage of Man on the Moon. Sponsored by Kellogg's. Kellogg's puts more in your morning. Here from CBS news Apollo headquarters at Kennedy Space Center: Correspondent, Walter Cronkite.”

But as the video continues, the real broadcast is edited in such a way to show something going wrong with the mission – a disinformation technique much older than deepfake.

Francesca Panetta: I searched through enormous amounts of audio material trying to find any sound of stress in the voices of the mission control and the astronauts, which is really hard because those astronauts are really trained never to sound perturbed or scared in any way. We found one alarm that went off and we repeated it over and over again.

Halsey Burgund: This alarm is going and it's beeping and we don't know what it is and, “Oh no, communications cut off!” And then we kind of leave it up to the viewer to sort of think about what might've happened. And we put in a bit of sort of lunar surface footage to sort of make it feel like, okay, they've crashed but, you're still there with them a little bit.

Halsey Burgund: I forget who coined the term cheap fake, but is what has existed in the, as long as media has existed, there's been the ability to do this kind of deceptive editing, by the way that's happening with audio too. You are going to take my interview and you're going to chop it up and take a piece here and a piece there and put them together, hopefully in a way that represents fairly what I'm trying to communicate. These are very standard editing techniques that more available to everybody nowadays,then some of this is sort of AI enabled stuff like deepfakes. So we're making something fake out of a lot of truths and we're wrapping something fake with a lot of archival, true quote-unquote footage. And, we all know that the Apollo 11 mission did happen. And, we know that Walter Cronkite was a real anchor and covered it and there's all these truths in there, and then we, boom, we hit you with this massive, piece of disinformation that changes everything, but wrapping it in those truths, I think makes it so much more believable.

Beginning with real unedited TV coverage, then moving to real footage edited to tell a story that didn’t happen, then transitioning to the Nixon deepfake speech works really well in an audio/visual medium. That’s the subtitle of the installation as a whole: Unstable Evidence on Screen.

Francesca Panetta: As an artist and director, but also journalists, I think very carefully about the context. In which people come across content. So the attention that they will have, the amount of time they're likely to spend, how they're coming to the project. Because the whole exhibition is set up this way, there is an opportunity to really engage on it on a deeper level than is possible on an online context . There are different crafts for different mediums.

Panetta and Burgund are demonstrating the tools of misinformation in the medium of TV. On this show, we think of museums as a medium too. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most people are more conscious about the possibility of misinformation on social media or on TV than in a museum.

And one of the things that attracted me to this project was seeing something deliberately fake put in the middle of a museum – a medium that still scores very high on the list of most trustworthy institutions.

Halsey Burgund: Bringing it into a museum context in some ways it is a bit odd to bring into this traditionally thought of as a purely authoritative and factual and accurate space to bring something into it that is, in a certain sense inaccurate.

Halsey Burgund: It makes me think about sort of museums when I was growing up the thought of even whispering to somebody while walking through the hallowed halls of the museum was, “oh my gosh, I can't believe you'd even, shhh be quiet!” And now things have, you know, thankfully, and I think this is a positive direction: people are a little more relaxed about that.

The film works so well on a CRT TV set in a living room because that’s how the vast majority of people experienced the actual moon landing. The grainy TV footage is shorthand for the era itself.

Panetta and Burgund have created a believable fake broadcast of a failed Apollo 11 mission. But I would love to take it a step further — instead of the primary medium being TV, what if the project was a fake museum exhibit?

What would it feel like to walk into a dark gallery titled “The Last Moments of Apollo 11.” Dioramas of the lunar surface sit under speakers looping the last radio communication with the astronauts. Somewhere in the gallery, on not a living room TV, but on a flat panel screen is Nixon’s speech, forever echoing words he would have said.

How would the medium of a fake history museum feel different from the CRT TV broadcasting fake history in the living room?

Francesca Panetta: I think it's very obvious from how we all see media technology rapidly developing that, these kinds of tools develop very fast. That will be the case with artificial intelligence as well. Even in just seeing over the few years in which Halsey and I have been working in this area, we've seen incredible increases in what is possible in live face swapping and deepfaking, which wasn't possible when we started this project. I personally have no doubt. This'll be easy to do very realistically in the future. But I think also the familiarity with these kinds of techniques will become more widely known. So just like now, when a general member of the public looks at a photo, they will expect, well, that it's probably been photoshopped or had some filters on it. The kind of techniques of AI I hope will become more generally known by the public. And that's certainly what this project is trying to do is is make people aware about these kinds of possibilities. Because it's a new technique, it is not as widely known as more conventional editing techniques, but that's essentially where we need to get to so that as the technologies develop, so do the public's understanding of those capacities.

You can and should watch the full version of the excellent In Event of Moon Disaster at moondisaster.org.

It’s accompanying exhibit, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen is at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City until May 15, 2022.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast. If you enjoy this show, if you find it a meaningful addition to your week, please support us by joining Club Archipelago. Once you join Club Archipelago, you’ll find dozens and dozens of bonus episodes – including hour plus shows where special guests and I dive deep into museum movies and documentaries. But the best reason to join Club Archipelago is to make sure this podcast continues to exist. You can join club archipelago at http://jointhemuseum.club.

96. Tegan Kehoe Explores American Healthcare Through 50 Museum Artifacts Nov 15, 2021

Public historian and writer Tegan Kehoe knows that museum visitors act differently around the same object presented in different contexts—like how the same visitor excited by a bayonet that causes a triangular wound in an exhibit of 18th-century weapons could be disgusted by that same artifact when it’s presented in an exhibit of 18th-century medicine. Kehoe, who specialises in the history of healthcare and medical science, is attuned to how objects can inspire empathy, especially in the healthcare context.

Kehoe’s new book, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, looks for opportunities for empathy in museum exhibits all around the U.S. Each of the 50 artifacts presented in the book becomes a physical lens through which to examine the complexities of American society’s relationship with health, from a 1889 bottle of “Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters” that claimed to cure a host of ailments to activist Ed Roberts’s power wheelchair that he customized to work with his range of motion.

In this episode, Kehoe describes how her work has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts, how the aura of medical expertise is often culturally granted, and how living through the current coronavirus pandemic changed her relationship with many of the artifacts.

Image: Ed Roberts's Wheelchair, National Museum of American History. Treasures of American History online exhibition.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 The Old State House “Weapons of the American Revolution” and “Medicine and the American Revolution”
01:35 Tegan Kehoe
02:00 Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures
02:30 How Museums Tend to Present Medical History
05:40 Who Is “Worthy” of the Most Care?
08:02 Ed Roberts’s Power Wheelchair
10:06 Ambulance Damaged in the 9/11 Attacks
11:28 Lessons from the Latest Pandemic
13:41 Pre-Order Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures
14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 96. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Museum curator and historian Daniel Neff used to present tours in the Old Statehouse Museum in Boston, the site of the Boston Massacre in 1770. One tour was called “Weapons of the American Revolution” and went into gory detail of the carnage inflicted by bayonets and musket balls.

At the same museum, Neff also presented a tour called “Medicine and the American Revolution,” often featuring the same grizzly battle wounds.

As his colleague and today’s guest Tegan Kehoe recalls, Neff started to notice a difference between the way visitors responded to each of the tours.

Tegan Kehoe: He remarked a number of times that visitors who seemed otherwise temperamentally the same, sometimes even the same visitors would react very differently to hearing about a particular type of battle wound, depending on whether they were on the weapons tour or the medicine tour. And it seemed that people on the weapons tour were imagining themselves inflicting those injuries. And on the medicine tour, they were imagining being the victim and being the patient. And that's just such a powerful way of thinking about how people are relating to the content and museums and how people are relating to history.

Neff’s observation is featured in the introduction of Kehoe’s new book: Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures.

Tegan Kehoe: Hello, my name is Tegan Kehoe. I'm a public historian and writer specializing in the history of healthcare and medical science. I work at the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. And my forthcoming book is Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, which is coming out from AASLH press in January.

Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures looks at the fields of medicine and public health through the lens of artifacts in museums and historic sites around the country. Kehoe’s day job at a museum of medical history, where she researches and writes museum exhibits, has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts.

Tegan Kehoe: Museums, especially generalist museums tackling a medical history topic will often go for the gruesome because that is a hook for people. And I very much understand why exhibits tend to latch onto the gruesome and the macabre in medical history. But it can be a little bit narrow sometimes. And then the other thing that I see in exhibits especially of museums that do focus on healthcare or medicine is this narrative of progress. Of sort of the march of scientific progress always moving forward. And they'll go for sort of emphasizing the way in which medicine before a particular period was particularly primitive. And there isn't necessarily a particular set of imagery or exhibit style choices that goes with that the way there is with the sort of the more gruesome stuff. But I think this idea of “look how great progress is”, which I don't disagree with, but it's another way that it can be a very narrow way of looking at healthcare.

Each chapter in the book centers around a different historic artifact, arranged in chronological order to tell the story of American medical history. Chapter one is a wax model of a scrotum showing what was know as children’s chimney sweep cancer at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – typical of the models doctors and medical students used to study a variety of diseases in the eighteenth century. Chapter 24 is a bubonic plague pathology slide at a collection at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, from a cluster of outbreaks that happened along the U.S.’s Gulf Coast in 1920.

By grounding the narrative in objects, Kehoe is doing two things – first, copying the presentation style of most museums for artifacts that are scattered across the United States. And second, providing a window to a particular time and place. As Kehoe writes, “Looking at healthcare history through artifacts can help us see the people of the past as people, people who drank beer, waited for the nurse to read their high temperature, or hoped against hope that the new medication they took would prolong their life.”

Tegan Kehoe: Not being able to play with placement and just having those sort of static images, gave me a lot of freedom. So in the chapter about an infant incubator, I wasn't able to find any stories about a baby who might have been in that incubator, but I found a lot of information about a baby from a few years off from when that incubator was in use, but from the same county, really closely connected to the story. And I could trust the readers making it clear that this baby wasn't in this incubator, but I can trust them to sort of make that connection. So I was able to kind of go off on this in a way that I could do in a museum exhibit if I had room for it, but in a small object label, you wouldn't necessarily be able to. And so I could use that freedom a little bit to get the fuller story.

That fuller story, the story of American healthcare, touches on the societal ideas of who was worthy of a lot of care, and who was worthy of less care. And these societal ideas go both ways – Kehoe maps out varying levels of trust in medicine and medical institutions over time – something that medicine shares with museums.

Tegan Kehoe: I think that one of the similarities that's really striking to me is that in both medicine and museums, that expertise is–well, the expertise is real, it's based on study and work and certain methodologies–but that aura of expertise is kind of culturally granted.

Tegan Kehoe: And in both medicine and museums, it's culturally granted by the dominant, powerful culture within our society. It's white middle-class and upper-middle-class with certain educational backgrounds are the ones who trust doctors the most and trust museums the most. I don't have stats to back that up, but I know that the people who are most likely to be disregarded by either their doctor or by a museum exhibit are also the ones most likely to say, that's not for me. I'm not welcome there. I don't fit in there. Authority is messy when people feel like that authority is top-down and doesn't involve listening. And I think that's something that rings, throughout both medicine and museums.

Kehoe points to various movements in which doctors or self-styled doctors challenge established healthcare institutions, using newspaper advertisements or their own self-funded schools to create authority.

Tegan Kehoe: I have a chapter on 19th-century alternative medicine and there the problem or the perceived problem was that conventional medicine was thought to be really dangerous, largely because it was. If this is kind of the 1830s is sort of the era when the chapter begins, a lot of bloodletting, as in, cutting someone open and letting them bleed until they were weak. And that was thought to restore balance in the body. But the problem there was an ideological one for patients. Do we go with what doctors are prescribing or do we go with this street salesman who says that if I take the right herbs, I'll be able to treat myself and I won't need doctors ever again?

An artifact from the 20th century is the modified power wheelchair that belonged to activist Ed Roberts, now in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Tegan Kehoe: I think one of my favorite objects in the book is the power wheelchair that belonged to Ed Roberts, who was one of the biggest pioneers of the disability rights movement and the independent living movement within disability rights. He became disabled as a teenager because of polio. And one of his memories of that experience that he used in talking about his experiences–because he was a very eminent public speaker who campaigned for disability rights–he would talk about a doctor telling his mother within his earshot that she should hope that he dies because if he lived, he would be nothing but a vegetable. And that ended up sort of galvanizing him, but this really disgusting level of prejudice coming from someone who was supposed to be helping him through the huge changes affecting his body at the time. And so he would have absolutely seen a doctor as an authority figure, but not an authority figure in the sense of someone to trust. That would be an authority figure in the sense of someone who might be doing gatekeeping, someone who might be changing your level of access to the care that you need.

Tegan Kehoe: He got a power chair while he was in college, so that he could have more independence. He sometimes related that it was so that he could go on dates without having an attendant chaperone the date because he needed someone to push his wheelchair. And at first he was told that he couldn't use a power chair because he didn't have the correct range of motion in his hand to be able to use the controls. And he realized that if they installed the controls on his otherwise commercially-built wheelchair backwards, that the range of motion he did have in his hand was completely adequate to operate the chair and so it was a customized chair in that way.

One of the last artifacts presented in the book is an ambulance damaged in the September 11th attacks, in the collection of the 9/11 memorial museum in New York. Like always, the artifact is the jumping off point to a much larger story–in this case, Kehoe details the history of emergency medical services–from transport of the sick during epidemics to battlefield ambulances during the American Civil War.

Tegan Kehoe: The artifact in this chapter is an ambulance that was on the scene, and that was badly damaged after the second tower fell. So the two EMTs who had been in the ambulance, they both survived. They were not in the ambulance at the time that it fell. But they were responding before the second tower fell. And I felt so incredibly lucky that both of them had given oral histories that were publicly available. And so I can read their experiences of that absolutely horrible day and being separated from their work partner for hours with no way to find out whether the other person was alive and just these absolutely gut wrenching, heart wrenching stories. And I think that 9/11 is a perfect example of that as well as we're always living through history, but that is a moment that everyone understood immediately that it would be historic.

The ambulance from 9/11 is an example of an artifact that was collected for a museum soon after it was used – I’m not sure what medical artifacts, if any, were collected after treating the wounded of the Boston Massacre.

It won’t be long, if it hasn’t happened already, that museums will display commercial and homemade masks from the current coronavirus pandemic along with banners thanking healthcare workers.

The coronavirus pandemic is not covered in this book – Kehoe started writing the book before the outbreak.

Tegan Kehoe: In terms of the actual writing of the book: about the second half of it was during the pandemic, which certainly changed my research process and also changed my relationship to the material a little bit, because I was writing about medical history while living medical history.

Tegan Kehoe: I mean, we're all living history all the time, but it's a little more noticeable during something like a pandemic.

But while the coronavirus pandemic is not covered in this book, you can feel your own experience of the pandemic in almost every artifact. Before the outbreak, I didn’t think much about how health and healthcare don’t exist in a vacuum. I didn’t appreciate how the decisions that patients, providers, researchers, and public health professionals make are not only informed by correct or incorrect understandings of current medical science, but also by a host of other factors.

Tegan Kehoe: People who are dealing with healthcare, whether they're dealing as patients or providers or researchers, or some combination, they're always looking for answers to questions. And what answers they come up with is going to be influenced by science, but also by culture. By what kind of trust relationship they have with the other people in the equation. By the technology that's available in the day. By so many other things.

Tegan Kehoe: And so when you're able to take a step back and look at kind of the various ways that people are involved with health care and with medicine holistically, there are a lot of common themes, but very few are sort of universal. And that idea of everyone approaching it with questions and there are a lot of influences that affect their answers is the kernel that I'm actually confident in saying is universal. And I think that that's also the place that my book really connects to the pandemic

You can pre-order Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures anywhere books are sold, but I recommend going to bookshop.org/shop/tegankehoe, where you can both support independent bookstores and check out her other writings.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

95. The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland Knows Even the Most Futuristic Technology Will One Day Be History Aug 30, 2021

In 1969, noticing that technological progress was changing their fields, heads of Finish industry came together to found a technology museum in Finland. Today, the Museum of Technology in Helsinki is the only general technological museum in the country.

But of course, technical progress didn’t stop changing, as service coordinator Maddie Hentunen notes, and that can be challenging for a museum to keep up.

In this episode, Hentunen describes the museum’s philosophical stance on technology, how the museum balances industrial development with more open source design practices, and how the museum thinks about its own obsolescence.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 1969 in Technology
00:49 Maddie Hentunen
01:02 The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland
02:34 The Museum’s Building
03:51 Original Exhibits
04:50 Today’s Exhibits
07:07 The Museum’s Philosophical Stance on Technology
10:29 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 95. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Ian Elsner: Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Ian Elsner: 1969 was a banner year for technological advancement: for one, it’s the year humans first walked on the moon. It was also -- and this is not unrelated to technological advancement -- right in the middle of the Cold War.

Maddie Hentunen: 1969 in Finland was kind of a fraught time politically in a way that it was still the era of the cold war and we're right next to Russia.

Maddie Hentunen: So our political relationship with Russia has always been kind of a tightrope. We've always gazed eastwords with care and especially at that time.

Ian Elsner: This is Maddie Hentunen, service coordinator at the Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland.

Maddie Hentunen: Hello. My name is Maddie Hentunen, and right now I am the service coordinator here in the museum of technology in Helsinki, Finland.

Ian Elsnsr: The museum of technology was founded in that banner year of 1969 by heads of Finish industries. The idea was to make a general technology museum in Finland. The point is that it’s not siloed by industrial sector.

Maddie Hentunen: I think at that point, the global sort of Zeitgeist, the technology of the time was taking massive leaps forward. So at that time there were these, let's say there was a coalition in a very loose meaning of the word of these gigantic, in Finish scale, gigantic, industry had sort of, let's say, the forest industry, which in Finland has always been massive And then there was the metal industry, which includes the mining industry and, and the chemistry industry thinks like this, who felt the need for some kind of preservation because they started to, in their respective fields, notice that things are changing. And a lot of the old sort of wisdom, a lot of the old ways are gone. Pull it behind us in the past.

Maddie Hentunen: I feel that is very unique in a way or very, nice in that sense is that they actually came together and made that decision that we will make this sort of generalized museum of technology instead of making a forestry technical museum or a chemistry museum or stuff like that. It was a cooperative mission, so to speak. So that's actually how first our collection started to build. We've got these big donations from different fields, industrial fields that are still big parts of our collections.

Ian Elsner: The newly-founded museum decided it would use Finland’s first water purification plant -- built in 1877 -- as its main exhibit building -- it’s a delightfully squat round building that used to be filled with sand that the water filtered through -- water that would eventually be used for drinking or firefighting.

Maddie Hentunen: Helsinki started to grow pretty fast after the 1850s or so. So after that there was a real need for purified water. And, also, because the city was mostly built of wood. So also the fire security was a big question. But yeah, basically this is a giant round building, which was filled with water and sand. This place of course is very much part of the Finish industrial history. So it was like the perfect place, because at that point in the 1960s, when it turned into 1970s and when then this plant was closed down and it and the space was empty.

Maddie Hentunen: One of the most common things that people say when they walk in that door, they say, oh, it's bigger on the inside! I was a Doctor Who fan and I sort of got the TARDIS-like feel when I came in.

Ian Elsner: In this building, the museum first opened to the public in 1985, and some of these original exhibits were still being displayed until fairly recently.

Maddie Hentunen: Back then it was a very different museum. There was still a lot of the old museum thinking sort of like straggling. One of the 1985 exhibitions, the old communication exhibition, was still here, I think, five years ago. So it had a really long sort of shelf life that exhibition. And you could very clearly see that it was from a very different time that it was filled with artifacts. It was filled with stuff. And also the text were like super long, unreadable mostly, only in one language, which was Finnish at that time.

Maddie Hentunen: It was not very approachable. It was really cool to just look at things, but it was not super informative. You had to sort of guess what is this? And then there was those wall of texts somewhere, and you thought you had to go and find to be able to connect the artifact with the text. As we know, then the whole museum thinking around exhibitions has changed drastically.

Ian Elsner: Today, with the new exhibits, the museum features much shorter informative text in three languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English. As the Finnish industry has changed, so have the exhibits: giant machines used for forestry and mining share the open, circular space with tiny cell phones made by the Finnish firm Nokia and interactive touchscreen exhibits that teach the basics of computer programming.

Ian Elsner: Visiting the museum in 2021, the Nokia cell phones look impossibly out of date -- in the way that history tends to compress itself, a phone from 15 years ago looks almost contemporaneous to a TV camera from 50 years ago. But it wasn’t that long ago, before the arrival of the iPhone, that it seemed like Nokia phones -- proudly designed in Finland -- would continue to be ubiquitous.

Maddie Hentunen: Maddie Hentunen: Everybody had a Nokia phone at some point and that all the movies were. I remember when The Matrix came out and they had, they had their, their phones and everything that it was like, it was everywhere. And I think we're sort of still in that mind frame, even though Nokia has kind of declined from that.

Ian Elsner: But the way the museum approaches the gulf between past, current, and future technology is fascinating -- the museum knows that even the most futuristic technology will one day be history.

Maddie Hentunen: The past, the present and the future are all equally important. I think the Museum of Technology is in a special position in that sense, that technology changes so incredibly fast right now and has been doing that for the past 100 years or so, in Finland and everywhere else too.

Maddie Hentunen: So we actually really need to be able to preserve the present and also stay one step ahead of the curve, so to speak. So we can guess what's going to happen in the future so we can start the preservation of those things so that we can sort of in the future, have a comprehensive set of material or remains in our exhibitions and in our collections.

Maddie Hentunen: And I think that is one thing that we really want also for other people to see in our exhibitions that museums are not all about the past. Museums are not all about, the material remains of the very old age. It's also about what happens now and what's going to happen tomorrow because all of that is going to turn into history at some point.

Ian Elsner: The Museum is a museum of technology, not a museum of industry. So how does a museum that was founded by industry heads explore the full range of technological advancement, including, say open source methods that are often developed outside of industrial contexts?

Maddie Hentunen: So this is like the innovation part is something that we have really heavily tried to integrate it into our museum thinking here. We have cooperated with a lot of smaller companies or smaller, hobby groups. Right now we have this one special exhibition that has amateur radio technology. That has been built in very close collaboration with the actual hobby groups and the people who are the specialists in that who know a lot more about this, than any of us here in our museum staff do.

Maddie Hentunen: That is one of the things that we really want to heavily push moving forward that we want to collaborate with people from various backgrounds, also of course,the big industry, because that is obviously part of technology, but also the smaller groups. And of course the innovation often begins somewhere small and not in the biggest sort of fields.

Maddie Hentunen: It's somewhere small and somewhere like very personal. So those are the stories we actually love. Of course, as museum professionals and cultural professionals.

Ian Elsner: Like the tightrope of Finland’s political relationship with Russia, the museum walks the tightrope of Finish industry’s relationship to society. Those moon landings probably wouldn’t have happened in 1969 if the US and the USSR weren’t locked in a cold war.

Maddie Hentunen: We come clean with the fact that industry is a big polluter. Many of the things that have been done in this field and are still done in this field are incredibly harmful for the environment. So I think our stance in that is like, basically, acknowledging that fact and recycling is a theme that comes up in several different exhibitions that we really want to lift up.

Maddie Hentunen: In Finland, the recycling part of everything has been going on since after the war because of the war reparations that we had to pay to the Soviet Union. The after war years were desperately poor in Finland. So everything kind of had to be recycled. And we had to get really innovative about recycling.

Maddie Hentunen: But still, the parts that come from industry because, consumers, we can only do so much, but one of the really big things about being environmentally friendly is that we get the big industrial movers and shakers to understand that they also need to recycle their industrial waste, which can be incredibly harmful and they get such vast quantities of that.

Ian Elsner: The museum features a giant claw used to pick up and process metal scraps, as well as a completely crushed car, a block of twisted metal and rubber. Apparently, even the way cars are crushed has changed -- now the rubber is removed first to be recycled separately.

And that’s why Hentuen says that the museum’s new rule is short shelf lives for their exhibits.

Maddie Hentunen: So we are happy with our current exhibitions because they have all been renewed quite recently, but they have not been built to last forever. Maybe that is one thing that has changed from the past museum thinking that now we have built this exhibition and is going to stay like this until the apocalypse.

Maddie Hentunen: And, right now we built a shelf life for our exhibitions. So like maybe ten years max. And then it has to be reviewed again.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

94. Jazz Dottin Guides Viewers Through Massachusetts’s Buried Black History Jun 28, 2021

The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the American South has been slow to reverse. But Jazz Dottin, creator and host of the Black Gems Unearthed YouTube channel says it can be just as slow in New England. Each video features Dottin somewhere in her home state of Massachusetts, often in front of a plaque or historical marker, presenting what’s missing, excluded, or downplayed.

The history discussed on Black Gems Unearthed has been left out by conventional museums, which are among the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life, according to the American Alliance of Museums. This trust may have more to do with power than truth-telling — and today, there are many different ways to build trust with an audience online. Shows like Dottin’s might point to where our new relationship with the authoritative voice is heading.

In this episode, Dottin describes how working as tour guide and creating travel itineraries influences her work today, how she came up with the idea for Black Gems Unearthed, and what the future holds.

Image: Jazz Dottin in front of Emancipation in Boston, Mass.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 “Always Read The Plaque”
00:45 Jazz Dottin
01:00 Black Gems Unearthed
01:20 Hopkinton, Massachusetts
02:00 Exploring Black lives in MetroWest, MA in the 1700s - Black Gems Unearthed
02:26 Museum Archipelago 42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans
02:55 The Legacy of Slavery in New England
03:50 Working as a Tour Guide
05:35 The Idea for Black Gems Unearthed
08:21 Museums and Trustworthiness
09:36 Where The Name Comes From
10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖
11:39 What’s It Like Giving A Tour on A Segway?

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 94. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

There’s a saying among history nerds: always read the plaque.

Roman Mars: “Always read the plaque.”

But of course, the plaques don’t tell the whole story. Maybe a better mantra would be “start by reading the plaque.”

Jazz Dottin: If I see plaques, I have to stop and read them. But with Black history, you know, there's not as many plaques, if any at all that are describing events and people and things that have happened in different areas across the country.

This is Jazz Dottin, creator and host of a new YouTube channel called Black Gems Unearthed.

Jazz Dottin: Hello, my name is Jazz Dottin and I am the host of Black Gems Unearthed, which is a YouTube series where I talk about Black history around the state of Massachusetts.

So I am an experienced tour guide. I develop travel programs and itineraries, and now I'm working in the academic world at a university in Massachusetts.

Dottin grew up in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston.

Jazz Dottin: A small town, suburb outside of Boston. 21 miles or however many miles a marathon is where the start of the Boston marathon is. When I was growing up in Huffington, I don't have memories of learning about local Black history. And I was just curious about Hopkinton as I was starting to make these videos and started to do a little bit of digging.

An episode of Black Gems Unearthed describes when she figured out that a stone wall next to one of the streets that she drove down as a child was probably built by enslaved Africans.

Jazz Dottin (from Black Gems Unearthed): “It came up in the research that Africans likely built the tiers that you can see on the grass behind me, you can kind of see three layers, and they also may have done work on the wall that’s behind me too.”

Jazz Dottin: And it just feels eerie to know that there was slavery in this town that is just known for being a nice suburb to live in. That is part of the legacy that people may or may not realize it's like in our DNA.

In episode 42 of Museum Archipelago, we spoke with Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray, who in 2018, erected one of the first plaques detailing New Orleans’s slave trading past.

The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the Amerian South has been slow to reverse. But Dottin says it can be just as slow in the North.

Jazz Dottin: I just think it's the power of storytelling. We've told the stories for so long that the North was the place where people went to be free and it was valued. And we did everything in our power to end slavery. And the South was bad because they enslaved people, but really hello! We were connected in the institution of slavery. So we really need to address the past and discuss it and look at it because it has shaped our communities and the way that we view ourselves, which may or may not be accurate.

The connections to the institution of slavery in the American North come both from a time when slavery was legal in New England, and later when slavery was illegal but pwerful families profited from the slave trade and related buisnesses. Dottin was familiar with some of these connections -- say, a mansion belonging to one of these families -- because she worked as a tour guide for over 10 years.

Jazz Dottin: I actually graduated from Temple University from their Tourism and Hospitality program. I did a lot of work as a tour guide in my undergraduate program, like I used to give tours on segways and then I gave culinary tours. So I was the actual guide, but then I also have experience developing itineraries. I worked for Road Scholar, which is an educational travel company for older adults. And there, I actually pieced together itineraries based on a theme, say, people want to learn about the history of women's suffrage. We would put together an itinerary that had lectures and trips to visit museums and local sites that related to getting women the right to vote.

One of Dottin’s biggest challenges as a tour guide was trying to present Black history to an audience that wasn’t expecting it.

Jazz Dottin: Most of our itineraries were European-centric. So you're seeing allhese sites that are well-known tourist attractions, but where is that black history? And so that might have meant including a lecture about the fact that there were people that were enslaved that work here, or including maybe a music presentation from a group that's from the area that could weave together their story of how they came to live in the area. So it always felt like I was just sprinkling in a couple of fun facts. The itineraries are never specifically about Black history. At least the ones that I was working on. It's just the reality of developing itineraries for a primarily white audience and an older adult audience is just that wasn't necessarily what they were we're looking for.

Dottin first came up with the idea for a video-based guided tour focusing on Black history in Massachusetts in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

Jazz Dottin: Yeah, it was a result of George Floyd's murder. I was just very upset. Seeing what happened and just realizing that so many people were shocked by what happened when this is something that happens on a regular... Black people are murdered regularly throughout the United States for, for small issues and for no issues whatsoever.

So I was very upset by what happened. And I was upset by the reactions that companies had. Some that did not want to make statements. Some that did make statements that just didn't feel like there was any action behind it. So I decided, you know what, now's the time I'm going to make videos because I have a smartphone. I am going to get Adobe Premier and the software. I need to be able to make this.

I had an interest in creating walking tours, but I just realized, you know, we're also in the middle of a pandemic. Why don't we just focus on making videos? And it'll help me learn the information better. And perhaps people will enjoy watching it too.

By making and editing the videos, Dottin has complete control over the topics and what is being presented. The format is effective: every video features Dottin looking right at the camera on site somewhere in Massachusetts -- often in front of a plaque or historical marker. Her well-researched narration, supplemented by historical photos and passages from documents, presents what’s missing, excluded, or downplayed.

The episodes weave together multiple stories, all tied together with a strong sense of place.

Jazz Dottin: I'm researching the topic and then I'm hunting around for photos that are relevant. That's probably the hardest part. Where can I find photos, pictures, and items that I can include, then actually making the video.

Dottin says it takes about a month to make a video. The research buttresses Dottin’s effective presentation style, which features genuine excitement and subtle sarcasm -- it builds trust, and as a viewer, I would prefer to listen to Dottin explain something instead of another tour guide if given the choice.

Jazz Dottin: So you know what? I do watch a lot of videos on YouTube also as another way to learn history as I'm making videos too. And sometimes the videos are a little dry, so I try and make the videos sound like I am talking to friends because I wouldn't talk to friends in the same way I might deliver information in more of an academic setting. Just trying to kind of change the energy around how information is presented. The American Alliance of Museums often says that museums are the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life. And the statistics are remarkable: some surveys indicate that museums are the second most trusted news source after friends and family. We’ve argued before that this high level of trust might have more to do with power than truth telling. But today, there are many different ways to build trust with an audience online, and shows like Dottin’s might point to where our new relationship with authoritative voice is heading. In this model, the museum becomes the middleman. The plaques become the setting. Given that museums have excluded Black history from their halls for so long, it’s appealing that projects like Black Gems Unearthed allow people to go directly to the source -- a personality that’s trusted even more than museums.

Jazz Dottin: So I have been reading books for a long time on Black history, and I've kind of pinned down where people have lived and where events have taken place. So I figured, you know what, why don't I just make some videos about this because more people than just my friends that happened to be with me could benefit from knowing this information. Black history is kind of hidden. It's not in clear sight, but then I was also thinking about how Black history is so important. It's really valuable. And I was talking to my partner about it and he was like, “oh, gems are formed in bedrock under a lot of pressure.”

And I was like, yeah, you're onto something. There’s Black Gems! And we're Unearthing them! Yes, this is the name: Black Gems Unearthed.

You can find Black Gems Unearthed on YouTube by searching for Black Gems Unearthed. The project also has a website at blackgemsunearthed.com. In every episode, you’ll see Dottin in front of a plaque somewhere in Massachusetts, telling a much deeper story than what’s printed.

Jazz Dottin: I'm very hopeful for the future of the museums in Massachusetts and in Boston that they'll keep sharing information about Black history and just history from groups that have not oftentimes been showcased.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

You love Museum Archipelago. But maybe you don’t love that each show is only 15 minutes. Well now, there’s a way to support the show while getting more.

By joining Club Archipelago, you get access to hour-long episodes where I dive deep into pop culture about museums — movies like 2006’s Night at the Museum, 1966’s How To Steal A Million, and 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire — with friends and fellow museum folks. It’s a lot of fun!

If you want to kick back and listen to a whole lot more about how pop culture reflects museums back to us, join Club Archipelago today for $2 a month at jointhemuseum.club. Thanks for listening.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links. Visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.

What is it like giving a tour on the segway?

Jazz Dottin: Exhilarating? Oh yeah. I mean, all of your senses are coming together at once because you're riding the segway. You're talking about what's around you. And you're also keeping an eye that all of the participants are staying in line behind you and are not going into traffic or having any other issues...

93. Bulgaria’s Narrow Gauge Railway Winds Through History. Ivan Pulevski Helped Turn One of Its Station Stops Into a Museum. Jun 07, 2021

In 1916, concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders, a young Bulgarian Kingdom decided to build a narrow gauge railway to connect villages and towns to the rest of the country. The Bulgarian King himself, Tsar Boris III, drove the first locomotive to the town of Belitsa to celebrate its opening. But the Septemvri - Dobrinishte Narrow Gauge Railway would far outlast the King and the Kingdom, the communist era that followed, and the rocky post-communst period.

Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region as a vital link to remote villages with no road access. But decades of neglect have left many stations crumbling. Train enthusiast Ivan Pulevski, a member of the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway,” helped found the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway in one of these abandoned stations. A sign on the building says the museum was built “for people, by people.”

In this episode, Pulevski describes the decision to build the museum using only volunteers, how to interpret multiple eras of Bulgarian history through the lens of a railway, and why they have had no plans to seek official museum accreditation in Bulgaria.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Winding Through History
00:50 Septemvri–Dobrinishte narrow-gauge line
01:10 Ivan Pulevski
01:33 Stoyan Mitov and the Engineering of the Railway
03:20 Tsar Boris III
03:50 The House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway
04:40 No Electricity and No Water Supply
05:30 After The Collapse of the Communist Era
05:55 Organization "For The Narrow Gauge Railway"
06:32 Restoring the Building / Making the Museum
08:30 Bulgarian Museum Regulations
10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 93. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

The waiting room of Tsepina Station, south of the Bulgarian city of Septemvri in the Rhodope mountains, sits under the watchful eye of portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Georgi Dimitrov -- the revolutionary communitst leaders of Russia and Bulgaria respectively. But the communist period is only one of the eras of Bulgarian history the narrow gauge railway winds its way through.

Construction on the railway, and the station, began in 1920, when a young Bulgarian Kingdom was concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders. Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region. Each day, 10 times a day, a diesel train passes by the station.

Ivan Pulevski: Many people rely on this railway because it's their only transport, their only way of transport, because there are many villages which has no road.

This is Ivan Pulevski, a train enthusiast who is also one of the founders of the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway, which sits inside Tsepina station.

Ivan Pulevski: Okay, my name is Ivan, Ivan Pulevski and I'm from Plovdiv. I'm currently a student in the Technical University of Sofia and I study transport technology and management.

Creating the railway through such mountainous terrain was a transport technology and management problem for 1920. The first two engineers who were invited by the government to plan the railway quit because of the technical difficulty of building it. Instead, the honor fell to a young engineer called Stoyan Mitov.

Mitov’s innovation was to build the railway in such a way that if you looked at it from above, the track would form numbers -- eights and sixes as the tracks pass over and under themselves to change elevation in such a tight space, The design also called for numerous tunnels.

Ivan Pulevski: This is actually a map of how it crosses. And it looks like eight. And these are two forms, which are more like six. So it was really, really complicated project: so all these tunnels. The railway actually has 35 tunnels.

In order to do that, the rail needed to be narrow gauge, which could handle the tight turning radiuses. The gauge refers to the distance between the two tracks of the railway: in this case, 760 mm. Every other working railway in Bulgaria today is standard gauge, with a distance between the tracks almost double that at 1,435 mm.

The painstaking construction continued for over two decades. Slowly, more and more villages and towns were connected to the rest of Bulgaria.

Ivan Pulevski: It was pretty primitive actually, because they didn't have multiple techniques and all the works were done by hand.

Finally, in 1939, the railway reached the Bulgarian town of Belitsa. To celebrate a more interconnected Bulgaria, none other than the Bulgarian King, Tsar Boris III drove the first locomotive to the city.

Ivan Pulevski: He was the only monarch in Europe who had a legal driving license for a train, for a steam engine. And the elderly people who still remember this moment say that they saw two miracles of their time: the train and the king.

The majority of the House Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway concerns the daily functioning of the station after Tsar Boris III, and the beginning of the communist era in 1944. By 1945, the railway was complete in its current form, stretching from Septemvri to Dobrinishte.

Ivan Pulevski: It was actually probably the period in the timeline that the railway was at its peak. And in 1966 it had 71 trains per day.

The station’s waiting room is preserved with pictures and information about the different types of carriages and locomotives from the era. There’s a ticket counter window looking into the main control office of this station -- all using technology that was not regularly updated.

Ivan Pulevski: This station had no electricity and no water supply. So they used lanterns with gasoline and these phones, which are only connected to the Telegraph wire. And we still have no electricity.

As a result, the artifacts in the control office have an old-school charm -- you can see the hand-written diary of each train that came through, you can handle the heavy metal keys for the track switches, and you can even “validate” your ticket with the official heavy-duty ticket validation machine.

The station manager lived at the station, in rooms right above the control office and waiting room. Managers would get buckets of food and water delivered by train.

After the communist era collapsed in 1989, things got worse for the narrow gauge railway, and with no station manager, this station building fell into disrepair.

Ivan Pulevski: After the collapse of the communist era, many factories closed and actually the railway was not really maintained and the total abdication of the government made things so complicated that in 2003, all the freight trains were cut.

Pulevski’s organization, called “For the Narrow Gauge Railway” fought against cutting passenger services too.

Ivan Pulevski: Seven years ago they decided to cut some of the passenger friends as well. These people had no option to go home from work. Well, they have the train to go to work, but they did not have a train to go back. So fortunately, because a friend of mine who is actually part of our organization, decided to take some actions and the Bulgarian state-wide ways decided to put on track these trains as soon as possible.

As part of the cuts, stations like the one we’re standing at got removed from the schedules. In 2015, the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway” decided to do something with the abandoned building.

Ivan Pulevski: At first we decided not to make it a museum, but to just -- it was in really bad condition, so, decided to just fix some things. And then we had to think of a purpose. Why? Why we do this and decided to make it a museum, because it was the best solution. We don't have a museum for this railway.

The museum was created by Pulevski and other volunteers over the course of two years. The Bulgarian National Railway company repaired the station’s roof, and people donated money, time, and artifacts to be displayed in the museum.

Ivan Pulevski: In 2017, we opened the museum. It was a big opening actually. We had more than 100 guests at the time and it was really interesting, but unfortunately it's in the middle of nowhere, as you can see, and the maintenance -- it's hard.

The reasons for the maintenance issue are the same as the reasons for the railway in the first place.

Ivan Pulevski: We had a person, a retired person who used to come here to open the museum on the weekends, but he had some medical issues, so he does not come anymore. And since we are a voluntary organization, we did not have the funds for a salary of a person who will be here all the time. And also, there is no water supply or electricity, it is not the best place to work.

Today, a tour of the museum is available by appointment. The organization has acquired some display cases they hope to soon fill with more artifacts, and plans are in place to build a scale model of the station and surrounding railway.

But Pulevski is less interested in getting the museum officially accredited as a museum -- because that would come with all sorts of Bulgaria n museum regulations.

Ivan Pulevski: I shouldn't be saying this actually, but we are not a legal museum because in Bulgaria we have a procedure to be a museum. It's pretty complicated to be a museum in Bulgaria. The regulations sometimes are kind of left from years of socialism and actually they have even regulations for an expert to come to your museum and decide which object should be exposed. We wanted to make a museum for the narrow gauge railway. Why would a person who's an expert, but well, we can argue about that here and say, “okay, this and this and this.”

The best museum’s I visited are just like small museums made from the ground. Because of somebody who is really passionate about the topic or the museum.

Pulevski and the other volunteers hope that the museum, which is now adjacent to a road, becomes a place for motorists to stop, learn about the railway, and hopefully consider taking the train for their next journey.

Ivan Pulevski: The railway itself is that it is not only an attraction because the people still use this training. And it is part of the experience of seeing these people using the train every day, sharing their emotions, their worries, et cetera.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

You love Museum Archipelago. But maybe you don’t love that each show is only 15 minute. Now, there’s a way to support the show while getting more.

If you want to kick back and listen to a whole lot more about how pop culture reflects museums back to us, join Club Archipelago today for $2 a month at jointhemuseum.club. Thanks for listening.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links. Visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.

92. The Pleven Panorama Museum Transports Visitors Through Time, But Not Space May 03, 2021

The Pleven Panorama transports visitors through time, but not space. The huge, hand-painted panorama features the decisive battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought at this exact spot, which led to Bulgaria’s Liberation. The landscape of Pleven, Bulgaria depicted is exactly what you see outside the building, making it seem like you’re witnessing the battle on an observation point.

Bogomil Stoev is a historian at the Pleven Panorama, which opened in 1977. The opening was timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire’s surrender following the battles and the siege of Pleven. The building itself is etched with the story of the siege and the battles, and because the landscape is filled with the remains of the combattants, this was the only structure allowed to be built on the spot.

In this episode, Stoev describes how the creators of the Pleven Panorama learned from previous panoramas, how the museum contextualizes the history of Bulgaria’s Liberation, and how this museum has become a symbol of the city of Pleven.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Skobelev Park and the Remains of the Dead
01:06 Bogomil Stoev, Historian at the Pleven Panorama
01:36 Our Story Begins in the 14th Century
01:58 April Uprising
02:40 The Start of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78
03:10 The Pleven Panorama
05:16 General Skobelev
06:00 General Totleben
06:10 The Siege of Pleven
07:00 December 10th, 1977
07:40 Episodes 47 and 54 of Museum Archipelago
08:07 Building the Museum
08:46 A Brief History of Panoramas
10:15 Pleven’s Enduring Symbol
11:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 92. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Skobelev Park just South of the Bulgarian city of Pleven looks like a typical Bulgarian park. A pleasant place to sit on a bench, walk around with friends, and enjoy the day.

Which it is.

But to the people of Pleven, the area has another name. It's known as the Valley of Death, the site of the decisive battle of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which ultimately led to Bulgaria's liberation from the Ottoman Empire after 500 years.

Bogomil Stoev: Around 70, 80 thousand people, they died here and their remainings, they are here. They were not buried in the cemetery. They were using the trenches and they would put the bodies and just put mud on them. So here we cannot dig. You cannot do anything, any kind constructions and this is why when they built the museum in 1977, we are the only structure here.

This is Bogomil Stoev, a historian at the Pleven Panorama museum — the only structure in Skobelev Park.

Bogomil Stoev: Hello, my name is Bogomil Stoev. I'm a historian and I work in the museum Panorama Pleven and this is actually my job to work with visitors, to show the fights and the history of our city, city of Pleven. This was the main place of the fights that actually liberated Bulgaria and Bulgaria exists at this day because of this war and this fight.

Story of this war and this fight actually begins in the late 14th century when the Ottoman Empire conquered the land controlled by the Second Bulgarian Empire, leading to the long period of Ottoman rule.

Bogomil Stoev: [For] 500 years we didn't exist like a country. We were not existing as a country, only as a nation. And after this war, Bulgaria was again on the map of Europe after 500 years.

By the 19th century, Bulgarian nationalism started to take hold, culminating in the April Uprising in 1876. Bulgrians rebelled in towns and cities across the territory against the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire's response to the insurrection — a violent suppression by massacring civilians — led to an outpouring of public support for the Bulgarian cause.

Bogomil Stoev: Koprivshtitsa and Panagyurishte, those are the main places for the uprising. This is actually the punishment for the Bulgarian people because they made the uprising. 30,000 innocent people were killed this was a big news around the world.

The coverage of the Ottoman's suppression was one of the factors that led the Russian Empire to declare war on the Ottoman Empire.

Bogomil Stoev: And one year after the rebellion on 24th of April in 1877, Alexander II, the Russian emperor, he declared the war. And this is the beginning of maybe [the] 10th, 12th war between the Russian and Ottoman Empire, but in our history, in Bulgarian history, it stayed as a war for liberation.

All of this context is briefly presented in the first gallery of the Pleven Panorama — as visitors walk up the stairs to the main attraction: the Panorama itself.

Bogomil Stoev: And this is the main part of the museum actually.

Wow.

Bogomil Stoev: So this part of the museum, it's actually the unique part. The name of the museum is because of this part here: Panorama. The name starts in Greek. It means, looking around yourself and the idea is that when you go in a museum like this, you can see actually the real place.

The Panorama is huge: one unbroken cylinder of painted canvas wrapping all the way around the room.

Bogomil Stoev: It was hand- made. This is on canvas. It's one big piece. It's 115 meters long and it's 15 meters high. 15 meters here in Bulgaria are like four floors of a building. 13 painters did everything here in four months.

Everything in the room — the lights, the atmosphere creates the illusion that you're standing at this location in the afternoon of September 11th, 1877. It's as if the canvas is a window — the mountains in the distance, the rolling hills in the foreground are all exactly what you would see if there were actual windows in the building.

Bogomil Stoev: And the idea of this part here, or the museum is actually to show you the fight for the place that you're sitting right now. We will go on the roof of the museum: this is the view. This is not a place somewhere around the city. This is exactly the place we are right now.

The focus on the exact location mirrors Pleven's geographic destiny — this was the only place for Russian troops and their Romainain allies to enter the territory because their access to the Black Sea was blocked due to the Crimean War. The trade routes and the paths over the mountains were such that whoever controlled Pleven could control access to southern Bulgaria and Istanbul. So this is where the Ottoman Empire tried to stall the invaders' progress. And it almost worked. September 11th, 1877 was the third attack on the Ottoman defensive positions. On the canvas, Russian troops — under the command of General Skobelev— stream towards you in two main divisions, with guns and bayonets. A third division of Romaian troops capture a nearby position.

Bogomil Stoev: The whole park here is by the name of the person that you can see over there on the white horse. So this is General Skobelev, he was in charge of the soldiers here. And from here he wanted help to go and liberate the city.

We, the museum visitors, are put in the position of the defenders, the Ottoman soldiers, surrendered by two battlefields.

Bogomil Stoev: The only successful fight at this day is the fight here for the place of the museum. And this is why we are here. So 13,000 soldiers came from the green hills that you can see over there that were crossing the Valley. They separated on two and they attacked at the same time.

Looking north, you can see the city of Pleven as it would have looked in 1877, one of the largest cities in Bulgaria at the time.

The battle resulted in so many casualties that the attackers switched tactics, and brought in General Totleben. Totleben decided to conduct a siege of the city of Pleven, still under Ottoman control.

Bogomil Stoev: The idea of Totleben was very different. So he didn't rely on soldiers to fight for the place. As you can see here. His idea is actually to use the place. You can see that the city is in the Valley. It's very easy to surround the place so that nothing goes in and nothing goes out. For 45 days, no food, no water, the water mills that were in the city, they were not working. The soldiers, they started to die from hunger, from diseases. Actually the people of Pleven started to actually die from hunger and diseases. They are telling that the city was like tomb.

The siege was successful in forcing the Ottoman soldiers to break out of the city: after another battle, the Ottomans surrendered on December 10, 1877. Bulgaria was finally back on the map of Europe. The Pleven Panorama museum opened exactly 100 years later, on December 10th, 1977. 100 years is a long time, and Bulgaria looked very different. In 1977 Bulgaria was a satellite state of the USSR, operating under a communist regime. I asked Stoev if the political environment — and the story of Russian armies contributing to Bulgarian liberation — was one of the reasons for creating the panorama.

Bogomil Stoev: Our museum was made from volunteers and from donations and it's not part of any political things, we were just representing the fights that actually liberated Bulgaria.

And so that's different than something like Buzludzha?

Bogomil Stoev: Yeah, yeah that's made from, for the government and from the government and it was something different as an idea.

Buzludzha — the concrete flying saucer monument that we covered on episodes 47 and 54 of Museum Archipelago — comes to mind because it was built only a few years later in 1981, and it has a similar feel: an imposing, disk-shaped structure of pressed concrete with a vertical column or two. But the comparison ends there. While Buzludzha was constructed to make the communist party look futuristic, the architecture of the Pleven Panorama itself is etched with the story of the siege and the battles of the past.

Bogomil Stoev: This building was built to be the museum. It was not something that already existed and they used. This vision of the building here is something that was part of the history of the city. How? You saw the spikes, they represent the two battlefields. You can see the structure that is on the rings.The first three rings that are the upper part of the museum. Every ring represents one attempt to liberate the city. And then the siege is the big ring that's down in the museum. So this is the idea. When you see the museum to see the three attempts, then the siege and the two battlefields.

The shape of the building supports the massive panorama inside. 1977 was long after the peak in popularity of European panorama painting or cycloramas, as they tend to be called in North America. They were a way to create an immersive environment by hand — an early example of virtual reality. The landscapes and the battles they portrayed — almost always in custom built-buildings — presented spectacle without words, and like modern immersive experiences, each little detail helped complete the illusion. The Pleven Panorama learned from the panoramas before it. The studio that built it had experience with other panoramas. They knew the color temperature the lights had to use to make it feel like sunshine. They knew how sensitive the canvas is to heat and humidity, so they built the museum so that only 30 people would be in the room at any one time, for a maximum of 10 minutes — but with two staircases leading to other galleries, the visitor flow could be continuous. The surface in front of the panorama canvas, but beyond the viewing platform, is littered with artifacts — cannons, makeshift camps, broken wagon wheels. It's all positioned to create the illusion that the scene continues into the painted canvas.

Bogomil Stoev: Everything that you can see, the uniforms, all the weapons. They are actually real, they were not made, they're found here and they're real. And they were used in the war.

Of the approximately 100 panoramas in the world, the Pleven Panorama is one of only 19 extent examples in the classical style.

Bogomil Stoev: This is the old way how you make a museum like this, you make a painting, that's handmade. It's on canvas. It's with oil painting. And it was made here on the place of the museum. The modern panoramas they can be prints or even they can be all digital, where you have even sound, you'll have some kind of lightning, even a smell. It can be full experience for the visitor. So this is not a modern type of museum.

It's as if lot of things came together perfectly to create this panorama — the innovation was doing the older-style panorama correctly, with enough resources, and with the technology to protect the canvas. In a city teaming with nearly 200 monuments to the events of 1877, the Pleven Panorama has become the most enduring symbol of the city and the decisive battle.

Bogomil Stoev: And every place is a symbol for something, every city in Bulgaria. But when you tell someone Pleven, they think about this, they think about the war, liberation of Bulgaria and the Panorama.

91. How Fake Museums Are Used in Theme Parks with Shaelyn Amaio Apr 19, 2021

Museums can be a shorthand for truth, or for history, or for what a culture values. Disney theme parks all around the world use fake museums as a tool to immerse visitors in the themed environment. This detailed world-building can make the imaginary universe more real—or provide a setup to subvert a narrative.

But these fake museums aren’t the only ways the Disney theme parks present history to visitors. Public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio describes how the parks “traffic in the past.” By removing references to the present or a future with consequences, parks like Disneyland free the visitor from responsibility for what happened in history. Since the opening of Disneyland in 1955, there have been several iterations of Disney theme parks, each reflecting the way we think about knowledge and history in the times they were built.

In this episode, Amaio describes examples of fake museums in Disney theme parks, details how corporate-sponsored edutainment can reflect the public's anxiety, and explains why EPCOT has the most museum-like spaces at Disney theme parks.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 The Yeti Museum
01:30 Shaelyn Amaio
02:03 Amaio’s First Visit to Disney World
03:30 Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom
05:50 EPCOT and World’s Fairs
08:01 17. Entertainment and History at Disney’s America
09:12 Dinosaur at Disney’s Animal Kingdom
10:20 Layering in Theme Park Design
11:00 Overlap Between Museums and Theme Parks
11:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 91. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

There's a museum just outside Orlando, Florida at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. It's called the Yeti Museum, and it's dedicated to the scientific, historic and cultural studies of the legendary humanoid primate said to inhabit the Himalayan Mountains. The curator of the museum is convinced that the Yeti is real and dangerous.

Shaelyn Amaio: It includes local, indigenous cultures and references to their beliefs about the Yeti. And it's all of this evidence, quote unquote--I'm doing air quotes, but you can't see it--that the Yeti is real and it's something that you should be scared of.

The museum is actually the queue to a roller coaster called Expedition Everest, which is themed to look like a train taking visitors on a journey through the Himalayas. At points in the ride, visitors encounter an audio-animatronic Yeti.

Shaelyn Amaio: So by the time you get on the train, you're primed. You know you're going to see the Yeti, even if you haven't been on the ride before. And so then when you encounter it, it does make it a little bit more real because you've already seen all of this evidence of the existence of Yetis. And so you're not just like, Oh, this is just a robot covered in fake fur with a strobe light on it. And it kind of like switches that on in your brain.

For public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio, this is a great example of how museums--and museum iconography--are used as shorthand for reliability, truth, and prestige in theme parks.

Shaelyn Amaio: Hi, my name is Shaelyn Amaio and I am somebody who works in museums, mostly in history museums, but I like to think of myself as a public experience advocate. So my interests lie both in museums and in other leisure activities.

Amaio grew up in Connecticut, and first visited Walt Disney World in Florida as a five-year-old.

Shaelyn Amaio: I just remember the feeling of being on Main Street U.S.A. in the Magic Kingdom and being completely overwhelmed. Right? Because when you're five, you don't know the history, you don't know what it's referencing, but you still know that it's like this nostalgic feeling, even if you don't have the words or the experiences. To, to relate that. And I think at that age, a lot of what you're feeding off of are the reactions of the adults around you. When people talk about going to Disney, they tend to center children and, like, what the kids will think of it. But I think something that's left out of that conversation is how adults react to the theme parks and why the kid's experience is kind of a mirror of adult experience in theme parks.

Back in Connecticut, Amaio also spent her childhood visiting museums.

Shaelyn Amaio: I was really lucky to get exposed to museums from an early age. And then as I got older, I will admit that I did not see a career in museums for myself. And then I went to undergrad and I was studying anthropology and I got to the end of my undergrad and was like, oh no, I don't actually want to be out in the field all the time. What am I going to do?

Shaelyn Amaio: And so I ended up in a museum education program. And when I went on to get my MA I actually wrote my thesis on the presentation of history in Disney theme parks. So it all, it all came together.

The 2011 thesis, which was titled “Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom”, dives into how the so-called Castle parks at Disney resorts around the world, like Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Disneyland Paris in Paris, France and the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida--which all feature an iconic castle in their center and differened themed lands surrounding it like Adventureland and Frontierland--remove the present from the visitors’ experiences.

Shaelyn Amaio: So the Disney theme parks actually like traffic in the past, that is their main currency you have in the Magic Kingdom most of the areas of the park are themed to different historic moments, right? The one main exception being Tomorrowland, which is kind of set in this retro-futuristic never. And so when you look back and say, okay, I as a visitor am now the main character, the important thing to understand is that they remove the present.

Shaelyn Amaio: And so if you are only looking at the past and this future that will never be then the past doesn't have any impact, right? There's no responsibility for what happened in the past. And so as a visitor, I can just kind of be like, wow, the past was bad, but look, we've made so much progress. Things are getting better every day and not really have to grapple with all of the history and, and its continuing legacies today. I think another important thing is that it's intended to feel neutral to mostly to white Americans, which I think we can't talk about Disney parks without talking about that.

Each of these images of the past, weathered rocks etched in the landscape of Frontierland or the oil-lantern illuminated shops of Main Street, U.S.A, help us relate to history. One of the main principles of experience design is that even the smallest out-of-place detail ruins the illusion.

Castle parks that follow this same formula continue to open into the 21st century in Hong Kong and Shanghai. But even by the 1980s, Disney had developed a different model of park in the form of EPCOT. EPCOT was a theme park which sought to create a permanent World’s Fair. Disney had experience with the 1964/1965 World's Fair in New York, where no fewer than four corporate sponsors hired the company to develop attractions for them.

Shaelyn Amaio: It is really interesting to think about how these different parks and the periods in which they were built reflect the way that we think about knowledge in these different times. If you look at EPCOT, which opened in 1982. Here you have a different relationship to history and a different relationship to progress for Americans. So you're coming off of the 1970s, which were really tumultuous, right? You have an entire pavilion in EPCOT that is the Universe of Energy Pavilion, which was sponsored by Exxon Mobil. And we had just come off of the gas crisis. Americans were not really feeling secure in the future of fossil fuels. And so you have this entire ride that talks about how great everything is, how technology is advancing, how we're going to solve all of the problems of humanity.

Universe of Energy Narration: In our ever-changing world, the road to tomorrow’s energy is indeed long, complex, and challenging. It demands the development and wise use of today’s energy resources. It calls for practical and affordable new sources for tomorrow.

But at this point they have to kind of also be like, we know sometimes things are bad. Like they have to acknowledge the reality of the situation, but at the end of the day, they're still like, yeah, but don't worry. Corporations are doing great. We're going to figure it out together. We'll get there, which is this just a really interesting contrast to what's happening in the Magic Kingdom, where it's just like, we've removed all of the bad things. Don't worry. We're all doing great!

EPCOT represents the closest experience to going into a museum in a Disney theme park, precisely because of its World’s Fair legacy.

Shaelyn Amaio: You also have things like a pavilion devoted to imagination that was sponsored by Kodak. So thinking about the power of creativity and imagination, you have a pavilion about the ocean and about things that live in the ocean and ocean technology. So all of these attractions are basically set up so that you are learning something, it feels like a very didactic experience, right?

Shaelyn Amaio: Like probably the most traditional quote unquote museum-y, edutainment-y experience in the parks.

By the early 1990s, Disney was on track to develop yet another type of park--a theme park that presented actual history in an edutainment context called Disney's America. In episode 17 of Museum Archipelago, we cover its spectacular failure. Disney’s idea would have put a park showcasing [quote] “the sweep of American History”--including the institution of Slavery and the Civil War--within a fun theme park environment just outside Washington, DC.

The idea met so much public resistance that it was scrapped and there’s no plans for this type of park in the future.

In recent years, in the current park types, there’s been a mixing of mediums happening: the introduction of fake museums in the Disney parks, like the Yeti Museum. The mixing says more about the medium of museums than the medium of theme parks.

Shaelyn Amaio: There's so much that you have to do in order to help people take that leap, to kind of letting themselves be immersed in an experience. And the fact that theme parks very often turned to museums as a tool in that journey is really fascinating to me.

Another example is also at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Park: it’s a ride called Dinosaur, which begins with a museum space filled with fossils and printed graphics, setting up the subversion that happens in the ride itself -- and is actually meant to be dull.

Pre-Show of Dinosaur: Hello! I’m Dr. Marsh, Director of the Dino Institute, and I hope you enjoy those quaint exhibits in the old wing. That's how dinosaurs happened was into to the public since the study of fossils began over 150 years ago.

Shaelyn Amaio: You have the Institute quote unquote, where the Dinosaur attraction takes place, which has the actual fake museum inside of it. And I think all of that is meant to set up this idea. That this is somehow legitimate in a way that it wouldn't be understood otherwise. And so I think just the use of not only museum environments, but also just the science world in general is really interesting. it really just tells you as a visitor, like I am meant to understand this as real. I am meant to understand that we are actually going back in time, and it’s not just strobe lights.

The museum, and everything it represents, can be a tool in the world building of a themed environment. Theme park designers talk about layers of meaning, all on top of one another to create a successful theme. A fake town seems less fake if there’s a fake historical maker describing the founding of the town. It’s even less fake if within the fake town there’s some disagreement about the accuracy of the marker -- feuding families, each trying to tell their own stories. As visitors, this level of detail doesn’t distract -- quite the opposite.

For anyone who works in or thinks about museums, it’s worth figuring out what museums are shorthand for in themed environments.

Shaelyn Amaio: Walt Disney himself had this quote that was like, “I'd rather entertain people and hope they learn something, then educate them and hope that they are entertained.”

Shaelyn Amaio: I don't think that the way that theme parks use museums is meant to be educational the way that museums want to be educational. I think it's a little bit of a distortion of theme parks, even the ones that are more traditional in terms of how they're displaying things in the topics they're covering. But there is a lot of overlap when you're looking at how humans act, and so that's where we really have this opportunity to learn from each other to improve experiences in both spaces so that visitors do learn some things. So that visitors do have fun. I think we have to kind of embrace some things that theme parks are doing well so that we can better serve our visitors and continue to fulfill our missions.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

90. Civil Rights Progress Isn't Linear. The Grove Museum Interprets Tallahassee's Struggle in an Unexpected Setting. Mar 15, 2021

The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.

Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection.

In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on civil rights.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Ian at the 1992 Springtime Tallahassee Parade
00:55 White Supremacy in Tallahassee
01:20 Smokey Hollow
01:40 John Grandage
02:35 The Grove Museum
03:05 Developing the Interpretive Plan with a Focus on Slavery and Civil Rights
03:30 Governorship of LeRoy Collins
04:36 Tallahassee Bus Boycott
06:08 Presenting the Narrative through Collins
06:50 White Backlash to Collins’s Moderate Position on Civil Rights
08:15 The Construction of the House by Enslaved Craftspeople
09:45 The Genealogical Role of the Museum
10:50 Forced Removal of Indigenous People in Tallahassee
12:25 How Tallahassee Interprets Its History
13:00 The John G. Riley House
13:10 The Meek-Eaton Black Archives
14:08 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 90. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

I found an old picture of me, taken about a block away from what is now the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, FL.

The picture was taken in March 1992: I'm facing the camera as the Springtime Tallahassee parade -- Tallahassee's biggest annual celebration -- goes by behind me. Positioned in the frame is a confederate flag, proudly carried by two people parading down the middle of the street. My three-year-old self is blocking whatever group came after the flag -- maybe a club, maybe a mascot, maybe a group of Civil War reenactors?

The fact that the confederate flag in a parade happened to be in the background of this candid shot hints at the white supremacy that undergirds Tallahassee, a city that had a majority Black population during Reconstruction.

In 1907, the city refused Andrew Carnegie's offer to build a library, because the conditions of the donation stated that the library would have to serve Black patrons. In the 1970s, Apalachee Parkway was built right over the Black Smokey Hollow neighborhood -- a pattern of development which repeats to this day. And the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, waited until 2006 to apologize for it's pro-segregationists coverage of the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott.

And of course, that white supremacy extends to the local museums.

John Grandage: So the whole idea of historical preservation in the United States, so in our country, has been what is worth preserving. And here we are, interrogating the source material to reach back in the past and bring stories that have been dormant or deliberately excluded, silenced, now into a place where they can be told.

I think what's interesting is how museums have a role to play in that.

John Grandage: Exactly. Right.

Because, in some ways museums have been, maybe the nicest way to say it is complicit in that storyline.

John Grandage: Right. They're part of that dominant narrative.

And that's why this historic house, the Grove Museum, which opened in 2017 is so interesting in the context of how Tallahassee interprets its history. This is John Grandage, executive director of the Grove Museum.

John Grandage: My name is John Grandage, and I'm the executive director at the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, Florida. And we are at the Call-Collins house at the Grove Museum.

At first glance, the Grove Museum doesn't look like a museum that might change how Tallahassee interprets its history. It's a stately mansion house in the center of town -- less than a block from the parade route -- and it was built from 1835 to 1839 by Richard Keith Call. After that, it was owned by a series of wealthy Floridians, most recently by former Florida Governor LeRoy Collins and his wife, Mary Call Collins, who left the house to the state to preserve as a museum.

John Grandage: So I've been here since 2014 and like there wasn't really a clear interpretive plan. So coming up with the, let's tell the whole story, let's talk not just about politics, but let's dig deeper and try to look at this as sort of like a witness to all this history. And then coming up with the let's emphasize on civil rights.

The museum uses the governorship of LeRoy Collins as a narrative arc to tell that ‘whole story.’ It traces how his own thinking on race evolved from his early years as a staunch segregationist, as an opening to tell the story of civil rights in Florida. Collins was elected in 1954 -- the same year that the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation is unconstitutional in public schools and other places of public accommodation.

John Grandage: When he ran for office, he didn't initially come out in support of that. So it's thinking about how does the country respond to civil rights? Collins feared also, to be very frank about it, the economic ramifications of Florida having kind of, you know, people being firehosed in the street or people standing in front of a doorway of a school and like shouting and calling out the troops to prevent integration. Like that to him was, would have been very damaging to the image Florida.

Collins became one of the most prominent white Southern politicians to speak in favor of racial integration and the growing Civil Rights movement. He was governor from 1955 through 1961, which means that he was in charge during the 1956 Tallahassee Bus boycott.

John Grandage: The bus boy caught here with the two students at FAMU that that really started it: Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson are their names.

John Grandage: And then the community organized behind them, then you see the local churches, people like C K Steele, leaders in the community, sort of bring some broader community organization, which of course the boycott put all this economic pressure on the city and the bus company, which ultimately led to them repealing segregated seating ordinances and at the same time, the bus boycott in Montgomery, which started earlier, but runs somewhat parallel. And that's an important part of our interpretation of Collins is that he undeniably has a very specific moral view of the world. And as the state, or as the local government in Florida started to react very extremely to Civil Rights activism like jailing the sit-in demonstrators. What we can trace is here's a person who began to question these beliefs that he had grown up with. He says, it's like a two class society. Right. And he's on the privileged side. And then seeing the response and thinking about the potential for all kinds of ramifications in society. That's really what drove him to do a lot of the things that he did. And so he began to adapt his thinking. So in that way, we can actually take Collins and position the decisions he made, you know, not as something that came solely from him. So it gives a little bit of power to the activists and it helps to position the people really who were putting it on the line. So alongside the Collins story, we're able to tell that story of the local activists, and so it's important that Collins didn't act in a vacuum.

Even more critical to the story -- in a way that de-centers Collins -- was the white backlash to his moderate stance on Civil Rights and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. The version of the civil rights movement that I was taught in public schools in Tallahassee focused on sweeping and uplifting narratives that had widespread support and presented progress as a straight upward line. Simply put, that’s not what happened. After leaving the Governor's office, LeRoy Collins was appointed by President Johnson in 1964 to direct the Community Relations Service under the Civil Rights Act.

John Grandage: And so he was present in March, 1965 in Selma, Alabama to negotiate on behalf of the federal government. So the marchers are attacked on March 7th. Collins comes in on March 9th, they sort of negotiate this sort of settlement. They progress past Selma. They go onto Montgomery, but this photo's taken and this becomes like the number one piece of anti-Collins propaganda. So he's with John Lewis and Andrew Young and Dr. King and Coretta Scott King and Ralph [Abernathy], like the main figureheads in the Civil Rights movement.

John Grandage: He runs for Senate in 1968, loses the election. And it's really tied back to him being at Selma. He was too liberal, right? Yeah, he was, he was associated with the civil rights activists and that blow back in the South is really pronounced during that 1968 election.

Collins went from receiving 99% of the vote share in Tallahassee in 1954 when he ran for governor to 48% in his 1968 senate race. Again, the museum uses this story as the opening act -- presenting Colin's preserved office and an old-timey TV playing videos of his speeches alongside the most detailed account of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott and backlash that I've ever seen. But here's where the museum really opens up -- remember when I mentioned that this house was built by Richard Keith Call?

John Grandage: So when we take people through the tour, we sort of give them that story arc, but then we jump back and nest it all within the fact that this was a plantation that, bonds people who were claimed as the property of Richard Keith Call built the home. And like, you can reach up and still touch, the physical fabric of the home that they laid into place, the bricks or those floor joists or whatever. The number one artifact that speaks to African-American history here is the house itself. And it's the positioning of credit who built the home, right? Enslaved people built the house, right. You know, we get this telling of American history where it becomes, you know, Call built the house. Which we know is, you know, maybe not in all cases intended to erase the people: it's our manner of speaking. Right? It's kind of the way that we conceptualize this history at a broader level.

John Grandage: So even the position, the credit back to the craftspeople that built the house. was vitally important and putting this museum together. Because when we come, when we bring people in the space and say, think about Collins in that Civil Rights era, and then jump back a hundred years and what this property would have literally been witnessing on a day-to-day basis. Civil rights had been really the purview of only people like Call, you know, not even, you know, women at that time, and certainly not at the African-Americans who were considered property. And sort of denied all, you know, humanity, like we were talking about, even in the records, right there, there tally marks, there may be an age or a gender, and I could show you some ways that we've worked against that, but this speaks to that.

One of the interactive exhibits is Call's logbook about the people he enslaved -- represented by tally marks and business records. But the Grove Museum uses the interactive to focus on their humanity.

John Grandage: So like for example, this family here, starting with Tom Hackley, We've been able to trace their family up into the present. I mean, present living people who we’re in contact with, who are descended from Tom and Diana Hackley. So that's like that genealogical role that a museum can play. So like Thomas 34, these are their children and , the bank owned them as property at the time, kind of a complex thing.

John Grandage: But we've been able to take a document like this and then jump to different documents and make connections to like living people, right. Who are, who are increasingly. The tools that we have, through databases and things like that enable us to do this genealogical research. So people all around the country are finding out things they had no idea about.

The museum presents a house -- and even the land it sits on -- as a witness to all of this.

John Grandage: The very presence of this place on the landscape is directly related to the forced removal of indigenous people from this area. So we wanted to bring in that because Call got his start as a soldier fighting against the Creeks, the Seminoles. And so he's literally, you know, as we know about, um, kind of colonialism this sort of dropping onto this place of an entirely different way of land use, politics, culture, et cetera, you know, that, that swept, you know, generations of the indigenous people that have that lived here and they were in the process of being removed by the American government from this area, just as Call and his associates were coming here. So it was a very active process.

John Grandage: They had actively wage war against them, and they knew it was about expanding slavery into this area. And that these red Hills of Tallahassee were agriculturally going to be very productive. So it's, it's strange how we then tell these different stories. Cause we, we don't want to engage fully with, with, um, you know, the removal of indigenous people and we don't want to engage with with slavery as a system that was, you know, the value of the land was not as important as literally the value placed upon those bodies that were put to work and should be shaping the land. And people don't want deal with that.

What's unusual is that the Grove Museum does deal with it -- most institutions in Tallahassee simply don't. The mascot of Florida State University, where Grandage got a degree in Indigenous History is still, as of 2021, a representation of a Seminole Indian.

The Grove Museum was able to build on the work of local Black museums and archives, some of which have been featured on previous episodes of this show.

John Grandage: I would say like for a museum like this in Tallahassee, and I know you talked to Mrs. Barnes. So like if Althemese Barnes hadn't created the Riley House and hadn't created the Florida African-American heritage Preservation Network. And if Professor Eaton, hadn't created the Black Archives. And if we didn't have FAMU, that's all the framework that it's interesting. Cause we think about the, his, his historical museum landscape. And it's largely defined by these institutions that don't represent the African-American community.

John Grandage: Let's say, right. And that's, as we talked about is sort of a legacy of historic preservation of museum and cultural studies in the U.S.

The Grove Museum’s central location in the city -- right across the street from the current governor’s mansion and its deliberate decision to focus on civil rights instead of the white owner protagonists, is helping change how Tallahassee interprets its history.

89. Tehmina Goskar Critically Engages with Curation, Wherever It Happens Feb 22, 2021

Dr. Tehmina Goskar, director of the Curatorial Research Centre, co-founded MuseumHour with Sophie Ballinger in October 2014. The weekly peer-to-peer chat on Twitter “holds space for debate” for museum people all around the world.

This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role at MuseumHour. This episode serves as both an “exit interview” for Goskar’s MusuemHour work and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophy.

In this episode, Goskar discusses founding the Curatorial Research Centre, democratizing culture through her Citizen Curators program (in association with the Cornwall Museums Partnership), and how over six years of MuseumHour conversations have shaped her work.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 MuseumHour at 6.5 Years Old
00:50 Tehmina Goskar
01:20 MuseumHour's Founding
03:00 Mediums and Platforms
04:35 Museum Conferences
05:30 What is Curation?
07:15 "To Care For"
07:30 The Curatorial Research Centre
09:20 Citizen Curators
12:38 Archipelago at the Movies: How to Steal A Million (1966)
14:05 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 89. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

For the past 6 and a half years, more or less weekly, museum people gather on Twitter for something called MuseumHour. Together, these people form a peer to peer community, supporting discussion and debate between those who work in, enjoy, and challenge museums in society.

Tehmina Goskar: That's the beauty of MuseumHour. It is entirely independent. It is not an organization. It is just about holding a space so other people can talk with each other.

This is Dr. Tehmina Goskar, who co-founded MuseumHour back in October 2014. Goskar also founded the Curatorial Research Centre.

Tehmina Goskar: Hello, my name is Tehmina Goskar and I am the director and curator of the Curatorial Research Centre. And that's an organization I started back in 2018, very much to support fellow curators from around the world and also to make progress in modernizing curatorial practice.

This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role in MusuemHour. I wanted this to serve as both an exit interview and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophies.

Tehmina Goskar: Museum Hour started back in October, 2014. Sophie Ballinger, who was the co-founder with me, got together over Twitter. We've never met in real life. Goodness knows whether we ever will. Sophie was based up in the North of England. I'm based in the far West of Cornwall. But we both decided we'd give the idea of these discussion-based hours that were kind of finding their feet on Twitter at that time. So we decided to give it a go and it's grown and grown and grown and changed a lot since then. Of course Twitter's also changed hugely in terms of who participates, who feels confident about speaking up, who lurks in the background. There is a lot of polarization on the platform now.

And so we've changed and adapted MuseumHour to all of those trends that we've seen happen, including its growing politicization as well. If I'm being honest, I kind of treated the whole thing even six and a half years on as an ongoing experiment in trying to understand how it is people like to communicate with each other and how it is that you can provide some kind of support for this peer to peer contact is what we're really after.

On Museum Archipelago, we look at museums as a medium. And Twitter is also a medium -- one that has changed since MuseumHour started six and a half years ago. Since then, Twitter has shifted from a simple subscriber model, one where you see all the tweets from the people you follow in the order that they tweeted, to a system that uses algorithms that optimize for other factors, such as engagement with the tweets. This can make a global conversation about museums difficult.

Tehmina Goskar: With the change in how Twitter is managed and how the concept of driving engagement and algorithms are dictating what we see on our timelines, there has absolutely been an impact on MuseumHour because of that. We've got to work much harder to try and get ideas for topics, for example, or people's ideas out to as broad and interested audience or participation group that we can. And that, that has proven very difficult, in fact, particularly of late, because people's timelines are so manipulated by Twitter's algorithms and because there's so much more noise on Twitter now than there was. So I'm kind of glad that MuseumHour has managed to hold its own so it retains a light structure. It does support those intimate conversations, as well as supporting bigger thoughts and opinions and even ones that people disagree about in one space.

I’ve participated in and even hosted a few MuseumHours, and the thing it reminds me of the most is a museum conference, or the conversations you might have at a museum conference, which is yet another medium. But, interestingly, Goskar says that MuseumHour has never been about recreating that experience.

Tehmina Goskar: That certainly isn't the kind of experience you usually get, unless you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to go to very expensive, large international museum conferences, for example, like the Museums Association Conferences in the UK or any of ICOM conferences. But we've never really perceived of MuseumHour to fill that kind of gap. We're still kind of exploring what it is that we think we're doing. And that's just by way of being very honest about not having an agenda and letting sort of the emergent process of MuseumHour happen.

MuseumHour is just one of the volunteer projects Goskar works on. She is first and foremost a curator -- I term I still ask for the definition of after almost 90 episodes of this show.

Tehmina Goskar: Curating doesn't just exist in the museum world. And I think far too many people in museums think that being a curator is somehow a special feature of museums, but no other field, but that is just not true. The way I described curation is very, very simple. For me. a good curator is part knowledge creator, and part communicator. So the philosophy of the Curatorial Research Centre is very much to promote this 50% model as we call it, idea of a curator. That you should be as interested in communicating knowledge stories, ideas about people, about material culture, and of course the connections between them as you are in the research, in the generating of knowledge, and also to recognize that not all knowledge and not all research comes from a Western idea of academic research.

That's very important to me in my practice, but I would certainly also recognize expertise coming from lived experiences, coming from curatorial cultures, as I would recognize them in other parts of the world and certainly from other cultures past as well. So for me, it's very simple: I boil it down to a curator is 50% knowledge generator or knowledge creator and 50% communicator and wrapped ‘round that kind of equation is the very heart of the word to curate, which means to care for. So there must be some elements of intention and meaning and caring for what you're curating in order to authentically curate whatever it is you feel you want to curate.

Goskar founded the Curatorial Research Centre in 2018, and a few months later brought archaeologist and audiovisual specialist Tom Goskar aboard -- who also happens to be her husband. The Centre aims to work in partnership with museums, not just in a transactional manner. Research is the core of the Centre’s work. At every opportunity research answers the questions: why are things done like this, what should we be doing instead?

Tehmina Goskar: So why Curatorial Research? What on earth is Curatorial Research? It is critically engaging with the act of curation, wherever that may happen. The study of the phenomenon a bit like museology is the study specifically of museums. Curatorial Research is I would say taking a much more proactive stance towards constantly critically engaging with what curation and being a curator is all about and what it might be all about.

So from my standpoint, I am an action researcher. I am a pretty vocal thinker and I'm interested in systems. So that means that I'm. Always analyzing, always lining up the evidence to take a really good look at it. Whether that's exhibition making or collections research or that I might be now currently focused on so that might be diversity and decolonization. It might be more about the change in technical skills, a curator needs, or it might be as my current professional life is dominated by training others in how to be a curator, put simply.

These curatorial values and philosophy are on display in Goskar’s other project: Citizen Curators with the Cornwall Museums Partnership. Citizen Curators is designed to support volunteers by building their confidence and competence in key areas of curatorial work.

Tehmina Goskar: Citizen Curators a bit like my creation of the Curatorial Research Centre, was a long time in the making before it happened. So I was beginning to think that the idea of volunteer reliant or volunteer run museums needed some kind of channel into what I would call the mainstream professional museum world. And I felt that there was a lack of opportunity there that I felt that a program like citizen curators could fill. There were these really fascinating, bigger ideas, like inclusion, like decolonization of late that were not touching the small museum world. The idea came for Citizen Curators, which, but simply as pitched as a work based curatorial training and museum awareness course aimed specifically at volunteers from our communities and part of it was to sort of break down barriers between volunteers and collections and asking new questions of them.

Through my support, they had permission to, for example, browse the stores, browse the object, databases, come to their own conclusions, go outside the museum, talk to people about the kinds of things that they were coming up against to also bring their own talents and hobbies and ideas to the process.

There’s a similarity between holding the permission space for Citizen Curators and holding the discussion space for MuseumHour. For Goskar, both projects feed back into her work at the Curatorial Research Centre.

Tehmina Goskar: I've always been a practitioner. In the kind of museum, heritage, culture, arts world. That is what some people, and I would describe as, I bring my whole self to the table so I don't compartmentalize the voluntary activities I do. For example, running MuseumHour. And the professional activities I do to earn a living. So as a career curator, curating in all sorts of different contexts, not just exhibitions, but being engaged in collections research, critically engaging in the systems that museums use and take for granted, trying to understand the whole phenomenon of museums. I would say that my experience of MuseumHour has in parts quite heavily shaped how I see other people's views of museums. Other ideas and other thoughts about what museums can and should be. It's also helped me formulate and to check my own understanding and also my own, my own prejudices and biases, about museums and you know what I think a good museum is isn't what someone else thinks a good museum is. And that's okay.

You can find Tehmina Goskar at curatorialresearch.com.

88. Jérôme Blachon Collects and Transmits Precious Memories at the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France Jan 25, 2021

During World War II, a Nazi collbatoring regime governed the south of France, and the city of Toulouse was a Resistance hub. The Vichy Government promoted anti-Semitism and collaborated with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Fragmented Resistance fighters organized to form escape networks and build logistics chains to sabotage and disrupt the regime.

In 1977, former Resistance members created a community museum in Toulouse about their experience. Today, that museum is called the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, and is run by the regional government. Museum director Jérôme Blachon is reimagining how the museum tells the story of the French Resistance as the people who experienced firsthand pass away.

In this episode, Blachon describes the challenge of presenting the fragmented nature of the resistance to a modern audience, the 2020 renovation of the museum, and his focus on transmitting precious memories.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Memorials in Toulouse
01:00 Toulouse During World War II
01:32 Jérôme Blachon, Director of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France
02:20 "Engage, Collect, Transmit"
02:50 France During Nazi Germany's Administration
03:38 Museum Archipelago Ep. 51
04:08 Presenting the Difference Forms of Resistance in the Museum
05:25 2020 Renovation
05:35 The Disappearance of the Last Witnesses
06:26 The Museum as Transmission
06:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 88. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Toulouse, France has many memorials, covering hundreds of years of history. There’s a statue of Joan of Arc, there's monuments to the soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War, and there’s memorials to the dead of World War I.

But look closer, and you’ll also find sites covering a very specific slice of history: the years between 1940 and 1944, the period of Nazi Germany’s military administation of France. There’s the building where the Gestapo secret police made their local headquarters, there’s a monument to the Glory of the Resistance, and there’s the Shoah Memorial, the Hebrew word for the Holocoust, that honors the Jews who were deported and killed during this period.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Toulouse, during World War II, was a Resistance hub in the South of France. A lot of Resistance fighters came to Toulouse to form a Resistance unit and many then left for the rest of France or Spain. A number of escape networks began in Toulouse and took English airmen, for example, or Resistance fighters across the Pyrenees to London or the United States.

This is Jerome Blachon, speaking French. Blachon is head of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, which is right down the street from many of these memorials in Toulouse. This museum brings together these sites, as well as artifacts, stories, and witnesses from across the region and all over France.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Hello, my name is Jerome Blachon. I am in charge of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France. The museum actually opened in 1977. It was first a community museum.

The museum was initially a community museum set up by former members of the French Resistance, and in 1994, it became departmental--which is to say it is now funded by the regional government.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The three themes of the museum are: engage, collect, transmit. We collect to store and transmit this memory of our ancestors from our elders to future generations. Memorials that defend the memory of the Resistance gives us access to people who have objects in their homes and documents and some of them intrust them to us.

The focus on Toulouse and the surrounding region in the museum is in not just because it’s under the authority of the regional government--it also reflects the the uneven and ever-changing military administation of France under Nazi Germany. Until November 1942, the Nazis only had direct occupation of part of the country: mostly the north of France, including Paris, and the western coast. The south of France was under the jurisdiction of the Vichy regime--an independent ally of Nazi Germany, which promoted anti-Semitism and practiced collaboration with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps.

So when it comes to the people fighting this regime--the Resistance--It’s tempting to present history like a story, with clear-cut intentions and a simple narrative. But the history of the French Resistance was anything but simple. It’s not like there was one single unified resistance with one single outcome in mind.

In episode 51 of this program, we examine another collaborationist regime: Bulgaria in the early 1940s, by visiting the Sofia Jewish Museum of History. Today, one of the galleries is named The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria, which even the museum staff say is an overly simplisic title.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Many visitors are in fact unaware of this fragmented structure of the Resistance, with the Gaullists on one side and the Communists on the other. So, in the Museum, we do indeed present the different forms of Resistance.

To present the complexity, the Museum of Resistance and Deportation focuses on presenting objects gathered from witnesses. These include Resistance newspapers of various groups, and photos and testimonies of those who were fighting -- whether in acts of sabotage, providing shelter to those who needed it, or even building the logistictics of feeding fighters in other parts of France. There’s also catalogues: names and photographs of people deported and accounts of reprisal attacks against Resistance Fighters and Collaborators alike, as control of territory ebbed and flowed.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The period of World War II is quite complex to explain to the younger generations, who often have a rather Manichean view, that is to say in black and white. You are either a Resistance fighter or a collaborator, pro-Vichy, Nazi, that's it. You are either a good guy or a bad guy. The museum was closed for an 18-month renovation from 2018 until 2020. The renovation modernized the museum, and also reflects our moment in time.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Today, this type of museum has a new dimension with the disappearance of the last witnesses, since they can no longer testify in front of students, scholars and the general public. So it is our mission to transmit this memory. To do so, we have collected and we continue to collect objects, and especially testimonies.

The renovated museum features two floors of permanent galleries and space for temporary exhibitions. Special programs are available to school kids, who are encouraged to question the sustainability of the spirit of resistance, the current struggles for the preservation and extension of rights and freedoms, and the fight against inequalities. Today, it’s no longer a museum run by former members of the resistance, but instead it focused on being the transmission to new generations.

Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The witnesses are now 90 or 95 years old, and we continue to collect their testimonies and to project, broadcast, and record these testimonies in order to gather their precious memories and transmit them to the new generations.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

87. The Vitosha Bear Museum Lives in a Tiny Mountain Hut Nov 16, 2020

Vitosha Mountain, the southern border of Sofia, Bulgaria, is home to about 15 brown bears and one bear museum. According to Dr. Nikola Doykin, fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the bear population is stable—if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward, and the Vitosha Bear Museum does just that.

Founded in 2002 by repurposing an abandoned mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers, the Vitosha Bear Museum provides “useful tips on how to meet a bear.” It’s also sparse: the entire gallery is a single room, and the gallery lighting is powered by a car battery.

In this episode recorded at the museum, Dr. Nikola Doykin describes why the location is so useful for eco education, how groups of schoolchildren react to exhibits, and what the museum plans to do when it installs solar panels.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Vitosha mountain
00:50 The Viosha Bear Museum
01:05 Dr. Nikola Doykin
02:10 The Location of the Museum
04:00 "Useful Tips On How To Meet A Bear"
04:35 Bear Markings in the Museum
06:40 Ep. 6 Muzeiko
06:50 Ep. 46 Vessela Gercheva Directs Playful Exhibits at Bulgaria’s First Children’s Museum
08:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 87. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Towering over the Bulgarian capital of Sofia is Vitosha mountain. Connected to the city by several public buses, residents like me love hiking the numerous mountain trails to get away from the hustle and bustle.

[Hiking Sounds]

And it was on one of these solitary hikes that I first came across The Vitosha Bear Museum. At first I didn’t quite know what I was looking at: a cute little hut halfway up the mountain with a locked door and boarded up windows.

But the sign said Bear Museum in Bulgarian, and also that the museum was closed because it was “hibernating” for the winter.

So I sent some emails and that’s how, a few days later, I met Dr. Nikola Doykin at the museum.

добър ден! (Good day!)

Dr. Nikola Doykin: добър ден! (Good day!)

Dr. Nikola Doykin is a Fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the organization that runs the museum. And he also had a key to open the museum door, which he wasn’t sure would work because it had been a month since he last used it.

[Key Unlocking Sounds]

Dr. Nikola Doykin: “And as you see, our museum is how to say, very simple.”

The museum is as small on the inside as it looks on the outside. There’s no electric connection at the museum -- the LED lights that illuminate the gallery are powered by a car battery that Doykin switched on when we entered.

The rustic appearance is a carryover from the building’s first purpose: a mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: And this was the place that they are staying during the night. And after that, it was abandoned, totally. And one guy had the idea to make this a place where we can show the bears, and where they can live, and the whole idea of the bears in the forest.

The abandoned shelter was turned into the Vitosha Bear Museum in 2002. For Doykin, this is the perfect setting for the museum -- because what’s outside is just as important as what’s inside.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: it will be easy for us if this kind of a museum was in a city. But we cut the line if we are in the city, but not in the forest because after that we can go out in the forest and show something else to the children. And mostly we have a little bit of a different education with the children and we start from here after that, we go out in the field and they can feel everything.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: the idea is to put especially the children, the new generation, to put them in a real feelings to smell the forest, to feel the wind. The whole idea of the eco education, forestry education to take out the children from the cities and to show them real nature and how they can walk around and even to have fun in the forest, not only in the cities.

The forests and mountains of Bulgaria represent a part of the national ethos, and so do the brown bears that live there. As the number of bears in the country declined, so too has the cultural pervasiveness of bears as fearsome carnivorous predators. Today, there’s an increased focus on conservation and even a sense of pride about Bulgaria’s remaining bears.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: We can say something about 10 to 15 bears that are left in Vitosha mountain, but mostly on the south part of the mountain.

According to Doykin, DNA testing has indicated that there’s enough genetic diversity in this population of bears to reproduce and ensure their continued survival on Vitosha mountain -- that is if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward. As a local news article about the museum put it, “useful tips on how to meet a bear are given at the Vitosha Bear Museum”.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: And mostly what to do, not to meet the bear. And if we meet it, find it somehow, what to do.

In the corner of the room, there’s a tree taken from the forest which has markings from a bear.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: What they do to mark their territory, the different types of markings. And also, one tree that is for real marked, from a bear, here with his teeth and here with his claws.We can show to the children what, what to look for.

The tree in the sparse interior makes it easy to connect visitors to what’s going on outside the four walls.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: After we show them how the bears mark their territory, to start to look around, to see if some of the trees are marked, And then we present to the children that same information. Where it can live, where we can find it, to take care of the animals, not to kill them, we make some programs and speak to the childrens.

On interpretive panels, visitors will also find information about the evolution and geographic distribution of different types of bears. These cover not just the brown bear -- the only type of bear found in Europe in Bulgaria, but also black bears in the Americas and in Asia, and polar bears. A glass case displays skulls from all of these bears. There’s even a bit of space in the basement where visitors can go inside a fake bear cave and see statues of a brown bear and her cub.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: In here, the main idea was to be dark, because in a cave, there is no lights. We had no real bears, but only those. And the small bear in the cave, that's his mom take care of him.

The cave is the perfect example of the museum working with what it has -- in this case a dark, low-ceilinged basement that doesn’t require electricity, and choosing the interpretive materials carefully -- in this case a simple statue is quite effective.

In many ways, the museum stands apart from the Muzeiko Children’s museum in Sofia, which we’ve featured in episodes 6 and and 46 of this show. That museum: the first children’s museum in the Balkans, features a huge number of computerized interactives centered around the concept of playful learning, which was not encouraged -- to say the least -- when Bulgaria was a Communist country.

But The Vitosha Bear Museum also breaks the mold of rote memorization and statistics overload that used to define Bulgaria’s education system and is still present at many of Bulgaria’s museums. But instead of computerized interactives, the museum finds playful learning in the feeling of a sparse ranger’s hut.

And next season, the museum will add electricity with a solar panel system.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: Next year, already we got contract with company to make a solar system with solar panels. We will have electricity and then we will have more things to do.

With electricity installed, Doykin and his team hope to increase the number and interactivity of the exhibits.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: For me, it's not bad to have this kind of nature of feeling of wood, really to touch the bear or to smell the leaves. And also you can have some interactive games. You can make some 3d, and mentioned to see how the bear walking around.

But Doykin -- who would spend all his time in the mountains if he could -- still considers the real museum to be on the outside.

Dr. Nikola Doykin: We have both museums: the biggest and the smallest. And it's good to have both.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

86. Nashid Madyun Fights the Compression of Black History at the Meek-Eaton Black Archives Sep 21, 2020

History professor Dr. James Eaton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black University in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. So he started collecting himself, driving a bus around South Georgia, South Alabama, and North Florida to gather artifacts.

That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus. Today, museum director Dr. Nashid Madyun presides over one of the largest repositories of African American history and culture in the Southeast.

In this episode, Madyun describes how the structure of the gallery fights the compression of Black history, how the archive handles dehumanizing records and artifacts, and how a smaller museum can tell a major story.

Sponsor: SuperHelpful

This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SuperHelpful, an audience research and development firm dedicated to helping museum leaders create more equitable and innovative organizations through problem-space research.
Kyle Bowen, the founder of SuperHelpful, has brought together a team of designers and researchers to build a new community for museum folks who want to support one another as they reimagine what museums will be in the future. To join—and bypass the current waiting list—use this special link just for Museum Archipelago listeners!

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 86. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

History professor Dr. James Eton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black university in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents.

Nashid Madyun: And that helped him to realize that the understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the KKK , the rise of the Black middle class, Jim Crow, all of the stories where will forever untapped properly if there is no repository. And he found that as people die, they had material in their attics. But in this region: South Georgia, South Alabama, Northern Florida, there was no place to present these wares. So he started to try to enhance his classroom with these artifacts. He took advantage of an available bus and went around the region, asking people for material and they were happy to share and donate.

Nashid Madyun: And there was no formal museum practice or archive at the time. It was a professor of history trying to find a way to help the students see that there are two sides to a story.

That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus, one of the largest repositories of African-American history and culture in the Southeast. This is Nashid Madyun, director of the museum.

Nashid Madyun: Hello, my name is Nashid Madyun. I'm director of the Southeastern, regional Black archives research center and museum at FAMU, that’s Florida A&M University.

Nashid Madyun: So this institution was founded in 1971. It opened its doors officially to the public in 1976. Professor James Eaton was able to collect artifacts to enhance the classes he was teaching in history, in African American history. And he was able to utilize this building in the mid seventies to present the rare memorabilia and artifacts that he found to interpret African American history as he saw it and present public programs.

The collection and museum are housed in the Carnegie Library on FAMU's campus. Dr. James Eton died in 2004, during the construction of a four story expansion building that was erected right behind the library to keep up with the growing size of the collections.

Because the archive was started from artifacts and documents gathered by bus, there is some geographic focus on the North Florida region. But today the Museums interprets Black history in general -- with objects from all across the country.

Nashid Madyun: The research we pulled together takes us to the entire Florida panhandle and South Alabama, South Georgia. So now we have what we consider amongst these four floors, 13 galleries. The highlight, the number one highlight would be our Jim Crow and KKK collection, an authentic uniform, the constitutions from the 1920s, the memorabilia that highlight the derogatory advertisements and propaganda of the Jim Crow era. We also have an authentic-style church highlighting the plantation churches of the TriCounty area, as early as 1830s and replicas of those churches. 64 churches were utilized for this exhibit.

Nashid Madyun: We also have a changing gallery upstairs that we highlight items or issues that address some point or some aspect of popular culture. Public culture now would be Black Lives Matter. And that movement has been going on for the past couple of years, so what we have up now is an exhibit objectively presenting the subject of newsprint from the 1700s to the present, how the violence and Black Codes and legislation and perspectives have been portrayed in print media. And so people have been very interested in that exhibit, so that's very compelling.

The galleries also include African Americans in the Military -- which features artifacts from the Civil War and the Spanish American War, and African American pioneers in medicine and science, which highlights FAMU’s role as a research institution.

With the way the gallery is setup, Madyun fights against the compression of African American history -- when I was studying Black history in Tallahassee, Florida as a high school student, we moved quickly from the Emancipation to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, skipping the time between.

Nashid Madyun: I like to integrate new possibilities and ways to tell stories that are hidden or not properly told. We call this particular exhibit Jim Crow and KKK, aside from Slavery to Freedom. So the exhibit previously had all of these words together. And I wanted to separate those two so that we could see that there was a split and time: there was bondage and then there was amancipationand freedom, and there was a gap from the 1880s to the 1930s, when cotton was king, tobacco was strong. You had the rise of the Black middle class and the rise of the Black middle class, the mobility of the Black middle class specifically coincides with the three waves of the KKK.

Nashid Madyun: So we present the derogatory material in the face of the public and say, this is how it was, and this is why it was, you had people who feared this rise.

Nashid Madyun: And so. You can interpret it how you want to, but we presented based on the information we have. We could talk about the rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the introduction of dentists and lawyers, the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, all of these movements just so happened to coincide with the exact time frames of these waves of the KKK. And that's what's going on. And so I don't believe that any part of our history, whether slave chains or breathing beds or KKK robes should be hidden.

The depth and breadth of the collection enables The Museum to tell a much broader story than just a historical house -- or a museum that is tied to a single event. For museums that interpret Black history, that’s still somewhat rare, but Madyun sees it as the beginning of a trend.

Nashid Madyun: I've been in museums for 20 years and when I came into museums all the museums, the majority were mainstream, there were only a few African American museums. If there was an African American museum, it was an African American historic house, right? And so the idea that a major story can be told by a small museum in our new virtual world is possible.

Nashid Madyun: It was not possible 10 years ago. Definitely not possible 20 years ago. So we have the opportunity. Unfortunately, we still need to catch up to the digitization that’s needed so that we can compete. Major museums, some city museums, you know, especially art museums, they receive city funding, even if they're attached to universities. And now we're starting to see that happen with the Black museums. And my role is to take advantage of these resources and bridge the gap.

Madyun says that part of the gap is technological -- that museums are always trying to catch up to where visitors are. An example that he cites is seeing his student visitors not being able to read cursive handwriting.

Nashid Madyun: We had an exhibit last year that we thought was wonderful and opened it up. And the students are coming in and looking at manumission, actual bills of sales from slaves, you know, former slaves buying their sisters and brothers and wives, buying their freedom. And so we're waiting for that jaw dropping expression, and they're looking at it like it's art.

Nashid Madyun: I'm like, “oh, they don't know how to read cursive writing!” Here's a letter from Zora Neale Hurston talking about her ex and going through that divorce, you know, she's from Florida, understanding that the cost of a slave was $800 and pulling these details that you would normally get. And there's a generation gap. I'm in my forties and beyond, but the new generation that are not learning to write long form or manuscript or cursive writing. So now we're able to go back and look at some of these exhibits and enhance them and align them properly.

It turns out, the museum has time to go back and enhance some of the exhibits because of the pandemic.

Nashid Madyun: Because of the time we live in with the pandemic the idea of digitization has, really been propelled into a stage that is front and center. People were at home doing summer wondering what they could do. They wish they could go visit the museum. You've had three or four years to get to the museum in your hometown. Now we wouldn't really want to get out and get to the museum. We began to walk through the museums and pull out artifacts and have virtual tours. It's been a very good, very productive summer. Partly because we've had no guests so we've been able to focus on all of these very practical logistical projects. And we're going to come out a nice polished, shiny diamond able to look at K through 20. So the students on campus and the counties that surround us, the exhibits will be aligned to support curriculums. Students and teachers will be able to go to our website and pull down scavenger hunt and coloring pages or discussion questions and see artifacts to help illuminate that.

The Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum is part of the Florida African American Heritage Network, which we discussed in episode 85 of this show. For Madyun, the increased focus on Black museums in the state and the slow progress towards more historic markers on Black history are stepping stones.

Nashid Madyun: It's a stepping stone. These are the first step into establishing and acknowledging stores sometimes. And hopefully stories are our objective, but at the least you are able to identify the initial point of interest and organizations, nonprofits, grassroots communities can come together and expound on that. Whether they erect a structure, a walking park, an activity, but across the South specifically, and I'm from Arkansas, across the South, it's been wonderful to see places that have monuments, or a historic house, or parks or demonstrations where there was once just a marker.

[Outro]

85. The John G. Riley House is All That Remains of Smokey Hollow. Althemese Barnes Turned It Into a Museum on Tallahassee’s Black History Aug 31, 2020

During the period of Jim Crow and the Black Codes, a self-sustaining Black enclave called Smokey Hollow developed near downtown Tallahassee, Florida. As the first Black principal of Lincoln High School, John G. Riley was a critical part of the neighborhood. In 1890, he built a two-story house for his family—only about three blocks from where he was born enslaved.

In the 1960s, the city of Tallahassee seized and destroyed the neighborhood as part of an urban renewal project through eminent domain. Riley's house was all that remained, thanks to activists who fought its demolition. Althemese Barnes was determined to not let the history fade: as founding director of John G. Riley Research Center and Museum, she transformed the building into a place where people can learn about Smokey Hollow.

In this episode, Barnes talks about creating a museum to connect with young visitors, the process of becoming familiar with Florida's museum organizations which are often resistant to interpreting Black history, and the long process of building a commemoration to Smokey Hollow in Tallahassee’s urban landscape.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 John Gilmore Riley
00:50 Althemese Barnes, Founding Director of the John G. Riley House and Museum
01:15 Tallahassee in 1857
02:45 Why The Name Smokey Hollow?
04:00 The John Gilmore Riley House
05:00 Jim Crow and the Black Codes
05:40 Growing Up in Tallahassee
06:00 The Destruction of Smokey Hollow Through Eminent Domain
07:26 Barnes Steps Forward to Found the Museum
08:10 Interpreting Black History at the Museum
09:10 Dred Scott v. Sandford
09:25 Brown v. Board of Education
10:00 The Development of Cascades Park
11:40 Smokey Hollow Commemoration
12:15 Florida African American Heritage Preservation Network (FAAHPN)
12:30 Barnes Becoming Familiar with the Museum World
12:45 Resistance to Teaching History
13:44 SPONSOR: Ian Elsner
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 85. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

John Gilmore Riley was born enslaved on a Tallahassee, Florida plantation in 1857.

Althemese Barnes: John Gilmore Riley was born into slavery about three blocks from here. After slavery ended, he chose education for a career and became the first black principal of the Lincoln high school that was built to provide an education for newly free slaves and their descendants.

Here - where we’re sitting right now -- is the John G. Riley House and Museum in what is now basically downtown Tallahassee, and this is Althemese Barnes, the founding director of the museum.

Althemese Barnes: Hello, my name is Althemese Barnes and I am the founding director of the John Gilmore rally research center and museum. And I've also been, I'm still the executive director and I've been that for 24 years.

The John G. Riley House -- a handsome two story wood house -- sits in the same neighborhood as the older well-kept plantation homes.

Tallahassee in 1857 was the center of Florida’s plantation economy, a system built almost entirely on enslaved labor. Enslaved people outnumbered white people three to one. Of the 779 white families living here in 1860, nearly two thirds owned at least one person.

Althemese Barnes: Once the slavery system broke down or was eliminated in the area, a lot of the properties remained a part of that establishment. And a lot of the Blacks who worked on the plantation remained in the area. Over time, other Blacks moved in. So ultimately, it became this African American enclave we call it. And it's over 80 families settled around the 1870s.

The families had stores. They had churches. They had a school that operated out of new Saint John AME church. Um, they had a Woodyard and I say all that to say that it was a pretty much self sustaining community. They had pretty much everything that was needed, which was important because it was doing on the days of segregation, legal segregation.So they were limited in terms of where they could go to shop. Where they could go for entertainment and what have you.

And during the period of Jim Crow and the Black Codes, this neighborhood, this enclave, became known as Smokey Hollow.

Althemese Barnes: Why the name Smokey Hollow? With our younger visitors, we have fun with that, but Smokey Hollow grew up out of the fact that, okay, it's an all-Black community. So a lot of the more, I would say, undesirable elements ended up in Smokey Hollow. So you have the electric station, the first electric building, the incinerator where all of the city’s trash was burned was in Smokey Hollow. Many of the women did domestic work, white families brought in their clothes and back then the women did the wash outside over a black smudge pot. So they had to make these fires. And so he would always see smoke coming up from the fire pots and then the train ran right through Smokey Hollow.

So what does it emit smoke? So that's all of that is about the smoke part. Then we say to the children, well, where are we? Are we on a hill? No, we are in a hollow. So that's the Smokey Hollow.

John G. Riley was a critical part of the self-sustaining neighborhood. As the principal of the the Black Lincoln academy, which later became Lincoln High School, he was known as Professor Riley. He also served as a Guardian -- a kind of official record keeper of births and deaths for Black people in the Smokey Hollow neighborhood.

The majority of houses in Smokey Hollow could be described architecturally as “shotgun homes”. Riley was able to buy some, and rent them to tenants in Smokey Hollow.

In the 1890s, Riley built this grander house for his family on the northern end of Smokey Hollow.

Althemese Barnes: this house, when it was built, Was a very upscale, big deal for Tallahassee, for a Black person. Because if you think of the fact that, okay, you have a person who was born a slave and he was a slave until he was about eight, nine years old then along came. Another time in history when people like Mr. Riley still, we're not allowed to learn, to read and write. So he had to slip and get books. He had an auction. Yeah. Riata who was very learned it. So she could teach him how to read and then he grows up a little more, but he still has obstacles.

And then. Look at the fact that other people counted on him. And then you Jim Crow and the Black Codes. Yeah. Black people, especially the men were in danger. Couldn't do things that other men did. There were lynchings close by because the jail was in Smokey Hollow, and they could it pass in there every day.

I grew up in Tallahassee—in fact, I grew up and went to school less than 2 miles from Smokey Hollow, but I had never even heard of it, not even once.

So why had I never heard of it? That was the question I came to the Riley house to ask.

It turns out there’s a lot of reasons, but it all stems from an event that Barnes simply refers to as eminent domain.

14 years after Riley died, the city of Tallahassee decided that it needed the land that the Smokey Hollow neighborhood sat on -- and proceeded to take it as public property through eminent domain.

Althemese Barnes: In 1968 the community was eminent domained, you had maybe about eight families that were able to negotiate and stay in there long enough to get money for that property.

The residents were told that the city needed the land to build a new capital complex -- Tallahassee is the capital of Florida -- but not much actually came of the project save for the construction of a new road over the neighborhood, and this was the Talalhassee I was familiar with.

The community: erased out of the urban landscape, and out of the minds of people like me.

But not for the former residents, who forever resented eminent domain.

With most of Smokey Hollow already cleared out, in the 1970s, the city also had its sights on the Riley House itself.

Althemese Barnes: the idea was to demolish the house and turn it into an electric substation here.

Former residents of Smokey Hollow -- many of whom were taught by Riley -- rallied to prevent the home from being destroyed. The house was fully restored in 1981.

Barnes says that it was the preservationists’ goal that the house would serve as a center to interpret local African American history.

And that’s where Barnes comes in. In 1996 she stepped forward to turn the dream into a reality, starting with oral histories.

Althemese Barnes: We were the first people to come over to get it all cleaned up after the restoration, to turn it into a research center and museum. There are many ways to interpret this house history through aspects of his house. One of the first things I did when I came here. I said, we don't want to just be a museum with pictures on the wall. I wanted to document history that has been ignored, neglected.

So with my old camcorder camera and tripod, I did almost a hundred interviews. All the people are deceased now.

If people want to know anything about the Black history, the real authentic Black history.

You have to talk with people who lived it. Someone else might tell you something, but your primary source is much better.

Today the dream is realized. The museum doesn’t just have pictures on the wall..There’s even a talking, Audio Animatronic likeness of Riley which was, in a very Florida twist -- donated by the Disney cooperation.

Audio Animatronic Riley: “If you don’t know your roots, people can tell you anything and convince you of its truthfulness.”

Barnes says that the museum uses the years of Riley’s life as an interpretive method to provide context for the legal forces of segregation acting on Smokey Hollow and Black people across the nation.

Althemese Barnes: We kind of bring it up even with, with the birth and death date. Mr. Riley was born in 1857, so we said, okay, what famous court decision happened in 1857? And if it's then middle school or up students, keep thinking, if you think. Oh, Dred Scott. Yes. Dred Scott decision. Tell me about Dred Scott. Black man trying get his freedom. Didn't work. Courts ruled against him. Okay. Mr. Riley died in 1954. What happened in 1954 relates to education? Oh yes. Brown vs the board of education!

The location reviews of the John G. Riley House and Museum mostly express gratitude to learn what reviews didn’t learn in school. There aren’t too many museums in Tallahassee that interpret these kinds of histories. Barnes knows all too well how much work -- often bureaucratic work -- is necessary to keep the memory of Smokey Hollow in the city of Tallahassee.

A more recent example of this comes in the City’s development of a new 24 acerpark, called Cascades park on mostly land that used to be Smokey Hollow.

Althemese Barnes: Now here we are with these 24 weeks, well, we will do this part. And the whole thing was that the people doing the development city County, whomever was making no mention. Of the footprint, of the original footprint.

And when it was time for Q and A, I raised my hand and it got to the point where people knew what I was going to say, you know, I think you need to represent the history of what was here before. You make this into cascades park, bam, no reference to smoke hour that went on for about two years.

Finally, after a shift in project management, Barnes was invited to create a group that would commemorate Smokey Hollow at Cascades Park.

Althemese Barnes: So we met for about, I would say two and a half, three years identified people from Smokey Hollow, brought them in. Did oral history histories. We had work groups, we got a bit map, they will come and put a sticker. Okay. This family that was here is they mopped where everybody lived, where every business was located, everything we needed to document Smokey Hollow.

The results of Barnes’s efforts are now right across the street from the John G. Riley house.

Park goeres pass the Smokey Hollow Commemoration -- which includes historical places and cleverly designed 3D outlines of the ubiquitous Smokey Hollow shotgun houses.

Althemese Barnes: We really wanted to put real shotguns, but there was the safety security factor, that kind of thing. And so we decided now what should we call these and run around? And so we said spirit houses, because, because though Smokey Hollow is not here, the spirit of Smokey Hollow lives on.

When she stepped forward to work on the museum in 1996, Barnes was unfamiliar with the museum world -- she had worked in state government. She had never written a grant. But she became familiar with the museum world in Florida. She helped found the Florida African American Heritage Preservation Network, which features landmarks and museums all across the state. She wrote grants. She helped others write grants. In order to fund projects that were overlooked by the mostly white historical establishment, she realised that she needed to sit on committees that decided which grants should be awarded, and then she sat on those committees.

Althemese Barnes: But to this day, there are still resistant. If you go to some of the organizations that are supposed to be representing the state museum groups, associations, go to some of their meetings… phish. And it's really unfortunate because there's a rich history here.

Now I would say during the past, say five to seven years, I've noticed more and more as a few younger people come up, they have come in wanting to know what are you doing?

But it's a richness that people have missed all these years. The resources were there, but they didn't have the people with the right mindset. And this is all a part of this social justice that people talk about.

And then the house itself built 1890. How many years ago was that? In a person's life they aren't supposed to still stay in, but this house is standing because some people cared about it.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

84. On Richmond’s Transformed Monument Avenue, A Group of Historians Erect Rogue Historical Markers Aug 10, 2020

Near the empty pedestals of Confederate figures that used to tower over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a new type of historical marker now stands. The markers have most of the trappings of a state-erected historical plaque—but these are rogue markers erected by a group of anonymous historians called History is Illuminating.

History is Illuminating decided to use historical markers as a medium to talk about the Black history taking place while those statues were erected as monuments to white supremacy.

In this episode, an anonymous member of History is Illuminating discusses the ubiquity of the Lost Cause narrative, the reasons for being anonymous and going rogue, and the means of historical marker production.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Historical Markers in the U.S. South
01:00 History is Illuminating
01:20 Rogue Historians
02:10 Lost Cause Narrative
03:13 Monument Avenue
05:15 The Origins of History is Illuminating
06:10 Studio Two Three
06:20 Naming History is Illuminating
08:10 Constructing the Historical Markers
08:30 Episode 42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans
09:05 The Markers
09:45 John Mitchell Jr.
10:30 Going Rogue
11:00 Means of Historical Marker Production
12:35 Learn More and Donate to History is Illuminating
13:05 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦
13:52 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 84. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Over the past few weeks, near the empty pedestals of confederate figures that used to stand on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a new type of historical marker started appearing. The markers have most of the trappings of a state-erected historical marker--etched letters and an iconic shape.

But there is no official logo, just a bright sun icon at the top, text in the middle describing a past event, and at the bottom simply the words: History Is Illuminating.

History is Illuminating: If you start looking at historic markers that were installed in the 60s, 70s, 80s across the South, not just in Virginia, but in states all across the South, they're so biasly worded and the subject matter is so biasly chosen.

History Is Illuminating is a group of anonymous historians from the Richmond area who, as the confederate statues were being removed, decided to use the format of those historical markers as a medium to talk about the Black history taking place while those statues were erected as monuments to white supremacy.

The anonymous historians started calling themselves rogue historians.

History is Illuminating: “We have had a lot of discussions around this and we consider ourselves rogue because while all of our bosses appreciate what we're doing. A lot of the issues that come across in history are issues where the Lost Cause narrative was taught for so long in schools that talking about aspects that go against the Lost Cause narrative can often be divisive in our society, especially in the South. And I know personally for the organization I work for, I regularly receive phone calls or voicemails from people angry that we're talking about Black history or saying things along the lines of it's better just not to talk about it. We've actually had a couple of our signs defaced and we felt like it was safer for us as well as significant because the facts are what are important, not the historians that are coming forward.

The Lost Cause narrative permeates museums, historical monuments, and textbooks in the United States. The narrative casts the cause of the confederacy as a just and noble one. The ideology has been used to perpetuate racism a racist power structures since the end of the Civil War.

History is Illuminating: The Lost Cause narrative was actually invented here in Richmond, Virginia. There was a popularity of glorifying the battles and glorifying the nobility of what happened in the Civil War, rather than acknowledging the loss or acknowledging the essential part of slavery that was played out within the Civil War.

The popularity of that concept just grew ridiculously and the United Daughters of the Confederacy joined in on this and popularized it across the South, putting it as the mainstream form of education within textbooks, as well as making monuments rise across the South. The Daughters of the Confederacy, actually not only rose monuments to the Confederacy, but they also actually rose a few monuments to the Klan.

And one of the single densest and largest collections of confederate symbols was in Monument Avenue -- a grassy, purpose-built grand avenue in Richmond. The first monument erected was a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee, which as of this recording is the only confederate monument still standing on the Avenue. When it was erected in 1890, there were no buildings around it.

History is Illuminating: At the time it was constructed, you can actually see photographs to Google it that have pictures of the Robert E. Lee monument, surrounded by people working in cotton fields.

The whole thing about monument Avenue that's so interesting is that Monument Avenue has been a street of walking tours. It has been a street of people coming and walking down and remembering a glorified past that was taught to them in their textbooks, in childhood, and many people from outside of the South come to Monument Avenue and are taken aback and gasp at how dramatic it is.

It's these large, larger than life monuments set up on huge pedestals with marbles sculptures around them that seem like something from ancient Rome. With Jefferson Davis, giving his, ‘I quit the federal government’ speech and all of the symbolisms around him. And they also have quotes on that monument. There was a quote on that monument. There, it was, I forget the exact wording, but it goes on into detail talking about how he deserves these inalienable rights to pass on the legacies that he knew to his children. And this it's fascinating, the way that the sentence structure so often just falls short of a full sentence. The ideas just fall short of a full idea. The idea that we were fighting for states' rights, not the state right to own slaves.

It's these half ideas that are not fully constructed that caused really short winded debates because there's not many talking points beyond the short ones. People were taught in school. It's just been really upsetting to everyone in our group.

After years of pressure, on July 2nd, 2020, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced the official removal of most of the confederate statues on Monument Ave. That’s when History is Illuiminating started.

History is Illuminating: The way this initially came down was me and a friend who is the other lead organizer, were talking on the phone one night after Levar announced that the monuments were coming down and we said, this should happen. And we initially had just planned to write them ourselves and write them in with the yard signs. We were just going to keep replacing yard signs on Monument Avenue. And my partner in signs started talking to a few friends and they were really interested. And then I knew a couple of historians that we thought might be interested too. And we just kind of kept talking to people and everyone was like, this is what I've been wanting to be doing!

The group of rogue historians continued to grow. They communicate by a text channel, bouncing ideas off each other. The group partnered with Studio Two Three, a local collective, feminist printmaking studio to print a Zine featuring the markers and a map of how to find them.

History is Illuminating: So there's about 10 members in the group, they're all different races, genders, sexualities, ages, all of those different representations. And there are people in the group who wanted to participate in the signage and have no interest because they are way too busy to participate in social media or anything like that.

I think it's important to just keep going back to everybody and saying, who wants to participate in this, or have an opinion and let us know if you think this is a good idea or not.

The name History is Illuminating is meant to indicate that it is the act of studying history itself that can illuminate the present.

I choose to read it as History Can Be Illuminating.

To the extent that the statues that used to stand on Monument Avenue “teach” history when combined with tour guides, they teach the battle history and the aesthetics of quitting the federal government. That history has a lot of facts in it, but what might be more illuminating could be a discussion about the reasons of the war, or the backlash against Reconstruction.

History is Illuminating: When I came to them and told them I wanted the name History is Illuminating, they were kind of taken aback and they were like, I don't know how people are going to feel about hearing history. The word history seems like a bad word so often. And it's so true that so often history has been manipulated and utilized to hold people down, which is so true in the Lost Cause narrative.

The people in our group realized that working in history and listening to the people getting frustrated and angry, that if we take these monuments down without taking a moment to educate people about the larger picture of why these monuments are offensive to so many people and not simply the things that people are saying in their head, the one liners from history classes as children, once you start realizing these larger pictures and you start to realize that it is unjustifiable that they're still here in our communities or even if it is justifiable that they're still here, we need to be telling the whole story.

The markers are created using a CNC machine which chisels the text and creates a convincing-looking historical marker. Members of History is Illuminating are quick to point out that the markers are not intended to be confused for an official marker, but they clearly evoke the medium.

In episode 42 of Museum Archipelago, author and historian Freddi Williams Evans and activist Luther Gray describe their efforts to go through more official channels to erect historical markers in New Orleans, Louisiana. Like Richmond, there was plenty of commomentation going on in New Orleans, but like Richmond, there was almost nothing that acknowledged the city’s slave trading past or powerful backlash against Reconstruction.

History is Illuminating’s approach demonstrates some of the advantages of bypassing the official channels: they can act quickly to comment on the changing situation on Monument Avenue.

History is Illuminating: We did the signs in chronological order. And since the Monuments themselves are not in chronological order, it's a little weird, but it works out. We wanted to talk about Black history and what was occurring to Black people in the city of Richmond concurrently with what was happening as these monuments were raised surrounding the white history.

So like the first sign is Dusk of Black Power, Dawn of Jim Crow, and it discusses members of the Virginia Black men who served in the Virginia general assembly between 1869 and 1890 and 1890 was the date this monument went up, and the first act of the 1889 elected Virginia Senate was to accept the Lee monument.

Another marker erected by History Is Illuminating describes John Mitchell Jr, a business person and editor of the Richmond Planet, which was Richmond’s Black newspaper at the time, and quotes what he wrote on the occasion of the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee statue in 1890.

History is Illuminating: John Mitchell Jr. wrote on the unveiling that “the South’s reverence for its former leaders slowed progress and forged heavier change with which to be bound.” And he also stated that, “Black men were here to see this monument raised and we'll be here to see it torn down.”

It is also illuminating to realize that even within the history and museum fields, going rogue and staying anonymous can be the easiest ways to get something like this done.

History is Illuminating: Trying to move forward in a way that everyone gets a little bit more education and understands the fuller picture. It's something that a lot of museum organizations, because they are held accountable by donors or grants or things like that often have to tiptoe around and are not able to just come out and say flatly and the idea of bringing some other discussions up within the community is unsettling to many people, even within the historic fields itself.

There’s also a technological story here. It used to be that only civic institutions could raise the funds to make something like Monument Avenue.

History is Illuminating: What's so interesting in the city of Richmond is actually just like how all of these monuments were written. Historically, the way that monument commissions work is somebody will say, “Oh, we need a monument for this person.” And someone in the monuments commission or someone involved in the city says, yes, yes, that's a great idea.

Let's create a commission for that and they'll come together. And it's a lot of experts. It's not like they don't know what they're doing, but they'll all sit down in a circle and kind of say, “yes, just I am an academic and I work in museums or I work in public history or yada, yada, yada.” They think they know what is right for everybody.

And then they'll go to Richmond city council or some whoever's community city council and say, we need X amount of dollars for this piece of public art in front of this building. And they'll say, “yes, yes, that sounds great.” And then they'll go and interview a bunch of artists and choose the piece of art.

But at no point, is there actually -- and these are not elected officials -- at no point does the community actually get a say in the construction of it, this monument, which is exactly what happened all along Monument Avenue.

Today, historians can go rogue because the tools of producing and erecting historical markers are relatively inexpensive. The technology to 3D print a convincing life-size statue of anyone or anything is right around the corner.

Today, museums are expensive and require huge funding structures to start. But they won’t be forever: the tools of museum building at every level are posed to become much cheaper. And when that happens, it won’t just be historians going rogue.

History is Illuminating: If anyone is interested, they can download our Zine for completely free on Studio Two Three's website. They can donate if they want to, but I mean like it's really not a big deal. Um, we are encouraging people that if you can't afford to donate or just don't have it in you right now, that's totally fine. Fine. We'd much rather, instead of donating, you have that really hard conversation with a relative or friends that you've been putting off.

[Outro]

83. Chris Newell Forges The Snowshoe Path as the First Wabanaki Leader of the Abbe Museum Jul 06, 2020

Chris Newell remembers the almost giddy level of excitement he felt when he visited the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. Every summer, the family drove for more than two hours for his father to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum.

But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the the Native Market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, and the Museum itself, which was not.

Today, Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy citizen, is the first member of the Wabanaki Nations to lead the Abbe Museum. When he took on the role, the museum changed his title to Executive Director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations, one of many steps toward decolonizing the museum and shifting power. In this episode, Newell describes how to spot a colonial museum, how museums’ default colonial mindset—including when it comes to maps and language—harms everyone, and his plan for his tenure.

Image: Beadwork by Kristen Newell (Mashantucket Pequot). Wabanaki double-curve motif with dawn time as the background.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Visiting the Abbe Museum
01:40 Chris Newell, Executive Director and Senior Partner to the Wabanaki Nations
02:05 Akomawt Educational Initiative
02:29 Museum Archipelago Ep. 68 with endawnis Spears
02:46 What is a Colonial Museum?
04:30 The Abbe Museum’s Decolonization Process
05:45 The Wabanaki Nations
06:31 What It Means to be Senior Partner to the Wabanaki Nations
08:07 Museums’ Default Colonial Mindset
09:06 How Do You Know If You’re Visiting a Colonial Museum?
09:30 Maps in the Abbe Museum
10:39 The Use of Language in the Abbe Museum
12:05 “There’s No Book”
13:24 SPONSOR: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green, Available Wherever Books Are Sold
14:27 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

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Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 83. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Chris Newell remembers visiting the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. His father was hired to put on educational performances, to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language, history and culture at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum.

So every summer, the family would drive the two and a half hours from their home Motahkmikuhk. Newell looked forward to it year after year with an almost giddy level of excitement.

But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the surrounding events, like the Native market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, and the Museum itself, which was not.

Chris Newell: Back then, the Abbe Museum was more of a traditional ethnographic collection, a lot of lithics and things like that, so when it came to the museum itself, it did feel very much like a colonial museum. It was a Bar Harbor institution, not necessarily a Wabanaki institution. So I definitely felt a lot more connection to things like the events, the Native American festival and those because those were Native run and the Abbe supporting them. Although I knew what the Abbe had, I knew the special collection, I knew the treasure that they have as far as the history of my peoples, Passamaquoddy people as well as Wabanaki peoples in general. and so I've always been attracted to what is available in the Abbe. Back then as a child, I felt it was kind of two different spaces.

Today, Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy citizen, is the first member of the Wabanaki Nations to lead the Abbe Museum.

Chris Newell: Hi everybody. My name is Chris Newell and I am the director of education for the Akomawt Educational Initiative, also a cofounder, and I'm also the executive director and senior partner to Wabanaki nations for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Chris Newell cofounded the Akomawt Educational Initiative in 2018 with endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) and Dr. Jason Mancini. Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together.

On episode 68 of this show, we interviewed Spears about how the Initiative was born out of their experiences seeing colonial museum practices across present-day New England.So what do we mean when we say colonial museum -- outside the context of Colonial Williamsburg, of course.

Chris Newell: this kind of goes off of my colleague endawnis Spears who was on Museum Archipelago before: museums are colonial artifacts. The idea of a museum comes with colonization. And tribal museums, even in their own right, are using that colonial artifacts methodology as a way to present their native histories, although they do it in different in a tribal museum. In a non-tribal museum largely it's based off of the American Conservation Movement, which started in the 19th century. And when it came to museums and especially the way museum content was created, colonial museums would oftentimes focus on tribes that they felt at the time were less impacted, which would have been Western Plains tribes and Southwestern tribes.

Chris Newell: So if you go into a non-tribal museum that has native content, a colonial museum, then what you typically see is a presentation of native cultures from through the lens of anthropology and archeology. And a lot of those voices, 99% of those voices, especially in the past were non-native voices that were framing that lens on how to view our cultures and so it's not uncommon to see things that may seem out of place. So to go to a Northeastern museum that has a Native collection and to see only Plains artwork or only Southwestern pottery and no Wampum art, no Ash Splint basketry is really kind of an old fashioned way of presenting things that goes back to a mode of thinking that really originated in the idea that Native people were going to vanish at one point, and that we needed our history saved by an outside force. And that's literally what the colonial museum represents is that mindset.

And the Abbe Museum is rooted in that mindset. Opened in 1928, it housed the collection of Native American objects gathered by radiologist Robert Abbe in a purpose-built building.

Newell was hired to lead the Abbe Museum in February 2020, just before lockdowns due to Covid-19 began. But the decolonization process had been going on at the museum for the past five years.

Chris Newell: The Abbe Museum has gone through the past five years under the previous executive director, the president-CEO at the time, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, a decolonization process. And part of that was not just in the content of the museum, which centers Native voices now, but also in the structure of the way the museum is run. And the Abbe has, over time, restructured its board to become a majority Wabanaki board. So, as a colonial museum that presents Wabanaki history, we are probably the only museum that has that structure, where the voice of the people that we are representing is now centered and also is governing the institution itself.

When the changeover in directorship happened, the museum changed the title from president and CEO to executive director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations as part of this decolonization process and the shift of power.

Chris Newell: The Wabanaki tribes of today are five tribes, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Miꞌkmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki tribes and the history, there was 20 tribes at one point , but currently there are five tribes. Wabanaki are, is an overarching term for the cosmology of the peoples in those tribes in the belief, in the Gloosekap stories, a creation named Gloosekap created our people from the ash trees and gave us the name Wabanaki, which is the anglicized version of in Passamaquoddy Wolastoqiyik, which would translate to the people of the Dawn. Collectively, that's how we see ourselves. We understand that we are the Eastern most tribes on the continent. And we are all connected in that way.

So when it comes to that portion of my job, I take it very, very seriously. There's no book, right? There's no example for me to follow. I think about the museum world and the lack of representation by native people in the museum world. There's a history for the reason why that is, but what I always tell people is that it doesn't not do us any good as native people to be absent from these spaces. No matter what these spaces are interpreting our cultures and our histories and everything else, therefore we need to be present there. 85% of native people work in the museum field as an entry level of visitor services or security. And very few of us get up into the intellectual leadership positions and what I would want to do, in the long run, I would love to see the Abbe museum have full Wabanaki staff. I mean, that would be the, the biggest goal I could actually have, but how do I do that? I need to partner the community into the museum world. That way, the Abbe always feels like a welcoming space to any of the community members from the Wabanaki communities in Maine and beyond.

Newell acknowledges that encouraging members of the Wabanaki Nations to work at the Abbe Museum can be an uphill battle because of the racist history of museums like it.

Chris Newell: The way museums in the past have done things like hold on to Native American remains that has, you know, the older generation would not go into those physical spaces because of that. The Abbe museum is one of the places where we have repatriated all of those remains and we're making it into a welcome space and that's a big change for the museum world.

But even outside of holding onto human remains, there are many examples of how museums’ default colonial mindset can—in addition to everything else—lead to a worse visitor experience.

Chris Newell: As somebody that used to work in a tribal museum, it was not uncommon for me in that space for a non-native visitor, whether a child or adult to ask whether the tribe that we were presenting the history of still existed. There's a lot of people in this world that still think that Native people are all dead and gone, and that's oftentimes reinforced by their childhood experiences and their adult experiences going into a colonial museum and seeing artifacts that are only from the past or seeing our work that is only from the past.

And so for museums to update or be decolonized the way that they present themselves. They really gotta get out of that mode of trying to save a vanishing culture, but rather hosts the art in the histories of the living cultures that exist here now.

One of the easiest ways to tell if you’re visiting a colonial museum is if it doesn’t ask you as the visitor to normalize some aspect of the culture presented. So an Abbe Museum experience that only features maps with modern-day political borders, or is entirely in English, is not doing a good job of presenting the culture that members of the Wabanaki Nations share.

Chris Newell: Two dimensional maps are, of course, a European a derivation or creation, Native people map the world in a different way. And we use songs, very long songs and orations to map our territory. But if you go into the exhibits, what we did was we did create a two dimensional map of all of Wabanaki territory, but we took out the roads and the cities and all the colonial borders. And then when you see the landscape that way, representative in that fashion, you see how it all of a sudden makes sense how our tribes existed, the riverways that separated our territories and all of those things.

Chris Newell: And you can see how people traveled, great distances, how they would portage from one river to another. So it’s also is going to enrich the experience for the non-Wabanaki visitor, because they're really going to be able to, you know, see our perspective in our worldview in our language and the way we view land, all of those things, not an interpretation, but rather a first person perspective, which is really, really a powerful and impactful way.

Bar Harbor, Maine is an international tourist destination—cruise ships dock there. Today, the museum’s exhibits and signage are mostly in English, but Newell hopes that under his tenure, much more Native language gets incorporated to the point where a non-Wabanaki visitor will have learned some Native words before they leave the museum.

Chris Newell: Iit gets rid of the implicit bias that colonial museums have been feeding for so long. When the early English would arrive in the 17th century, they would use the word “improvement” as a reason for taking over and subduing land. Building things like farms, permanent housing. But nowadays in America we used a word development to do the exact same thing, but when we use that word development, what we mean is we're about to dig up a big plot of that life giving life cycle, and we're going to do something and build something, but really the process involved destruction first.

Chris Newell: Viewing the landscape through the different languages really gives you a window into the different mindsets. The use of language I think is probably the best bridge that I can draw for making all of that happen. When an English speaker learns some of our language and learn some of our worldview through it, they have experienced something. And so for the non-Native museum visitor, the international visitor to come through and to learn our worldview through our language and to have it normalized, you know, to have the bathroom signs to say, “skitap” and “ehpit”, you know, instead of men's and women's,, and for people to figure that out with the international signs, you know, but they would learn, some of our wording and that’s a profound experience.

As Newell says, there’s no book and there’s no guide for the process of transforming the Abbe Museum from a colonial, traditional ethnographic collection into a fully decolonized museum run by members of the Wabanaki Nations. But because of work like this, the snowshoe path becomes a little bit easier for other museums to follow.

Chris Newell: We want to be informative to anyone who would walk through the door. But we also want to be informative to the Wabanaki person. And then by also doing that the Wabanaki people who already know that language come into a space that uses their worldview and then it doesn't become a Bar Harbor institution, to the Wabanaki visitor anymore. It starts to become a home away from home. We are in the land of the Dawn, no matter what. And so the Wabanaki visitor should feel that sense of welcoming one walking into that space.

Chris Newell: This is really a passion of mine, a passion that was born out of my childhood, watching my father, you know, making a difference in this world. And that's what I would hope to do. I leave a lofty goal of my future in that I would hope that by the time I am done with this world, that I have changed it for the better, not just for the good of Wabanaki people, but for everybody.

82. Statues and Museums Jun 15, 2020

In the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor — the same harbor where Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock.

In this episode, we examine the relationship of statues and museums. Why do so many call for statues of people like Colston to end up in a museum instead of at the bottom of a harbor? Looking at examples from Dr. Lyra Montero’s Washington's Next! project in the United States, American Hall of Honor museums for college football teams, and statues of Lenin and Stalin in Eastern Europe, we discuss the town-square-to-museum pipeline for statues.

Image: CC Keir Gravil - Black Lives Matter Protest, Bristol, UK

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 Tim Tebow Statue at the University of Florida
00:50 Football Hall of Honor Museums
02:02 Tearing Down Edward Colston’s Statue in Bristol
02:44 Dr. Lyra Monteiro
03:00 Episode 77. Washington's Next!
03:12 The “Slippery Slope” Argument
04:56 Dr. Sadiah Qureshi
05:33 Should Colston’s Statue End Up in a Museum?
05:58 Episode 5. Stalinworld
06:42 Grūtas Park
07:32 Episode 25. Museum of Socialist Art
08:20 Museums of Bristol Website
08:40 Number of Confederate Statues in the United States
09:55 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone
10:25 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 82. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

The statue appeared in 2011 on the path of my daily commute to the University of Florida, where I was a student.

It was a statue of a football player named Tim Tebow, and the strange thing about it was that Tim Tebow was still around. In fact, it was just a few months after he graduated, and it was commemorating events, like touchdowns, that I remembered. I remembered seeing him around campus, and now I was looking at him as a statue.

But it wasn’t just a statue. Behind the statue was the entrance to a Hall of Honor which featured football trophies.

But the space was not just a room with trophies, it was a story about the football program where the trophies were an inevitable consequence. In short, it looked like a museum. Reader rails and old pictures of the early days of the program were presented alongside pigskin footballs from the 1930s with good lighting.

But this wasn’t just at one university. All across the football conference, these trophy rooms looked like museum spaces.

At Florida State University, just a few hours away, the trophy room begins with artifacts from and descriptions of the Seminole Nation — even though these are tellingly light on the details. The point was to tie the athletic program’s success with that of historical figures fighting a US invasion. It is all done very deftly — one minute you’re looking at a map of what is now Florida drawn by a US general, and the next, you are looking at a tattered football jersey, the next bronze statue of the story’s heroes. There’s a bridge between statues and museums — they feed into each other.

So why do athletic programs adopt statues and museum-like spaces? Because they want to sell us a selective account presented as a neutral archive of the past.

[Audio of Edward Colston Crashing Down]

Last week in Bristol’s The Centre, Black Lives Matter UK protesters tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader.

[Audio of Edward Colston Rolling Through the Streets of Bristol]

Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor. The same harbor that Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock.

Before it was thrown in the harbor, the statue of Colston had been standing in the center of town since 1895. And it wasn’t as if the source of Colston’s wealth was just discovered last week.

Lyra Monteiro: The idea of how do we make visible, for instance, the enslaved people who are invisible at all of these sites of memory that were about white supremacy when they were created. And now they still are, but we don't talk about that. How do we make that visible? You know? That's something that I've been, I've been playing around with for a long time.

This is Dr. Lyra Monteiro, professor of history at Rutgers University Newark and cofounder of the Museum Onsite and the creator of Washington's Next!.

In our interview for episode 77 of this show, she explains — and answers — one of the arguments against taking down white supremacists statues in the context of the United States.

Lyra Monteiro: The slippery slope argument. And the people who make this argument tend not to be the ones who are like. Overtly gung ho and like, you know, it's our Southern heritage to honor Robert E. Lee. It's not those folks. It's more the people who are historians. Sometimes our historians, sometimes like museum folks. The argument that they make is that, well, yes, it's not good that there is a statue to Robert E. Lee. But the thing is if we take him down (and obviously using him to stand up for all the Confederate statues) if we take him down, well then where are we going to stop? Because the reason why he's not appropriate for us to honor and public spaces because of slavery. Well, there are other slave owners that we honor in public space, and of course the biggest ones there are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And of course, there's no way in hell we're going to get rid of those statues. Right? What we're going to take down the Washington monument? I don't think so. The idea is it's a slippery slope that we're setting up. If we are starting to tumble down, the minute that we start taking down the statues of people who supported and promoted slavery.

Monteiro’s answer to the slippery slope argument is yes, Washington’s Next.

Lyra Monteiro: The tone of voice in which I hear the slippery slope argument from scholars and from museum practitioners is, and from, you know, public parks officials is less one of panic and concern about attacking that legacy and much more one of, “Well, that's just silly! Obviously we wouldn't do that.”

Dr Sadiah Qureshi, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham writes in _Flux: Parian Unpacked_ about toppling statues, “critics accused protesters of wanting to ‘rewrite’ history. Yet... fail to engage with what is really at stake... namely identifying, acknowledging and removing endemic structural problems of racism in reparative form”

A suggestion offered by more than a few people is museums. Why not put the statues of problematic people in museums? Is the bottom of the harbor really the right place for a statue of Colston?

Of course, these questions tend to ignore that the bottom of the ocean is the final resting place for hundreds of actual people thrown overboard from Colston’s ships because they were deemed a poor investment for Colston’s company.

On Museum Archipelago, we’ve investigated what various Eastern European countries are doing with old statues of dictators like Lenin and Stalin.

Monika Bernotas, who was interviewed on episode 5 of this show, describes how her family’s native Lithuania removed it’s ubiquitous Soviet statues from city squares all across the country. The removals were events that helped build the young nation, but once the statues were removed from their original locations, no one knew what to do with them.

Many of them ended up at something called Grūtas Park — a kind of half-theme park that includes a massive statue garden. The statues are presented simply and somewhat randomly — each has a little description of the city and square where that statue used to stand. Many Lithuanians and the Lithuanian government have criticized the uncritical approach to the park’s layout. Visitors are free to do whatever they want.

Monika Bernotas: Once you get into the actual statue walk, it’s kind of funny because you can do whatever you want. So like, climbing on top of Lenin and Stalin, picking their nose, patting them on the head, doing whatever you want. But I like to think that I have some sort of connection, some sort of understanding, that these images might have been both scary and inspirational at different times in somebody’s life. For me, they’ve been images that were bad. When I was going up I always knew that Lenin’s face that Stalin’s face, these were the faces of terror that drove my grandparents out of Lithuania. But to be able to interact with them on this very humorous level is really interesting.

The situation at Bulgaria’s Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia is somewhat similar. The outdoor sculpture garden is littered with statues commemorating Soviet power placed wherever there is room.

I’ve visited many times and I’m never quite sure how to react. There’s a lot of power in deliberately taking these statues out of the context they were made for. What once may have been an imposing statue underscoring who’s in charge in a public square is now gesticulating impotently at a rose bush.

In Eastern Europe, the statues of Lenin and Stalin were erected during the Communist times, and were swiftly removed when the system fell. In the West, statues erected more than 100 years ago still stand without context.

Washington’s Next because the money he made from owning, working, and selling people isn’t a footnote -- it is the reason he was the first president.

Even at the Museums of Bristol website, Colston is identified as a “revered philanthropist / reviled slave trader”, in that order, as if the money he gave away to the city of Bristol wasn’t violently extracted from the people he enslaved.

It’s not a sufficient answer to put these statues in a museum. I don’t know if there’s enough museum space for all the Confederate monuments in the American South or enough museum space for all the statues of King Leopold in Belgium. But more importantly, the political exercise in selective remembrance neatly packaged as an unbiased archive that statues represent is the same exercise that museums represent.

Museums and statues are bridged together -- many of these statues are right in front of the museum entrances, priming the visitor for what they can expect to find inside.

Statues and museums share a centuries-long history of supporting white supremacist, colonialist, racist ideologies and helping them flourish, and providing the evidence for them and undergirding them through their placement, through their air of authority, and through their supposed neutrality.

The statues of American football players at American universities helps me think about this because the stakes are so low: the rivalry is clear. “Our football team has heroes and a long legacy.” And it is telling that the two tools that were employed make that point are statues and museums.

81. Living History in a Pandemic at Old Sturbridge Village Jun 01, 2020

Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Massachusetts depicting life in rural New England during the early 19th century. But the early 19th century isn’t specific enough for the site’s historical interpreters—to immerse visitors in the world they’re recreating, knowing exactly what year it “is” matters.

Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village was tasked with choosing that “default” date. He chose 1838 in part because the social and political change of that time period would resonate with today’s visitors. But there’s another aspect of the year that will resonate with visitors today once the museum reopens after closing due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s.

In this episode, Kelleher describes the difference between first and third person interpretation, and how visitors might react to seeing 19th century costumed interpreters with modern facemasks.

Topics and Notes

00:00 Intro
00:15 What does the word interpreter mean?
00:56 Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village
01:34 Old Sturbridge Village
02:30 First-Person Interpretation
03:30 Third-Person Interpretation
05:35 “Who’s the president?”
06:50 Picking a default year
07:40 How people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s
09:30 Living History Museums Interpreting Pandemics
10:00 Interpreters in facemasks
10:44 Archipelago at the Movies 🍿
11:56 Outro

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 81. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro]

Tom Kelleher first learned what the word “interpreter” meant when he applied for a job at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Massachusetts.

Tom Kelleher: They posted a job for a research historian and being young and firstly minted as a historian. I thought I knew everything and I applied and they called back a few weeks later and said, I'm. Sorry, you didn't get a job. Tom. Um, and I went to hang up saying, thank you because it was nice of them to tell me. And they said, would you be interested in being an interpreter? And I thought for a minute and said, well, my Spanish isn't that good. I don't think I could do that. And they said no you don't understand. The people who explain the past are called interpreters. They interpret the past for the present.

Today, over thirty years later, Kelleher is Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village and one of the museum’s longest-serving employees.

Tom Kelleher: Hello, my name is Tom Kelleher. I’ve been working in the living history field, which is wearing the clothing of people of the past and trying to have the past make sense for the present.

I work at a living history outdoor museum in Massachusetts called Old Sturbridge village. And I literally and figuratively wear a lot of hats. And one of them is, I'm the one in charge of initially training all our new costumed historians or historical interpreters depending on what term you like.

A living history museum recreates historical settings to simulate a past time, providing visitors with an experiential interpretation of history. Old Sturbridge Village is a living history depicting life in Rural New England, set on a couple of hundred acres. The museum features over 40 historical buildings -- most are antique buildings that have been moved and restored to the site. There’s also three water-powered mills and a working farm with animals.

Tom Kelleher: It's not a recreation of the town of Sturbridge or anywhere else. It's more like a slice of life, a historical sampler. So in a couple hours of walking around, a day of walking around, you can get an idea of what life was like in early 19th century New England.

And one of the ways the museum gives visitors an idea of what life was like in early 19th century New England is historical interpreters. In the business of historical interpretation, it turns out, there are two broad categories: first person interpretation and third person interpretation.

Tom Kelleher: What's called first, first in a role, playing, pretending you're a person from the past explaining how the past worked over a particular time and place. You, me as the historian pretends that I don't know anything past whatever year I'm portraying. For example, Plymouth Plantation, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, there are costumed staff that pretend it's 1627. They have this confusion thing, which then I think puts a burden on the public because then instead of being an interpreter, you're not making things clearer, which is what an interpreter should do, but just confusing the situation. An example, I give my new staff all the time of bad roleplaying interpretation is people ask, where's the bathroom? And you get this at some sites, you know, you say, excuse me, where's the bathroom?

And they go, “Bath? Why I haven’t had a bath! You'll catch your death of cold bathing. I wash my face, I wash my hands with water, but oh my, why would anyone immerse themselves?”

So you know, the kid there, he got a kid who needs to go to the bathroom, for heaven's sake, just point right over there!

The historical interpreters at Old Sturbridge Village interact with visitors in third person.

Tom Kelleher: When you're in third person, you're wearing the costumes, the clothing of an earlier time and place. And you're doing the work of an earlier time in place, but you are not pretending that the people you're talking to are wearing strange clothes and our magic inventors with all their electronic technology. You just try to have conversations with them to try to relate to how the past in present, interact, or as I like to say, you don't know where you are until you know where you've been. And so I think while I do a lot of role playing at Old Sturbridge village, most of us are not in character at any one point in time, but we're just portraying the past to try to make it make more sense to the present.

In a museum without historical interpreters, the date and place don’t necessarily have to be specific.

But a historical interpreter exists in a specific date and place. Whether they are first person or third person interpreters, the visitor experience depends on that anchor in time and space.

Tom Kelleher: One of the drawbacks if you will of living history of portraying clothes is, is that you do have to narrow down your time period. And truthfully, we as an institution at Old Sturbridge Village, wrestled with that for a number of years. When the museum was founded, we opened to the public in 1946.

It was kind of like, well, you know, about 200 years ago, about 1800. About, about, about, it was hazy. But they weren't doing a lot of costumed interpretation at the time.

But in the early 1970s, Old Sturbridge Village and a number of other sites in the United States and Canada especially started getting serious about making sure our clothing was more accurate. And the tools and techniques we were using, the recipes the ladies would cook in the houses, that kind of thing, were more authentic. And it started dawning on us that you couldn't just show a 50 year old span. I mean, if you're trying to show a 50 year time span from 1970 to 2020. How should people dress? How should they act? What kind of devices should they be using? And so it gets confusing.

An example is a visitor asking an interpreter: who’s the president?

For first-person interpreters at Plymouth plantation, that’s a difficult question to answer: in 1627, not only was there no United States or heads-of-state who used that term, organizations that might have used the word president were few and far between.

But even for a third person interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, answering that question requires a specific date.

Tom Kelleher: Well, it depends. Andrew Jackson was president from 1829 to 1837 Martin van Buren was president from 1837 until 1841. So what specific year are you in? And so they might go into the shoe shop and ask the Shoemaker, “who's the president?” And it'll say, Andrew Jackson, and he'll be right.

And the same people might be in the printing office later in the day. And the printer says, Martin van Buren. And the guy said, well, wait a minute. The guy in the shoe shop thinks it's Andrew Jackson. So we decided that you have to pick a year. And frankly, about 10 years ago, the administration told me, “Tom pick a year.”

I agonized and justified it. And I arbitrarily, not arbitrarily, but with a lot of reasons that nobody needs to know about, picked 1838. And so that's our default year. We don't really make a big deal of that to the public, but our staff knows that when push comes to shove, when somebody asks, what year is it, who's the president? We’re 1838.

Picking a specific date also allows the museum to go back in time. People in 1838 would be using objects and recalling events from earlier decades.Kelleher points to more rapid means of communication, widespread substance abuse, a widening disparity of wealth, rapid technological development, rising consumerism, and growing political divisions as aspects of the 1830s that resonate with visitors today.

But there’s another aspect of 1830’s that resonates with visitors today -- or at least it will once the museum opens up again after its closure due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s, also known as second cholera pandemic.

Tom Kelleher: At Old Sturbridge Village, we interpret health and healing a lot of ways. Cholera is an infectious, uh, bacterial disease, usually from poor sanitation. Is that still fairly prevalent on the planet.

In the 19th century, people didn't understand until the late 19th century, didn't understand bacteriology didn't understand what caused diseases, how diseases are spread.

Even more so than Covid-19, it was very scary because even though there's a lot that's unknown.

The second cholera pandemic would have been in recent memory to people in 1838. And even before the current pandemic, Old Sturbridge Village portrayed 19th-century diseases and medicine as part of its presentation of the lifestyles of the time.

Tom Kelleher: We do sometimes talk about the cholera epidemic and we talk a lot about a lot of diseases. I mean, the early 19th century was a time when people didn't really have a germ theory. So there was especially in the popular mind, there's very little separation between the spiritual and the physical world. There were ideas then. There was a health reformer in the 1830s named Sylvester Graham who had made a name for himself as a temperance preacher, preaching on the evils of alcohol. And he took advantage of the cholera epidemic when it came to the United States in 1832 and basically started advocating a vegetarian diet, very regular meals, no snacking, whole grain breads. So he guaranteed that if you followed his regime that you would not get cholera.

A lot of people then, in the 1830s, blamed immigrants for the cholera.Softentimes, people do point fingers and scapegoat. It's “them” making “us” sick.

Kelleher sees living history museums as uniquely suited to interpret public health, historical pandemics, and medicine.

Tom Kelleher: Some sites actually have special event weekends that focus on epidemics. There's a place in Georgia called Westville that used to have, I think, yellow fever days, and they'd have a weekend about the panic when a yellow fever epidemic would sweep through the American South.

Old Sturbridge Village, like most museums, is currently closed to the public. The farm animals and gardens are being tended to. As Kelleher and his team plan for the reopening, they know that the costumed interpreters will sport a new item of clothing when the museum opens: an anachronistic face mask.

Tom Kelleher: Our museum, when we reopen, we, the costume historians are going to be wearing face masks. I mean, we're not necessarily in roll, but it is the 21st century, and that's going to be a constant reminder to the public that, you know, we're in a different time and place: not so much in the 1830s, a different time in place, but during the Covid-19 world. So yeah, I think it will be a constant reminder and perhaps even a minor shock to people that is going to be a necessity because we are, we're where we are. And how people are gonna react to it and deal with it. I don’t know.

[Outro]

80. British Museum Curator Sushma Jansari Shares Stories and Experiments of Decolonising Museums May 04, 2020

The British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum.

So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the museum by South Asian collectors and presented photographs of a modern Jain Temple in Leicester, where she’s from.

In this episode, Jansari talks about giving visitors the tools to think about the colonial interest in items in the collection, why she started her excellent podcast, The Wonder House, and how not to let the decolonization movement’s momentum evaporate.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Seleucid–Mauryan war
00:45 Megasthenes
01:30 Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum
02:00 How Events Are Transformed Through History
03:00 Decolonising Museums and Collections
04:21 39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum With James Delbourgo
04:50 Empire and Daily Life in the U.K.
05:46 Being the First South Asian Curator of the South Asia Collection
06:30 Working on the 2017 Renovation of the British Museum’s South Asia Collection
08:00 Creating Unexpected Moments in the Gallery
08:15 Mathura lion capital
09:30 Visitation Trends Since the Update
10:58 “Not Just One or Two Tweaks”
11:10 Why Jansari Started The Wonder House Podcast
12:10 “Every Movement Has Its Moment”
12:30 Subscribe to The Wonder House Podcast Apple Podcasts
13:30 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS
14:28 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️

Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 80. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

There’s a way to look at history that focuses on the events themselves.

And then there’s a way to look at history that focuses on the fallout.

In the 4th century B.C.E., Seleucus who was one of Alexander the Great’s successors, and Chandragupta, who was the first Mauryan emperor in Northern India, met for the first time by the banks of the river Indus, and they had some kind of military encounter.

What kind of military encounter? Well we don’t really know. What we do know is that, following the encounter, Greek ambassador Megasthenes was sent to the Indian interior for the first time.

Sushma Jansari: And he wrote an ethnography called the Indica, and it sort of described India for a Greek audience, based on, personal observation, but also the, you know, there's lots of strange storytelling as well and it, this particular text has sort of formed the, the foundation of Western knowledge of India for generations. And you can just imagine that, soldiers, British soldiers in the 19th century took translations of this particular text with them to the Northwest of India when they were exploring. So it's had a very long life, and it's a particular moment that that continues to resonate.

This is Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum.

Sushma Jansari: Hello, I'm Dr. Sushma Jansari. I'm the Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British museum, and when I'm not at work, I work on my podcast, which is very much a passion project, and this is called The Wonder House.

We’ll get to the Wonder House in a minute, because it’s an excellent podcast, but first, as a doctorate at the University College London, Jansari studied this ancient encounter, of which only Greek descriptions survive.

Sushma Jansari: that moment of meeting and connection has been completely transformed. It was transformed during the colonial period by British and Indian scholars. And you have British scholars saying, Oh, you know, so, because once ward, and he defeated this Indian general, whereas the Indian scholars wrote the complete opposite. Their take was that Chandragupta got to defeat this incoming European and he became a great leader and ruler.

So actually, because of this uncertainty, I think it tells us a lot about the time we live in right now and how moments have been transformed in the past.

What we can study is the fallout -- how people interpret these historic events and how that reflects on the moment they are living in now. And of course, what better way to see -- in the form of a building -- how people interpret historic events than a museum itself.

Sushma Jansari: I think this is why the whole idea of decolonizing museums and collections is so important because I think up till now we've all been complicit and telling very partial stories, under the guise of trying to be neutral. And as we know, that neutrality is quite problematic and it tells a very, very, partial truth or partial version of a story.

Museums are a great way to see what historic events meant to the museum builders, and I can think of no clearer example than the British Museum.

Sushma Jansari: We have, you know, really incredible exhibitions on say, you know, when you're thinking of ancient South Asia, they're often on Buddhism or Hinduism or Jainism. So they have a very close religious focus. But what they don't tend to address, very rarely that I've ever seen anyway, is how did those collections arrive here? What was the colonial interest in that material and how has it been interpreted? How has it been presented? And also why, why in those particular ways? How, how has that changed over the last, you know, century or so?

It's too easy to present, so-called neutral view of the ancient past and of ancient religions. But I don't think that's particularly ethical. I think if you’re going to be doing that, you need to be telling that fuller story.

In episode 39 of this show, we examined Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, Sloane assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world that became the bases for the world’s first public museum, The British Museum, a place where anybody could freely enter to see the glory of the British Empire.

Sushma Jansari: I think empire enfuses pretty much every aspect of life in the U.K., whether we're all aware of it or not, you know, whether it's the names of the streets, we walked down, the, the museums that were founded, the collections, they are hold the structures we still all inhabit. When we actually look around at the museums, most of the museums, I'd say in the U.K., they hold the contents of empire, you know, objects that were collected around the world by colonial officials, by soldiers, by sailors, people working abroad.

You can't disentangle the two, when you are telling a story, you need to be honest and tell the whole story, or at least as much of it as you can possibly share. Because otherwise you're telling a very, very partial one that often overlooks the violence of an object's collection. and the situation and circumstances it was created, taken, purchased and brought here to the U.K. to be held in a museum.

Today, Jansari is the first curator of Indian descent of the South Asia Collection at the British Museum.

Sushma Jansari: In the past, truth be told, I didn't really think about it very much. I think it's only when I look at my curatorial practice and how I approach my role, the collections, who I want to work with and how I realized that actually there is a difference between what I do and what other people, you know, in a whole range of institutions bring to their role and at first I was really uncomfortable about that. I thought, my goodness, you know, is it just because of who I am and what I am? What about, you know, my academic side, and you know, all of that and my skills and knowledge, but actually I think it's. My ability to do my job is it's somehow richer. I bring a slightly different perspective to what I do and how I do it.

The South Asia Collection at the British Museum is so enormous that it can capture the sweep of history of South Asia, from the Paleolithic period to the present day. The gallery reopened in 2017 and before that, it was last refurbished in 1992.

Sushma Jansari: It just happens to be the largest gallery in the museum, so, Hey, no pressure. and I. Yeah, exactly. And everyone's looking, you know, the, so, you know, try not to fail on your first go.

So it was, it was really tricky. and so we started by thinking, well, who actually comes to the museum and does, I mentioned over 70% of our audience comes from outside the U.K.. And if those people, a huge proportion, they. They're not very well versed in the history, cultures and religions of South Asia, so how would you present your collections in a way that shares this really incredible part of the world with people who don't know a great deal about it? And so we, decided to have a chronic thematic kind of approach. So we started with the paleolithic, which is about one and a half million years ago, and ended at the present day.

The encyclopedic collections at the museum permits us to be able to do something like that. And as part of that, I sort of worked on the ancient to medieval sections, which is, the, the, the collections I cover along with, the bulk of the anthropological collections and also the textiles. It's got a mammoth collection that I look after.

But as part of that, I was very keen to introduce moments where, you know, slightly unexpected stories and people were presented. So for example, in the main aisle, you walk down, one of the first sculptures you encounter is the Mathura lion capital, which dates about the first century A.D.

And it was actually excavated and request to the museum by a South Asian collector, Bhagwan Lal Indraji. And I put a portrait of him on that, on the label as well as a little bit of text explaining it. Cause I wanted people to be confronted by South Asians in the South Asia gallery. It's not enough to, you know, display “their” culture and “their” collections and “their” history. I think it has to be a shared enterprise and, you know, in another section, for example, in the Jainism in Western India, the medieval section, I included photographs of the Jain temple from Leicester, which is where I'm from in the U.K..

I wanted to show that the sculptures on display, they are just as much part of British culture, as it was, you know, back then in the medieval period, it's not just some alien religion and alien culture. It's, it's our shared culture now. I think it's really important to sort of connect the dots. So you do share this, sort of broad sweep of history and culture, but then you want to also intersperse it with these other really important moments linking, you know, who and what you might see around you as you're going about your everyday life in the U.K. and linking it with, with the past as well.

I asked Jansari if she’s noticed changes in who visits the gallery and how much time they spend there since the update.

Sushma Jansari: I'm very interested in who's there, how they engage with different displays, how I can sort of tweak them to make them more engaging. And I have definitely noticed that there are more, South Asians in the gallery space, the South Asia section. This is a really tricky one because, although you hope that a museum is for everybody. The reality is that as you say, a lot of people don't feel that the museum is for them and it's, it's, it's, it's terrible because obviously the museum is for everybody, but once again, when you have very neutral displays and people aren't addressed. People aren't consulted, you aren't working with members of the community. I think it's understandable why they might feel somehow excluded from these spaces. And you know, we've all had moments where we've been chatting to people and they assume that a museum is not for them.

It's somehow seen as a very different othering space. And when you see the workforce inside the museum, also predominantly white, and. There are very few members of, you know, black and minority ethnic staff in the museums. Once again, what sort of message are you trying to share with everybody else?

You're saying, Hey, come come to our museum, but you got work here. You know how, how. How do you change that? And I think it's not just one or two tweaks. I think it's a fundamental reimagining of what exactly a museum is and who exactly this museum is for and how do those parts come together? I'm not sure that we yet have those answers, but what I think is really, really important is that we start having these conversations and we start experimenting.

And this is one of the reasons why Jansari started the Wonder House podcast. The podcast, which is completely independent of the British Museum, is a way for Jansari to share the most innovative contemporary approaches to decolonization.

Sushma Jansari: And so I got in touch with some people whose work I really respect, and I asked them if they were willing to talk about their work, what they learned, what they, what they thought didn't work quite so well, and share their stories and experiments with decolonizing so that everybody could have a chance to listen in on a friendly conversation. See what aspects might work for them, their collections, their institutions, and sort of feel supported and encouraged to experiment.

What I love about The Wonder House is being able to listen in on these conversations that might not be happening in museums themselves, but are happening at coffee houses and pubs nearby. And the show explores the scale too -- you hear Jansari, who works at one of the largest institutions in the world in conversation with people who might be their museum’s only curator.

Sushma Jansari: Because I think I really worry that the decolonize that the decolonizing museums, sort of incredible energy that it has right now. It's quite easy for that to evaporate. Every single movement has its moment, and unless we embed this kind of, knowledge and approaches, it's going to evaporate and not just the collections, but also, you know, the simple fact that you know, many of us who work in museums, you're often one of the only one or two. black and minority ethnic people in an entire institution. That's not easy.

Jansari studies the ancient world, but now she is at the forefront of modern museum interpretation, printing not just the event, but also how the event rippled through history.

Remember the story about Seleucus, and Chandragupta from the beginning of the episode?

Sushma Jansari: And in fact, that Indian interpretation of that moment has won out. And actually if you read, historical novels, modern comics, if you watch, Indian films and Indian TV series, that's exactly the vision of Chandragupta that we have now.

It's evolving all the time. you know, ideas are being shaped and reshaped, almost day by day at the moment. And I think that's really exciting.

[OUTRO]

Sushma Jansari: I remember one time I saw somebody just from the corner of my eye looking, really, it looks as if they're really focusing close on a particular textile. I thought, Oh my God, what is it? Know what's going on? So I wandered over and actually she had a compact out. I was applying her lipstick, so it's always good. You know, you assume you created this amazing display, but you know what?

79. The Future of Hands-On Museum Exhibits with Paul Orselli Apr 20, 2020

The modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent.

Museum exhibit developer Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop says he’ll be reluctant to use hands-on exhibits once museums open up again. But he hopes that future hands-on exhibits are more meaningful because museums will work harder to justify them.

In this episode, Orselli predicts what hands-on exhibits could become, the possibility that the crisis will encourage museums to adhere to universal design principles instead of defaulting to touchscreens, and how Covid-19 might finally put an end to hands-on mini grocery store exhibits in children's museums.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Hands-On Exhibits in Museums
01:00 Michael Spock
02:04 Paul Orselli
02:40 The Growth of Hands-On Exhibits
03:30 “The last thing I want to do is rush into a super-crowded museum”
04:40 “Empty Interaction”
06:50 27. Yo, Museum Professionals
07:30 The Future of Touchscreens
09:14 Universal Design Principles
10:20 The End of Mini-Grocery Store Exhibits
11:00 “Constraints Are A Good Thing For Creativity”
11:40 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone
12:15 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS
13:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 79. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

The modern museum invites you to touch.

Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent.

And the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia-- which is inviting you right there in its name--has presumably stopped running commercials.

Please Touch Museum Commercial: “No need to keep your hands by your side here. Exhibits are rich in detail, encouraging children to touch, feel, and see the way everyday things in our lives work… to learn more and to plan your visit, visit pleasetouchmuseum.org.

Interactivity in museums in the form of hands-on exhibits has been a trend since 1962, when Michael Spock, director of the Boston Children's Museum, removed “do not touch” signs from the display cases.

Since then, hands-on exhibits have served as a way for museums to indicate they’re free of their paternalistic past; that knowledge doesn’t come from on high, but instead comes from the vistor’s own curiosity, investigation, and play.

Paul Orselli: Traditionally in science centers there were all of these science content that lend themselves to physical and interactive demonstrations and in a children's museum, they were very much concerned about multi sensory approaches and engaging, different types of learning styles. You know, full body and kinesthetic. When the bulk of your audience is preschoolers, they can't read, so you need to engage them in some other way. I think that's traditionally where interactive have lived in science centers and children's museums.

This is Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop, who knows a lot about science centers and children's museums.

Paul Orselli: Hello. My name's Paul Orselli. I'm the chief instigator at Pow: Paul Orselli Workshop. That's my company that specializes in museum exhibit development and consulting. Before I started running my own business, and I worked inside museums, I sort of oscillated back and forth between the science center world and the children's museum world.

But hands-on exhibits spread further than science centers and children's museums. They spread to art museums and history museums and natural history museums too.

Paul Orselli: And I think the reason that interactive approach expanded was that those other types of museums realized that this interactive or immersive approach helped them reach a broader audience. As more and more museums become more and more concerned with reaching a broader audience, one of the opportunities for them to explore, or one of the tools in their toolbox are interactive exhibits and experiences.

So, the question is, will visitors still want to use hands on exhibits once museums open again? Is the trend that started in 1962 over?

Paul Orselli: as a museum designer and as a visitor, the last thing I think I want to do immediately after museums open up again is to rush into a super crowded museum. We're sort of training people in the era of covid-19 and maybe future pandemics to socially distance and be careful about touching surfaces and objects and so on and so forth. Part of me wants to say, especially as it relates to children's museums, even before covid-19, it wasn't like they were the most rigorous cleaned places in the world.

So the thing is, it's kind of hard, for my friends in the museum world with a straight face to say, well, we're. We're just gonna, be more rigorous with our cleaning schedules and our cleaning regimen. I mean, are you really gonna trail after hundreds of visitors in a, in a decent size museum and sort of wipe down everything they've touched after they touch that.

One thing that Orselli can see happening is that hands-on exhibits will need to work to justify themselves a little harder during the planning stages. He sees the end of so-called “empty interaction.”

Paul Orselli: There are lots of good examples, but maybe there are also some examples of things that I would consider primarily empty interaction. And a good example of that is a flip label. You know, here's one piece of texts and information on a little flap or a door, and to encounter the rest of the information or to get an answer to a question, you have to open up the flap and you get the rest of the textual or graphic information. I mean, that's interactive in the sense that you had to do something to sort of complete the informational circuit, but that might be about the lowest level of interaction possible. When I teach graduate students, one thing I often say is the flip label is the last vestige of an exhibit scoundrel. You know, it's like somebody who's not really somebody who's not really putting in the work, you know, they just sort of mailed it in. “Oh, we can put a bunch of flip labels here, or we can put a flip label here, and then that's something for kids to do.” It's sort of a challenge because now that I mentioned that about flip labels, it's sort of like, whoa, could you actually design a flip label experience that is more of a conversation or open-ended or engaging in terms of an intellectual sense and not just sort of this base level, tactile or mechanical sense. And, you know, I'm sure you, I'm sure you can. It's that when it's misused or thoughtlessly used. You know, the end results are just bad. We can't just so glibly and unthinkingly employ something like a push button as we did before. And I, and honestly, I don't know that that's a bad thing because then it sort of forces us to think, well, how could we provide a satisfying experience and what are the interfaces or other kinds of opportunities that we could provide that would let people, you know, that would carry the content, that would carry the emotional ideas that we want to carry across?

In episode 27 of this show, I argued that there’s a certain type of content that digital media is best suited to: systems simulation. Understanding Concepts like climate change requires thinking about how complex systems interact with one another, and computer simulations allow for that type of enquiry. It’s almost like a video game: visitors try to find the edge of the rules of the world, expect in an exhibit about climate change, those rules are the rules of atmospheric and oceanic physics. Right now, the best understood and most common interface to digital media is a touchscreen.

Paul Orselli: There is a certain segment of people who love their touchscreens. You know, they would, if they could fill up their museum with touchscreens, they would do it. And you know, again, I'm agnostic, touchscreens and touch tables: they are amazing tools, but now we have to be realistic. So now you're going to bring somebody into a new museum and ask them to crowd around with several other people and poke at a touchscreen after what has just happened in the world? That's a toughie.

So what are some interfaces that allow visitors to interact with digital media, without a touchscreen and without requiring the visitor to touch anything with their hands?

Paul Orselli: And if I think for example, of a large floor projections system. Where you could even just tap with your foot to control some different parameters or different people may be on the different corners of this large projection area could be controlling in real time different parameters. I could imagine that actually being a positive and a worthwhile experience that still takes into account a social aspect, but also a social distancing aspect as well as, you know, something that is sort of full body and it doesn't involve people touching their hands and that you don't have to sort of sanitize the floor cause people are tapping it with their feet and doing things.

In his most optimistic moments, Orselli hopes that a new approach to hands-on exhibits can bring universal design front and center.

Paul Orselli: Flexibility or control with something like tapping of a foot, which could easily also be somebody wheeling their wheelchair over the active area too. I mean, I think this brings the notion of universal design to a different place and a positive place. You know, these, these limitations and this triangulation between post Covid-19 perception and the notion of universal design. I'm going to be optimistic, and maybe that puts us in a, a better place, in a more thoughtful place, in a more satisfying place, ultimately, in terms of interactive experiences for visitors, which I suppose is really what this sort of all boils down to. How supported are museums as institutions in the various countries or parts of the world where they exist or how resilient our particular museums or museum structures that let them withstand these sorts of events.

But Orselli sees a silver lining: an end to all those mini grocery store exhibits at children's museums.

Paul Orselli: Although this might finally be like finally be a good reason for all the children's museums in the world to get rid of those horrible mini grocery store exhibits! A small room filled with lots of tactile objects that kids are just constantly pouring over and checking out and throwing into their mini baskets, and then they get put right back on the shelf.

Already already it's a gigantic entropy experiment, so if you're going to keep that experience, are you, after everyone has touched something, hundreds of things, wipe and disinfect them all, and then replace them for people, you know, to just do this. I think constraints are a good thing for creativity and now we've just been thrown some public health and perceptual constraints.

And we have to, we have to think about that because certainly our visitors are going to be thinking about that. Then if we don't show that, at least we're sensitive to that. Our visitors could rightfully think that we are insensitive. Not only to those design constraints and those design considerations, but insensitive to them as people who want to have fun and want to be safe.

[Outro]

78. How Museums Present Public Health with Raven Forest Fruscalzo Mar 30, 2020

Museums across the globe are now closed because of Covid-19. Some of those shuttered galleries presented the science behind outbreaks like the one we’re living through.

As Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, Content Developer at the Field Museum in Chicago and host of the Tiny Vampires Podcast points out, the fact that museums are closed is an important statement: they trust the scientific information.

In this episode, Forrest Fruscalzo discusses the people that make up public health, how museums can be a trusted source of public health information, and examples of museum galleries that incorporate public health.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History
01:06 Raven Forest Fruscalzo
01:45 Public Health
02:08 Information Deficit Hypothesis
03:29 Museums and Trust
06:10 Museums That Present Public Health Topics
06:38 The Ancient Americas | Field Museum
07:04 Northwest African American Museum
07:40 Visitor Experience at Outbreak
08:40 Museum Closings Because of COVID-19
10:10 Tiny Vampires Podcast
11:00 SPONSOR: Pigeon
12:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 78. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

A few months ago, before reports of a new form of coronavirus now known as COVID-19 started appearing in the news, I visited an exhibit called Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit laid out the coordinated detective work that public health workers and many other professionals do as they identify and respond to infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola virus, and influenza. There was even a touchscreen game that invited me to work cooperatively with other visitors to contain an outbreak before it spread further.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So the funny thing about public health and a lot of the scientists that contribute to the knowledge that public health workers use, is that if you're doing everything right, nobody realizes that you're doing it right. It's the opposite of a glamorous job.

This is Raven Forest Fruscalzo, a professional science communicator and writer who works as a content developer and production assistant at the Field Museum in Chicago, and hosts the excellent science podcast, Tiny Vampires.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: Hello, my name is Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, I am the host of the Tiny Vampires podcast and my day job is at the Field Museum here in Chicago. So public health is a little bit of a complicated thing because there are a lot of people who do public health that maybe people don't consider them to be public health workers.

Forest Fruscalzo lays out three broad groups of people working in public health: scientists, public health workers, and clinicians. The scientists generate new knowledge, the public health workers apply that knowledge by creating plans to prevent disease and increase access to treatment, and clinicians carry those plans out by directly treating people.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: As a science communicator, I think one of the issues between scientists or health workers and the public is this thing that we say insights, communication called the information deficit hypothesis, which is basically we're assuming that people don't know things and if only we could just give them the information, then they would know and understand. Using that model, which is basically how most science has been communicated in the past. It causes a lack of trust because it's kind of this assumption that on a scientist's standpoint that other people are ignorant and we decide what information they need. That has created this massive rift of this massive trust issue because the public doesn't trust the scientists because the scientists are assuming that they're ignorant and the scientists are not trusting the public to understand. With healthcare in particular, there's a lot of emotions, people are afraid of getting sick and they also have a lot of their own personal experiences that they're trying to incorporate into what public health officials are telling them.

And this is where museums come in.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So museums, which I think is something that you've talked to a lot of on your show about is that they have a lot of trust, their credibility is really high. There's a lot of information out there about disease and different public health aspects that are kind of all over the place. For example, burning a tick with a match. So when you have an exhibit about why it's important to remove a tick with forceps or tweezers instead of burning it with a match, if a public health worker tells them that they might be skeptical about it. This is the way that my family has been doing it for years and years. Whereas with a museum they have that credibility and they have that ability to show in more detail and in a lot of different ways why that's important. People will take that information and internalize it more than with an organization that they might not trust as much. A lot of museums are starting to do exhibits that not only incorporate what we know, but also how we learned what we know. And that really increases people's trust in that information.

One of the advantage of presentations of public health within a museums is simply the context.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: A lot of museums are starting to do exhibits that not only incorporate what we know, but also how we learned what we know. And that really increases people's trust in that information.Because if I just tell you a fact, you might be skeptical, you should be skeptical and want to look into that deeper. But if I tell you a fact and then explain to you how we got that information, your ability to trust that information vastly increases. I think a lot of exhibitions and a lot of museums have started to put a priority on that. And I think that's really important because museums in the past have done and said some really terrible things and we're constantly trying to acknowledge and move past that or at least the Field Museum is. And I think one of the ways of accounting for that is starting to tell people how they know what they know. Because if that was the philosophy of museums back when they were presenting a lot of racist information, they would not have been able to support it with scientific information or scientific research because it's not there. The new way of doing things is you can't just say things, you have to back it up. And I think that is a really important way of accounting for the past.

There are a number of museums that present public health topics, either as outreach or by focusing entirely on the subject.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: There are actually a few museums that, that's all they do. There's a public health museum in Massachusetts and then the CDC actually has a museum of their own. Museums really have the ability to make a large impact when they do public health sorts of exhibits or incorporate public health into their existing exhibits. So a good example of that is like at the Field Museum, part of our Ancient Americas exhibit is about the smallpox transfer from Europe to the Americas and how that impacted the native people of South and central America. So that's not what the exhibit was about, but it is incorporated into it. So another great example is the Northwest African American Museum in Washington. They did a really cool exhibit that was about five diseases and conditions that disproportionately affect the African American community. And there are a lot of art museums around the country who have art therapy programs that aid people who are being treated for mental illness. So there are a lot of different museums that are starting to think about what their role is when it comes to the health of their community.

The Outbreak exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History opens with videos of planes taking off and landing at various airports around the world -- underscoring one of its main points that the world is connected. As I was walking through the exhibit -- and I can’t stress how abstract the threat of viruses seemed to me at the time -- I was suddenly aware of walking through the gallery with many other people. Reading about infectious diseases, I was less eager than usual to use the touchscreen exhibits with my bare hands.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: It really is a testament to the power of that exhibit when you're pulled out of the exhibit and then realize that what it's about is something that you're currently participating in. I think that's where museums really fit in. Because they have so much experience in helping people to understand complex ideas and using lots of different types of media to make that happen.

We’re broadcasting during this pandemic: the end of March 2020. Almost all of the themes presented in the Outbreak exhibit seem relevant today: that diseases aren’t “exotic, in other words, they don’t all arrive from distant places. That a connected world has advantages even during a pandemic. But as Forrest Fruscalzo points out, the fact that the National Museum of Natural History is physically closed because of COVID-19 -- and so is the Field Museum and every other museum we’ve ever featured on this show is telling in itself.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: So museums closing I think is a really important statement that they're making. That they trust the scientific information that is being put out there. There's a lot of scientists who work at museums, but that does create a gap. Museums are where people get a lot of their scientific information, especially adults. Once you're out of school there really isn't as much access to scientific information, a lot of it's behind paywalls. So museums are institutions that the public is relying on. COVID-19 has really changed my view on how important digital media is to how the museum is interacting with the public.

On her podcast, Tiny Vampires, Forrest Fruscalzo avoids the assumptions of the info deficit hypothesis as she communicate science to her listeners. Each episode is instead guided by questions sent in by listeners about insects that transmit disease and the scientists that are fighting them. And like a good museum exhibit, the question is answered with background information and the story of how scientists were able to shine a light on that particular mystery.

Raven Forrest Fruscalzo: People are far more intelligent and far more understanding than the scientists, public health workers of the past gave them credit for. This whole concept of talk to people like their fifth graders is exceedingly condescending. We're all in this together regardless of our educational background or anything. So yeah, it's definitely a... We're all figuring this out and just being good stewards of the information and having really good communication.

77. Trump Asks, “Who's Next?” Lyra Monteiro Answers, Washington’s Next! Mar 16, 2020

The statue of George Washington in New York City's Union Square commemorates him on a particular day—November 25th, 1783—the date when the defeated British Army left Manhattan after the American Revolutionary War. The statue celebrates the idea that Washington brought freedom to the country, but professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro researched how many people of African descent that Washington was enslaving on that same date: 271.

Representing these people formed the heart of Washington's Next!, a participatory commemorative experience focused around that statue. In this episode, Monteiro describes how a tweet from President Trump was the inspiration for the name, how passersby reacted to the project, and the subtle ways that public monuments have power.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 George Washington in Union Square
00:30 Evacuation Day
01:50 Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro
02:35 Trump’s Tweet
03:30 The Slippery Slope Argument
05:30 George Washington Viewed As Beyond Reproach
07:26 Washington's Next!
09:10 Making Something the Public Wants to Engage With
11:05 How Public Monuments Have Power
12:50 Museums on Site
13:20 Episode 25. The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia, Bulgaria is Figuring Out What to Do With All the Lenins
13:40 Outro / Join Club Archipelago

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 77. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

There’s a statue of George Washington in Union Square in Manhattan. It’s the oldest statue in New York City’s Park service; it was erected before the Civil War. it is cast to present Washington on one particular day -- November 25th, 1783 -- otherwise known as Evacuation Day. On that day, which was just after the end of the American Revolutionary War, the defeated British Army departed New York City.

Lyra Monteiro: Because Manhattan was their stronghold. And most of the black people who had joined the British side with the premise of freedom were evacuated from in defiance of George Washington's terms for this surrender, for the British surrender and all that. But this particular statue of George Washington is commemorating a hugely important date for this city. It's commemorating and marking and celebrating the idea of freedom being brought to the country, and hence as a moment to look at and draw attention to the hypocrisy of all of that. That at the same time that he's being celebrated for freeing the country, he's actively enslaving a number of other people, most of them in Virginia, some with him there, and actually a couple of them getting onto boats and going up to Nova Scotia with the British because they had escaped and joined and joined that immigration. So again, that's why the specificity of this statue mattered.

The number of Black people enslaved by Washington on the day commemorated by the statue is 271 -- and these people are at the heart of Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s project Washington’s Next!

Lyra Monteiro: The idea of how do we make visible, for instance, the enslaved people who are invisible at all of these sites of memory that were about white supremacy when they were created. And now they still are, but we don't talk about that. How do we make that visible? You know? That's something that I've been, I've been playing around with for a long time.

Lyra Monteiro: Hi, my name is Lyra Montero and I am an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University Newark, where I also teach in the graduate program in American studies and the African American and African studies department. Okay. And I also am the cofounder of the museum onsite and the creator of our most recent project, Washington's Next.

The name, Washington’s Next comes from one of President Trumpʼs tweets following the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017.

Trump took the opportunity to argue against movements to remove statues of Confederate generals like Robert. E. Lee, which live in prominent public places in U.S. cities.

One of these tweets read, You can’t change history, “Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson - whoʼs next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

I’m a little bit sorry to ask this, but could you lay out Trump’s argument, such as it is? What he is trying to say?

Lyra Monteiro: I can explain the argument that he is referencing. How about that? Whether or not he actually understands it, I don't know. But Donald Trump took an argument that has existed, you know, probably just about as long as we've had, you know, controversies over these statues honoring Confederate leaders. That is the slippery slope argument. And the people who make this argument tend not to be the ones who are like. Overtly gung ho and like, you know, it's our, it's our Southern heritage to honor Robert E. Lee. It's not those folks. It's more the people who are historians. Sometimes our historians, sometimes like museum folks. The argument that they make is that, well, yes, it's not good that there is a statue to Robert elite. But the thing is if we take him down and obviously using him to stand up for all the Confederate statues, if we take him down, well then where are we going to stop? Because the reason why he's not appropriate for us to honor and public spaces because of slavery.

Lyra Monteiro: Well, there are other slave owners that we honor in public space, and of course the biggest ones there are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And of course, there's no way in hell we're going to get rid of those statues. Right? What we're going to take down the Washington monument, I don't think so. You know, so. The idea is it's a slippery slope that we're setting up. If we are starting to tumble down, the minute that we start taking down the statues of people who supported and promoted slavery.

So part of it, part of that slippery slope that you're describing is that, to the extent that someone like Washington encapsulates our founding myth, we can't let it touch that myth. It's too sacred and we're protecting them by protecting the statutes around them. But the things that Washington represents, the thing that, the things that I learned as a school child in the floor of the public schools about George Washington were things about his honor, and his honesty and how, thank goodness he wasn't a tyrant because America would look a lot different there as a result. And that is a very, very powerful thing.

Lyra Monteiro: And the implication there is also that America is a wonderful and beautiful place. I very much come from the perspective that enslaving other human beings is one of the most dehumanizing things imaginable for the person who's doing it, too. You summed that up really well in terms of, you know, the role that George Washington, much more so than Thomas Jefferson serves as being the father of the country. It's impossible to imagine questioning anything about him. Anything about his character, as you said, he's this honest person, all of these things, we should look up to him. And you know, a lot of that is just good old fashioned nationalism and the need for a coming-out-of-nowhere nation state like the United States to create these religious symbols and these religious narratives about where it comes from. And how important it is, and then how powerful it is. And yeah, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, they are just so central to that. And so I think that when people are saying that, honestly, like when the tone of voice in which I hear the slippery slope argument from scholars and from museum practitioners is, and from, you know, public parks officials, and also frankly from Donald Trump is less one of panic and concern about attacking that legacy and much more one of, “well, that's just silly! Obviously we wouldn't do that.” And the way that he phrased that tweet really kind of like set it up very nicely for us. You know, who's next? Washington's Next! We added the exclamation point under the title also because, because our fearless leader really loves exclamation points, so, we thought it would be an appropriate thing to add.

The centerpiece of Washingtonʼs Next! was a participatory commemorative experience, focused around that statue of George Washington in Union Square.

Monteiro and the Washingtonʼs Next! team placed 271 empty chalkboards on the ground in front of the statue, to represent each of the 271 people. The empty chalkboards invoked erasure -- how these people are forgotten in favor of the man we’re supposed to admire. For a few hours, these chalkboards stood empty, reflecting the absence of these people from public memory, in contrast to the man depicted in the statue. Then the Washingtonʼs Next! team invited passersbys to honor individuals Washington enslaved by reading their biography and writing their name on one of the chalkboards.

Lyra Monteiro: So the project actually went through several iterations. You know, the, the core of it, focusing on that statue, on the date, and on the people who were enslaved by him at that date. That quarter of the project was there for many, many months. But the, how it manifested in physical space was something that went through a number of changes. And one of the reasons was making sure that we were presenting something that would draw people in. And it turns out, yeah, I mean, those, I remember the first time that we did a test with the actual chalkboards we ended up using on the easels. It was crazy. I mean, cause you know, New York is New York has seen everything. But you would be surprised, like all kinds of other things that we'd put on the ground or other things that we'd done, you know, with different kinds of like, you know, you know, formations and costumey things that we were playing with, you know, nobody cares. But the minute they saw these like easels on the ground that were blank at that stage, everyone was like, “what's that>” And so that was when we knew. That is the thing we need because of it. You know, it doesn't make sense. I don't know what that is. You know, it's not a protest sign. It's not just some random shit on the ground.

Monteiro’s philosophy is that it is important to create something that members of the public would want to engage with -- and then stick with them as they go about their lives.

Lyra Monteiro: Everyone who was working the event in Union Square on that day was wearing a black t-shirt that had Washington's Next! on it. So you'd be pretty identifiable. And also holding onto these little handouts that we had. So then if people came up to us and were like, “Hey, what's going on?, we'd give them a handout. Usually the questions were much more specific. Like, “Oh, I don't get it. What's the statute?” Okay. Well, and then the thing about the handout was that it was designed very carefully to answer all of those questions live and in front of that statue. You know, here's the picture of the statue from another angle. So you can see more clearly. So this is statute George Washington. It was built in, right? You know, “George Washington had slaves?” Yeah. So here's a description of his slave ownership and blah, blah, blah. And you know, in general, and here's Mount Vernon and a map of the different plantations that he had around Mount Vernon that are not part of the tour anymore, of course, you know, and things like that. So like basically, and even though we had, we had the image of that particular tweet as well, it was part of that pamphlet. But again, you know, we weren't, we were never asking people to take it.

Lyra Monteiro: They were asking us for it. And then on top of that, then we rely on word of mouth, right? So somebody does come up to us, gets a pamphlet, talks to us about the things they have questions about. They're still looking at it. Another person comes up and sees, they have a pamphlet and goes, what's this about?

Lyra Monteiro: Um, because. You know, that I think has a lot more power than us being like, hey, “we're smarter than you and we know a lot of stuff. Pay attention to us!”

Washinton’s Next! Ties into Monteiro’s academic work about public memory and stories around how we commemorate people in public space.

Lyra Monteiro: When I teach a public introduction to public history class to undergraduates, one of our, one of the main projects they do involves studying a monument or ,emorial in Newark, so near our campus, and you know, finding out who made it, spending time by it and watching how people interact with it or don't. Inevitably, of course, usually nobody interacts with it. And if they look over it all, it's because they're like, why is the student hanging out there in this like, kind of dreary weather, you know? And the number of times that they themselves are like, yeah, I used to walk by it all the time. I never even looked. Right? And then that weird thing about monuments and what I think makes them so powerful, and any statues in of people in public space is that we don't think about them having power or mattering. And yet they do, in some ways because we don't think about them, you know, until there's a threat to them until somebody says, “Oh, yeah, no, I think I'm going to take that down.” You know, like my. Seriously, like all of my students and, and, and Rutgers-Newark is the most diverse university in the country and has been since these things have been measured. You can probably imagine that most of the statues in Newark are not to People of Color to put it mildly. And it's amazing how over the course of that project, how many of them just develop this like ferocious, cause I'd taken that project in different ways. And one of them at one point had to do with like, do you think your statute should go, especially after Charlottesville? Do you think the statute should be torn down, or should we, you know, keep it, and if we want to keep it, how would we enhance it to make it more relevant? And I was, it's always interesting to see how many of them just get so devoted to the idea of keeping the statute to the person that's already there. Even if they've never heard of that person. There's something that there's just so much power in having something set in stone, you know?

Washington’s Next! is a project of Museums on Site, which is dedicated to helping people understand their worlds through free, site- and community-specific experiences. You can find more information about Washington’s Next!, see a panel discussion about the project called Monumental Racists, or get involved in other ways, by visiting washintonsnext.com.

[Outro]

Lyra Monteiro: My favorite joke around that to this day remains, you know, Washington and Lee university in Virginia.

Yeah. So there's Washington and Lee University. I need to check up on the latest status of this cause this was like a decade ago that I originally heard about this, they were talking about, you know, getting rid of the Lee part because. Obvious reasons, but then it gets pointed out, well, what about the Washington part? Why on earth are you make a huge deal to change and rebrand your whole university? Just to eat wise, you're going to get rid of Lee. Really? And this was from people who actually got it, I think, you know, as opposed to the ones who are like that stupid. They're like, ha, ha, that's awesome. And they, and so their proposal was that they should change the name of the university to Ampersand University!

Which I just adore.

76. 400 Years Post-Mayflower, the Provincetown Museum Rethinks Its Historical Branding Mar 02, 2020

Sometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts as the spot where the Mayflower pilgrims first disembarked 400 years ago this year is pretty strong.

The branding is strong enough to override the fact that the Mayflower actually first landed on the other side of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown. The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum commemorates that site. And even within a museum that’s trying to correct an inaccuracy, it has its own to grapple with: the museum used to portray the meetings between the members of the Wampanoag Nation and the Mayflower pilgrims with dehumanizing murals.

In this episode, Courtney Hurst, board president of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, describes how the museum is working to correct these inaccuracies by working closely with the Wampanoag Nation. And as the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower arrival approaches, the museum is in the middle of yet another rebrand. Just as the word pilgrim was reframed by Mayflower passenger William Bradford as a way to tie his journey to stories in the Christian Bible, the museum is reframing the word pilgrim to include recent Provincetown history.

This episode was recorded at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum on February 22, 2020.

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 76. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Sometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock as the spot where William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims first disembarked is pretty strong.

In the American tradition that I grew up learning, the Rock symbolized the Pilgrim’s arrival in what is now the United States, and the beginning of their interactions with the Native Nations who lived nearby. Plymouth Rock is an easy visualization tool, a shorthand, something that sticks in your mind.

But, the Mayflower didn’t first land on Plymouth Rock, or even near what is now Plymouth Massachusetts. Its first five weeks -- including the signing of the Mayflower compact -- happened in a bay on the other side of Cape Cod, near a city now called Provincetown.

Courtney Hurst: I grew up in Provincetown, and when you grow up in Provincetown, and it’s all you know, it's all you ever know. So I grew up knowing that the Pilgrims landed here. And we were always taught the importance of that, the Mayflower compact, and to go out in the world and realize that not everyone was taught that is just fanicanting. They spent five and a half weeks here exploring our shores, there were a lot of significant moments before they realized that the terrain was just too rocky, not as protected from the weather. So they got back on the boat and headed to Plymouth. For whatever reason, in history books and when kids were thought, it just picks up in Plymouth.

After those five weeks, the Mayflower continued on to Plymouth, where the pilgrims settled. It’s really easy to compress five weeks, particularly if they happened 400 years ago. The quest here is not just accuracy -- it’s not about saying, “well actually.” It’s to be aware that we’re all participating in historical branding -- and that monuments and museums are perhaps the best brand ambassadors.

Courtney Hurst: Hello. My name is Courtney Hurst and I'm president of the board at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum. So it is interesting. Even recently, unfortunately there was some graffiti on Plymouth rock just last week. And in the news, you know, every news feed was running it, especially here locally. And it was saying Plymouth, the landing place of the pilgrims. So we were, we were calling to correct people and say, that's actually not true.

The Provincetown Museum sits under the Pilgrim Monument -- a slim granite tower that dominates the skyline of Provincetown. The monument was completed in 1910 to draw attention to the fact that the Mayflower landed here first -- good branding.

As a school kid, Hurst said that the top of the tower was a great place to escape with friends, and since the museum was free, she would hang out there whenever her school was between sports seasons. But during those childhood visits, she was unaware of another type of dehumanizing branding happening in the exhibits.

Courtney Hurst: A whole wing used to be aligned with these huge murals, almost life size. As a kid, they felt life-size. And now that I'm talking, I see they're not, but they're big. And each one depicted a different moment in the Pilgrim's arrival and the impact on that Wampanoag Nation.

So it’s their first interaction. And the Native people all look exactly alike. There's no definition in their faces. Their hair is exactly alike. They all look really aggressive, really angry, and that they're on the attack. The pilgrims all have very distinct features. They're wearing different clothes, their expressions, they look almost fearful. They are cowering. They almost look like they are under attack. So you can even start to go layers deeper and deeper and deeper in the inaccuracy is, but when you just look at it, the stereotype that it was portraying on a subconscious level.

The portrayal of Wampanoag people like this isn’t unique, but it serves the narrative of the pilgrim's virtue and nobility in the face of a hostile world—not only were they persecuted in Europe, that narrative goes, they were also persecuted in the new world, which creates a justification for anything that happens afterwards. All this is buttressed by the implied neutrality of the museum.

Courtney Hurst: And they were so inaccurate that we're actually going to leave one of them up in this new exhibit as a, can you point out what's wrong? And is part of the interactive of the exhibit will be to show what’s wrong.

The new exhibit, which is called Our Story, is a partnership between the Provincetown Museum and members of the Wampanoag Nation.

Courtney Hurst: So Our Story, we’re working in conjunction with the Wampanoag Tribe, Paula Peters and Steven Peters specifically have been the real brains behind it and the execution of it. We have learned in the last few years through working so closely with the Wampanoag tribe that a lot of the story was wrong. And then it wasn't told accurately. So we have worked with them to create a whole entire new exhibit. We've gutted the room and we're rebuilding it, and it's called Our Story. And what's interesting about it is it will be told from their perspective as far as how they were living here before the pilgrims showed up.

An example of a story from those first five weeks that has been told exclusively from a colonial lens is the story of Corn Hill -- the spot near Provincetown where pilgrims “found” stores of corn preserved by the Wampanoag.

Courtney Hurst: it was always positioned as they just simply found the corn, and that's how history tells it. It was actually stolen corn, that it was clear the way that it was stored, the way that it was kept, that it had been put there by people. There's no way that you could have been able, they even say that in their log. So it was clear people were living here, they just hadn't come across them yet.

The Our Story gallery opens later this year to commemorate the 400 Year Anniversary of the Pilgrims Arrival, under the initiative Provincetown 400. The initiative is planning for a much different commemoration than the 300th anniversary in back 1920. Back then, it was called a celebration, not a commemoration, and included pageants and parades.

Courtney Hurst: It's not a celebration for everyone and that it is. Somewhat more solemn and that, yes, you know, the pilgrims came here and they did some good things and they were brave for coming here and seeking. And that's part of the story. But it's not all to be celebrated. So we've been training ourselves for the last two years.

Even that small nuance of a word, but it's not a nuance when you see how important it is. So everything from that word choice will shift to things like, we're not having a parade. You know that that was an initial brainstorm idea. You think like, Centennial, let's do a parade. And things like that, we're not going to do that. Cause that would be seen as disrespectful and we understand that. So the collaboration has been so tight throughout that I think it's going to feel a lot different in all those ways, I hope.

But the Provincetown Museum is also in the middle of another, maybe even bigger branding change: connecting the pilgrim story of 400 years ago to the modern history of Provincetown. Over past 100 years, Provincetown has attracted artists, playwrights, and the LGBT+ community. Today, Provincetown is perhaps the best-known gay resort on the U.S.’s East Coast.

Hurst wants to expand who we think of as Provincetown’s Pilgrims. The word “pilgrim” has been intentionally used to describe the passengers of the Mayflower because of a passage in William Bradford's journal, therefore connecting his journey to the Christian Bible. That’s good branding. But Hurst sees a throughline to Provincetown’s more recent history as well.

Courtney Hurst: We're hoping to reframe the word Pilgrim and for it to symbolize a group of people and really what they're seeking, which is to be accepted for who they are, whatever that be, whether it’s religious freedom or any freedom at all, seeking a place for them to be themselves.

I think there's a sense that this board and this team are committed to telling a more accurate story of Provincetown. And the Mayflower pilgrims were the first pilgrims to arrive here 400 years ago, and they came seeking acceptance and tolerance and freedom. And then pilgrims of all sorts have come to Provincetown shores since them, they were the first, but so many, the fishermen, the artists, the LGBQT community, so many. So we're really hoping that we can take each of those stories, each of those pilgrim stories, and tell a cohesive history of Provincetown.

Growing up here, the AIDS epidemic was so close to us, and again, you just grow up thinking that's what most people saw and life. And to think that my mom would like cruise dinners by guy's house that were struggling and had no one, and how many of them came here to, in some cases, die and how this town, these Portuguese women in the community just took them in and loved them and really took care of them.

That's a story that's, you know, it's Provincetown story, but it's, it's the AIDS story and it's a national story. And that's a case that likely might be in the new updated version of the museum. So when we say that we want to tell a more accurate, it's even just a more comprehensive story cause it does have a thread in the nation's history as well.

An example of a future exhibit might be about the Spiritus Pizza riot of 1990, which Hurst says was Provincetown’s analog to the important Stonewall riots in New York City.

Courtney Hurst: When the bars would get out at night. And typically the gay bars would get out and not just gay bars, but gay people would come into the street and they would all eat pizza and it would be really hard to get through. Well, one night there was a police officer was giving some, giving them trouble unnecessarily, shouldn't have been, and the group rioted. So these moments that were happening here in our Cosmo, but shifted the town and the town shifted legislature on what used to be called gaybashing and putting more laws in place and protecting them even further. And it was this moment that for us changed perception and culture in Provincetown.

Historical brands are powerful. In the same way that a single moment can shift a town’s legislation for the better, a photogenic rock can diminish five weeks of history in the minds of millions of students, and the word choice that a museum uses can turn a bushel of stolen corn into just an innocent lucky find.

As the 400 year anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival approaches, the Provincetown Museum is preparing for the commemoration by changing things up. They don’t use the word branding—but, like the Pilgrims themselves, they’re expanding the word pilgrim to include recent Provincetown history, they’re working to tell the story of members of the Wampanoag nation directly instead of through the lens of the colonists. And they want people to know that the Mayflower landed here first before moving on to Plymouth.

Courtney Hurst: So we obviously want to shine a spotlight on the fact that the pilgrims actually landed here and the time that they spent here. But beyond that, we're hoping to cast a spotlight on Provincetown as a place that is welcoming to pilgrims. And that message for us in today's time feels just as powerful.

75. Museduino: Using Open Source Hardware to Power Museum Exhibits Feb 17, 2020

Proprietary technology that runs museum interactives—everything from buttons to proximity sensors—tends to be expensive to purchase and maintain.

But Rianne Trujillo, lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU), realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives. She is part of the team behind Museduino, an open-source system for exhibits and installations.

On this episode, Rianne Trujillo and fellow NMHU instructor of Software Systems Design Jonathan Lee describe the huge potential to applying the open source model to museum hardware.

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Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 75. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

On Museum Archipelago, we focus on power in museums. On how cultural institutions have a tremendous amount of unchecked power.

But power takes many forms and one of these forms is control over the technology that delivers museum content to visitors.

From a button that plays a bird call when you touch it, to a projection screen that plays a story about the Battle of Gettysburg when you get close to it, every museum interactive requires a technological solution.

Rianne Trujillo: Oftentimes, museums will purchase proprietary solutions. Oftentimes they're very expensive, especially to maintain them, and if they break you are sort of forced to rehire the same company or rebuy new equipment, and that can be fairly costly really quickly.

This is Rianne Trujillo, lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab at New Mexico Highlands University.

Rianne Trujillo: My name is Rianne Trujillo. I'm the lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab at New Mexico Highlands University, and I’m also an instructor of Software Systems Design.

The Cultural Technology Development Lab is an R&D program where university faculty and students, museum professionals, and other partners work together on technology and design solutions for cultural institutions. Through working these institutions across New Mexico and the U.S., Trujillo realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives.

Rianne Trujillo: So by using open source hardware, we can basically solve that issue of cost by using fairly inexpensive, off-the-shelf components from various electronic suppliers.

And that’s how Museduino came to be. Museduino is an open source hardware controller designed specifically to be used in museums. Using this hardware controller, which is about the size of an altoids tin, and a little bit of technical knowledge, museums can create and control their own interactives instead of always hiring an outside company.

Rianne Trujillo: We built Museduino to solve our own needs when building exhibits.

Jonathan Lee: It's all open source, and if we want to put it out there, we can show anyone else how to build that and they can implement it in their museum.

This is Jonathan Lee.

Jonathan Lee: My name is Jonathan Lee. I'm a professor of Software Systems Design at New Mexico Highlands University. Either they can implement it by buying the same parts or just downloading our code if it's off-the-shelf components and then inserting their content into it as well.

Both Lee and Trujillo see a huge potential to appling the open source model to museum hardware.

The phrase open source comes from the software world: open source software is a development model where the source code of a piece of software is freely available to anyone who wants it.

We all use open source software every day, whether we realize it or not. Most ATMs, web servers, and cash registers rely on open source software simply because it’s the cheapest and most secure -- the source code is freely available so bugs are identified and fixed quickly.

Open source hardware projects, like Museduino, borrow from the software world by making the instructions of how to build and program them freely available. Yes, you still need to pay for someone to manufacture the physical components, but they are commodities -- there’s multiple vendors that can make you the exact same thing.

Jonathan Lee: We have used an open source program to create the printed circuit board design and so if you wanted to, anyone could download that circuit board design and they could actually have however many they needed printed.

This together makes for a radical way to approach exhibit hardware -- where the technical solutions that a museum comes up with aren’t confined to just one museum.

Jonathan Lee: One of the originators of the project said they liked the Linux model of put it out there, let other people make it better, make it, fix it, build something for the platform that we make and then set it free.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened with Museduino: it was built upon another piece of open source hardware, a single-board controller called Arduino.

Rianne Trujillo: What Museduino is, is essentially a Arduino shield that extends the footprint of the Arduino via four RJ45 or standard Cat-5 cable cabling in four different directions. We've tested it with up to 200 feet away. So if you're building a very large scale museum exhibit and you need a sensor in one location and an output maybe 10 feet away, you can control all of that with the one Arduino, using our system.

Exhibits components tend to be far away from each other, even in small museums, because the gallery is designed for the visitor moving through the space. The specific problem is that, unlike wireless devices like internet of things or IOT -- light bulbs or buttons, museum hardware needs to work 100% of the time, and right now, the best way to do that is with wires like the standard cat-5 cable.

Rianne Trujillo: We're from New Mexico where we work with a lot of cultural institutions, where the walls are adobe, and there's always not great internet connection in the space, or also remote sites where there might not be internet connection, so we try to stay away from IOT boards and we use our system to have solid hardwired connections because those other systems could be a point of failure for the exhibit.

From the outside, or even from the inside if you’re focusing on the museum from purely a visitor experience perspective, exactly what tools museums use to create interactives might not seem like that big a deal. But it is a big deal for the museum itself to own its means of production.

Rianne Trujillo: We primarily work with institutions who don't have a lot of funding to be able to purchase these proprietary systems. So open source hardware allows us to build relatively inexpensive exhibits. We've heard instances where maybe they purchased a piece of software from a company and then like a month later they didn't exist anymore. So that can happen to people, especially if you're putting thousands of dollars into it.

Hardware lock-in mirrors software lock in: many museums use a video player called a Brightsign. These are little closed-source purple boxes that allow museum staff to play and schedule videos. They are designed to solve a problem: to help museums not have to worry about playing videos for their visitors. But they also remove the ability of museum staff to fix the system if something goes wrong.

Museduino is already installed at many museums and cultural institutions around the U.S., like Acadia National Park’s nature center, the Carlsbad Museum, and the Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos National Labs. From the beginning, Trujillo and the other members of the Museduino team have been sharing their knowledge with the wider museum world.

Rianne Trujillo: We go to conferences and share Museduino and just also a general Arduino tutorials and things like that. We do workshops at these museum related conferences to get people interested in open source hardware in hopes that they can start thinking of ways to incorporate it into their museum exhibits.

Museduino represents a radical approach to exhibit technology design. By allowing museums big and small more control over the installation and maintenance of the technology in their galleries, the Museduino team shows how the principles of the open source movement fit within the museum landscape.

Rianne Trujillo: Since we've presented at these different conferences, people got to take home Museduino, so we know that it's in institutions in several places. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in California, they just recently did a project with it, where they actually made a pneumatic tube system with the Museduino for donations. They said their donations went up 10 times the amount that they normally had before. Of course, it was probably somebody with a bin or it was a drop box where you can donate. And now when you donate a dollar, you see this whole theatric thing happen where you get to watch your money go up in some twos and some lights flicker.

You can find more about Museduino at https://museduino.org, and keep an eye out for a workshop near you.

74. 'Houston, We Have A Restoration' with Sandra Tetley Jan 13, 2020

Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city: Mission Control. In that room on July 20, 1969, NASA engineers answered radio calls from the surface of the moon. Sitting in front of rows of green consoles, cigarettes in hand, they guided humans safely back to earth, channeling the efforts of the thousands and thousands of people who worked on the program through one room.

But until recently, that room was kind of a mess. After hosting Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions through 1992, the room hosted retirement parties, movie screenings, and the crumbs that came with them.

Spurred by the deadline of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019, the room was carefully restored with a new visitor experience. The restoration project focused on accurately portraying how the area looked at key moments during that mission, right down to the ashtrays and soda cans. In this episode, Sandra Tetley, Historic Preservation Officer at the Johnson Space Center, describes the process of restoring “one of the most significant places on earth.”

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 74. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city -- mission control.

In that room, NASA engineers -- average age: 26 -- answered radio calls from the darkness of space. Sitting in front rows of green consoles, cigarettes and cigars in hand, they guided humans to the moon and back, channeling the efforts of the half a million people who worked on the program through one room.

Sandra Tetley: I realized the value of this room to American history and to the world history. It's one of the most significant sites on earth.

But up until a few years ago, that room was kind of a mess.

Sandra Tetley: It was open to anyone who could get into the building. You could actually go into that room, you could sit in the chairs, you could dial the phones, press the buttons. They would have the co-ops come in their first day and they could have coffee and breakfast at the consoles. The Department of Defense used to have their retirement celebrations in there. It was looking pretty ragged when we first started restoring it.

This is Sandra Tetley, historic preservation officer at the Johnson Space Center.

Sandra Tetley: Hi, my name is Sandra Tetley. I am the historic preservation officer and real property officer at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Tetley and her team at the Johnson Space Center or JSC just compleated a restoration of the Apollo Mission Control Center, also known as MOCR-2 or -- because space programs are built on acronyms -- simply, “moker.”

Putting aside the room being used for retirement parties and breakfasts, the real challenge of the restoration was simply the fact that history keeps going. MOCR-2 served as mission control before and after the Apollo missions to the moon.

Sandra Tetley: So it started out with Gemini. It flew all the manned Apollo missions. Then it did the Apollo Soyuz test project, Skylab and then began into Shuttle. And we actually lost the Shuttle Challenger out of this same room.

So if the goal is to restore the room, how do you know which is the most significant mission? How do you know which era to restore it to?

Well, in this case, it’s clearly Apollo. Sometimes history is messy as its layers overlap, but here it’s pretty clear.

And this is a widely held-view. In 1985, the room became a National Historic Landmark or NHL, specifically because of its role in Apollo.

Sandra Tetley: The building is a National Historic Landmark based on the man in space survey, which was a survey done of all the NASA centers. When the building was designated that they have a series of performance, which was from Apollo 11 and then through Apollo 17, which is when man landed on the moon. Of course except for 13. But that was the period of significance of the room, meaning that in this designation of an NHL, this is what the big focus would have been about.

By 1992, the room was no longer being used for any missions and this gave way to the era of retirement parties and breakfasts.

Sandra Tetley: That's where the Texas historic commission stepped in. And they really fought to keep that room from being completely gutted and modernized. You know, we were in the throws of Shuttle and Space Station and so we did not have the budget or you know, really the interest to do an actual restoration of that room.

And because it was a National Historic Landmark, and what happened is the Texas state historic commission made an agreement with NASA and with JSC to leave that room alone. To basically preserve it or restore it for posterity because that is where we landed men on the moon.

The restoration really got underway around 2014 when Tetley started applying for grants with the national park service. The interest was there, but it wasn’t obvious what the next steps were.

Sandra Tetley: We began to try to get buy-in and support to do the restoration. And there was a lot of consternation because that room is so visible and it is so important. Various organizations on site wanted to control it and they wanted to control the restoration. So there was a big battle on who would do that and how it would work and how it would go.

Tetley pushed for a restoration rather than a simple renovation. Gene Kranz, who served as chief Flight Director of the Apollo missions, decided to leverage the upcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 to get it done right.

Sandra Tetley: Only after Mr Kranz wrote what I call his nuclear letter and got the, an article in the newspaper, Houston Chronicle, and he wrote the Park Service, the advisory council, both our senators, the NASA Administrator. I mean, everyone got a letter saying it is time to restore this room. You're running out of time. It needs to be ready for the 50th anniversary. And that finally got everybody kind of on, you know, off dead center to get going.

That’s when the restoration really started to take shape. During the missions, the room featured a visitors gallery behind it. The idea was that media and family could watch what was going on without disturbing the engineers on the floor. Since they were making life-and-death decisions, the engineers couldn’t be interrupted. Today, that same visitors gallery serves the same purpose -- to keep visitors off the floor.

Sandra Tetley: One of our biggest battles that we had, was to begin to lock it down and prevent people who go into the consoles and going into the room. And that continues to be our biggest battle is to keep a limited number of people off the floor of the MOCR.

This is not a unique problem to human heritage on earth. And once we create a museum at the Apollo 11 landing site on the moon, it won't be a unique problem to human heritage off of the earth either. There’s only so many people can visit the cave before the cave paintings are ruined.

Sandra Tetley: Now that it's restored, the best vantage point is from the viewing room because all the consoles are lit up and there's furnishings and documents and so forth all over the console. That’s the best view because noone goes into the console room at all except for the retired flight controllers.

The restored room looks exactly like it did in 1969. As visitors enter the gallery above, t he room comes alive in a 14 minute experience that portrays five different parts of of the Apollo 11 mission with historical accuracy: the descent and landing, the first step, the reading of the plaque on the lunar module, President Nixon calling the astronauts, and finally, the recovery after splashdown. The lights on the consoles, the projected graphs and maps, the buttons, and even the clocks change to display how they would have at those moments.

Sandra Tetley: Space Center Houston, who's our visitor experience, wanted more of a Disney-esque type experience. Where you heard the, the chatter about the main landing, but that you saw it at a computer generated imagery on the screen of the moon, of the, the LM landing on the moon. What a restoration is that you try to make it be historically accurate. And that wasn't historical accurate. They never had any film or any imagery of them landing on the moon until they returned. So the only thing that was showing on the screen was data, whatever was showing from a console, they would project up there. They showed the map where they were expected to land. The lunar map and information like that, that they were making these decisions. So we have to go through all of the film that was ever filmed in mission control. We had to go through all that and then we had to recreate every single thing that was on all five of the summery display screens and all the clocks and then sync it all up to the actual audio.

What I like about this approach is that it lets the drama of the historical events play out because there is a lot of drama in the room itself. Having all the real-time information come through maps and numbers and the astronauts own voices -- particularly as a decision-maker -- is an incredibly intense experience on its own.

Sandra Tetley: We wanted people to really understand what the flight controllers were doing and what decisions they were having to make. You hear backroom loops of people saying, we've got, you know, another 1201 alarm. No, keep going, keep going. You know, and you've got the, you're hearing these decisions and you can feel the stress, and what they're having to do. And then even when they land, you continue to hear, okay, we've got a stay and no stay, you know, and then they begin to make that. And so it's very intense.

And that is what we want to portray to people. We want them to understand that these men whose average age was 26 years old, we're having to make these, these real time decisions based on these numbers. And if you look at the screens on the consoles are crazy. I don't know how anyone can make heads or tails out of them and they're having to sit there and make these decisions for these men's lives. And you know, what will happen and what do I do and how do I do this? And, and they, you know, they did it. And that's what we really want people to, to get in there and just go, Oh my gosh, this is so cool. This is great. And I think it really comes across very well.

When you visit Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed, you see that the desks in the Assembly Room are staged with quill pens and spare parchment as if the signers just had to step out for a moment. The restorers did the same thing here, but instead of quill pens, the studied the binders, cigarettes, ashtrays, bottles of coke, the engineers Han in hand from old film and video.

Sandra Tetley: When you go into to and view the MOCR, everything there is place for a reason, based on films and still photography. And we placed them all there during the mission for the flight controllers. And it is a little bit of a blend of flight controllers. For example, one may drink coffee and we'd have this coffee cup that we may have the RC Cola can there as well. So we didn't try to just isolate it to one particular, there were different shifts during that time. And there was also lots of people in the room. It wasn't just the one flight control. I mean there was four or five people around each flight controller. So there was stuff everywhere. We have briefcases, we have sports coats that were their jackets and, and sack lunches that they brought in and ashtrays. We realized that we didn’t quite get it without ashtrays. Our cigarettes are ashtrays or are full of cigarettes and, and if anything about the ashtray we have, they have those big amber ashtrays because they're cigar ashtray. And the reason why they got the big cigar ass tradings cause they smoke so much that they would fill up the smaller ashtrays too fast.

The restoration opened on July 20th, 2019, exactly 50 years after the room guided humans to the lunar surface for the first time. In attendance were Gene Kranz and other flight controllers and engineers. This time, though, they didn’t have life-or-death decisions to make. They could simply enjoy the room.

Sandra Tetley: So on the 50th anniversary, the flight controller said, we really want to have that list to ourselves. We don't want a big crowd. We'd like to take our wives in there too because I very rarely I will to the family and their wives on the floor during missions. And that never happened during missions. One of the things the flight controllers said is that when they landed man on the moon, we did not set to celebrate. So the 50th anniversary came around, stay really celebrated. And we had them all come in and we showed them all the visceral experience because a lot of them, that was the first time they've seen it. And then we brought them on the floor and all of them could just go and look at all the consoles and you know, they told us, they told us so much, no it didn't look like this, you know, is this look like this? And Oh my gosh, how did you find my coffee cup? That's just wild, you know, a lot of comradery and then we took their pictures. So we took each flight team pictures at their console. So we have these really great photographs. A lot of them were very emotional and, and, uh, you know, just sort of were able to really relive it and realize what they've done at this point. And so that was very special. That kind of topped it all off.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

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73. Sanchita Balachandran Shifts the Framework for Conservation with Untold Stories Dec 02, 2019

The field of conservation was created to fight change: to prevent objects from becoming dusty, broken, or rusted. But fighting to keep cultural objects preserved creates a certain mindset — a mindset where it’s too easy to imagine objects and cultures in a state of stasis.

Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, founded Untold Stories to change that mindset in the conservation profession. Through events at the annual meetings of the American Institute for Conservation, Untold Stories expands cultural heritage beyond preserving the objects we might find in a museum.

In this episode, Balachandran talks about Untold Story’s 2019 event: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation, avoiding the savior mentality, and how the profession has changed since she was in school.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:14 The Conservation Profession
01:12 Sanchita Balachandran
01:35 Untold Stories
03:30 Mohegan Sun 2019: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation
04:58 endawnis Spears and the Akomawt Educational Initiative (episode 68)
06:09 Savior Mentality in Conservation
07:37 Changing Working Practices
09:03 Changing Technical Practices
10:30 Changing Social Practices
11:25 Activating Cultural Heritage
12:15 Salt Lake City 2020: Preserving Cultural Landscapes
12:30 Learn More About Untold Stories and Watch Recordings of Past Events
12:40 SPONSOR: StoriesHere Podcast
13:40 Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️: National Treasure
14:34 Outro

Photo credit: Jay T. Van Rensselear

Sponsor: StoriesHere Podcast

This episode is brought to you by a new museum podcast, StoriesHere! The latest episode is an excellent two-part series about the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. It includes the story of a family secret being hidden from a daughter, revealed after talking at the site with a former incarcerated person. If you like Museum Archipelago, check out StoriesHere!

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 73. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

The field of conservation was created to fight change: to prevent objects from becoming dusty, broken, or rusted. But fighting to keep cultural objects preserved creates a certain mindset -- the mindset of protector. A mindset where it’s too easy to imagine objects and cultures in a state of stasis -- that this is how it always was and will be forever.

Sanchita Balachandran: Often, I mean, just given the Colonial and Imperial histories of museums, it was because people were going to be gone forever. That culture was gone. And so this is the last trace, but in fact, that's not how cultural heritage works. It's transformed. It's changed. It continues on in different forms. And a lot of the way that conservators think about cultural heritage is, is about mitigating that change, which makes it a little bit fossilized. But to me, that changes where things are really vibrant and exciting and people are so closely connected to cultural heritage, that it really feels alive.

This is Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum.

Sanchita Balachandran: Hello, my name is Sanchita Balachandran. I’m a conservator and I’m trained in the conservation of archaeological materials in particular. And my day job is the Associate Director at the Archaeological Museum at Johns Hopkins University.

Balachandran founded Untold Stories, a project that pursues a conservation profession that represents and preserves a fuller spectrum of human cultural heritage. For the past few years, the project has been hosting public events at the annual meetings of the American Institute for Conservation.

Untold Stories emerged out of Balachandran’s frustration with how narrowly conservation has been defined.

Sanchita Balachandran: I felt that there were, literally, too many untold stories in the field of conservation. I wanted to find ways to actually start to think about what else cultural heritage could mean other than, say, the things we typically think of as belonging in a museum.

For many of us, cultural heritage means going to this, you know, important-looking building that has paintings and sculpture and has labels next to it. And I think we've kind of decided in some ways that that's cultural heritage and preservation means taking care of those things. And really, I've become more and more aware and curious about the fact that cultural heritage is a much more complicated and diverse set of practices. It's often not necessarily about a single object or a thing, but rather how that thing might function within a community or communities as part of a series of practices and exchanges and storytelling. And I just wanted to have a way to work with people who are really doing that work outside the museum and doing it in ways that, I think preserve, but also change cultural practices.

Since Untold Stories takes place at the annual meetings of the American Institute for Conservation, a lot of professionals in the field are already gathered there -- the meetings attract over 1000 conservators. Like many professional conferences, the meetings are often held in a nondescript hotel setting.

But Untold Stories makes it a practice to contextualize where attendees are sitting and the history that preceded them. An example of this is the 2019 Untold Stories event, titled Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation.

Sanchita Balachandran: How many times have you been to a conference and you could be anywhere. Right? I mean, you're in this big room and you never leave the hotel or the conference center. And part of what I was interested in was trying to actually place us somewhere.

So in 2019 since we were actually meeting at the Mohegan Sun, which is a Mohegan owned casino. We were on native land. It seemed like a really important opportunity to talk about Native sovereignty and the kind of history of genocide in our own country. The fact that anyone who's non-indigenous in this country is a settler-colonialist. But to really think about what this means in terms of how we take care of collections that have come to us, as a result of historical happenstance, but also a very violent past and to acknowledge the fact that museums, which for most of us who work in museums are very safe, welcoming, and, you know, joyful places are evidence of this history of pain and removal. So, the opportunity to work with, the Akomawt Educational Initiative was really exciting because it's a partly Native cofounded and they do a lot of educational work around questions of how we even think about the history of this country. And to me that was really important to be able to say in native space as opposed to, you know, in a place somewhere else.

Part of Balachandran’s point is that there isn’t such a thing as a contextless cultural material: the intentionally non-descript conference ballroom has a lot in common with a deliberately sterile museum environment.

Episode 68 of this show features an interview with endawnis Spears, Director of Programming & Outreach at the Akomawt Educational Initiative and one of the conveners of 2019 Untold Stories event. In the episode, she discusses her presentation about how Native narratives are violently presented through a white lens in museums.

Sanchita Balachandran: It was in endawnis Spears of Akomawt who suggested the title. She had worked in museums, she's very familiar with these questions and she's the one who suggested Indigenous Futures, which forces you to recognize that this is not something of the past.

We really wanted to do something that felt like we were going to push. This had to be uncomfortable, but it also had to be aspirational. Where do we go now? And how can as conservators we actually be part of this very kind of collaborative, supportive mission to ensure futures?

We can't make it happen by ourselves. It's not like we're saving anybody. And that's another big concern of mine. There's a real sort of savior mentality that I think conservation has to, we save objects. And I certainly came out of graduate school thinking that I was going to save everything. Um, and to me that's a very problematic way to think about it because frankly, if the object still survives, it didn't need me. Right? It made it thousands of years without me. Somehow we've kind of decided that we're the ones that making the, that make these things live forever, which is pure arrogance. So part of this event was really to think about how as conservators can we come up with action items and by action items it was practices, but more than anything a kind of shift in a mental framework for working much more equitably and more humbly, you know, to really have a sense of respect for this notion that there has already been a history before you. And so when you enter into this hopefully collaborative relationship, you need to acknowledge that things have survived for a long time without your intervention and they don't need you, but you could actually provide some sort of service, some sort of benefit that could actually help.

The Untold Stories team, true to their mission, is careful not to present the workshop as a single solution, or even a set of solutions. The team wants to counter the assumption within the profession that all you need to do is go to one workshop and you're all done.

Sanchita Balachandran: Unfortunately this doesn't change the working practices. It doesn't change the mindset. It doesn't change the way an organization functions. And what happens is, you know, then marginalized people are called upon again and again to kind of keep performing this vulnerability and this discomfort for themselves in order to educate people who are unwilling to do the work, the consistent -- like, every single day for the rest of their lives work -- that will be required to make transformative change possible.

So part of what, in the 2019 conversation we, we felt very strongly we had to say is if, if you really believe in equality, if you really want to do something that is truly collaborative, that does not assume some sort of hierarchy it means being really uncomfortable the entire time. And maybe at the end of it things will change, but you still have to kind of follow through on it when it gets really uncomfortable. And the fact is most marginalized communities, people have done this their entire lives.So it just feels like it's time for, you know, I think in general, the museum community to say we're willing to engage in these kinds of difficult ongoing, perpetual conversations.

It’s really interesting to approach these issues from the framework of such a technical profession. What is different, what has changed in the field of conservation since you were in school?

Sanchita Balachandran: I was in grad school two decades ago, so it's, you know... I guess I would break it down into technical practices, which I think most conservators would, would think of themselves as doing sort of things with their hands, changing a surface in some way and then more social practices. How do you be in this world? Uh, in terms of technical practices, some of the things that we do on a regular basis are certainly did to me raise a lot of questions about how do we even come up with this. So, you know, one of the things that I was trained on, and I think a lot of conservators still do, is something like spit cleaning, right? For a long time, uh, it was known that something like human saliva has really amazing cleaning properties. And, you know, it's the reason why your mom might've like licked her thumb and you know, rubbed a mark off your face. But, but it works really well and it's, you know, there have been attempts to make this much more scientific as to like, what are the enzymes, for example, in saliva that work. But you know, now thinking about it and my gosh, to spit on someone else's things, it's this really strange concept. And yet it was something that was really suggested as a very efficacious way of doing a treatment.

For me, this has meant that I really have to be extremely aware of the choices I'm making and at least be aware of the discomfort that they raise in me when I start thinking about what I'm actually doing. So that's the kind of technological discomfort and awareness. And then there's how, how does one work with anybody else? Certainly in academia, and I would say also in museums are very hierarchical spaces where, you know, in the museum the sort of curator often has had the privilege of storytelling. And often when people who are not within the museum are consulted, they're consulted either after most of the work has been done or that that information is kind of extracted from them and presented as part of this larger narrative rather than allowing people to simply say what they believe these objects are, or how, you know, the story needs to be presented.

For those in an established field, like museum professionals or conservators, it is easy to go with the language and practice that exists before you arrive. Projects like Untold Stories challenge those assumptions and help create a new model.

Sanchita Balachandran: For me, it's really about kind of activating cultural heritage and, in very kind of living ways. Underlying all of this work with Untold Stories was to really think about what is possible, in terms of preserving cultural heritage.

I think if you think of cultural heritage as being something that's preserved by people in, you know, conservation labs only, to me that's really limiting. And it also is untrue because we have millennia of, you know, people caring for their things and their stories and passing this knowledge on, um, through oral traditions and other kinds of traditions. So to somehow claim that we are the only ones capable of doing this kind of preservation work is fundamentally untrue. And so to me, kind of bringing up this resilience, but also just this joy of doing this incredible connected, human work was something that I wanted to be around.

The next Untold Stories event will be held during the American Institute of Conservation’s annual conference in Salt Lake City from the 19th to the 23rd of MAY 2020. The title of the event will be PRESERVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES.

You can learn more about The Untold Stories Project, and watch recordings of past events, at Untold Stories dot live.

72. ‘Speechless: Different by Design’ Reframes Accessibility and Communication in a Museum Context Nov 18, 2019

Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and audio guides lead headphone-ed users from one piece to the next, paragraph by paragraph.

But Speechless: Different by Design, a new exhibit at the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, guides visitors as far away as possible from words with six custom art installations.

In this episode, curator Sarah Schleuning and graphic designer Laurie Haycock Makela discuss how their personal experiences lead them to Speechless, and describe the process and considerations of putting it all together.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 72. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and artists guide headphone-ed users from one piece to the next paragraph by paragraph.

But there’s a new series ot exhibits designed to be different, to guide visitors as far away as possible from words.

One of those is a collaboration of the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. It’s called Speechless, and to underline the point, it is subtitled: different by design.

Sarah Schleuning: Speechless has been an exhibition that merges research and aesthetics and innovative new design to explore accessibility and modes of communication in the museum setting.

This is Sarah Schleuning, curator of Speechless.

Sarah Schleuning: Hello, my name is Sarah Schleuning and I am The Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design and the interim Chief curator at the Dallas Museum of Art. And I love to focus on projects that really explore ideas of how design and art can transform our everyday lives.

The roots of Speechless come from Schleuning’s own rethinking of how to communicate without language.

Sarah Schleuning: The idea really germinated out of something very personal for me which is that one of my children has motor planning disability, a neurological issue that rendered him, when he was younger, fairly speechless and I had to sort of rethink how I communicated with him and how we as a family interacted with somebody where language wasn't the primary avenue. So it started in that idea, but I was also in my curatorial work had been really interested in issues of playscapes and interactivity and how the exposure to aesthetics and design are really great gateways to get people to really think about how that impacts their everyday life. And so this project was a merger of these ideas.

Even museums that specialize in the visual arts have a tendency to communicate verbally with their visitors.

Sarah Schleuning: I think that that was the thing that I realized even for myself here. I deal in visual culture. But the way I communicate about it is through words or through, you know talking about it and and that I myself am hyper sort of hyper-verbal. All of a sudden, I had this very close proximity to somebody who wasn't interested in learning from me through language and what I started to realize really because we started using the Picture Exchange system communication system, which is a series of images that you use to communicate. So you'd say what do you want to eat? And on the sheet would be a picture of a series of different foods and then they could point and so it's very sort of prescriptive. And it would be apple.

And then what I started thinking was we at museums are sitting on this vast repository of images is I mean, you could use Magritte's Apple, there are so many different looks and feels and kind of different nuances to what an apple could be or these images and in essence that communication is kind of a two way thing.

The project is made up of six art installations intended to foster “participatory environments” within a museum context, and in particular, engage the senese.

Sarah Schleuning: We had the opportunity about a year ago to invite 6 design teams to come to Dallas and work on this project. And we invited six specialist from the Dallas community that were scientists, but kind of both theoreticians and practitioners who specialized in fields like neuroscience and autism, dementia, communication disorders, physical therapy related to sensory issues and really to think about the broader spectrum of what disability looks like and how to broaden our own perceptions of how to design for that and think through those ideas.

Sarah Schleuning: But I think the biggest underpinning of the exhibition for me and for the institutions were that it was an experience that ultimately was positive and joyful so that these fully immersive interactive spaces that each design team was creating was really something that was positive and felt like it offered an opportunity to see the greatness in the difference between us, instead of seeing it as a negative.

One of the pieces, by Yuri Suzuki is called ‘Sound of the Earth Chapter 2’ and features a giant, unmarked black globe. Without the context of the familiar outlines of continents, visitors instead hear sounds recorded at the part of the earth while they place their ear against the surface of the globe. Sounds from more southern regions are accessed by crouching down.

Another, by Misha Kahn, features a garden of colorful sculptures that inflate and deflate throughout the day.

The task of bringing all of these tinstallationals together fell on designer and educator Laurie Haycock Makela. Maklela was responsible for the overall graphic identity and the corresponding exhibition publication.

Laurie Haycock Makela: Hi. My name is Laurie Haycock Makela. I'm a graphic designer and an educator and I'm working on the book and some of the kind of related exhibition kind of graphic identity issues for Speechless. As a book designer I deal with words also, so there's a certain irony and working on this project, but it made me really attentive to you know, I'm a typographer, you know, kind of. You know from the bottom of my heart, you know, I look at language as image also,

Like Schleuning, Makela understands what it is like to communicate non-verbally.

Laurie Haycock Makela: I've been a book designer and an educator and all that for years and years and then I had two brain hemorrhages and brain surgery which really made my everything stopped, you know, that was but… So yeah, I think that Sarah brought many of us in here because of certain personal experiences that make it so we really understand in some pretty deep way or experiential way what our options are when we. You know are left with maybe for a while. I couldn't I didn't speak or write or read or anything like that. So I had to rethink all that. So I really identified with the content or the concept of this project from the very beginning, you know.

The six installations only thematically relate to one another, and are introduced by the ground rules “Be curious, be thoughtful, be gentle.” -- one of the few instances of text in the gallery. Visitors can experience the installations in any order they choose by going into rooms off the main area, which Schleuning explains by evoking a sea creature.

Sarah Schleuning: The exhibition itself will be designed kind of like an octopus is I guess the best way I can think to describe it and when you go in the room if you think of the octopus's sort of head, it is actually going to be an empty room.

Sarah Schleuning: And that room will have some furniture and we'll have some things and they'll be these kind of videos that are really going to be sort of short Boomerang videos of each artist in their space kind of showing people what to expect what they would use their and so that then you could understand. Yes, they're six spaces.

Sarah Schleuning: Then the place like Lori's doing is really. We wanted to make a space. That was what we called kind of a de-escalation Zone and you know those spaces typically a museum like sensory spaces and others which are becoming more commonplace in institutions, like Museum often are off of the sort of educational space or in other places, and we wanted to put it primary in the exhibition it we wanted it to be sort of fully accessible and not, stigmatized is probably too hard of a word but making it feel like it was accessible to everyone that everybody may need it the opportunity to just have a moment to take a to sort of reboot and refresh. In that space there will be rockers and weighted blankets and one of our Specialists deals primarily with that. So we vetted that project and what we wanted to use in there in that. And then Lori the book that Lori is done, which really shows the whole creative process of each of the different designers will be wheat pasted on one of the walls and and so we'll both be a place for reflection for people to look at these but also a kind of stabilizing line for people if they need to sort of combat calm down or recenter.

Even though the museum world has a term for visitors needing a break from galleries -- it’s called museum fatigue and you can listen to a brief overview of it on episode 2 of Museum Archipelago -- the causes of museum fatigue and a best practice approach remain speculative.

Researcher Beverly Serrell found that visitors typically spent less than 20 minutes in exhibitions regardless of topic and size before becoming much more selective about what they explore. Her research supports the notion that visitors have a limited time frame after which their interest towards exhibits diminishes.

And this is the reason why you can usually find at least a bench 20 minutes into a linear exhibition -- but it’s clear that museums can do much more. The designers of Speechless hope that their approach can contribute.

Sarah Schleuning: The other thing that I really wanted to make sure happened in the exhibition was that you never walked from one project to another you always go into a space and then you come back into this central, sort of emptier, zone so that you always have a chance to it's almost like a palate cleanser, right? You always kind of go from one experience and then you're able to reflect a decompress and then you can move into another.

Sarah Schleuning: We don't know how it's going to go. I mean part of the idea of being experimental, and I applaud both institutions for encouraging us to go really go for it is that you don't know what's going to be successful or not. And so we are investing in doing evaluations during the project and it's our intention to then publish those findings at the end because we want to.

So much of the planning for this exhibit comes from making visitors comfortable enough to have a non-museum-like interaction with the art, but visitors are used to a museum context with clear text instructions.

So how soon into the visit do they start playing and lose some level of inhibition, loose some of the exhibit context.

Sarah Schleuning: I stay up at night thinking about that. I think it's been really interesting because even with you know, the designers themselves, you know, it's that balance between they want to make something that's really spectacular and it's in an art museum and they want it to really have, you know be elevated at that level and at the same time, how would you interact with this as a child? You know and and how would you change that to be more responsive to that or to think through these things? And trying to work through, you know the best you can but you never know. And and that's what makes it both, you know, exciting and anxiety-producing.

Laurie Haycock Makela: Yeah, I just started biting my nails. Yeah.

Speechless, with its visually-striking rooms is opening into a world more comfortable than ever about expressing itself non-verbally. Audio and images and animations of images are just as easy to create, modify, and share as words. Episode 14 of this show, which was an entire discussion of museum selfies from 2015 feels hopelessly outdated in 2019 -- images are how many visitors “talk” about the galleries they visit.

Like any language, there’s a continually evolving grammar in images and selfie, and one strategy is for a museum to give visitors the tools of that grammar: a dictionary and a thesaurus in the form of strange shapes and a colorful backgrounds.

Exhibits like Speechless give visitors the tools to center non-verbal expression within a museum frame.

Speechless: different by design is now open at the Dallas Museum of Art, and will be until March 22, 2020. After that, the same exhibit will be on display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

71. Assessing Curatorial Work for Social Justice With Elena Gonzales Oct 28, 2019

Museums are seen as trustworthy, but what if that trust is misplaced? Chicago-based independent curator Elena Gonzales provides a solid jumping off point for thinking critically about museums in her new book, Exhibitions for Social Justice.

The book is a whirlwind tour of different museums, examining how they approach social justice. It’s also a guide map for anyone interested in a way forward.

In this episode, Gonzales takes us on a tour of some of the main themes of the book, examining the strategies of museum institutions from the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Trust in Museum Institutions
01:00 Elena Gonzales
- Website
- Twitter
01:45 Exhibitions for Social Justice
03:05 What is an Exhibition for Social Justice?
04:20 National Museum of Mexican Art
07:12 “Questioning the Visitor”
07:50 Anne Frank House Museum
08:25 Eastern State Penitentiary
11:23 Buy Exhibitions for Social Justice
- On Routledge (Use Promo Code ADS19 for 30% Off)
- On IndieBound
- On Amazon
12:30 Introducing Archipelago at the Movies!

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 71. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

The American Alliance of Museums often says that museums are the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life.

And the statistics are remarkable: some surveys indicate that museums are the second most trusted news source after friends and family.

As rates of trust in other institutions plummet: the news media, etc, museums still enjoy a privileged position in collective consciousness. It’s something I’ve noticed over the past few years: even non-museum spaces try to adopt museum-like presentations to apply the veneer of trustworthiness.

But it’s an uneasy set of statistics. Is it possible that the reason museums are so trustworthy is because they've been excellent at toeing the status quo, the party line? And whose public consciousness are museums enjoying a privileged position inside of anyway?

That’s why I was thrilled to come across Exhibitions for Social Justice by Elena Gonzales during a recent museum binge.

The book presents the current state of museum practice as it relates to the work of social justice, but also a guide map for anyone interested in a way forward.

Elena Gonzales: I think if a lot of people fully understood how museum work is done, they might actually not trust us so much because they would understand the subjectivity. But I think the more that we are transparent about museums, content, who creates it, how, what the goals of an exhibition are, et cetera, the more people can trust us authentically and rightfully.

I’m joined today by Elena Gonzales, author of Exhibitions for Social Justice.

Elena Gonzales: Hello, my name is Elena Gonzales and I’m the author of Exhibitions for Social Justice which is newly out from Museum Meanings and Routledge. I’m an independent curator and scholar in the Chicago area, and I’m also the co-chair of the exhibitions committee at the Evanston Art Center where we curate 20 to 30 exhibitions per year.

In Exhibitions for Social Justice, Gonzales lays out the ways that institutions can use the overwhelming and uneasy trust capital built up over centuries.

Elena Gonzales: Museums have a centuries-long history of supporting white supremacist, colonialist, racist, bigoted ideologies and helping them flourish, and providing the evidence for them and undergirding them. And it is museums' ethical and moral obligation now to not only dismantle that through de-colonial practices, but also to make themselves into pro-social inclusive institutions that are actively working for social justice.

Gonzales believes that museums have the power to help our society become more hospitable, equitable, and sustainable, and the book presents a survey of specific museums and exhibitions that have made their goals clear.

Elena Gonzales: People often ask me what counts as an exhibition for social justice? And I think people, they immediately snap to museums and exhibitions that deal with mass violence, that deal with redress of major wrongs like genocides. Your Holocaust museums, your Memorial museums, that type of thing. And when they ask this question, I say what I think is the most readily accessible definition for social justice, which is that social justice is the equitable distribution of risks and rewards in society. And then I say that there are so many different areas that this touches in terms of content beyond Memorial museums, beyond Holocaust museums. And that's not to minimize the work of those institutions. Those are critical institutions and holding those memories is very, very important. And sites of conscience are very important to my work in general.

Elena Gonzales: But I think there are many topics anywhere ranging from equity in education, equity in health care, environmental justice, gender equity. Any kind of moment where a culturally specific group is gaining access to historical voice or contemporary voice in the public sphere. There are just many different entry points to this topic.

One of the main ideas of the book is that the work of social justice must be institution-wide, not just the work of one curator.

Gonzales writes about the experience of her first curatorial effort at the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) in Chicago. NMMA is a culturally-specific first-voice museum dedicated to serving its local Mexican community.

Elena Gonzales: It was a really big project for us. It's called The African Presence in Mexico. And the main exhibition was called The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present. I curated a second exhibition. It was about the relationships between African Americans and Mexicans in the United States and the relationships between African Americans and the country of Mexico, and that was called Who Are We Now? Roots, Resistance, and Recognition.

At an all-staff meeting shortly before the opening of the project, Carlos Tortolero, the president and one of the founders of the museum, reiterated the goal of solidary to the entire staff of the museum. If the museum did everything right, the museum would have a large number of new African-American visitors in particular. He said that if any staff members felt prejudices towards the museum’s Black visitors or doubted the history being presented, then they should look for another job now.

Elena Gonzales: The President of the museum, Carlos Tortolero, who's still the President now, said that he wanted everyone in the museum to feel that we had found long lost members of our family. Cousins, brothers and sisters, however you want to think of it. And he was saying he wanted us to feel this way and he wanted us to make all of our visitors feel that level of celebration as we welcomed them to the museum. And in particular, he wanted our African American visitors to feel extremely welcome, extremely celebratory about the nature of this relationship that we were eager to share at a level that it really hadn't been told in an educational way before, or even in a history capacity.

Exhibitions for Social Justice makes the point that the exhibition was successful because the whole museum -- every person in the building -- was behind the mission.

Elena Gonzales: I've studied museums like the NMMA where the entire institution is headed in the same direction, and everyone is committed to the goal of this exhibition for social justice in question, in this case, the African Presence. And then I've studied museums where that that's not the case. Where the curators may have this idea that they're working for social justice, but the institution is not behind them in that way. The institution does not believe that that is an inappropriate goal. And that just hampers the work of those curators in that are.

Gonzales discusses the various ways that museums can inspire action inside and outside the museum, and the states involved in how museums envision visitors as social actors. One of these strategies is questioning the visitor -- like the traveling exhibit Free2Choose developed by the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam.

Elena Gonzales: But I think that what is a strategy that I talk about in the book and that I've discovered in other places that I think is really effective is questioning the visitor. Questioning the visitor in a way that involves the visitor in this dialogue with him or herself, once again. This conversation that is going to create memories about the experience and produce rehearsal of the experience, like an ongoing thinking about the experience after the fact and possibly talking about it with others. For example, the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam had an exhibition for a number of years, it's since closed, that had you think about the tensions between freedom of speech and protection from hate speech, and you got to think about some examples where these things come into conflict and then you voted on which right should win out, which was more important, and you voted in such a way that people could see the responses going up in real time.

The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia features another example of the visitor questioning technique. The museum address the American crisis of mass incarceration directly by making visitors answer the question, “Have You Ever Broken the Law” by the two pathways into the Prisons Today gallery.

Elena Gonzales: the Eastern State presentation is not confrontational. It's, I think, thought-provoking and inviting. They simply say, "Have you ever broken the law? Yes, no," and there are two pathways that you can take. And you're going to see the same material or you're free to see the same material after that, either way. You're not actually separated from the other content.

This works because 70% of American adults admit to committing a crime that could have put them in prison, but most of them never go. The exhibit goes on to explore some of the systematic reasons why, as well as what life is like for those who go to prison and the families they leave behind. But the path you walked down to get in is always on your mind.

And the museum also has strategies to reconnect the visitor with the content even after the visit -- sometimes even years later.

Elena Gonzales: So at the end of the Prisons Today show, you can do an activity that that allows the museum to send you postcards to yourself after the fact, after the visit. So they send it at a couple of different intervals. It's like a month, a year and two years or something like that. It's a few different intervals of time. And it's very clever because you don't just fill out a postcard and put it in a box, it's a digital thing. You answer some questions and they create the postcard. So you haven't seen the postcard in advance. You don't see it until you actually check your email and then you receive a postcard based on the responses that you answered to the questions. So I think that is a very effective way to create ongoing engagement because when you consider the way in which the position that museums have in our informational environment, and then you consider the position of the museum experience in the life of the visitor, this content might actually become more relevant over years or even decades. So I think that ongoing contact that takes place not soon after the visit is really valuable.

But Eastern State Penitentiary also sits in a unique place: the social justice aspect of the exhibition is far from the primary draw of the institution.

Elena Gonzales: It's a very interesting spot to visit. Most people think they're going to visit there because they want to see Al Capone's cell. They're passing through, it's this historic penitentiary and there's all kinds of draws that have nothing, so they think, to do with social justice. And for Eastern State, they have an opportunity with a huge number of this middle majority for them, of this body of visitors that is not necessarily apathetic about criminal justice and mass incarceration. Not necessarily experts in criminal justice or mass incarceration. They're tourists and they're visiting for that purpose.

Elena Gonzales: So Eastern State has an opportunity by not advertising the social justice content that they do indeed provide in their exhibition presence today, and in other ways throughout the prison. They have an opportunity to explore the topic with visitors who aren't seeking it out, which is very special because as you say, the minute you say the words social justice, or justice, or activism or a variety of other keywords, you do start to get a self-selecting audience. Eastern State offers this opportunity to talk to people that you might not otherwise get to talk to if you say that your topic is social justice. And I think that actually works really well for visitors, and visitors have very important experiences there that they might not otherwise have.

The book is excellent -- for me it was helpful just to see the way the book categorized different types of museums and introduced vocabulary and models I’m unfamiliar with. Gonzales provides a whirlwind tour of various museums, each presenting different strategies, buttressed by academic studies. If you’re looking for a jumping off point to think more critically about museums, take a look.

Elena Gonzales: This is a moment when we need all of our institutions and all of our people in different areas to help work for social justice. And museums are a huge part of that. But it's not just for museum professionals. People who are activists in other areas, people who are educators, people who work in environmental justice, people who are community organizers, I think are going to love translating the tactics and strategies to their own work.

70. The Gabrovo Museum of Humor Bolsters Its Legacy of Political Satire Post-Communism Sep 30, 2019

To the extent that there was a Communist capital of humor in the last half of the 20th century, it was Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Situated in a valley of the Balkan mountains, the city prides itself on its unique brand of self-effacing humor. In 1972, the Museum House of Humor and Satire opened here, and the city celebrated political humor with people in Soviet block countries and even some invited Western guests.

Today, three decades after the collapse of Communism, the Museum House of Humor and Satire remains one of the region's most important cultural landmarks. The museum has had to reinvent itself to interpret not only a democratic Bulgaria, but a the global, meme-driven, and internet-forged culture most visitors live in.

I went to Gabrovo to visit museum director Margarita Dorovska, who describes how the museum's strengths in its early years—like knowing how to present political humor without arousing the interest of the authorities—inform how the museum thinks of its role in the world today.

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 Gabrovo, Bulgaria
01:07 Margarita Dorovska
01:44 How the Museum House of Humour and Satire Started
02:40 How to Run A Humor Museum Under Communism
04:05 1st International Biennial of Humour and Satire in the Arts in Gabrovo
05:55 The Museum in 1989
06:40 After the Collapse
07:00 Humor is Not Universal
07:30 Media Freedom in Bulgaria
07:55 Addressing Civic Space in Bulgaria: Garden Town
09:09 The Museum and the Internet
11:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 70. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

In the middle of Bulgaria, not far from the crumbling Buzludzha monument, lays the town of Gabrovo. Situated in a valley of the Balkan mountains, the city prides itself on its unique brand of humor.

Many local jokes jokes are self deprecating about the Gabrovoian obsession with frugality and entrepreneurship, and center around the comical lengths that townspeople go to save money. The mascot of the city is a black cat without a tail. It is said that Gabrovoians prefer cats without tails because they can shut the door faster when they let the cat out, saving on their hearting bills.

Margarita Dorovska: That's actually typical for the Balkan mountains. This used to be the kind of humor that would exist in the region around Gabrovo, not just Gabrovo itself. But Gabrovoians were smart enough to brand it as theirs. That's the entrepreneurial side of things, of course. [laughter].

This is Margarita Dorovska.

Margarita Dorovska: Hello! My name is Margarita Dorovska and I'm a curator by profession and I'm the Director of the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, Bulgaria.

The museum was founded in 1972. Before the Wall fell, this location was known as the Communist capital of humour, extending its reach across Eastern Block countries, and also to certain circles in the West.

I visited Gabrovo because I wanted to find out how this political humor and satire museum could have started here during communist times, and how the museum is tackling the global, meme-driven culture of the world today.

Margarita Dorovska: There are a couple of precursors that we have to go through to understand how the museum appeared. Two things. One is the Gabrovo humor jokes. So someone announced the completion in the newspaper, that the municipality is paying a certain amount for each joke that gets juried into a collection of Gabrovo jokes. They collected a lot of these jokes, made a book, and this book was an absolute bestseller. It was immediately translated of course in Russian, but also in different languages like French, English, German and it started selling very very well. The other thing that happened was the the Gabrovo carnival: this was restarted in the 60s and it is typical for being a carnival with a lot of political humor and satire.

And this is the crucial theme of the museum and why it was able to exist in an age of single-party rule. The people running the carnival, and later the museum, were experts at walking up to the line, without crossing it.

Margarita Dorovska When we speak of political satire, do not imagine the general secretary of the party being satirized. It was very clear to what level the satire can reach. So satire was an instrument in the hands of good communists to fight those who abused power, but to certain level.

So it extends up to maybe a local official, but never higher?

Margarita Dorovska: Exactly, exactly. It was very clear where the satire can reach. As to the Gabrovo jokes, they’re not political, they deal with economy, with the mentality of the local people.

Combining the two: or maybe more realistically, using the Gabrovo jokes as a Trojan Horse to present more political satire, was what led some entrepreneurial Gabrovians to open a museum.

Margarita Dorovska: [In] Typical Gabrovo style, they didn't build a new building, but they refurbished an old leather factory. So the building we are in is the fromer leather factory. First it was cheaper, second it could go slightly unnoticed because you don't need the same kind of permissions to build and to refurbished.

And if you wanted your out-of-the-mainstream project to succeed in communist Bulgaria, asking for permission was not the way to go.

The museum started to put on biennials, festivals held every two years which featured invited Western guests. The first was in 1973.

Margarita Dorovska: They immediately started with the biennials, the first edition of the biennials was dedicated to cartoons and small satirical sculpture. It was international and they brought in amazing names. How could that exist? If you think of that time, most cartoonists in the western world would be critical, would be leftists. So they would be very welcome in Bulgaria. And that would indeed be a gathering place for East and West.

But there was a problem with that first biennial: the jury selected, for first prize, a cartoonist from Turkey, a country on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Margarita Dorovska: The director thought, "oh wow, what we did?" "What are you doing? How are you going to give a prize to a cartoonist from a NATO country?" And they started asking themselves, but we never asked for permission to start a biennial, to gather all of these people, that's going to be a huge problem, what are we going to do?” Then he thought, what am I going to do? The only thing he could do was go straight to the monster.

So the director went straight to the daughter of the general secretary and the Bulgarian dictator, Ludmilla Zhivkova, who would later become minister of culture.

Margarita Dorovska: She was good enough to listen. She was smart to perceive good ideas and to support them. So, it worked. She came, she opened the biennial. And it all went on well. And they never gave the reward anymore to a cartoonist coming from a country that would be an issue.

The museum and the biennials kept growing, until communism collapsed in 1989.

Margarita Dorovska: In 1989, they had more than 80 foreign guests, artists, juries coming for the biennial. So it was massive. After 1989 was the collapse indeed. At that time there were more than 100 people working in the House of Humor. Because if you think of all the different departments: cinema, literature, folklore, it was a big enterprise, with a lot of events, with amazing exhibitions. When I look at photos from the 1970s and 1980s, I'm absolutely astonished by the exhibition design you see. It's amazing, it's so well done. I don't think anywhere in Bulgaria it was so good.

After the collapse, the museum's staff shrank to a skeleton crew. Dariskova joined the museum in 2016 and argued for a new direction for the museum's curation.

Margarita Dorovska: As you can imagine, until 1989, my colleagues would have insisted that humor is universal. That all human beings all laugh. Humor is omnipresent and universal. The first fight that I had to have with the team when I came was to say, “I’m sorry but humor is not universal.” Humor is so culture based. It’s totally culture-based. Of course, it is safer to say that humor is universal and not to go into political humor. It’s safer. But then you don’t do your job. Our mission is to be very timely, to show things that are happening today. And if a humor and satire museum can’t do that, who else can do that?

While a lot has improved over the past decade in Bulgaria, media freedom is declining. Most of the press has been purchased by oligarchs, and corruption and collusion between the media and politicians is widespread.

Margarita Dorovska: You know there are issues with freedom of expression in Bulgaria. So at least a museum should be some sort of outlet.

The museum addresses the civic space in Bulgaria with a new temporary children’s exhibit called Garden Town. The charming subtitle is “where mischief has a happy end.”

Margarita Dorovska: We wanted to look at different examples or area of publicness, what’s public life, public debate, public media, public space and so on, and we really wanted to have this theme for children, so for the first time we are doing this children’s exhibition. It’s called Garden Town, and it’s a model of a town where the different neighborhoods address different issues, such as graffiti, you’re invited to draw, or voting, that’s the place where you go by yourself and it’s accidentally a toilet but it’s also a voting room, then we have some gorilla guarding, making bombs of seeds, etc. Finally, there’s the PensivePark where kids -- because they usually come in groups, they are invited to sit down and have a discussion and reach a decision. We give them some advice about how they can make a decision like tossing a coin, or concessions, or voting, or different options -- including anarchy! [laughter]

It’s really something to see how far the museum has come from starting within the communist system, to reinventing itself to remain relevant in ways that are crucially important to a modern Bulgarian audience. Dariskova admits that the next stage of reinventing -- interpreting humor on the internet, to an audience that lives online -- hasn’t happened yet.

Margarita Dorovska: That’s the first big challenge I could think of when I learned that the museum was looking for a director. I came to the museum, I looked at it, I was real impressed, and then I thought how can I change this place? How can you make it really fun when all the fun you need is on your phone. You can just scroll for hours and never stop laughing, so what can a museum do about that? Are we supposed to show the same things? No! You don’t go to the museum to go look at something you could see on your phone. Internet certainly has changed humor a lot. This is an exhibition we’ve been planning but we are trying to find the right research team to prepare that, memes, all the different funny games. It is very interesting to see how internet has been changing humor and where we are at now.

The way jokes developed in Gabrovo, where people told slightly different versions to each other -- and in the process carefully distilled the most sharable essence of the joke -- mirrors the way that memes are forged in online communities. Constantly morphing to get more attention.

Maybe the best chance we have of interpreting communities online and off comes from a humor museum. Thre Gabrovo Museum of Humour and Satire, which has already morphed through 20 years of communism and 30 years of democracy, is a good place to start. Just close the door quickly when you let the cat out.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

69. Soviet Spacecraft in the American Heartland: The Story of the Kansas Cosmosphere Aug 26, 2019

From Apollo Mission Control in Houston, Texas, to the field in southeastern Russia where Yuri Gargarin finished his first orbit, there are many sites on earth that played a role in space exploration. But Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t one of them.

And yet, Hutchinson—a town of 40,000 people—is home to the Cosmosphere, a massive space museum. The Cosmosphere boasts an enormous collection of spacecraft, including the largest collection of Soviet space hardware anywhere outside Russia. How did all of these space artifacts end up in the middle of Kansas?

To find out, I visited Hutchinson to talk to Cosmosphere curator Shannon Whetzel. In this episode, Whetzel describes the story of the Cosmosphere as “being in the right place at the right time,” why the museum’s collection includes “destroyed” artifacts, and how she interprets Soviet hardware for a new generation.

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Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 69. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

There are many sites on earth that played a role in human spaceflight: the mission control building in Houston, Texas where flight engineers communicated with the Apollo astronauts on the moon, or even the grassy field in southeastern Russia where Yuri Gargarin landed to end his mission as the first person in space.

But Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t one of these sites. No spacecraft engineering happened here, like in Huntsville, Alabama. No rocket testing happened here, like in Perlington, Mississippi. There’s not even a historic, exploration-related radio telescope here, like in Parkes, Australia.

Despite this, Hutchinson -- a town of 40,000 people -- is home to the Cosmosphere, a massive space museum. The Cosmosphere boasts an enormous collection of spacecraft, including the largest collection of Soviet space hardware anywhere outside Russia. How did all of these space artifacts end up in the middle of Kansas?

To find out, I visited Hutchinson to talk to Cosmosphere curator Shannon Whetzel.

Shannon Whetzel: I think some of our brochures say, “why not Kansas”, right? The story of the Cosmosphere is more or less the right place at the right time.

Whetzel says that the museum has had many decades to be in the right place at the right time.

Shannon Whetzel: Hello, my name is Shannon Whetzel, and I am the curator here at the Cosmosphere.

The Cosmosphere’s first iteration was a star projector and folding chairs set up at the Kansas State Fair Grounds in 1962 by a woman named Patty Carey. She was inspired by the launch of Sputnik and ultimately wanted to set up a space science center in the Midwest.

Shannon Whetzel: The volunteers we have who have who knew her personally, I did not know her personally, have basically said she’s a very nice arm-twister. You didn’t say no to Patty Carey. And that planetarium grew to what you see now.

By the late 1970s, Patty Carey was making plans to transform the planetarium into the Kansas Cosmosphere and Discovery Center.

Shannon Whetzel: The collection as we know it started in the late 1970s. NASA is looking to… I hate to say “unload,” but looking to get some hardware out there for the public to see, and the Cosmosphere was beginning its first expansion, so we had the space and the connections, and that’s how we started collecting space hardware.

The Cosmosphere was the right place — a big building in the midwest— and the right time — the late 1970s. The era was a strange time for space exploration: it was after the Apollo program, but before the Space Shuttle. The Smithsonian Air and Space museum opened in Washington, DC in 1976, and I get the sense that a whole bunch of space artifacts that didn’t make the cut for that museum ended up in Hutchinson.

Shannon Whetzel: The Smithsonian and NASA… they want to get stuff… I say stuff… artifacts, priceless artifacts out for the public to see everywhere. Maybe also that’s a sign of their success, that they’ve gotten into the Midwest and it’s been a priority. And we are so grateful to the Smithsonian I don’t know if you noticed how many of our exhibits have Smithsonian labels. I believe we are the only Smithsonian affiliate in Kansas.

Looking carefully at the collection, you also see another pattern: hardware from missions that didn’t go exactly as planned. There’s a heavily damaged Mercury boilerplate capsule from the Mercury-Atlas 1 mission. There’s Liberty Bell 7, another Mercury Capsule that was the US’s second human spaceflight mission in 1961 -- the Astronaut survived, but the capsule sank into the ocean and wasn’t recovered until 1999. And then there’s the Apollo 13 Command Module, Odyssey, which was restored and added to the museum in 1995.

Shannon Whetzel: I think at the end of the Apollo 13 mission, the astronauts were home safe, it was fantastic, but I think it was viewed more as a failure than a success. So yes, Apollo 13 was display in France for a while, it wasn’t viewed as something that should be in the States as much. And then our guys restored it.

I can’t imagine any museum turning away the Apollo 13 Command Module today. But it is the Cosmosphere’s ethos to say yes to an unwanted, unrestored artifact -- even if that artifact is sitting under water, or somewhere in France. They see the investment in recovery and restoration as well worth the effort to add to their collection. And that’s what makes the museum so notable today.

But there’s also a point that the museum is making with the collection as a whole: space exploration is as much about the failures as about the successes.

Shannon Whetzel: I believe Apollo 13 had come up with that contingency plan before, it wasn’t on the fly. And in a way it was testing their contingency plan. And it went wonderfully. They got home safely.

Shannon Whetzel: We discuss a lot now about how it seems in our culture that there’s a fear of failure. We are afraid to fail. Or if something doesn’t work the first time, that means that that idea should be discarded. And I think that that’s not what got us to the moon. That’s not what made our space program successful. Without meaning to, that’s become one of our catch phrases around here. We don’t want our campers, our students to be afraid to fail.

But the collection isn’t just made up of American space hardware. The Cosmosphere also boasts the largest collection of Sovet space artifacts anywhere outside of Russia. And this fills in the sizeable gaps of how most other space museums present the Space Race. The Cosmosphere team, which included Patty Carey, started obtaining Sovet Space hardware in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Shannon Whetzel: Again, right place at the right time. The Sovet Union was crumbling, they were looking to get rid of their artifacts, we worked through a broker, and we were able to obtain them. And they are part of our collection. They are loaned pieces.

Why the decision to try to collect them? Why didn’t other museums try to, in the same way that you did?

Shannon Whetzel: I think that our early leaders were very visionary in what we could become and realized in a sense that we were only telling half the story.

Half of the Space Race gallery is colored red and filled with Soviet space objects and text about the Soviet human spaceflight program, and the other half is blue, telling the American story.

Shannon Whetzel: I think that our gallery is set up particularly well in the sense that you get the comparison. We split the gallery so you can get the sense of this is what’s going on in the Sovet Union at the time, this is what the Americans were doing. So I think our gallery does a very good job of comparing the two-- Mercury and Vostok are right beside each other.

The effect is striking -- the Cosmosphere is not a design museum, but by putting the artifacts from two different superpowers close to one another, you get an appreciation for the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the industrial design -- compare the design language of the Lunokhod Moon Rover, on display at the museum, with Amercian Mars rovers that Americans might be more familiar with, and you can see the different ways each program approached the problems of surviving in space, even without the color coordination.

Whetzel’s favorite Soviet artifact is the Lunasphere, a copy of a soccer-ball shaped device carried by Luna 2, whose only purpose was to cover its crash-landing site on the moon with little pendents embossed with images of the hammer and sickle.

Shannon Whetzel: The Soviets send the Lunasphere, and it’s just a small ball that upon landing, it has a small explosive in it and all of these, our gallery calls them Cosmic Calling Cards go all over the surface of the moon. What a nice little metaphors for the cold war -- what a stick in the eye.

Whetzel also said that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to teach younger generations about the political context of the Space Race. After all, it’s been 30 years since the Berlin wall fell.

Shannon Whetzel: It is very difficult to explain the cold war. First of all they didn’t live through it, I don’t know if you did. It wasn’t black and white, there was so much grey, and I think that’s the difficult part. Especially, you’ve seen our gallery, it’s pretty big, a 45 minute tour down there you just barely make it to the shuttle, and that’s if you’re rushing. It’s difficult to portray those ideas in a short amount of time to a younger audience. No matter what you do, historically it gets wrapped up nice and neat.

As we change here on earth, so too does the way we teach the story of spaceflight. Whetzel gave me an example of the list of items humans have left on moon -- a list that includes everything from the propagandistic Lunasphere pendants to actual trash left by the Apollo astronauts.

Shannon Whetzel: I did a tour with our campers the other day, we do a collections tour, and I was telling them, and they were appalled. I was like, wow, the generational difference. They were appalled, they were like, “we trashed the moon”? And I was like, “we did.”

This is one of the reasons I will always keep coming back to space museums. The environmental consciousness that the Apollo program itself sparked by its images of a tiny, fragile, borderless earth, now gets the chance to reevaluate Apollo anew.

And that is just one of the ways that the Cosmosphere, free from a specific location, can tell the story of human space exploration better than a site-specific museum.

Visiting the Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, Texas, visitors learn about how that site played a role in the larger Apollo missions. Visiting the Parkes Observatory in Australia, you can learn about how the radio telescope was instrumental in broadcasting the famous image of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon to the world.

But the Cosmosphere allows visitors to take a step back.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

68. The Akomawt Educational Initiative Forges a Snowshoe Path to Indigenize Museums Aug 05, 2019

Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together.

endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) is director of programming and outreach for the Akomawt Educational Initiative. She saw a need to supply regional educators with the tools to implement competent education on Native history and Native contemporary issues. She co-founded the Initiative with Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy) and Dr. Jason Mancini to make those tools.

In this episode, Spears talks about the different between living culture and sterile museum artifacts, her discussion at Untold Stories 2019: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation about how Native narratives are violently presented through a white lens in museums, and the potential for museums to disrupt that for many visitors.

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 68. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

endawnis Spears: “For many indigenous people, we are looking for ways to engage our culture at all places at all times. And for me and for many other Native people, it happens to be in the realm of museums.”

endawnis Spears focuses on engaging with her culture within the realm of museums precisely because museums violently separate her culture from a living context.

endawnis Spears: [Introduction in Diné]

endawnis Spears: [Translation] Hello, I’m endawnis Spears, and I am Yucca-fruit-strung-out-in-a-line clan.
I’m born from the Ojibwe people. My maternal grandfather’s from the Tangleclan, and my paternal grandfather is from the Choctaw/Chickasaw people. I’m the director of programming and outreach for the Akomawt Educational Initiative.

endawnis Spears co founded the Akomawt Educational Initiative in 2018 with Chris Newell and Dr. Jason Mancini. The Initiative was born out of their experiences in museum and classroom education across present-day New England. They saw a need to supply regional educators with the tools to implement competent education on Native history and Native contemporary issues. They created the Initiative to build those tools.

endawnis Spears: The word Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. One of our co-founders, Chris Newell, is a Passamaquoddy, and he recommended this term as a defining a part of our Initiative. In [the] Passamaquoddy world, snowshoe pass at the beginning of the wintery season is hard to find. It’s hard to walk on, but the more people pass along this path and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together. And we see that as part of our mission and part of the work that we’re trying to do, part of the guiding principles for our work, that we are looking to add to that educational experience for people we are living with and amongst here in what is present day New England because we are all going on the same direction, and the more information and the more culturally accurate and respectful and historically accurate information we are working with, then the easier it is for our children, for our grandchildren. And when I say our, I mean native people, but I also mean non-native people, and so I mean our neighbors and our allies that we live and make lives with here in the present day United States.

The Initiative focuses on what is called Sites of Knowledge. These include K-12 schools, universities, and museums. But as Speares describes, the notion of slioed sites of knowledge is a western idea, poorly suited to the work that they do.

Instead, The Akomawt Educational Initiative seeks to employ knowledge at all places at all times—something that museums as they exist today fail to do.

endawnis Spears: In our traditional communities, in our native communities, there was no place that you would go to learn and to gain the authority on one particular place and then leave that place and not employ that knowledge someplace else or not see the connection between one place and another, so to go to a museum, and this is the authority, and this is where you learn about this, and then you exit the museum, and that knowledge is no longer useful to you as you go about your daily life, that concept of siloing knowledge and siloing our understandings of the world is a foreign one to this continent.

Spears shared a striking example of this at Untold Stories 2019: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation, the closing session of the American Institute for Conservation’s annual conference.

She showed an image of a Haudenosaunee cradleboard, as presented in the Detroit Art Institute. It is completely divorced from context and certainly doesn’t feel lived in, in typical museum conservation fashion.

She compares this with an image of the cradleboard that held her as a child and has securely held all four of her children. The ties on the cradleboard are ceremonially re-tied for each child — representing a continuity in the material world, that is nowhere to be found in the museum.

endawnis Spears: If you came into my house right now, you would see all of the cradleboards from when I was a baby that were made for me, which I have a few. And then the cradleboards that we had made for our children, my husband and I’s children. They are placed up on the wall. They’re displayed on our wall as beautiful art, as part of our family and part of our heritage. The difference between that and a museum is that we keep pieces of that baby’s experience within the cradleboard, so we keep a blanket in one of them. We put them up on the wall to remind us of that time, that special time with our son or our daughter. And so these are instances where the cradleboard is referring back to a specific child in a specific place in a specific emotional life of our family.

Spears uses The difference between her cradleboards in her own home and how they would be treated in a museum collection to illustrate the difference between living collections and ethnographic objects.

And I think when we look at cradleboards within museum collections, all of that is ripped away. All of that is stripped, and that stripping of those experiences and the spiritual and emotional life of that piece is a violent one, and it’s a very apt representation of what colonialism is, that we are going to take this, and we are going to rip it away from its relationship with you and make it only relevant in its relationship to us, the colonizers, and that’s the story that gets honored. That’s the story that’s more important, and that is a violent story, and it’s one of domination, and so when we go into museums, and we see items that have a lived relationship with us, within our communities, within our homes, we see them on display as ethnographic objects. That is a reminder that our understanding of our own material culture is not the one that is important.

To prevent the continued violent ripping of the emotional life that object collections represent, the Initiative offers a range of educational support services and educational programming across present-day New England. And part of that is making sure certain words remain problematized.

endawnis Spears: We don’t like to use the term New England unproblematized. This is not problematic. Everyone calls it New England. This is OK. We sanction this term. We don’t want to use any terms that place American western understandings of our places and our culture and our communities in reference to Europe, in this case England.

Some of the services offered by the Initiative take the form of outreach programming like, “Understanding Cultural Appropriation”, or guided tours like, ”Lessons in Radical Feminism From the Fourteenth Century” at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. The Initiative also offers consulting services, providing museums, historical societies, and cultural institutions with socially just and accurate historic information and the means with which to interpret Native collections and themes with and for Native communities.

endawnis Spears: We get to go to museums across southern present day New England and, again, look at exhibits critically. There are many museums in the area that are starting to form Native American advisory panels, and who sits on those panels is so important. I think one thing that Akomawt really is very good at is we are also part of the native communities here in the northeast, so I’m from these other tribes, but I married a Narragansett and all of my children are also Narragansett, which is a federally recognized tribe here in Rhode Island. And so I do have buy-in into this community, into the wellbeing or the representation of my children’s community.

Knowing how inaccurately museums portray your own culture, or cultures you’re familiar or interment with, how does that change how you visit museums where you don’t know much about the culture being presented?

endawnis Spears: I think that for me to say that I’m always aware of that when I go into a museum is not completely accurate, that native people, even though we know that this has been done to us, we still look to some of these institutions as places of knowledge. And I think that when I go into a museum to learn about something, there is always that question of, how did this get here? Whose was it? Who made it, but really why did they make it? What is this object’s life outside of here? And I think that I’m not always asking that question all the time, but that is a question that’s there at the back of my mind. And I think that the more that museums can bring these disembodied pieces back to a body, the better I would relate to it as a native person and as an indigenous person. I think that there’s definitely a duality at play for me when I go into a museum. It’s conflictual.

There are some newer museums that deliberately define their primary audience as members of a Native Nation. An example that just opened in Minnesota is the Hoċokata Ti (the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community’s new cultural center). There’s a touchscreen interactive media piece there that protects some information behind a code that only Nation-members know. How can practices like these change how museums have presented themselves for centuries?

endawnis Spears: That is so interesting because it asks the question, who is the primary recipient of what we’re giving in this space? Who are we pointing this space towards? Who is the orientation point? And that doesn’t mean that there can’t be other people in the space learning from that or watching that process. I think that as museums grapple with their colonizing past and the role that they played in colonizing Turtle Island, the world, being in bed with imperialism, I think that as the museum field grapples with that history, we are going to start to see museums as places where practice can be on display, so in the sense that there is an orientation towards this tribal nation. This is who we are speaking to, but the museum can point out or put on display the fact that this practice is being followed and people are in a museum using the actual practice.

The museum is speaking very directly to the practice, very blatantly using language and terminology and saying, “We have a certain group that we are prioritizing here. We want you to learn in this space, but you are not the thing that this museum revolves around,” and that in and of itself is an educational experience.

Sometimes it’s good to be disruptive in that way and that museums can be a disruptive force in that process by saying that their orientation is towards this particular community and not towards the over-culture. And I think it’s really important for white visitors to museums in a very comfortable space. They know how to interact with museums. They know how to interact with exhibits that reaffirm what they were already thinking before they went into the building. I think to disrupt that experience can be really interesting and really important, and I think that museums have an opportunity to be a really interesting disruptive tool in that process.

The Akomawt Educational Initiative lives at https://www.akomawt.org/. There, you can find a list of resources from a “guide to indigenous terminology” to readings and books organized by grade level. You can also see a list of classes and services that the initiative offers across present-day New England.

You can watch Spears in the complete proceedings of Untold Stories 2019 at untold stories dot live. Information is also available for the 2020 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah called, PRESERVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPES.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

67. Cité de l'Espace Celebrates Apollo Day from the Middle of the Space Race Jul 15, 2019

Cité de l'Espace in Toulouse, France is a museum in the middle. It is in the middle of France’s Aerospace Valley and the European Space Industry. But it is also geographically in the middle of the two competing superpowers in the Space Race that ended with Apollo 11.

From its vantage point in the middle, Cité de l'Espace has its own story to tell. The museum features a mix of Soviet and American space hardware, like an American Apollo lunar module and a Soviet Soyuz capsule. The museum also features an extentive collection of French-made space hardware.

In this episode commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, I visit Cité de l'Espace to see their preparations for “Apollo Day,” discuss a museum on the lunar surface, and see how the Space Race is presented from the middle.

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Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 67. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

All over the city of Toulouse, France, on buses and on the streets, there are ads featuring a smiling moon with an American astronaut reflected in its sunglasses.

[Audio of Toulouse radio ad]

Apollo Day is the 50th anniversary celebration of the Apollo 11 moon landing — the first and for now, only time humans have made it to another celestial body — hosted by the Cite de l’Espace museum in Toulouse.

[Audio of Toulouse radio ad]

Toulouse is the centre of the European aerospace industry, with the headquarters of Airbus anchoring what is known as Aerospace Valley — a cluster of engineering and research centers in the heart of France. Like the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex featured in episode 64, the museum also has aspects of themed attractions, but unlike most space museums in the United States, the museum presents hardware and content from multiple space agencies around the world, taking a more global approach to the history and future of space exploration.

This could be because, in addition to being the Centre of the European aerospace industry, the museum and the rest of France sit in the middle: physically in the middle of the two competing superpowers in the Space Race that ended with Apollo 11.

NASA, the American Space Administration, and the Soviet Space Program are both well represented here. The museum features a mix of Soviet and American space hardware, like an American lunar module, and a Soviet Soyuz capsule.

And the mix of Russian and American is also present in more subtle ways too: in a planetarium show, an animated “James the Penguin and Vladimir the Bear” guide visitors through the night sky.

[Audio from planetarium show: “Vladimir, you’re a surprising bear!”]

I was keen to visit Cite de l’Espace because my family also sits in the middle of the Space Race.

My mom, who is Bulgarian, remembers watching the Apollo 11 moon landing as a kid on TV from behind the iron curtain. She says news about humanity’s achievement was broadcast in Bulgaria, but with an air of disinterested detachment. The adults she was watching the broadcast with knew better than to celebrate.

My dad, who is American, remembers watching the Apollo 11 moon landing at his home in Wisconsin: everyone around him was interested and, of course, openly excited.

From its vantage point in the middle, Cite de l’Espace has its own story to tell. The story of the Apollo landings is presented here with all the excitement of an American space museum, if a little less patriotic.

One obvious difference was the date: when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, it was 8:56pm Houston time on July 20th, 1969, but in France it was almost 4am on July 21st. There’s something charming about accounting for timezone changes on a place like the moon, but I wonder if that’s the reason why the museum’s Apollo Day is July 21st, when I have always learned the moonwalk began on July 20th.

Cite de l”Espace did not answer my request for comment, but the exhibit text says that French children were awoken in the middle of the night to watch the moonwalk. In the galley, footage of the moonwalk was interspersed with footage of people watching from all over the world, including Sydney, Australia and Paris, France.

In the gallery about the Apollo missions, I watched a museum presentation of earth-moon comparisons for children called Meeting Moon. The focus was on physics: a demonstration of what it would it would feel like to lift a heavy object on the earth and then the moon. But the presentation was rooted in the Apollo Project, referencing specific missions and even the experiences of individual astronauts.

The finale of the presentation was as feat of coordination by one of the child volunteers. They were strapped into a harness that simulated moon-like conditions, and were asked to erect an American flag in a hole in the carpeted lunar surface…

[Audio of room noise]

Which they finally managed to do.

[Audio of the room applauding]

The presenters noted that the United States was the only country to land humans on the moon so far.

[Audio from gallery]

I like the optimism of the “so far.”

Even if the next enterprise to land on the moon is American, the United States won’t be the only country there for too long. The museum has a temporary exhibit called “Moon, Episode II” (presumably Episode I was the Apollo missions), which presents some of the challenges, and proposes some solutions to going back to the moon. Each of the solutions presented did not rely on national agencies, but simply human ingenuity.

Cite de l’Espace is not designed for an American or Russian audience. Instead, the museum is the showcase of space achievements in general and French contributions to those achievements in particular. The biggest thing in the museum is an Ariane 5 rocket, a human-ready launch vehicle designed by the French Space Agency that accounts for 60% of global satellite launches. You can get a bite to eat at La Terrasse guanaise, a reference to French Guiana, an overseas department of France, where European rockets are launched because of the department’s proximity to the equator.

But while I was there, the museum was making its final preparations for Apollo Day: moving a lunar module to a special location in the middle of the open air part of the museum, all to get ready to celebrate not just an American achievement, but a human one.

One of the young visitors also curious about the preparations was wearing a tee shirt with Yuri Gagarin’s face on it. Gagarin, the first person in space, flew on a Soviet rocket only eight years before the moon landings. The modified version of that rocket is also on display not far away.

In a video in the Moon episode II gallery, the narrator notes that the boot prints around the Apollo 11 landing site are still there, untouched just as the astronauts left them, ready for humans to visit again.

Cite de l’Espace has nothing to say on the topic of a museum at the site of the landing — a project regular listeners know I want to help develop when the time comes.

I hope that future museum at the Apollo 11 landing site is a little like Cite de l’Espace. I hope that it doesn’t just feature the American story, but instead features the mix of countries presented here that lead to the achievement.

So, whether you celebrate on July 20th or 21st, I wish you a happy Apollo Day. This has been Museum Archipelago. [Outro]

66. From ‘Extinct Monsters’ to ‘Deep Time’: A History of the Smithsonian Fossil Hall Jun 17, 2019

The most-visited room in the most-visited science museum in the world reopened last week after a massive, five year renovation. Deep Time, as the new gallery is colloquially known, is the latest iteration of the Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

It might not seem like much in geologic time, but the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has been welcoming visitors for more than 100 years. Over those years, the dinosaur bones and other fossils—even some individual specimens—have remained at the center, even as the museum presentation around them has changed dramatically. You can measure the change by the different names of the hall through time. What is today Deep Time first opened in 1911 with a different name: The Hall of Extinct Monsters.

In this episode, we’re going back in time through the iterations of the Fossil Hall with Ben Miller, an exhibitions developer at the Field Museum in Chicago. From its opening as The Hall of Extinct Monsters in 1911, to renovations in the 1960s and 1980s, to the forceful climate crisis message of 2019’s Deep Time gallery, the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has answered life’s biggest questions. This is the story of how museum workers shrugged off their “cabinet of curiosity” roots and embraced education-oriented exhibits like what we see in the gallery today.

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Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 66. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Audio of Deep Time gallery]

This is the most visited room in the most visited science museum in the world — the east wing of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. It’s the Fossil Hall, known simply as “the place with the dinosaurs.”

Today is just a few days after its 2019 grand-reopening. For the past five years, this room was closed to visitors, undergoing a massive renovation.

The new gallery is called Deep Time after the concept of geologic time. Deep Time reflects our current best understanding of life on earth. The dinosaurs in the hall are presented as part of the larger story of evolution: the gallery is punctured by prominent black pillars marking extinction events like the End-Permian Extinction, the End-Cretaceous Extinction that killed all non-avian dinosaurs, and our devastation of life today.

It might not seem like much in geologic time, but this room has been welcoming visitors as a museum gallery for over 100 years. Over those years, the dinosaur bones and other fossils have remained at the center as the museum presentation around them has changed dramatically to keep with our understanding of the world. You can measure the change by the different names of the hall through time. What is today Deep Time first opened in 1911 with a different name: The Hall of Extinct Monsters.

Ben Miller: It was this great big, open neoclassical space with a skylight three stories up. There was a handful of mounted skeletons of dinosaurs and other animals on pedestals in the middle of the floor, some smaller fossil cases lining the walls. It was very reflective of paleontology in museums at the time, in that paleontologists were concerned with taxonomy and with classifying known forms of life, but they weren’t really concerned about, say, the behavior of those animals, or the ecosystems they fit into.

From its opening as the Hall of Extinct Monsters in 1911, to renovations in the 1960s and 1980s, to the new Deep Time gallery today, the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has answered life’s biggest questions. This story is not just a story of life on this planet but also the story of our changing understanding of how we fit into it. Today we’re going back in time through the iterations of the fossil hall with exhibitions developer Ben Miller.

Ben Miller: Hello my name is Ben Miller and I’m an exhibitions developer at the Field Museum in Chicago. Before that, I worked for the park commission in Maryland. I was putting together Dinosaur Park. That’s largely my career at this point.

Miller writes a blog about the history and artistry of paleontology exhibits in museums called, fittingly, Extinct Monsters dot net.

When the Hall of Extinct Monsters opened in 1911, the building that is now the National Museum of Natural History was called the United States National Museum. The hall, with various fossils scattered around the room, generally resembled a classic “cabinet of curiosity” approach to exhibit design.

Ben Miller: “Certainly museum workers of the time, particularly at the Smithsonian, they were considering exhibitions as showrooms for the collections, rather than having any particular public educational function.”

In other words, there was no overarching story — the exhibit wasn’t telling the story of life, it was just saying, ‘here are some cool fossils.”

Ben Miller: That’s always the first thing that is conceived of when one’s putting together an exhibition today is what the story is. At the time, this was a showroom for the collections. There wasn’t any kind of narrative that was considered. They were certainly adding new specimens over the course of the first half of the 20th century, including the biggest thing in there, the Diplodocus, the big, long-necked dinosaur went in in the early thirties. But, the basic architecture of that space remained pretty much the same. It just got more and more crowded.

Diplodocus remains in the hall to this day, forming an impressive set-piece in Deep Time. The Hall of Extinct Monsters persisted largely unchanged until 1962, when it was finally renovated as part of a Smithsonian-wide modernization project.

Ben Miller: In the 50s and the early ‘60s, the Smithsonian went through this modernization project. The US National Museum and all the other components of the Smithsonian, they were looking at overhauling all these older exhibits and bringing in more a visitor-centric focus to those spaces. The Dinosaur Hall and the adjacent halls got renovated. This was a project led primarily by Ann Karras, who was the exhibit designer at the time. She had a hand at rewriting some of the labels, re-organizing the different fossils that were on display, to put them into a story that the general public would be able to follow moving through that space. They also changed the aesthetics quite a bit, which to me, it was a bit of a downgrade. They got rid of all this gorgeous neoclassical design, the big skylight on the ceiling. They boarded up all the windows, put in dingy brown, wall-to-wall carpeting. Yeah, that’s what the exhibition looked like.

The most polite way to describe the dingy brown carpeting would be, “earth tone”. When doing the renovation, workers realized that the largest mount, Diplodocus, was too difficult to disassemble and move, so the new exhibit was designed around it. Still, the exhibit was evolving.

Ben Miller: It was partially still based on taxonomy. There was a room for reptiles, a room for mammals, a room for fishes. But, they were bringing in the story of life over time and the evolution of life over time, so, which organisms came first, which came later. There was definitely a tone of progress, that was more in vogue at that time, than you would really see in a modern take on the history of life.

The next set of renovations took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Those renovations, known as “The History of Life” followed the evolutionary progression of fossils, plants and animals through time.

Ben Miller: I think the turning point was in 1974, when they did the Hall of Ice Age Mammals and the Rise of Man. That exhibit was, rather than being based on taxonomy or the structure of the collections, it was this integrated story that drew on paleontology and anthropology and climatology and geology, bringing in different curators and different experts, as well as exhibit designers, to tell this cohesive, collaborative story about what the Ice Ages were like. That dovetailed a bit with the reorganization of the paleontologists at the museum at the time into what’s now known as the Department of Paleobiology. They were more interested in the life and evolution of these animals. I think everyone knew at the time that that was going to be the future, this integrative approach, telling a story about a particular point in time or bringing together a particular narrative was going to be what exhibitions were going to be in the future. That was what drove the renovations throughout the whole east wing for the rest of the century. They continued on to the spaces where the dinosaurs were and around them and eventually finished in 1991 with the Ancient Seas Gallery. It wasn’t always easy. There were some points of tension between this old guard of curators and the new professionalism and greater voices of authority in the project that the exhibitions department was having. But, ultimately, people were seeing these exhibits as something that existed more for the public, rather than being a showroom for the collections.

It’s also the version of the exhibit that Miller remembers visiting as a youngster growing up in the DC area.

Ben Miller: I’m not sure when I started going, probably around 1990, and there were still a few changes after that.I was maybe two or three years old, so I don’t really know how deeply I was thinking about it. This was probably the first dinosaur exhibit I went to, so it was just the place to see dinosaurs, I didn’t really have a point of comparison, and got to know all of those specimens very well, going to see them year after year after year. What I think was always very clear is that space was at the mercy of its history, and that this had been a series of partial renovations over the course of decades and decades. There were some tight corridors. There were a lot of false walls boxing people in, leading to dead ends and cul-de-sacs. That was just the result of continuing to add new things and new partial renovations to a space that wasn’t really built for that. They added the cast of T. rex around 2000. But, that version of the exhibit, it stuck around for quite some time.

The gallery was restricted in part by the story it was telling, guiding visitors through time in a maze-like fashion, making it difficult from a visitor flow perspective to go backwards, particularly with the visitor numbers as high as they were. This is also the version of the gallery that Miller studied when, later, he worked as an intern at the Smithsonian.

Ben Miller: I was working with the Paleobiology Department and, later, with the Education Departments, and one of the things I was doing was visitor research, interviews with visitors there about: how they understood the history of life on earth, how they conceived of the great expanses of time, what they thought about the presentation of evolution in the gallery, and that sort of thing. I hope that that little contribution I made was helpful in eventually conceiving the hall as they did.

This series of renovations from the 70s and 80s lasted all the way to 2014 — when the hall was closed for the renovations that ultimately became Deep Time. What makes Deep Time so exciting was that it was by far the most complete renovation since the hall first opened in 1911. And that meant the possibility to completely rethink fundamental assumptions about the way the story of life on earth was presented. That meant stripping the entire gallery of the “earth-tone” carpet, and clearing away all the false walls and cul-due sacks that had made the renovations in the 1980s so claustrophobic.

Ben Miller: They had this opportunity to take everything out and start over from the beginning, which I’m very jealous of as a museum professional. Usually, you’re just building on decades and decades of what already exists and trying to fit your new story in. They wanted to bring back that historic architecture. I imagine that also has something to do with the visitorship that the Smithsonian gets. That’s one of the most highly visited museums in the world. They get 8 million people every year. When they plan exhibitions, they really have to think about getting those crowds through the space. I imagine that to that end is part of why it’s such an open exhibit, that you can explore at your own pace and go in different ways instead of going along a predetermined route.

Deep Time presents the story of life on earth and that includes drastic changes in climate. The gallery does a good job of presenting anthropogenic climate change against the backdrop of previous, much slower changes. The people who made the exhibit have made it hard to visit the museum without contemplating the climate crisis and our role in creating it. Project manager for Deep Time, Siobhan Starrs, says that while people come for the dinosaurs, “they’re get get a lot more than dinosaurs.”

Ben Miller: They were able to really start from square one, what do we want people to think about when they think about the history of life on earth? What they landed on was they really wanted to bring the human story into that, to show that we, as people today, were part of the evolution of life. We’re not separate from it, and everything we see in the world today is something that has a story and has roots in the long history in deep time, as the exhibit is called. I think orienting the exhibition around the extinctions seems like a really good move, as you said, because it connects to the modern story about humans causing extinction today, and, also, because, these extinctions are checkpoints in the history of life where everything changed

One of the exhibits that helps visitors think on a deep time scale is an animated interactive media piece called “Your Body Through Time,” which illustrates early instances of characteristics found in our bodies like bilateral symmetry and lungs, and how they evolved in our ancestors. And the presentation of the fossils themselves is dynamic—very much a departure from the taxonomical presentation when the room was simply “the hall of extinct monsters.”

Ben Miller: I know something that was important to the curators was to show the skeletons as animals. They went through the process of disarticulating all of their mounted skeletons, conserving them, and putting them back together in poses that show different kinds of behavior, not just eating and killing each other, as you see in a lot of newer exhibits. But, they’re doing things like sleeping and guarding eggs. There’s even a mammoth in there, that’s using its tusks to clear snow off the grass. All sorts of really interesting behaviors that bring new life to these creatures and really show them as living, thinking beings that once existed.

The re-imagined exhibit is also arranged in reverse chronological order: visitors start among mammoths and ground sloths of more recent history and move backward in time through increasingly alien-looking versions of North America, until ultimately encountering the earliest life. This reorientation also means visitors enter the gallery in the middle of a human-caused mass extinction event already in progress — the same way we enter any place on earth.

Ben Miller: I think it’s a very novel approach to start in the present day and move back. I think most exhibitions, they have started with the origins of life and moved forward. It will be really interesting to see how folks react to going back in time. Certainly from an aesthetic perspective, I think it’s very clever, because you can put your big, impressive ground sloths and mastodons at the front and really show people something really cool.

Ben Miller: Whereas if you start with the origins of life, you’re starting in a room full of really old stromatolites and rocks and hell scenes of what the earth looked like then. You’re kind of hiding what the big show is, which is going to be your skeletons of dinosaurs and so forth. It will be interesting to see how people respond to that.

65. Sarah Nguyen Helps Fight Digital Decay with Preserve This Podcast Jun 03, 2019

Everything decays. In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum—still decaying, but at least visible. Today, human heritage is decaying on hard drives.

Sarah Nguyen, a MLIS student at the University of Washington, is the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast, a project and podcast of the same name that proposes solutions to fight against the threats of digital decay for podcasts. Alongside archivists Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie, and producer Molly Schwartz, Nguyen advocates for Personal Digital Archiving, the idea that for the first time, your data is under your control and you can archive it to inform future history. Personal archiving counters the institutional gatekeepers who determined which data and stories are worth preserving.

In this episode, Nguyen cautions that preserving culture digitally comes with its own set of pitfalls, describes the steps that individuals can do to reduce the role of chance in preserving digital media, and why automatic archiving tools don’t properly contextualize.

Image (left to right): Mary Kidd, Sarah Nguyen, Molly Schwartz, Dana Gerber-Margie, and Lyra Gerber-Margie

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Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 65. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Everything is in a constant state of decay.

In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum — still decaying, but at least visible.

And today, human heritage is rotting on hard drives. The entire internet, everything from social media to Wikipedia, is stored on hard drives on anonymous computer, waiting for the inevitable, and not-too-distant day when they will just wear down and stop working… heritage lost forever to the sands of time.

But there is one potentially beneficial loophole to digital heritage as compared to non-digital heritage: digital files can be copied. They can be copied again and again and again, perfectly every time. The path between past and future for a digital file is to hop from one storage to another every few years in an unbroken chain: staying one step ahead of digital decay. Digital copies aren’t like a Xerox of a Xerox which just becomes unreadable over time do to increasing noise. And best of all, making a digital copy doesn’t destroy the original.

Sarah Nguyen: Wax cylinders there, you can only do it so many times. Or then the grooves we’ll be inaccurate after playing it. But then within the digital interface, because it’s so easy to pick up and throw away, that’s where it becomes even a higher risk of deterioration and loss within the file.

This is Sarah Nguyen, the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast, a project that proposes solutions to fight against the threats of digital decay for podcasts. She cautions that preserving culture digitally, while having some advantages over other mediums, comes with its own set of pitfalls.

Sarah Nguyen: Hello, I’m Sarah Nguyen. I am the project coordinator for preserve this podcast. So alongside the two archivists, Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie, and our producer, Molly Schwartz. Currently I am an MLIS student at University of Washington, so I kind of get to bring in the current readings of what people are talking about within preservation or within file formats.

Preserve this Podcast is a tiny and delightfully meta podcast called, Preserve this Podcast, and it is accompanied by an equally-delightful zine, detailing what you can do to prevent digital decay.

The founders saw the podcast industry booming, and wanted to teach independent culture producers who aren’t operating as part of new large, podcast companies, how to keep control of their narratives—now and in the future.

Sarah Nguyen: So podcasts are notorious for being DIY. People who are independent storymakers audio creators who don’t have an institutional backing. We kind of see Preserve this Podcast as supporting what we call the personal digital archiving: so PDA is the acronym for it. We want to make it so that podcasters are able to be autonomous and have the agency to control their content outside of the digital decay as we call it.

Personal digital archiving is the idea that today, individuals, who history might call normal people have the opportunity to preserve via digital methods. In the past, it was only the rulers or the vastly wealthy who could take control of their own data.

This is the first time in human history that your data have a good chance to be archived.

Sarah Nguyen: That’s why this whole kind of subprogram of personal digital preservation has been this movement. I think it’s like once a year or twice a year, there is like a PDA conference host at various institutions around the US, where it kind of just talks about what are low barrier to entry practices that people can use to archive their own work because in how the real world works, when you don’t have the luxury of your job being archiving any sort of digital files because you have to like create these things and make sure that there is a return on investment. Artists and creators aren’t really looking to save their work. At the moment in time when you’re creating something, it’s a disruption to actually have to think about “how do I backup and save things?” Because you get on a wave and kind of just want to make it happen.

Sarah Nguyen: One of my other part time jobs outside of preserve this preserve this podcast is with a dance company. And when you like just like creating like a piece of work or choreographing a piece while you’re in the dance studio, you’re not also making sure that your file is backed up off this camera off of your iPad or iPhone, you know, after you’ve created it.

I will admit it here: I am a hobbyist PDA-er. I have systems that automatically log everything I can about my activity and health to custom spreadsheets. I built a private server that my phone automatically updates my location to several times a minute, so I can always know every museum I’ve ever visited. You can be sure that the file you’re listening to right now will be transcribed and backed up in multiple locations.

But according to Nguyen, automatically backing up is only half of what properly archiving actually means. Automatic backups and automatic transcriptions are in some ways making it easier to preserve, but proper achieving is also about contextualizing.

So it’s not enough to just record podcasts or my locations as individual entities. I need to contextualize them, too.

Sarah Nguyen: And that’s kind of like the biggest one of the bigger bottlenecks of archiving is like are you contextualizing that object, that file correctly so that it’s represented in the correct way? So I think that in certain processing, like the manual side of it potentially is becoming easier, but the more intellectual side of representation and identity of a thing is becoming more difficult because, especially with podcast or almost anything on the internet, Youtube videos, whatever, things are being created at a much faster rate.

Many, many hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every second of every day, and each video is analized by machines looking for patterns. Expecting the machines to contextualize all those hours of content is only going to lock in biases — either mirroring society’s or introducing new ones.

Sarah Nguyen: The way that people have perceived libraries, museums and archives is an educational space, right? They think that it’s all fun and fun and interesting and educational versus like having a specific opinionated point of view. The whole point of a podcast is that you have a story, you as an individual have this idea of how the world works and you want to share it. That’s what makes it even more important to be able to assign your own descriptive texts to it so that you ensure that people know what you’re trying to say to them upfront.

Sarah Nguyen: So like in our most recent episode with Kaytlin Bailey, who does the Oldest Pro Podcast, she talks about, basically the oldest profession, which is sex work. And like for her to say, you know, specific words within her podcast, it can be misinterpreted completely by Google’s algorithm. Then her podcast could potentially be taken down just because through automatic flagging, they’ll misinterpret it as she’s trying to promote sex work.

It strikes me that we are in the middle big shift from archiving tools of the past: now, that archiving is in control of an individual — you! — instead of being left to a third-party like a museum or library. That changes the valence of collections if everyone can take control over their own story.

Whether any of this data are going to be useful or interesting to the future is beside the point. By reducing the role of chance, and eliminating the institutional gatekeeper who determines which data and stories are worth preserving, anyone and everyone’s data has a chance inform future history.

Sarah Nguyen: We put this under the guise of a PDA, a personal digital archive. Right? So it is up to you if you want to and you feel the need and, and the just want to save your work for the future, it’s under your responsibility. I kind of, that’s kind of where we’re putting it at. It’s kind of like if you want to share your story, then you will go as far to preserve it, versus just handing it off to someone who might preserve it under the wrong context. So I think that it’s important to the point where you as a creator believe it’s important. And so if we can give you all the tools and a step by step guide to do as necessary, we would love for anyone to be able to do it.

In the past, museums and libraries would control who got to be collected. The best way forward might not just be to force these institutions to open up, but also bypass them altogether by making the archiving tools accessible to all.

Sarah Nguyen: In libraries and archives, there is this whole debate about the archives and libraries are not neutral. We’re not neutral because there is that idea that like, yes, we want to give you the options to have access to all different types of materials, even if it is racist or can be hurtful to someone. But, um, should we, because our, we actually neutral in that way. Like is it going to actually help or is it misinformation at that point? So we want to make sure that within your podcast, when you’re creating it, you’re able to control, uh, so that someone doesn’t misinterpret it in a way.

Sarah Nguyen: That’s why we want to give the agency to the creator themselves, not to put it under the onus of someone else. And if this does take off, which we kind of hope it does that like someone will be able to fund an actual server or institution where people will be able to submit it for the long term versus in the generalized, internet archive. First steps are just kind of making it in an accessible way in a zine, a podcast, workshops where people can kind of dip into the waters and feel if it’s important to them and if they want to do it. And then if not, we’re totally fine with that too.

Preserve This Podcast can be found wherever podcasts are available — for now. In the final episode, Nguyen and the other hosts acknowledge that accessing their podcast into the future depends on a 301 redirect and remembering to pay server bills. The project is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is hosted by the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Preserve This Podcast is also traveling to various workshops and conferences to take podcasters, producers, and audio archivists through their curriculum of archiving podcasts. You can find a full list of where they’re going at PreserveThisPodcast.org.

64. Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Atlantis Experience Is Part Museum, Part Themed Attraction May 13, 2019

The Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience, which opened at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2013 brings visitors “nose to nose” with one of the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters. The team that built it used principles of themed attraction design to introduce visitors to the orbiter and the rest of the exhibits.

Atlantis is introduced linearly and deliberately: visitors see two movies about the shuttle before the actual orbiter is dramatically revealed behind a screen. The orbiter’s grand entrance was designed by PGAV Destinations, whose portfolio includes theme parks and museums. Diane Lochner, a vice president of the company who was part of the architectural design team, says that without that carefully-planned preparation, visitors wouldn’t have the same powerful emotional reaction to the Shuttle.

In this episode, Lochner is joined by Tom Owen, another vice president at PGAV Destinations to talk about the visitor experience considerations of the Shuttle Atlantis Experience, whether attractions engineered to create a specific emotional response in visitors are appropriate for museum contexts, and the broader trend of museums taking cues from theme park design.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 64. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

We’re going to start today’s episode with a thought experiment. Think of a museum. The first museum you think of. What does it look like?

Hold that thought.

Now think of a theme park?

How different do they look from each other? My guess, is pretty different.

But the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida has aspects of both.

One the one hand, it is a museum—galleries featuring spacecraft, historic launch pads, and a complete Saturn V rocket layed out in an enormous room.

But on the other hand, it is a themed attraction—a destination featuring ride-like simulators, themed concession stands, and the new Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience.

It’s as if the Complex, only a short drive from Orlando, Florida, is competing for visitors against one of the globe’s most effective themed attractions — Walt Disney World.

As it turns out, not everyone everyone mentally separates museums and theme parks so discreetly.

Tom Owen: We have a nuanced view about the relationship between entertainment and education

This is Tom Owen, a vice president of PGAV Destinations who worked on that new Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience at Kennedy Space Center

Tom Owen: Hello. My name is Tom Owen. I’m a Vice President with PGAV Destinations. My background is in theater, scenery and lighting design for theater and so I’ve been able to incorporate that theatrical thinking into my work with museums and zoos and aquariums and theme parks really the entire time I’ve been here.

It’s not surprising that someone who works in both museums and theme parks would see similarities between the two. But I am surprised that Owen doesn’t see the world divided between education and entertainment.

Tom Owen: I think that entertainment is a great way to educate people. If it was just the dry facts, people would get bored and leave. Entertainment doesn’t diminish education. In fact, I think it often times makes it more effective.

Diane Lochner We believe that you can actually learn quite a bit from theme parks and themed attractions.

This is Diane Lochner, who is also a vice president of PGAV. She also worked on the Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience.

Diane Lochner: “Hello, my name is Diane Lochner. I’m a Vice President at PGAV Destinations. And my background is actually in architecture. I’m a registered architect and have been for 20 plus years. And so my intrigue is the understanding of the built environment, but how that impacts visitors as they’re working their way through attractions and museums.

And the Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience can be described as both a themed attraction and a museum. The exhibit, which opened in 2013, features one of the three remaining shuttle orbiters — the white part of U.S. space shuttle system that looks like a giant glider.

Lochner and the rest of the design team used principles of themed attraction design to introduce visitors to the orbiter.

Diane Lochner: So we made some conscious decisions about how to introduce people to the shuttle itself. So, it’s a very scripted linear experience prior to witnessing the shuttle. And that was intentional because we needed to emotionally prepare the visitors to accept the information that they were going to learn about the shuttle. And we think that’s a critical piece in planning. And so before anybody actually sees the shuttle itself, there was a short pre-show film that gave a little bit of information, mostly about the people that were involved in designing the shuttle. It’s not heavy, it’s not deep, it’s not long. And then they move into another theater that is got a very inspirational film again about the shuttle and the launch and some of the sequence of the process of the shuttle, and then finally at the end of that film, the shuttle is revealed very dramatically.

This type of timed control with a required film reminds me of a more recent example: George Washington’s Headquarters Tent displayed at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The tent is presented in its own theater with screens and projections. If the tent was simply set up in a gallery without the focused attention, people would just walk right past it. But by making a large production out of it with lights, screens, and sounds, the effect is a viscerally memorable experience.

Now back to the Shuttle Atlantis.

Diane Lochner: The image on the screen actually aligns with the space shuttle beyond. At the end of the film, the screen actually lifts up and the visitors are presented nose to nose, so to speak, with Space Shuttle Atlantis. So it’s a pretty dramatic presentation relative to meeting Atlantis for the first time.

Diane Lochner: It’s really been an interesting thing to watch visitors clap and cry as that screen lifts up and reveals the shuttle. And so in that sense, I think we created that really important preparation so that people were ready to receive the information and start to learn and start their experience at Space Shuttle Atlantis.

After the screen dramatically lifts up relieving the orbitor, visitors pass through the hole where the screen used to be and enter the Atlantis display, after which they are free to wander through the entire gallery.

The main idea of the gallery is that the U.S. Space Shuttle system was an innovative program, designed to reuse spacecraft so that the frequency of going to space could increase and astronauts get more work done in space.

Tom Owen: The main takeaway about the whole shuttle program is the individual orbiters was part of a system and that that whole purpose of that whole shuttle program was working in space. And so we depicted Atlantis as a workhorse. In fact, the way that we chose to display it was up in the air, banked at a dramatic banking and with the payload bay doors open, the telescopic arm deployed just as it would have been at the moment that it was pulling away from the International Space Station. So that that message of Atlantis at work was a powerful image that we wanted to ingrain in the minds of people.

Tom Owen: Every exhibit that was designed had to be approved by NASA’s STEM education team. So there was, again, a very strong interest that people learn, but also that the project would inspire the next generation of space exploration. The project wasn’t designed for people that are already space enthusiasts or already knew a lot about space. It was really designed, at least as much or for the most part, for people that we wanted to inspire so that they would become space enthusiasts and maybe maybe take an interest in STEM or maybe even take an interest in a career in the space program.

So here’s that middle part of the Venn Diagram, the intersection of a themed attraction and a museum: the Shuttle Atlantis Experience is educational, and it deals with a set of historical events. But it heavily relies on some of the principles of themed attractions to get the point across.

Fundamentally, I see themed attractions as engineered to create a specific emotional response in visitors — and through that, they offer an escape from the real world. They are a chance for us to enter a fictional world. “Frontierland”, an “old west”-themed land in the Magic Kingdom at Disney World, never actually existed, but clever trick is to make it feel like a lived-in space that has a history. When I am in a fictional world, even the smallest thing that reminds me of the real world takes me out of the illusion. And hilariously, sometimes a theme park will go so far as to put up up fake historical markers and even museums that describe people and events that never happened, but nevertheless lead to what the environment looks like today.

But when learning about the real world, I’m not so sure the same strategies apply. The real world is messy, and the study of history, for example, is not fun, and not amusing. In episode 17 of Museum Archipelago, I cover the spectacular failure of a Disney theme park concept called Disney’s America in the early nineties. Disney’s misguided idea would have put a park showcasing [quote] “the sweep of American History” — including the institution of Slavery and the Civil War — within a fun theme park environment just outside Washington, DC.

Courtland Milloy, writing in a series of Washington Post editorials about the then planned Disney’s America around 1993, brought out the inherent contradiction of the project merging a fun day out with a view into American history. He writes, “Against a backdrop of a continuing distortion of African American history, which includes awful textbooks and self-induced amnesia about the legacy of slavery, a slave exhibit by Disney doesn’t even sound right.”

By contrast the U.S. space program happens to an example of a much less problematic history that, as a result, works displayed in a themed attraction setting -- and one on US. Government property not at Disney World. Being a shuttle astronaut was extremely risky -- of the five shuttle orbiters that have gone to space -- only three of them are still around to display in museums. But nobody become a shuttle astronaut by accident.

And since the failed Disney’s America concept, the big theme parks have stayed out of attractions based on real-life histories, or at least relatively recent real life histories. Instead, they have blurred the lines between various destination types by switching modes. Both Owen and Lochner see a world where competition for visitors leads museums to focus more on creating that specific emotional response you find in themed attractions.

Diane Lochner: I think that museums are beginning to investigate other attractions relative to continuing to capture more visitors, at least certainly the ones that we're talking to in the most recent projects. They are really beginning to understand that they might have to do some things that are a little more out of their norm relative to appealing to visitors because they still want to make sure that obviously they are achieving their goals relative to educational standards and things like that. But certainly the competition for time has really increased. And so I think, in general, museums are starting to think about different ways of curating the experience for individuals and really beginning to connect to visitors' emotions in different ways.

Tom Owen: And even though the objective of Disney may not be for visitors to come and learn something, or at least not to be able to go down a list of facts that they learned about a certain topic, which some of the museum might say is their objective. I think people learn things going to theme parks. For example, if a kid is at a certain age where they've been fearful of roller coasters but they get brave and they decide to get on a roller coaster. They're learning something important about themselves and the fact that they're put into an experience that's really special and over the top and different from their everyday experience, it inspires them and it opens up their world of thinking.

63. Sex and Death Are on Display at The Museum of Old and New Art Apr 29, 2019

The Museum of Old and New Art opened in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in 2011. With a name like that, MONA could include any type of art. But looking at the collection, it’s clear that its creator, millionaire gambler David Walsh, has a fascination with sex and death -- and bets that the rest of us do too.

Walsh himself calls MONA a “subversive adult Disneyland.” The building’s architecture is designed to make you feel lost, and the art is displayed without any labels whatsoever. It’s just you and the art.

In this episode, Hobart-based musician Bianca Blackhall talks about how she’s watched MONA reshape the creative community and art landscape of the island, what makes the museum different from other art museums, and how Hobart is now in “Sauron's Eye of tourism.”

This month on Museum Archipelago, we’re taking you to Tasmania. Over the course of three episodes, we’re conducting a survey of museums on the island, and exploring how each of them relates to the wider landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an episode.

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Topics Discussed

00:00: Intro
00:15: This Month, Museum Archipelago is Taking You To Tasmania
00:47: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)
01:05: Museum Archipelago on ABC Radio Hobart
01:30: The Way MONA Shapes the Island
01:44: MONA’s Architecture is Designed to Make You Feel Lost
02:42: Bianca Blackhall
03:05: David Walsh
03:50: “A Subversive Adult Disneyland”
04:08: The Holy Virgin Mary
04:13: On the road to heaven the highway to hell
04:29: Cloaca Professional, 2010
04:55: MONA’s Lack of Labels
05:33: “Art Wank”
06:20: Pride in MONA
06:50: “Sauron's Eye of Tourism”
08:20: A Monument to Joyful Secularism
08:43: Join Club Archipelago

➡️ The Making of MONA by Adrian Franklin

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 63. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Museums on the Australian island of Tasmania are a microcosm of museums all around the world. They struggle with properly interpreting their colonial past, the exclusion of First People from telling their stories in major museums, and having a large, privately owned art museum reshape a small town.

Today we visit the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. It’s known as MONA, and it is by far the largest museum in Tasmania… not only by square footage (it’s the largest privately owned art museum in the southern hemisphere), but also by its influence.

Helen Shield: If you were hosting an international podcast about museums, where would you spend your precious travel dollars to record?

That’s Helen Shield, host of a terrestrial broadcast radio program in Tasmania.

Helen Shield: There’s one obvious answer, isn’t there?

She’s a Hobart local and she interviewed me about this series. Listen to how she describes the way that MONA shapes the island.

Helen Shield: It wouldn’t be a trip to Tasmania without stopping in a museum that has singlehandledled changed tourism and probably the international reputation of this island, stopping in at MONA.

MONA, often called the museum of sex and death, opened in Berriedale, a suburb of Hobart in 2011. The building, an enormous bunker out on a peninsula overlooking a river, sneaks up on you as you approach. Once you’re inside -- though a rather small entrance that whisks you underground, the architecture is designed to make you feel lost. There are no signs or directions, so you have to choose your own route. The maze-like paths split in two, with no indication which way you should take, other than which one might seem more attractive to you. Tunnels and stairs -- which don’t always move you up or down by one story -- are not an escape from the disorienting experience -- instead, they might lead you to a tight closterphoic chamber, a lovely cafe overlooking the water, or another massive, previously undiscovered subterranean open space.

Bianca Blackhall: I don't think people expected it to have such an impact. It's kind of like a layer. It's very villainous.

This is Bianca Blackhall, a Hobart-based musician who has watched MONA reshape the creative community and art landscape of the island.

Bianca Blackhall: Hello, my name is Bianca Blackhall. I live in Tasmania. I'm 27 and I'm a musician among other things.

The museum is the product of Tasmanian millionaire and art collector David Walsh. Walsh made his fortune by gambling, and Blackhall says that he is a much-talked about figure in Hobart.

Bianca Blackhall: He'd be an interesting guest at the dinner table cause he's quite unusual in his manner and that he'd made his money through gambling and he was good with numbers.

In his introductions to one of MONA’s past exhibits, Walsh recalled of spending a lot of time in Hobart’s museums as a teenager.

Bianca Blackhall: And apparently he used to get dropped off by his parents in town at the museums. And he used to just walk around them all day as a kid and then they'd pick him up again at the night. They’d be like, “come home”. Cause maybe he was, you know, annoying them or whatever at home as a kid.

With a name like the Museum of Old And New Art, MONA could pretty much include any type of art. But looking at the collection, it’s clear that David Walsh has a fascination with sex and death -- and bets that the rest of us do too.

And, turns out, he’s right. Social animals like us, love thinking about fucking and dying -- and excretion and rot. Walsh himself calls MONA a “subversive adult Disneyland.”

There’s The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting created in part with elephant dung. There’s On the road to heaven the highway to hell, in which the remains of a suicide bomber are cast in dark chocolate. There are dead horses and rotting, festering wounds with swarming bugs encased in acrylic. There’s audioanamatornic skeletons fucking. There’s a digestive machine at turns food into feces and stinks up an entire gallery. The art tries to punch you in the gut, and it mostly succeeds in part because there aren’t any descriptive plaques telling you what’s important about the art or how to feel about it.

Ian Elsner (on ABC RADIO HOBART): I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it.

Helen Shield: And this from someone who works in, and spends his free time exploring museums.

Ian Elsner (on ABC RADIO HOBART): So often we are in the museum world very stressed out by the labeling. We spend hours and hours thinking about what the labels and placards look like next to a piece of art, and so it was it was really refreshing to just go into the museum and see no labels at all.

Bianca Blackhall: The wording in normal museums is more clinical, like these two people are it's a copulating and they’re enjoying it. They’re always removing feeling from the equation like, oh, objectively this is this, but moving on.

Your only guide to the museum is its inhouse app, called the O. The O will provide some interpretation of the art, but the interpretation is hidden away in a little tab called ARTWANK, which has the icon of a penis. It’s delightful to see art off the pedestal, but Blackhall says that the levity and approach might also be easier for the artists.

Bianca Blackhall: I think it's a very uncomfortable thing to be asked to explain. Please explain. You know, that's Pauline Hanson says, and it's like more, how do I say this stuff without being a twit? It's almost like they've made the unconventional the every day, you know, and sometimes, you know, you wander around there and then there'll be people in smocks getting about and you're like, why are they, well, you know, these are these arts smocks. I'm not sure you know what's happening, but it's, so it's like now it's a part of your every day.

Do you think for Tasmanians there's a certain amount of pride that it's here?

Bianca Blackhall: Definitely, yeah. People have welcomed it with open arms almost. The way people talk about it, they say things like, “MONA, Yup, Yup. Very good.” You know, like in a kind of very, you know, gruff way but like, “oh yeah. Very good. Yup. Going to go down to the big bonfire. With the kids. And it’s good.”

MONA has also been well-received by art critics and by tourists visiting from outside Tasmania. As a new destination on the global art tourism circuit, there’s no doubt that the museums has changed Hobart, a city of a quarter million people.

Bianca Blackhall: I feel like it partially began with MONA, this Sauron's Eye of tourism. I feel like we’re in the eye. It’s watching us. The world is going, “that little island there”. And it really in in the last year or two, you can feel the new foot traffic. You can really feel it. It’s a little bit… I don't know if we're actually quite got the infrastructure for the amount that we have tourists that we now have. Luckily, MONA I think took responsibility for itself but yeah you can definitely feel… we have cruise ships now coming in and that, I don't know if they even go to minor, but we've had the cruise ships coming in and out. Sometimes there are cruise ship traffic jams where they have to wait out in the bay for the other one to leave before they come in. And yeah, it's changed rapidly in a very short space of time. It's quite shocking.

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62. David Gough Reclaims Stewardship of Tiagarra for Aboriginal Tasmanians Apr 15, 2019

The displays at the Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia were built in 1976 by non-indigenous citizens and scientists without consulting Aboriginal Tasmanians. David Gough, chairperson of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation, remembers visiting the museum when he was younger and seeing his own culture presented as extinct.

Today, Gough is the manager of Tiagarra. When he took over, one of the first things he did was put masking tape over the inappropriate and incorrect descriptions and write in the correct information. As Gough explains, racist language covered up and written over by the very people it describes is the perfect metaphor for what Tiagarra was in the past and what it is going to be in the future.

On this episode, Gough and fellow Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation board member Sammy Howard give a special tour of the museum, describe using the museum to educate members of their community and the wider public, and discuss the future of Tiagarra.

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Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 This Month, Museum Archipelago is Taking You To Tasmania
00:46 Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum
01:56 Dave Mangenner Gough
02:53 “To Keep”
03:00 A Brief History and the Importance of Understanding the Past
0438 Tour of the Museum
06:00 Protecting Sites
07:15 Educating the Public About ‘Middens’
09:20 “A Collection of Hoop-Jumpers”
10:30 Optimism for the Future of Tiagarra
11:35 Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country
12:40 Connecting with Members of First Nations Around the World
13:28 Join Club Archipelago
14:10 Outro

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 62. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Today, we visit Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum in Davenport, Tasmania, Australia. The museum is situated on Mersey Bluff, a traditional Aboriginal sacred site, that now hosts a nature trail and a caravan park.

The museum was built in 1976 to promote Aboriginal culture and cultural tourism. But the displays were put together by non-indigenous citizens and scientists. David Gough, of the local Devonport/Latrobe Aboriginal community, remembers visiting the museum when he was younger and seeing offensive words on the plaques and on the walls.

David Gough: When we were younger and looking at this stuff and thinking, wow, you know, there's words…. really inappropriate words. Talk about about us as no longer a race of people. People have been writing my family and our stories and writing in a way that suited them. They wrote us as savages and nomadic and all these things. They wrote things like we didn't how to make fire, that we were really limited people. But we lived through two ice ages.

Today, Gough is the chairperson of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation and the manager of Tiagarra. One of the first things he did as manager was put masking tape over those words.

David Gough: As soon I got the keys to the door back, I put masking tape over words, this sticky tape there… I put masking tape over really inappropriate words. I’ve written over them like, “beautiful people,” rather than some of the words that were under those and said now we can put ourselves in here, rather than… this place told stories… left us as we don’t exist anymore, because we don’t have our stories in here.

Offensive racial language covered up and written over by the very people it describes is the perfect metaphor for what Tiagarra was in the past and what it is going to be in the future.

David Gough: Hello, my name is Dave Mangenner Gough. Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum Davenport, Tasmania. Tiagarra is an Aboriginal name that means “to keep”. This site is a significant site. Where the caravan park is, just there, was where there was huts and a village.

Aboriginal Tasmanians lived in Tasmania for at least 60,000 years: often completely isolated from mainland Australia by rising sea levels. European colonization of the island, and a violent guerrilla war between British colonists and Aboriginal Tasmanians from the mid-1820s to 1832 known as the Tasmanian War, was devastating to Aboriginal Tasmanians. For much of the 20th century, including when TIAGARRA was constructed, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were widely, and erroneously, thought of as being an extinct cultural and ethnic group.

David Gough: There was a roundup of our people and a mass attempted genocide of our people. The impacts of colonization and displacement has meant our families had to chop wood in order to survive and cultures changed and shifted. Growing up in schools, some of the kids go, "Aboriginal, what does that mean?” They don't really grow up knowing a lot about what their ancestors did or what happened to their families because it’s been pretty… well especially here, our families went through great trauma, and that still affects us, so we’re seeing young kids growing up, and there’s just this traumatic patterns that happen.

Through a series of careful museum upgrades, teaching Aboriginal cultural to as wide an audience as possible, and activism, Gough plans to change this.

David Gough: It's important for, for our own families, it's important for the the other kids in the areas as well. Then I think that that's why I go to the schools is to help work with our kids, but also the other kids. And then it builds this mutual respect and an understanding about who we all are. And I think understanding where our past, we'll give them hopefully a way forwards.

Gough took me through the museum as it is today. Except for the masking tape and some ochre handprints, the museum looks almost exactly as it did in 1976.

We enter through the front door -- a fake cave that opens to a description of the land bridges across the Bass Strait, which today separates Tasmania from the rest of Australia.

David Gough: Yes. We enter with a cave. We actually have some money to make some changes to this session, but we're very mindful that now this place is a time capsule and it's actually becoming a museum of museums. So I'm, I'm really cautious about making changes to it, but there will be some changes.

David Gough: This panel here talks about 12,000 years apart, two ice ages where we were connected to Australia and how that allowed what people would say migration and people and animals. We know this actually came up close to here and this is a great lake. People lived around this lake; it wasn't just people walking backwards and forwards. And we've got a lot of aboriginal heritage sites in rock shelters are underneath.

David Gough: When I bring kids through here and spend an hour with them or talk about living sites. We used caves as living sites and we have several different caves in our country that are, some are living in caves and some are ceremonial caves and the ceremonial caves, we try to keep quiet from most of the public because they get vandalized.

David Gough: I have visited a lot of our sites cause I was on the Aboriginal Heritage Council for quite a few years and I’ve been very heavily involved in protecting our heritage around the country. What happens is when someone comes across in damages something that we're saying, oh, they didn't realize what it was. So then it would get thrown back at you saying, well, if I had of known, I wouldn't have done that. That's why I went on the council already focused on changing that act, about protecting our heritage to take out that the ignorance clause and to put some due diligence around process so people understand so if they're going to dig somewhere or they're going to do something in an area they need to contact heritage and find out if there's if there is something there that they would damage.

The gallery continues through detailed dioramas. Gough says visitors, specifically school groups of children that come through, are fascinated by them. But he says that without proper interpretation -- without stories being told in the voice of Aboriginal Tasmanians -- the dioramas’ true meaning is lost and the lasting impact is lessened.

David Gough: What we keep in here is stone tools and artifacts and there's dioramas about how are our people live through two ice ages. It's very important as an education tool but without us being here, it's kind of pointless.

David Gough: And this over here talks about what they call middens, which I don't like the word meetings. And a lot of us is as we growing up were, were cause I think it might be a Latin name for rubbish, you know, um, and it's because that's what they saw it as.

David Gough: But people drive up and with four wheel-drives and, and are destroying them. And we constantly trying to make, get protection. We're trying to get world heritage listing of these areas because some of these are about four times as high as this building. So when you're standing there and you're looking at abalone shells on, on that and you see the hight, you know, that they were feeding, eating, people, eating, that's how old these places are. Many thousands of years old. And right there we have rock Petroglyphs, rock markings in those areas too, which are probably five times older than the Sphinx.

David Gough: There's a lot of ceremony that happens around these, these living sites. Babies are born and the elders have passed away and they're buried there or cremated there as well. So for us, these not rubbish tips, they’re hospital, the church there, everything, there are graves there, everything, and our family members have had to go up to where they've four wheel drives and rebury people. So in other exposing people's remains. It's really, really sad when you're up there and you're trying to stop people that they're now saying it's their culture to four wheel drive on these areas.

Gough sees the public education as crucial not only to protect the sites, but also protect the stories.

David Gough: So this place going through this with kids and that and getting to understand, maybe change some concepts and understanding about what's around them and what a landscape actually means. When you see something like this, you can turn around to someone else and say, do you know what this is? Then you become the educator and then you can pass on that, the reasons about why you would look after it, because once it's removed, the story can go.

The museum is currently closed -- only open for pre-arranged tours consisting mostly of schoolkids and the occasional podcaster. Even the ownership of the museum has been contentious up until recently -- the Devonport City Council rescinded the lease from the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation in 2014 and did not hand back the keys until 2015. Sammy Howard, fellow board member of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation, explains that the museum has been hampered by red tape every step of the way.

Sammy Howard: Really, as Tiagarra, we’ve struggled for years to try and keep the doors open. It's the only museum keeping place in Australia that’s not federally or state funded. I'm just sick to this of watching air governments set us up for failure. They didn't give us the training and the things that we needed. I’m starting to think that we've become a collection of hoop jumpers. Because every time we get through one hope, there's another one put in front of us, hurdle jumpers, whatever. They just seem to, we'll let you go this far, but hang on a minute. You can't go too far. You can't succeed. The white governments have got to be seen as with falling bulk amount of money at this and it's not working.

David Gough: When you’re trying to deal with these things, what people kept trying to talk about in meetings was Return on Investment. And it's a difficult space when you're talking about sharing and your culture and having a place for your community to be. This place means a lot to our families in this area.

But both Howard and Gough are optimistic about the future of Tiagarra. The Corporation hopes to bring some higher-tech exhibits like touch screens into the museum and build the resources to maintain opening hours with staff and guides from the community, all while centering their own story.

A number of factors contribute to their optimism. The museum can now apply for specific funding sources.

From other Tasmanians, there is an increased interest in understanding the land and its people, and a greater understanding of British colonization of the island.

David Gough: We've sort of feeling that this is our year where we will get this place open again. You know, more than just bringing school groups through. With this business plan, what we're doing is to get out to spend some, some of this money and upgrade some of the exhibits in here and put ourselves and our stories into this space. This is really important. That could be an option of having a self guided tour with people walking around it here. And as they come to different sections getting told that story is that where we're wanting to tell. But everything costs money.

And it is not just upgrading the museum. All over Australia, and indeed all over the world, the practices of welcome to country and acknowledgement of country are slowly becoming more common as a way to open events, school assemblies, and conferences.

David Gough: There’s a difference: there's an acknowledgement to country and they can be done by anyone. It is to acknowledge the land and the traditional people of the land. And that can be done by anyone. And it should be done by people to say. Before you do a speech or a forum or a function is firstly to say, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land. If you know, the name of them is to mention the name of them and to say that, you know, to acknowledge the land we made on is is their land and you know, those sort of things.

David Gough: Welcome to country is done by someone who is from that country. It's basically welcoming people onto our land and for people to understand where they are. And I feel it's very positive and people get to understand, I learned a bit about who we are or what land they're on and learn a bit about the traditional people and custodianship or other than ownership.

Gough describes visiting Native American nations in the US state of Arizona and realizing that the challenge that members of First Nations face all around the world -- including developing museums that simultaneously serve their own people and the wider public, are similar. And so a are some of the solutions.

David Gough: So I do believe they're doing that and more I can see that with my friends and Arizona that there's some acknowledgements coming up around the universities are where they see it. Yeah. And that's, um, that's, that's a great thing.

David Gough: You know. So when we're doing things here, I'm getting things in support from my friends on the other side of the world that have been going through similar things. So it was a conversation on there [Facebook] last week, which was around acknowledgements. Those people know what we do is, so I was able to comment on that and then people backwards and forwards. So there is some support in that, which is really, really positive.

Hi, it’s Ian again. Since you’ve listened all the way to the end, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re a fan of Museum Archipelago. Join other fans by subscribing to Club Archipelago. It’s a not-so-secret club that gives you access to special bonus features like longer versions of some of my interviews, my take on the museum industry, and insider tours of museums around the world, all with the same humor and quality you’ve come to expect from Museum Archipelago. Join today for $2 a month at Pateron.com/museumarchipelago, and get Museum Archipelago Logo stickers mailed straight to your door. That’s pateron.com/museumarchiepalgo.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

[Outro]

61. Jody Steele Centers the Convict Women of Tasmania's Penal Colonies at the Female Factory Apr 01, 2019

Penal transportation from England to Australia from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s was used to expand Britain's spheres of influence and to reduce overcrowding in British prisons. The male convict experience is well-known, but the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart is at the center of a shift in how Australians think of the role that female convicts played in the colonization of Tasmania.

Dr. Jody Steele, the heritage interpretation manager for the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, which includes the Female Factory, says that having a convict ancestor used to be considered shameful. But in the past 20 years, attitudes have shifted dramatically. Sites like the Female Factory, the Female Convicts Research Centre, and a general interest in geological research have helped the public better understand how the forced labor of women built the economy of the island.

Today, the museum is on the cusp of a major renovation. Dr Steele describes how the proposed design, chosen by an all-female panel, will present the female convict experience in Tasmania.

This month on Museum Archipelago, we’re taking you to Tasmania. For the next three episodes, we’re conducting a survey of museums on the island, and exploring how each of them relates to the wider landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an episode.

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Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 This Month, Museum Archipelago is Taking You To Tasmania
00:46 Cascades Female Factory
01:00 The Male and Female Convict Experience
02:26 Dr. Jody Steele
02:48 Why It’s Called The Female Factory
04:30 Being A “Respectable” Women In Colonial Society
06:10 Interpreting the Site
07:05 The Lack of Artifacts at the Site
08:50 Australia's Changing Attitudes Towards Convict Ancestors
09:38 History and Interpretation Center Design Competition
11:12 Female Convicts Research Centre
12:15 The Reminders of Convict Labor in Hobart
13:20 Join Club Archipelago
14:00 Outro

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 61. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Today, we begin with the Cascades Female Factory in the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart. It’s at the center of a shift in how Australians think of the role that convicts played in the colonization of the island.

Jody Steele: The male convict story is the story that everyone’s heard about and everyone wants to discover something about it. So I think it’s odd that the female story is equally as fascinating and as intricate as the male story, and yet until recently nobody’s really shown that much of an interest in it with the exception of family researchers or people who have a specific connection.

The site tells the story of European colonization of Van Diemen’s Land, the original European name for the island, from the female perspective.

Jody Steele: The whole penal transportation to Australia and subsequently Van Diemen’s Land started as a result of prisons in England. Post industrial revolution, and people turning to crime without all the industries that they were used to, machines taking their jobs, the prisons just started to literally overflow. So they needed a mechanism to get the people out of those spaces, stop the overcrowding, and the colonization of Australia was an attempt to get that population out of Britain, and essentially far far away. Over 170,000 men women and children were transported during the transportation phase, which started in New South Wales in the late 1700s and in Van Diemen’s Land in 1803.

The only museum in Tasmania that represents the female convict story is the Cascades Female Factory, where Dr. Jody Steele works as the heritage interpretation manager.

Jody Steele: Hi. My name is Jody Steele. I am the heritage interpretation manager for the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, and we are lucky enough to be the portfolio managers of three world heritage sites with form part of the Austrian convict sites world heritage nomination. And the Female Factory fall under our portfolio.

Understanding why the site is called the Female Factory means understanding how the female convicts were seen as resources to the early colonists.

Jody Steele: Moving men out here as a labor force was something that seemed to make a lot of sense to the early Brits, to be able to pack up men and move them across the fall trees and to gather all the materials necessary for building, as in literally building a new colony. And then of course, if you want that population to grow, that can’t be done with men alone. So in the early 1800s, the first vessels with women on board came. Those women in the first days as convicts were usually assigned directly out to the early Hobart population. As your servants, housemaids, that sort of thing. As soon as anyone in that situation needed to be reprimanded for anything that they’ve done, they needed an establishment to do that. And so, as a result of that, the Cascades Female Factory was established.

Right here.

Jody Steele: Right here. So the female convicts were an amazing resource to that particular set of colonials. They could have female convicts coming in and care for their children. Witnesses educators and a lot of these women weren’t just petty criminals you know they were quite skilled at a number of trades. So you had two seamstresses and all of the trades that the men didn’t lend their hands to. You needed somebody to do laundry for the colony. And so having a prison filled with women who you wanted to put under hard labour to punish them. Laundry was one of the greatest ways to do that. You could well if the military presence could have their their uniforms laundered here and washed and ironed so it gave the colony a massive resource of trades that the men weren’t doing. Which is why it got its name as the Female Factory.

The system operated under a strict series of punishments, that was nevertheless at the discretion of the guards. It was managed by a hierarchy of those incarcerated and was encouraged by attitudes towards what it meant to be a respectable women in the colonial society.

Jody Steele: A lot of the women who were assigned out were assigned out to people. Some of them to people that they knew. Some of them even to their husbands which is quite curious and I think in those instances there is an absurdity to the system where these women were assigned to people that they were genuinely in love with. They wanted to have families with. They got pregnant. Pregnancy while you were under sentence was considered a crime which meant that those women ultimately would be removed from their assignment brought back here to have child they would spend time with the child when it was a baby. They would be usually weaned quite quickly from their mother. And sometimes you know within within months that mother would then be back under sentence being punished separated from her child with the child being left in the care of other convict women in the nursery usually by sort of three years of age. The child would then be removed from this location the nursery here and removed into an orphan school. You may never see your child again. Now as somebody who wanted to have that baby with the person they were with. That must have been horrific. And then there is the flip side to that story when you could be assigned out to an individual master. He may have had absolutely no choice in falling pregnant and yet you were the one who gets punished for that occurring. You would come back in here and quite often that into that individual who you were assigned to originally would simply just get a new female convict servant and you know you’re left under punishment for something that was clearly not your fault it must have been horrific.

Steele says the biggest interpretation challenge is that is so easy for visitors to see the entire population of incarcerated people rather than individuals with vastly different, often contradictory, experiences.

Jody Steele: I think the biggest challenge when interpreting a site like this is people come with an understanding of a mass population. They think of a convict population. And unless they happen to be descended from an individual convict, they find it really hard to think about the individual within the system. And with over 7,000 women passing through these few yards alone, it tends to be the mass mentally that we try to break down here, which from my perspective is the most fun part of what I get to do, is to find the odd individual who has this amazing story, whether it be a tragic tale or a tale of resilience and strength.

Telling the stories of odd individuals is complicated by the fact that not many artifacts remain. The site itself is made up of three yards, surrounded by sandstone walls with only markings on the ground indicating the size of prison cells or nurseries.

Jody Steele: The challenge here, unlike a lot of our convict site museums is that the artifactual material associated with female convicts just isn’t there. Even our state museums, don’t have a lot of artifacts associated with female convicts. There isn’t the material history surrounding them that has been maintained for them men.

Jody Steele: Probably one of the hardest things to deal with is the fact that most of the convict population didn’t have access to the time or the inclination to sit down and write a daily journal, and for most of them the literacy wasn’t particularly high usually when they arrived, but part of the convict system was actually educating a lot of these people, so a lot of them left with a much better education when they got in, but the time they could have started writing a journal, they were most likely off getting married, building businesses. So there’s a massive gap, and we really do rely heavily on what is the administrator’s view of these individuals, right down to the way they described them when they got off the ships. And then, we rely heavily on their descendants, who have all those stories and the oral histories of how these families built up from these individual women.

Dr. Steele talks about a massive cultural shift in Australian attitudes towards ancestors who may have been incarcerated. Because the family memory of the Female Factory goes back just two or three generations, it’s an opportunity for the museum to better interpret and educate by becoming a hub for these stories.

Jody Steele: For a very long time, having a convict ancestor was considered something to be ashamed of. And that has probably only shifted in the past 20 years of having a sense of pride of being descended from a convict when they became aware that even through they may have been criminals, some of them quite serious, some of them petty, that they were responsible for building the new colony of Australia. And that’s been a real shift of people being real proud of it now, and because genealogical research is now enormous, we’ve got access to things that aren’t that oppressive record. Business records, and images of shopfronts where these people built businesses. Massive massive change in attitude.

The Female Factory is in the middle of a design process to open a brand new History and Interpretation Centre on the site. The process began with an architectural design competition judged by an all-female panel.

Jody Steele: It’s really important when we’re working on this site that we recognise the contribution of women to society. I mean that is that is why this place is is recognised and part of that process when we we put the call out for the architectural design competition was that we really wanted women to contribute to this project we had over 50 original people who came in who put their hand up to get involved in the competition and we pulled together a team of amazing women mostly architects and the chair of our board Sharon Sullivan who oversaw the process and did all of the review of all of the nominations. Looking for things like female contribution of course looking at the Heritage impacts and how the building would would sit in in the landscape and what stories the building itself might tell the new building that they were hoping to put in this space will be clearly identifiable as a brand spanking new building that is that is part of our intention but it will also hopefully be aside from being a beautiful architectural structure. We’re hoping that it will recede and then the individual stories will come out as you’re inside the building. The building will be located over the cellblock location so I guess you know in a lineal form it will represent part of the historic landscape. But outside of that most of our storytelling will have to be in a very different format and we’ll have to get really creative. We work really closely with a group of people called that are called the female convict Research Center that’s started as as a bunch of women female researchers who I think they would forgive me for saying they’re totally obsessed with female convict history and they have built up a an amazing database of all of the female convict women. And so we have access to that database and it would I mean what an amazing thing to be able to know that you have a female convict ancestor to be able to come here to tap into that find out how long they were here exactly what space they were living in working in even being punished in to be able to go to that space you know and stand essentially in the footprints of your ancestor would be an amazing thing.

You can see the winning design in the show notes for the episode. The architects call for a beautiful but solum building with plenty of play between the open spaces of the yards as they are today, and confined spaces of cells as they used to exist. Hobart is a city partially built with convict labor, but the reminders — the type of stone on a building for example — are subtle, and you have to know what you’re looking for. A structure like the one proposed removes the sublty, and makes it harder to forget.

Jody Steele: I would I would love you know the female convict history to be the first thing that people engage with and then to flow on into into the story of the men. I want people to walk away even if they don’t have a better understanding of convict female convict history. I want them to walk away asking questions and I think that’s what we all want when we build these places we want them to start questioning what they believe what they think what they knew before they walked in the door. I don’t necessarily I mean subliminally I’d love to educate everyone who walks through the door but quite often those people are on holidays and they probably don’t want me lecturing to them for an hour and a half about convict history. But I want them to walk away questioning you know what this place meant to Tasmania or you know what the women at least felt or went through to try and get some kind of gut reaction from them and to that experience that these people went through to create the place that we live in working today.

Do you like the podcasts I make? Club Archipelago is the best way to support me. It gives you access to a special bonus podcast that’s an even deeper dive into the museum landscape — kind of like the director’s commentary to the main show. There are longer versions of some of my interviews, commentary on the industry as a whole, and insider tours of various museums from past guests, all with the same humor and quality you’ve come to expect from Museum Archipelago. Join today for as little as $2 at Pateron.com/museumarchipelago, and get Museum Archipelago Logo stickers mailed straight to your door. That’s pateron.com/museumarchiepalgo.

[Outro]

Jody Steele: I can admit, I like you am a total museum junke and wherever I go I drag anyone who I’m traveling with to every possible museum to every possible museum in every possible place to wherever I travel around the globe. I’m the person who reads the sign and then taps on it to figure out what it is made out of, and whether I like the font. You’re there, you’re there with me, you do it in every museum you walk into.

60. Stephanie Cunningham on the Creation and Growth of Museum Hue Mar 18, 2019

The fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years. Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white.

Stephanie Cunningham has a clear answer for why these white institutions aren’t changing: “When you’ve been practicing exclusion for so long, you can’t change overnight.” That’s one of the reasons why she co-founded Museum Hue with Monica Montgomery in 2015.

In this episode, Cunningham traces Museum Hue’s trajectory from a small collective to a national membership-based organization, and spells out why being a well-meaning institution is necessary but not sufficient for equity in the field.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. Join Club Archipelago today to help me continue making podcasts about museums (and get some fun benefits)!

Topics and Links

00:00 Intro
00:15 The Ongoing Fight for Racial Diversity in Museums
01:52 Stephanie Cunningham
02:26 The Founding of Museum Hue
03:05 Hueseum Tours
03:52 “Authentic Participation” and Jobs
06:29 Museum Hue’s Membership Model
07:05 Knock On Effects of Resistance to Change
08:56 A Story of the Museum Exhibition Design Company
10:10 The Unchecked Cultural Power of Museums
11:05 Black Visuality
11:25 Museum Hue’s Memberships
12:07 Arts Targeted By Oppressive Forces
13:55 Outro/Join Club Archipelago

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 60. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Stephanie Cunningham: People of color, especially people of African descent, have been fighting for museums to be more inclusive over 50 years ago. It's the reason why institutions like the studio museum in Harlem was created. It's the reason why MOC, the Museum of Chinese in America, El Museo del Barrio, all these institutions came up because of the lack of inclusivity within these institutions.

What we've seen today is not actually a shift in inclusion in a white mainstream museum, but a two-tiered museum, which is still the white mainstream museums and the development of these culturally specific institutions that I mentioned. It's important for us to realize that there has been need for institution building for people of color, but also these white mainstream institutions that hold a lot of our cultural heritage have to also include us into the scope and the framework of their institution and become more inclusive as well.

A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white. This imbalance continues though museum visitorship numbers, even though many museums are within communities of color or within states that have high populations of people of color. Stephanie Cunningham has a clear answer for why these white institutions aren’t changing: “when you’ve been practicing exclusion for so long, you can’t change overnight.” And that’s one of the reasons why she co-founded Museum Hue.

Stephanie Cunningham: Hello, my name is Stephanie Cunningham. I am the co-founder and creative director of Museum Hue, an arts organization that works to increase the visibility of people of color working in arts and culture and museums in particular.

It's really important that we begin to think more critically on how to change this, how to shift this and make museums more innovative and inviting that will attract more people of color and also be very honest about their history and their conflicting provenances as well within the institution.

Stephanie Cunningham co-founded Museum Hue with strategic director Monica Montgomery in 2015. The organization began in New York City as a collective of people of color working in museums and other cultural spaces.

Stephanie Cunningham: We realized that we really needed a safe space, a space where we can have psychological safety, where we can be ourselves and talk about our experiences working within cultural institutions, whether it be microaggression, macro aggression or racism and talking about perhaps some best practices of the things that were also going well for people within institutions as well.

Museum Hue began infiltrating spaces with programs like Hueseum Tours, which the organization leads in art museums and other performance venues. The tours started in New York City but have since branched out to different parts of the country.

Stephanie Cunningham: We'll have a conversation focusing on staff and artists of color and also narratives of color as well, because what we also realize is that a lot of the narratives within museums and cultural institutions don't reflect people of color, and so we invoke and incorporate those within our own tours and presentations within these spaces.

The Huesuem Tours are one example of Museum Hue’s focus on authentic participation within the arts world. Another is jobs, particularly jobs in creative and leadership roles. At the heart of the issue is not a lack of qualified creatives of color, but instead that the doors of museums and the surrounding ecosystem are largely closed off to people of color.

Through extending Museum Hue’s network, and by pipelining people of color in the museum and cultural field, Cunningham has seen how a mostly-white cultural institution’s desire to be more inclusive is necessary but not sufficient when it comes to actual inclusion. And that’s why, last year, Museum Hue became a membership-based organization.

Stephanie Cunningham: We decided to become a membership based institution. This came out of our fellowship at Race Forward Racial Equity in the Arts organization. About 50 or so institutions throughout New York City were invited to participate, and we all had our own platform and ideas, but the basis was for all of us to create racial equity framework, and so we decided with the Museum Hue membership that we can focus on institutions that are willing and wanting to work with us in changing the framework of their institution, making it more inclusive of people of color.

We've been able to facilitate a lot of opportunities, a lot of jobs for people of color within these museums and also work with them in trainings on cultural competency, but mostly working on real action based because we know that these conversations, although well intentioned, they can fall short, and so we need institutions to take action steps. Action steps look like creating real policy and also procedures in ways that we are accepting or they are accepting people of color and allowing them to have a seat at the table in a real way, looking at their board, making it more diverse, and so looking at real ways that we can begin to focus on the framework of the institution and working on them from the inside out.

In episode 48 of Museum Archipelago, The Whitest Cube podcast co-host Ariana Lee makes the point that many museums can claim diverse workforces if you take into account people of color working in museum’s janitorial services department, but less so in seats of power. To that end, Museum Hue created an internal survey that any cultural or museum-related institution can use to develop an assessment of their current staff and institutional attitudes towards inclusion and diversity.

Stephanie Cunningham: This isn't a change that happens overnight because you've hired people of color. We want it to be a core part of the foundation and the structure of the institution. In order to do that, we have to encourage them and support them and thinking about this more critically, and so because we've moved in this new vein, it's been a real blessing that so many institutions around the country have wanted to sign on with It's about over 80 at this point, and so we're looking at different ways to support them in creating the toolkits and creating more tours, and not just focusing again on our institutional members but also mostly on people of color in the field as well.

Cunningham’s focus on museums and other cultural institutions comes in part because museums can be more resistant to change than some other parts of society--and in the case of museums, that resistance has knockon effects.

Stephanie Cunningham: Many people of color have the needed qualifications and some factors in many of our fields but yet don't see them represented, and so we have to realize that there's a real epidemic that have people of color are not represented in leadership or given opportunities for leadership or different spaces and different industries. For me, tackling museums, number one for me is my focus because I have a degree in art history and cultural heritage preservation. I also think that museums, for whatever reason, within the grand scheme of society that's been changing isn't seen as a place of importance for the there to be racial diversity.

I think it's needed in all industries, but especially in museums when we're talking about cultural heritage or talking about artistic freedoms of expression, it's incredibly important that we begin to look at museums first because museums create the narratives that we see throughout our landscape. It's important that people begin to see people of color represented in history, in art because that then opens up a new lens for people and of appreciation and recognition of cultural contribution that people of color do not get in this country. For me, museums have to begin to create a lane that is really much more inclusive than they actually are.

For Museum Hue, increasing the number of people of color at museum leadership levels begins to shift the framework of not just that institution, but of entire museum ecosystem, like museum exhibit design companies.

Stephanie Cunningham: There is a very prominent, I won't say the name, exhibition design company that works with so many museums throughout the country. They went to meet with a museum that they were speaking with to begin to work with on an exhibition design. During the meeting, they were asked by the person that they were working with, a person represented by the museum who was a person of color asked them, "Do you have people of color on your staff?"

They, for whatever reason, had not even thought about this. They're like, "We're doing exhibition design. Why does this matter?" But it does matter because perspectives and cultural differences and understandings are also needed as well, and so they reached out to Museum Hue because they were like, "Do you know of anyone in exhibition design that can possibly work with us?" People of color are also going to begin to ask these questions of companies that they're working with as well, and having companies think about this issue as well because it's going to affect their bottom line.

Museums have incredible cultural power, and most of it is unchecked. Cunningham’s point is that it, without serious change, that cultural power won’t last forever.

Stephanie Cunningham: Museum Hue is just working to change that and to utilize our collective power and our voices to call out these issues and help usher in a change that is constant, not a change that is dependent upon the funding that an institution gets for diversity and inclusion, but something that is a core part of museums and other cultural institutions, because I honestly believe if museums do not change and become more inclusive, expect obsolescence, expect museums shutting down, expect museums continuously become irrelevant for the greater public.

Cunningham also hosts an excellent podcast called Black Visuality. Past guests have included Blake Bradford, who is also featured on episode 43 of Museum Archipelago. As the director of Lincoln University’s Museum Studies program, Bradford also sees a pipeline of Black students, exposing them to career paths that are largely closed off to people of color.

Museum Hue has three different membership types. Once is an institutional membership, for organizations to align their diversity + equity efforts with Museum Hue, and also advertise job openings. Another is the Huers membership, for people of color interested in the Museum Hue platform. And finally, the Allies membership, for those looking to support Museum Hue’s mission.

You can listen to Black Visuality and learn more about Cunningham at stephanieacunningham.com. You can find more information about Museum Hue by going to museumhue.com.

Stephanie Cunningham: My work really if you look at all the things that I've been doing falls under two parts. It's really just looking at ways to support people of color to increase our visibility, to facilitate our employment and get us more entrenched in the creative economy and also on the other part, call out and challenge and address the barriers and the hierarchies and issues that relate to specifically racism and lack of opportunity in the field for people of color. That's what I'm continuously doing is just working on ways to shift this field and move it into where we can see much more equity, much more diversity, much more ... There's another word that I'm looking for. Much more parity as well in the field is incredibly important to me.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

[Outro]

59. Faith Displayed As Science: How Creationists Co-opted Museums with Julie Garcia Mar 04, 2019

There’s a new tool in young-Earth creationists' quest for scientific legitimacy: the museum. Over the past 25 years, dozens of so-called creation museums have been built, including the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum in Kentucky. Borrowing the style of natural history museums and science centers, these public display spaces use the form and rhetoric of mainstream science to support a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation of the universe in six days about 6,000 years ago.

In her 2009 thesis, “Faith Displayed As Science: The Role of The Creation Museum in the Modern Creationist Movement”, Julie Garcia visited the AiG Creation Museum and three other creation museums: The Creation Evidence Museum in Glenrose, TX, Dinosaur Adventureland in Pensacola, FL, and the Institute for Creation Research which is near San Diego, CA.

In this episode, Garcia discusses her findings and explores why museums are a particularly well-suited medium for creationist ideas.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 59. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

There’s a new tool in young-Earth creationists’ quest for scientific legitimacy: the museum. Over the past 25 years, dozens of so-called creation museums have been built, most of them in the US. Borrowing the style of natural history museums and science centers, these public display spaces use the form and rhetoric of mainstream science to support a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation of the universe in six days about 6,000 years ago.

Julie Garcia: A museum lets creationists speak directly to the people in an unfiltered and unchallenged way. Just being able to put all this inside something that’s called a museum and using the trappings of science, it gives creationism that additional feel of the legitimacy and credibility that it might not otherwise have.

This is Julie Garcia, and her interest in both evolution and the people who vehemently deny it, led her to explore why museums are a particularly well-suited medium for creationist ideas.

Julie Garcia: My name is Julie Garcia. I was formally known as Julie Duncan at the time I wrote my senior thesis, which was called “Faith Displayed As Science: The Role of The Creation Museum in the Modern American Creationist Movement”.

Garcia grew up in Kentucky, and as an undergrad at Harvard, she decided to become a History and Science major.

Julie Garcia: At other colleges that’s known as History and Philosophy of Science which is basically just the study of what science is and why we trust it and what are different ways of knowing the world. For me, part of the reason to go into it is because I loved evolution so much and had always just had a fascination with the whole process and had also had a corresponding fascination with why so many people so vehemently didn’t like evolution, and why so many people, to the point of 30, 40, sometimes 50% percent in certain polls, believe in creationism. So I was prompted to write this thesis when in 2006, I heard that in my backyard, in Boone Country Kentucky, Answers in Genesis, a creationist organization, was going to be building the largest Creation Museum in the world, known as the The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, a 27 million dollar facility, over many 20 acres, about 10 minutes from my house.”

The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, also known as just The Creation Museum opened in 2007. In its first year, it reported 400,000 visitors.

Julie Garcia: I eventually decided, coming into the summer of 2008, before my senior year, that I would spend that summer traveling back home to Kentucky to visit the creation museum there, and three other creation museums around the US. The Creation Evidence Museum in Glenrose, TX, Dinosaur Adventureland and the related creation museum in Pensacola, FL, and the Institute for Creation Research which is near San Diego, CA. That’s kind of how it all started, and I spent the summer visiting and learning about the four different museums.”

Garcia chose these four museums for their stylistic differences and for their geographical diversity. At each one, she viewed the exhibits, and talked to the founders and staff, then analyzed and highlighted the messages and methods common to all of the museums.

Julie Garcia: There was some trepidation before I went because I was worried that by disclosing that I was not a creationist they would assume I was going to write a smear piece on their museums, which honestly when I read my thesis now I feel there are certain things that I would phrase differently that came off snarkier than I think I would write them now.

But everyone was very kind to me and they were all very eager to show me everything that they had built and they were very proud of it. I came away thinking these are very nice people with whom I just disagree, but that’s what stuck in my mind the most: everyone I talk to was very faithful and believe completely in everything that was shown in the museums.

I did feel uncomfortable to seeing all the children there because it’s one thing obviously for adults to decide what they believe, and feel very strongly about them and teach them to others. It was just a little troubling to me to see young children learning things that were contrary to mainstream science. But of course, that’s kind of the purpose of these museums.

All four museums heavily feature dinosaurs — either in audio animatronic form or as fossils. This is not just because of time compression of geological ages present in young-Earth creationism — it is also because dinosaurs attract the pubic, particularly children, to these museums. The founder of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, Ken Ham, calls dinosaurs “missionary lizards” for their attention-getting power.

Julie Garcia: Dr. Hovan from Dinosaur Adventure Land in Florida and Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis very explicitly say the purpose of using things like dinosaurs is to attract the children and to bring them in. Then again, with distance now I can acknowledge that is true for secular museums as well because we all know that dinosaurs sell, but at the same time, given the counter narrative being told at these museums about dinosaurs and humans living together, yes, I did feel some discomfort seeing kids being explicitly told that these dinosaurs were alive 6,000 years ago and that people were riding them. In Answers in Genesis, they actually have a triceratops towards the end of the museum and they actually have a saddle on it. And you can sit on it and take a pictures. And it’s not a joke: it’s a representation of what the museum says would have been a typical pre-Flood diorama, where humans were living together with dinosaurs.

So why build a museum? Garcia argues that there are three significant and interrelated reasons for the creationist movement. The first: museums are seen as credible.

Museums really have a long history in the US as places of scientific research and public education. In the 20th century, they were sometimes referred to as “Cathedrals of Science,” this idea that they were buildings where we set forth the best of human endeavor and everything that the collective knowledge of our species was placed in these buildings. So simply by attaching that word, museum, it gives the building a sheen of credibility that it otherwise wouldn’t have if it were called a theme park or a bible center or something like that.

The second reason also relates to the focus on dinosaurs: museums are more entertaining than school, bible study, or bible school.

Julie Garcia: That is something that is like a theme park, but at the same time, it’s a kind of entertaining that a lot of teachers are going to like and a lot of parents are going to like in the way that a lot of parents and teachers want an educational experience for kids. A lot of parents who might want to spend the money on what they feel like is a frivolous day at a theme park, can get behind the idea of taking them to a museum where they’re going to be learning about science and they’re going to learning wholesome things and bettering themselves. And going along with that, the entertainment value is a decent amount of money. There is money to be made from offshoots from these museums.

The final reason: going directly to the people.

Julie Garcia: Number three is the most important of them, which is that a museum lets creationists speak directly to the people in an unfiltered and unchallenged way. So a creator of a museum has total control over the experience that visitors have. They can control exactly where you walk and what you read at what time, and what you take away from the exhibits. I think this is part of a larger movement, away from what creationists had been doing, which was bringing these challenges in the court system: in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s a string of defeats in federal courts for violating the establishment clause. A court, when things go right, a legal proceeding is designed to get to the truth, and part of getting to the truth is subjecting assertions to rigorous cross-examination. And you have someone sitting up there, the judge who makes rulings about what is a good argument and what’s not. And can keep certain evidence out, and can rule on who qualifies an expert. And those were things that weren’t going well for creationists. So after they lost a number of these cases, they started moving more toward this museum model. I think that is because there is no cross-examination in a museum. In fact, there is no opposite point of view if you don’t want to give it. There’s no requirement that you describe how other people see evidence or that you respond to criticisms to how you are presenting your point of view. So by switching over to these museum, a lot of creationists have switched strategies from trying to impose creationism on public school districts, or impose these laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution and instead to try to change people's hearts and minds on a more local and individual level in the hope that those people will have their minds changed and will go out and teach their kids at home creationists ideas or be part of a groundswell pushing again for the teaching of these creationist ideas in schools.

Being able to go directly to your audience without a middleman is one of the main ways the media landscape more broadly has changed. As institutions that used to be arbiters of truth are called into question, there is more space for viewpoints that used to be far outside the mainstream to directly attract their own audience.

And it doesn't have to be on the level of a single institution either. Garcia talks about guides to scientifically informed museums, zoos, and aquariums for sale in the Creation Museum's gift shop, meant to be used at these other institutions for alternative, biblically correct interpretations of their displays.

Julie Garcia: I know that in addition to those printouts you can purchase, there are also some organization that provide some of these tours, such as a group called “Biblically Correct Tours” that does tours of Natural History Museums, and my understanding of how this works is it is an offshoot of the two model approach: which is the idea that evolution and creationism is two competing philosophies and that they look at the same evidence and that they just draw different conclusions. And so by having a Biblically Correct tour of the museum, this organization explains how creationism is not opposed to science in their view because they know that Americans for the most part like science. Nobody wants to be anti-science. So if anyone disagrees about things like climate change or evolution, usually the way that it is phrased is not “well I don’t like science, and I reject science”, it’s more “well I take a more different view of the science and there are two sides of this story and I follow this interpretation.” That is exactly the type of thing that we’re seeing with tours like this, and that you also see in the Answers in Genesis Creation museum: they present things that could be in a secular museum, such as an image of a dinosaur skeleton obscured by a mudslide, and you can look at it in two different ways…

It’s not just that museum-goers like science: Garcia points out that audiences tend to trust information more if it is presented in a high-tech style. In her conclusion, Garcia writes that “It seems very probable that the years to come will see the construction of more museums, most likely in the high-tech style of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, which has proven quite lucrative.”

Julie Garcia: Now, it’s easier for people through mediums like Twitter and through buildings like their own Creation Museums, to claim the same kind of authority and to have an impact that they otherwise might not have in the past where they wouldn’t have had that ability get their message out.

58. Joe Galliano Fills In The UK’s Family Tree At The Queer Britain Museum Feb 11, 2019

Joe Galliano came up with the idea for Queer Britain, the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales. Discouraged by the focus on male homosexuality and on legislation, he launched a bid to preserve histories that have been ignored or destroyed. If all goes well, the museum will open in London in a few years.

In this episode, Galliano talks about the UK’s history of anti-gay legislation, how he is working to create a ‘catalytic space’ at Queer Britain, and why the medium of museums is right for this project.

The word ‘queer’ was synonymous with ‘strange’ or ‘weird’, and a common slur thrown at LGBT individuals. Activists in the 1980s reclaimed the word and used it as an umbrella term for a wide range of sexual orientations and gender identities. Nowadays, queer is an increasingly popular way to identify within the community, but as historical traumas persist, and the word can still be found in hostile environments, it’s important to note that not everyone is in agreement. Joe Galliano and Queer Britain use the term as a proud self-identifier, and an intentional move away from using the word ‘gay’, and male homosexuality in general, as a stand-in for all identities.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

Sponsor: Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, GW University

This show is brought to you by the Museum Studies Graduate Program at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. With a graduate degree in Museum Studies, you will be equipped to respond to the evolving museum profession by engaging in hands-on training in the heart of the nation’s museum capital. To learn more, click here.

Topics and Links

00:00: Intro
00:15: Joseph Galliano
00:35: 50th anniversary of the Partial Decriminalization of Homosexuality in England and Wales
01:55: Legislation from the 'Buggery' Act to Today
02:58: Legislation Focusing on Male Homosexuality
04:00: "Rightful Place"
04:43: The Word Queer
05:28: The Plan for Queer Britain
06:20: Dan Vo at the V&A
07:25: Virtually Queer
08:45: Museums Asking Questions
10:40: Fundraising and Partnerships
12:09: Sponsor: Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, GW University
13:18: Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 58. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Joe Galliano: Turns out, in order to launch a museum, it’s a long, complicated, expensive process. Who knew?

This is Joe Galliano, one of the co-founders of the Queer Britain Museum.

Joe Galliano: Hello, my name is Joe Galliano, the co-founder and CEO of Queer Britain, the national LGBTQ+ museum for the UK.

Galliano came up with the idea for a national LGBTQ+ museum in 2017, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in the UK, an anniversary commemorated by cultural and heritage institutions across the country.

Joe Galliano: I felt slightly conflicted because it’s an anniversary that’s focused around men. It’s an anniversary that was focused around criminality and victimhood. Some of the fairly familiar tropes that we get rolled out that we get when we start talking about gay men, largely, and it’s not very inclusive. We’re living in a world, thankfully, where there’s a rich and wildly diverse set of sexulaitlies and gender identities and it left me slightly sad that it wasn’t entirely recognized. And also the fact that it was hung on an anniversary, and I didn’t wanted it to be another 50 years before there was something major happening again and I wanted to make sure that we build on the momentum that was being gathered around that anniversary and that it didn’t just fizzle away: it turned into something with real lasting value.

The emphasis on an anniversary of legislation could have come from the context of a long history of formal, legal repression of male homosexuality the UK, going all the way back to the Buggery Act of 1533.

Joe Galliano: We had the Buggery Act, which was introduced under Henry VIII, which was very much around male sexuality, male same-sex attraction and policing that. And this all stayed on the books in various forms until 1967 when there was partial decriminalization. With partial decriminalization, the age of consent was set at 21, where it was 16 for everybody else. At that point, as well, prosecutions absolutely rocketed. As soon as there was some allowance for people to behave naturally, it then became a bigger stick to beat people with.

The legislation only focused on male homosexuality, which is, of course, telling.

Joe Galliano: It’s interesting that those laws were always about men. Women with same sex desire were almost rendered invisible to public life and the law. Yeah, I think there’s also, if we’re talking about that kind of legislation, there actually have been a prejudice, a lot of it is about patriarchy, about male views of sexualty and sex, who has an active sexuality, who has a passive sexuality. I think through a large portion of history, women’s sexuality was seen as in service to male sexuality, and so would you legislate against that? There are also some stories. When some of the later bills will brought to Queen Victoria, they were too embarrased to talk about lesbianisim or anything like that. How much truth there is in that, I don’t know.

Of course, the focus of Queer Britain will not be legislation. But as Galliano says, the laws previously on the books, and the increasing number of violent homophobic and transphobic attacks in the UK today have distorted the country’s understanding of itself — and tie directly into the mission of the museum.

Joe Galliano: We’re talking about a central hub that will visible globally and within the mainstream that will give a message that here is a catalytic space that will collect our stories and here’s a way of helping progress Britain’s understanding of itself by giving Queer stories their rightful place. So that means rightful place within the culture. And also a rightful place. A place that can be their own.

The word ‘Queer’ has a complicated history. It wassynonymous with ‘strange’ or ‘weird’, and a common slur thrown at LGBT people. Activists in the 1980s reclaimed the word and used it as an umbrella term for a wide range of sexual orientations and gender identities. Today, Queer is an increasingly popular way to identify within the community, but as historical traumas persist, and the word can still be found in hostile environments, it’s important to note that not everyone is in agreement. Galliano and the Queer Britain Museum use the term as a proud self-identifier and as an intentional move away from using the word ‘gay’, and male homosexuality in general, as a stand-in for all identities.

The plan is for Queer Britain to have a physical space in London, opening sometime in the next few years. Although the UK is full of museums, some of which are have Queer artifacts and Queer stories, Galliano is conscious of how backsliding can happen. In legislation and culture, the laws and norms of today don’t guarantee that the future will look the same. Institutions like museums are a part of maintaining today’s momentum — and can give people who have had their stories told by others a chance to narrate their own history.

Joe Galliano: I think there’s fantastic movement within the museum communities now to Queer those spaces, to make sure they are unearthing those stories and seeing how they can weave them through the main of their collections. Are they there yet? No. Some places have gotten further than others. Some aren’t doing anything. But there’s some really really good work. I would look at a volunteer like Dan Vo at the V&A who is conducting really good museum tours, LGBT museum tours and is a great volunteer activist. I think that part of my fear is that much of the movement forward relies on activist curators and really excited volunteers and it doesn’t take too many people to leave the sector, and that’s lost. The other thing I think is really important is that there’s such a rich and wildly diverse set of stories to tell. That those museums are never going to be able to tell all of those stories. Whereas what we have the ability to do is to create a catalytic space, where we can pour all of those stories in and where we can keep telling different stories and we can change the exhibitions all the time. And that LGBT people can be in control of telling their own stories as well. Over history, so often, it has been other people who have told our stories.

When these other people and institutions tell the Queer community’s stories, they often become the de facto intergenerational gatekeepers — if they decide to keep and organize the information at all. This can have devastating consequences. Galliano is acutely aware that stories are being lost every day.

Joe Galliano: That’s about making sure that we’ve gathered the stories of people who are with us now. They can add their voices into the archives and become part of that. It’s important really that we gather the stories now while people can actually talk to us. In terms of understanding where we’re gonna be headed with the archive to start with is that we are designing a national survey of museums around the country, which we’re doing with the assistance of the National Archives. What we really want to do is just get a proper sense of what is the nation’s holding of material that we would think of as LGBT focused. That will mean that it will give us steer as to where are the important gaps. How do we fill those gaps? That’s going to kind of give us a sense of where to focus our collecting activity.

When a museum is still an idea, what the word museum means is still flexible. In addition to educational exhibits about Queer history and culture, the proposed museum is also a place for people to upload their own stories and The Whole projects serves as an antidote to the psychological damage of homophobic and transphobic attacks and oppression.

Joe Galliano: Museum’s an interesting word, isn’t it, because it comes with all sorts of baggage. And actually, we’re talking about something very much broader than just a museum in the traditional sense. They show inherently show what a culture values and they’re a really good way of understanding what we are now, understand how we got there, and then take that understanding and use them to imagine the best of all possible futures. They ask questions. Who are we? How did we get here? Who do we want to be?

It should be different every time you come to the museum when the physical space itself opens. Which we’re a few years off yet. What we’re looking at is a series of guest curators, a rolling series of guest curators so that each time we bring somebody in we’re like, “What is the story that you need to tell? What is the story that hasn’t been told? What’s the material that sits unexplored in other museums’ archives that we’re able to shine a light on?”

Sometimes it’ll be about the blockbuster exhibition. What’s the exhibition that’s going to be bringing lines ‘round the block? Which of the exhibitions will there be telling community stories that haven’t been told? For example, it could be everything from - and I’m talking off the top of my head right this moment - It could be everything from, “What is Elton John’s stage costumes?” through to “What is the queer Bangladeshi experience of Birmingham in the 1950s?” It will be a space to tell a vast, endless set of experiences.

Creating a new museum is no small task, but Galliano is ready for the challenge. As he goes through the process of collecting and fundraising, he’s also focused on building partnerships. His route to creating a robust institution begins with acknowledging that it’s a project bigger than just one person or one identity.

Joe Galliano: There’s as many challenges as you want to look at and they’re all fascinating and exciting to step up to. I think the other thing is how do you carry the responsibility to make sure that something that there is such a need for and such a desire, certainly within the LGBTQ+ communities, how do you carry the weight and the responsibility of having said that you’re gonna this thing and making sure that you’ve delivered for those people. I want to create an organization that if I step away from it, we’ve got the right … There’s another person that will be able to take over that mantle. So that the organization isn’t about one person, but we’ve created a robust organization that will be able to delivery fabulously. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked on because it’s the thing that I’m most … I’ve never worked from something I feel so passionately is important. I’ve never picked up a project as brilliantly challenging as this in it’s scale, in the scope of all the different stakeholders we need to make sure are brought close and are doing the right things. And that we keep a laser focus on the strategy to make sure that it happens.

[Sponsor]

This has been Museum Archipelago

[Outro]

57. The Colored Conventions Project Resurrects Disremembered History With Denise Burgher, Jim Casey, Gabrielle Foreman, & Many Others Jan 28, 2019

In American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement.

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a Black digital humanities initiative dedicated to identifying, collecting, and curating all of the documents produced by the Colored Conventions Movement.

In this episode, two of the CCP’s cofounders and co-directors, Jim Casey and Gabrielle Foreman are joined by Project Fellow Denise Burgher to discuss how the Project mirrors the energy and collective commitments of the Conventions themselves, how to see data as a form of protest, and creating an a set of organizational principles.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. Join Club Archipelago today on Patreon to help me continue making podcasts about museums (and get some fun benefits)!

Topics and Links

00:00: Intro
00:15: Colored Conventions Movement
01:23: Gabrielle Foreman And Jim Casey
02:00: Colored Conventions Project
02:21: Denise Burgher
03:34: Data As A Form Of Protest
06:25: Terms Of Use For CCP’s Data
07:20: “To Respect, Not Just Collect”
09:20: “Celebratory History Of American Progress”
10:23: The Understudy Of The Colored Conventions Movement
11:25: Women's Centrality To The Movement
12:30: Getting People Involved
12:54: Douglass Day
14:15: Museums And Digital Spaces
15:00: Announcing Museum Archipelago Stickers

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 57. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: "The Colored Convention movement was Black-lead and Black organizers came together across so many of the states. Beginning in 1830 folks began to gather in Philadelphia, and there were both state and national conventions that discussed labor rights, educational rights, voting rights, violence against Black communities, the expulsion of people who were not considered residence and citizens.”

JIM CASEY: “The Conventions Movement was not just a single thing, where there was one issue that they were really dedicated to solving or figuring out. Conventions were held in at least 35 states. And keep in mind that this was the 19 century, so there weren’t 50 states even back then. That we really think there is a way, through this history, to rethink everything that begins far long before the Civil War and leads up into the 20th century.

GABRIELLE FOREMAN And JIM CASEY are two co-founders and two co-directors of the Colored Conventions Project, a Black digital humanities initiative focused on researching and teaching the Colored Conventions Movement.

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: "Hi, my name is GABRIELLE FOREMAN, and I teach at the University of Delaware, and I am one of the cofounders of the Colored Conventions Project, and the founding faculty director of that project.

JIM CASEY: “Hello, I’m JIM CASEY. I’m a researcher at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, and I am also one of the cofounders of the Colored Conventions Project, and also one of the co-directors.

The Colored Conventions project or (CCP) is dedicated to identifying, collecting, and curating all of the documents produced by the Colored Conventions movement, which started in 1830 and lasted until the 1890s. The project is much bigger than just Forman or Casey, and it includes graduate fellow DENISE BURGHER.

DENISE BURGHER: Hello, my name is DENISE BURGHER, and I am a team member of the Colored Convention Project housed at the University of Delaware. The significance of this collection is that none of these documents have been collected in the same place. It is a scattered archive, and so not even when the Conventions were going on were the proceedings and the minutes and the calls and the memorials all in one place for anyone to actually look at and see. So this is actually the first time that this archive will be collected. It allows us to see not only the issues that were facing African Americans but in particular, how to make more complex how we think the African American community and the civic, social, political activity that were taken up, not just in the United States, but across the diaspora.

So what we’re getting is a more complete idea of not only what took place then, but how these activists were able to influence, shape, and create contemporary civil rights, political action, and social justice organizations in our current moment.”

By studying the organizing principles of the Colored Conventions Movement, the Project reveals how data can be a form of protest.

JIM CASEY: “One of the things that we see in the Conventions most often is that they are responding to a lack of information about who they are, who their communities are, and what they’re doing. This is about a kind of form of protest where we are trying to combat against things like ignorance. And so many of these conventions would have formalized ways of gathering information, distilling them, and then preparing them to get published in all kinds of different ways.”

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: “And the conventions themselves have a longer life and a longer reach because the proceedings often appear in Black newspapers and in the antislavery press. But if you look for coverage of these conventions, then you understand this structural and strategized reach to make sure we get beyond the people who were actually in the meeting rooms themselves. That’s one of the things that the project has made central. To think not just about the podium. And not just about the podium and the pews, but to think through the ways in which Black infrastructure was built around Black convention organizing.

JIM CASEY: So I’ll give you and example. In the California convention, we have this very small, quickly growing group. And they get together for conventions a couple of times in the 1850s on into the 1860s, and what they do is they ask everyone to ask around, to do what effectively amounts to a census. And they want to gather information about who the population is that is being left out of the official records, that’s being left out of the government reports. We have all kinds of things happening in California where folks are being denied the right to testify in a court of law for example, where you’re not physically able to account for yourself. And so the Conventions compile all of these statistics, and they track everything that they can, with the idea that they’re providing a set of useful information for the writers in their ranks, but also the local politicians to know that the community is not just a couple of people living out in gold rush country, but stretches across a lot of territory and a lot of people. And then when they go to publish it, and this is an important part: is that they prepare some reports that go out to the people of the United States or the people of Canada, they mean the broad general public. And then, in many of the conventions, prepare more reports that are addressed to the People of Color in the state or in the country. And oftentimes, they are putting out the same message or the same set of ideas, but really gearing and prioritizing different kinds of arguments in different places. And so, when thinking about the conventions as a place to learn about recording keeping, it’s full of so many of these great examples of folks who were thinking in multiple directions at the same time.

And the co-founders of the Project purposely structured the initiative to mirror the energy and collective commitments of the Colored Conventions themselves. One of the first thing that struck me when I visited the project website was the terms of use for the project’s data: the data are freely accessible, but when you go to download, the site asks you to commit to the following principles:

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: “I honor CCP’s commitment to a use of data that humanizes and acknowledges the Black people whose collective organizational histories are assembled here. Although the subjects of datasets are often reduced to abstract data points, I will contextualize and narrate the conditions of the people who appear as “data” and to name them when possible.”

As Forman explains, principles like these reflect the wholeness of Black communities and is an example of one of the ways that the project intentionally, and in practice, continues the principles of the Colored Convention Movement itself: to respect, not just collect.

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: “Whenever possible, we try to intervene in the ways in which Black people are represented in academic language, in academic spaces, in ways that do honor the ways in which the delegates and the conventions were intervening about the ways in which Black people were represented in the larger press, in the Law, and in the exclusionary politics that try to erase them.

Big data sets call things items. Black people show up on ledgers as items. We have a whole history of being turned into objects, and objects and items are the nomenclature in libraries and in museums in ways that we talk about things that we curate. So we want to in all moments testify and witness to the humanity and the narratives of named people whose histories have been disremembered, and who can be turned to datasets in ways that are extraordinarily comfortable considering the history of objectification and ownership that is the legacy of Black people’s existence in these United States over the last 400 years.

So that’s I think what we’re trying to make sure does not happen: that people come to the use of data which is collected in a group of people who want to respect, not just collect the work of people who came before us and largely make our existence and study possible, and we want to do that in a way that’s humanizing not just to them, but to us.”

And as BURGHER points out, part of the Project’s purpose is to change the overall narrative of the most-often told version of Black American history in the 19th century.

DENISE BURGHER: “We have a very fleshed out and detailed notation of abolition in this country, but we don’t understand that the majority of Abolitionists were African American, nor do we then understand the ways that African American activism shaped contemporary quote unquote American notions of civil rights, of who gets to vote and why, of who gets to stand in the juror box. This erasure, this imbalance allows one story to dominate, but we lose the ability to actually see what happen and we lose the ability to understand what happens. And it also then leads us, I think, to create a kind of celebratory history of American progress and American race neutrality, what we call post-racal, that the truth belies. We’re much more interested in learning what African Americans are saying about African Americans who are involved in creating this movement.”

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: “And that’s one of the reasons that the understudy of the Conventions Movement is a particularly egregious disremembrance because the Movement speaks to the continuous targeting of Communities of Color in this country that has gone pretty much uninterrupted and documents a much longer history of organized protest and formal petitioning of fair and equal treatment of those communities.”

The Colored Convention Project’s is also studying the social network of the convention goers: when you list out who attended which conference, you begin to see patterns, not only of prolific delegates, but also the infrastructure around the conventions. The project has even organized records like reviews of boarding houses the conference-goers stayed in.

Another key principle of the Project is a commitment to resurrecting women’s centrality to the movement, records of which might not be as widely published.

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: “It took a great deal of energy to host these conventions. Those Conventions had hundreds and hundreds of people attending and that those people were men and woman and that women were responsible for the boarding houses and the feeding and the housing of the delegates and that so many conversations and political strategy sessions we know also happened in those informal places. So the Project has been committed to resurrecting women’s centrality in the history that they have been erased from or anonymized in in terms of the records themselves, but we know they were central in the actual historical moment. And we have strategies and protocols to make sure as we resurrect that history, that women are included in the history that they help to create.

CASEY makes the point that the original convention-goers were really good at getting lots of people involved in the movement, and this presents yet another opportunity for the Project to mirror the Movement.

JIM CASEY: “We know that if we do just enough to help get folks up and running and participating in different kinds of ways, then we can really expand the numbers of who can participate and preserve in creating access to this history. To that idea, we’ve created this annual holiday to celebrate the birthday of Frederick Douglass. And what we do every year is we get birthday cakes and we sing happy birthday and we get together with groups and we give out organizing kits to help folks at other locations and schools organize their own events. Together, all in one afternoon, we log online and we transcribe documents together with the idea that we are both celebrating something and we’re inviting folks to participate in building parts of the history that we’re talking about.

Douglass Day wasn’t created by the Colored Conventions Project, but is another example of resurrecting something that already existed before. The Read-A-Thons take place on Frederick Douglass's chosen birthday, February 14, and in 2019 will be held at University of Delaware Morris Library and the African American Museum of Philadelphia. They will be live-streamed over the internet.

I think the best way to describe the Colored Convention Project is as an open research framework with a very strong set of principles. It’s remarkable for me to see organizing tools that I think of as modern, or at least native to the internet, have their roots in this understudied movement of 19th century Black activism. It’s also interesting to think how other projects and institutions can contribute and follow some of the same organizational principles.

GABRIELLE FOREMAN: “There is a place for storytelling in the midst of all this data and in fact, that’s what tends to connect with people, and in fact, that’s something that’s shared between museum and digital spaces. Some of the very questions about accessibility, and participation that museums are attempting to grapple with finally at this stage, we’re also engaging as a project that creates digital content and digital stories about this incredible group of delegates and participates and hosts who made this movement possible.

You can learn more about the Colored Conventions Project by visiting coloredconventions.org.

56. Lana Pajdas Trains Her ‘Fun Museums’ Lens to Croatian Heritage Sites, From The Battle of Vukovar to Over-Tourism in Dubrovnik Jan 07, 2019

Lana Pajdas is the founder of Fun Museums, a heritage and culture travel blog with a radical idea: museums are fun. It is the guiding principle of her museum marketing, consulting work, and even her photographs.

In this episode, Pajdas describes Heritage Sites in her native Croatia, from the interpretation of the 1991 Battle of Vukovar at the Vukovar Municipal Museum to the Game of Thrones-inspired Over-Tourism in Dubrovnik

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Sponsor: The Museums, Heritage, and Public History program at the University of Missouri at St. Louis

This episode of Museum Archipelago is sponsored by The Museums, Heritage, and Public History program at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
The program is currently accepting applications for the Fall 2019 semester. They offer an MA degree as well as a Graduate Certificate. Their programs address pressing needs of museums and heritage institutions in the 21st century and prepare students for professional careers in museums, historic sites and societies, cultural agencies, and related organizations. Financial support is available for a limited number of students and applications are due on February 1st. For more information, please call 314-516-4805 or visit their website.

Topics and Links

00:00: Intro
00:15: Croatia
00:40: Over-Tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia
01:14: Lana Pajdas and the Fun Museums Blog
02:39: Disney’s America on Museum Archipelago
03:15: Vukovar Municipal Museum on the Battle of Vukovar
05:12: “Museum Procrastination”
06:14: Sustainable Tourism
07:59: Possible Solutions to Over-Tourism
09:08: FunMuseums.eu
09:18: Sponsor: The Museums, Heritage, and Public History program at the University of Missouri at St. Louis
10:11: Outro | Join Club Archipelago

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 56. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Lana Pajdas is from Croatia.

Lana Pajdas: We are a small country, and we have fewer inhabitants that some US cities. We don’t have as many fields of industry or strong economy or whatever, and tourism is maybe the most important field we have.

But in recent years, the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, due in part to being a prominent filming location of the TV series Game of Thrones, has experienced dramatic overcrowding.

Lana Pajdas: I was there last time, and it was pretty much terrible to see that people were waiting in lines to enter inside the old town, inside the walls. There were so many agencies selling Game of Thrones tours and taking people to some specific areas where it’s kind of difficult to have so many people in the same place, even for safety reasons.

Pajdas is the founder of Fun Museums, a heritage and culture travel blog.

Lana Pajdas: Okay, my name is Lana Pajdas, My blog is called Fun Museums because I like to say that visiting museums is fun above all. Visiting museums is a fun experience, and people shouldn’t think that museums are something cold, elegant, smart, intelectual. It’s just, people can have that experience in their leisure time.

Pajdas is also a museum marker and consultant. Her overall theme is that museums are fun. It is a radical idea — and it influences everything, from her philosophy on museum marketing to a way to approach overcrowding in museums and heritage sites.

Lana Pajdas: Exactly, that is my guiding principle. The way I write my articles it to say the most cool, funky stuff about each museums I visit. Sometimes museum professionals don’t like this at all, that’s why some people from museums, museum curators for instance, museum marketing professionals or education professionals, they send me messages: “could you stop saying things that way because it is in contrast to our professional values.” But then I said, okay, but that’s what people like to know. That’s what people like to hear. If you think it should be more intellectual, you have to understand that most people can’t read it that way, understand the way you want to present it to them.

But there is a real tension, because the axis isn’t just between what’s fun and what’s intellectual. In episode 17 of Museum Archipelago, I cover the spectacular failure of a Disney theme park concept called Disney's America in 1994. The park, which would open in Virginia not far from Washington DC, would showcase [quote] “the sweep of American History” within a fun theme park environment. It is particularly notable to witness the confidence and enthusiasm Disney executives had for a tightrope between entertainment and American history.

Lana Pajdas: An example is a town on the east of Croatia, its name is Vukovar. This town was heavily destroyed in the most recent war in this part of Europe in 1991 when it was occupied. Almost all the buildings were destroyed, most of the people have to go away from there, and it was one of the most terrible stories that happened in Europe after the Second World War. And now the city has been quite well restored some people went back to live there, and the museum was completely renovated. And obviously, the visit to that museum is a nice and pleasant experience, but in recent history you really need to deal with some awful stuff that happened less than 30 years ago. It’s difficult for a person from Western Europe to understand what happened in ex-Yugoslavia. Even sometimes too complicated for people from this areas. It’s not as simple as some books like to present or some journalists like to present and there are many different opinions. So I think that museums sometimes need to take certain sides, even if some will disagree. Museums that deal with that stories needs to first of all show those emotions and to collaborate with people who suffered those emotions. Of course some emotional intelligence is very important for people who create that storytelling, who transmit emotions of certain people or people who will be just visitors, or maybe have nothing to with those areas or stories.

No matter what kind of museum you’re about to walk into, you have a sense of what you might find inside. And since that sense is partially informed by a museum’s marketing, Pajdas has made a habit of noting how people react to museums before they go.

Lana Pajdas: In most cases, it happens that people procrastinate their decisions to go to a museum. That happens more often than not. Next time I would really like to visit that museum, but today I feel a bit tired. I’m hungry, I want to go to eat to drink, I prefer to stay at home, watch a movie, I would really love to go the museum, but maybe one day. When my friends go to Paris, for instance, they say, I want to visit Louvre, I know there are other museums, but maybe another time. Because Louvre is already enough for me for these three days.

This tendency to choose the most popular museum to the exclusion of less frequently-visited ones is part of Pajdas’s interest in sustainable tourism.

Lana Pajdas: I’m parallel interested in sustainable travel and the museum thing, and these are the two areas I mentioned as my primary focus and interest. So museums and sustainable travel. Sustainability has so many faces, I’m quite interested in seeing about energy efficiency and waste management. But overtorusiim being one of my focus areas even though I don’t really pretend to know what could be a solution to that. Some attractions like the Alhombre Castle in Spain introduced online booking and you can’t just come in, buy a ticket and enter, but you have to book your spot in advance online and sometimes you can’t get a ticket if you just remember a week before you go. These are some of the solutions.

I do wonder how much of this heavily concentrated overcrowding has to do with the nature social media itself -- there’s a network effect of a geotagged photo, not just a particular heritage site, but at particular spot within that heritage site that presents the best angle for a photo or looks exactly the way it did on Game of Thrones.

Of course, there are many other factors that lead to overcrowding — the cheap flights, the increasing ability of people to travel, and the dynamic of travel as a product.

And if the Acropolis is at already capacity every single day, what it is going to look like 10 or 20 years from now? And to go back to Disney, tourism as a product already has an answer — just raise the prices. But heritage for the rich isn’t heritage anymore.

Lana Pajdas: Heritage should be accessible. Obviously, for many people around the world, it’s not really affordable to go to some places. What I want to be avoided is it becomes too expensive that only wealthy people can afford visiting those attractions. That’s what I would like to be avoided. And another thing, I would really like to encourage more people who really like to travel to visit secondary attractions, not go necessarily to the most famous places, but to visit some places around that usually also need visitors and more local people could make money for living, if they get visitors on those particular places, because more people could be employed in those places and businesses could flourish. That’s the basic thing.

And this is what ties all aspects of Pajdas (pydash)’s work together — to use the social media network effect to share the secondary attractions of a city, balancing the pressure on the most popular heritage site.

To read Pajdas (pydash)’s blog, and to learn about her consulting work, visit Funmuseums.eu. Her twitter handle is @LanaPajdas.

55. Barbara Hicks-Collins Is Turning Her Family Home Into the Bogalusa Civil Rights Museum Dec 03, 2018

Barbara Hicks-Collins grew up in a Civil Rights house in Bogalusa, Louisiana. In her family breakfast room in 1965, her father, the late Robert “Bob” Hicks, founded the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The armed self-defense force was formed in response to local anti-integration violence that the local police force complicitly supported.

The house became a communication hub, a safe house, and a medical triage station for injured activists denied medical services at the state hospital. After her father’s death, Barbara Hicks-Collins decided that the house has one more chapter: as the Bogalusa Civil Rights Museum.

In this episode, Barbara Hicks-Collins talks about growing up with the Civil Rights movement in her living room and describes the process, progress, and challenges of today’s Bogalusa Civil Rights Museum project.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 55. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Barbara Hicks-Collins can describe the exact moment an idea for a civil rights museum in Bogalusa, Louisiana entered her mind.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “After Hurricane Katrina, our homes were devastated so I had to move back to Bogalusa, I was able to help my mom take care of my father, his health was failing.”

Barbara Hicks-Collins’s father is the late Robert “Bob” Hicks, a civil rights leader and founder of the first chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. The Deacons were an armed African-American self-defense force operating in the segregated — and violently hostile towards integration — city of Bogalusa and other towns across the American south in the 1960s.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “I spent about five years with him and every waking hour we could talk, he talked to me about what he loved to talk about: the civil rights movement. When my father died, I realized that a lot of things are not permanent. And that meant to me that a lot of the history that I felt would always be here because we experienced history and it was so important for people to know why they are where they are today, and history makers — they were dying off sooner than I had expected.”

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “But I was thinking of a way — how could we preserve the history permanently — and the idea of a dream came up: why not a museum? Where you can start preserving the history, talking to some of the decedents and make a civil rights museum so this generation and generations forever would know about that.”

Today, Barbara Hicks-Collins is the director of the museum, and she joins me to talk about the process, progress, and challenges of the Bogalusa Civil Rights Museum project.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “Greetings from Bogalusa, Louisiana! I’m Barbara Hicks-Collins. I’m the museum director of the future museum which is going to be the civil rights museum in Bogalusa and I’m also one of the founders and executive director of a non-profit organization named after my father, The Robert Bob Hicks Foundation. And how are you today?”

I’m doing well! Before we start talking about the museum, we have to talk about the town of Bogalusa and the life of Robert “Bob” Hicks.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: The Goodyears came from New York and they started the paper mill here in Bogalusa and they brought in people from all over the country when they heard there was going to be a mill here. They brought them in. Then they built homes for the people to love in. And since this was 1906, of course, they are separated. So in Bogalusa, it's separated where you have the blacks and you have the whites. They build churches for blacks and churches for white. So that's how they tried to do, they said it was equal if you did it that way. Everything, so you know that story.

In the 1960s, Robert “Bob” Hicks worked and labor organized at the paper mill and lived with his wife Jackie Hicks and their children in a house in the black neighborhood of Bogalusa.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “Since our family house was known as the civil rights house because we were a civil rights family and all the civil rights workers. Anyone who came into Bogalusa, just everybody. Civil rights lawyers, they would always come to the house.

On February 1st 1965, after a series of meetings at the Bogalusa Voters League, Bob and Jackie hicks invited two white civil rights workers, William Yates and Steve Miller into their home, aware that they would not be safe in a nearby hotel because of local Ku Klux Klan activity.

Robert and Jackie Hicks sat down for dinner that night with their children, including Barbara, and their guests Yates and Miller. When they finished eating, they retired to the living room to watch television and talk over the day’s events.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Robert Hicks opened it and found the Bogalusa Police Chief standing in the doorway. He had bad news: a mob of whites had gathered nearby and they were prepared to murder the entire family and burn the house to the ground if the Hicks didn't put the white activists out. The officer added that they should expect no help from law enforcement.

As Lance Hill writes in The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, “Bob and Jackie Hicks were levelheaded activists and they mobilized quickly; Jackie promptly called several friends for assistance. When it became known that the Hicks family needed protection, the black men of Bogalusa responded swiftly. The police officers watched line of black men — armed with shotguns and rifles—rapidly file into the Hicks house.

The mob never materialized.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “We were just an ordinary family, but we were placed here to do extraordinary things and that was to, as my daddy say, to be the voice for the voiceless. To be the person who would stand up for people who were afraid to stand up for themselves. And so that's what he did and that's what we, as a family, began to do. That's when we reached out ... well, he reached out and the leader, and they start the spirit and so men who had never stood up before began to stand up and say no to the injustice. ”

A few weeks later, after more violence in Bogalusa and on the day of Malcolm X's assassination, Robert “Bob” Hicks and fellow activists founded the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, headquartered in Hicks' home and made up of many of the same foot soldiers who had come forward with their guns to protect the family on February 1.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “In our breakfast room was the radio, so when people called in the communication radio, we could hear that all over the house. People called we would hear all of that. Some people were calling in for distressed. We would hear all of that. My brother was refused medical service because he shouldn’t have been at the public park which is all white.”

In this way, the house served as not only the communication headquarters, but as but a safe house and a medical triage station for injured activists denied medical services at the state hospital.

And now the house has one final use: as the future Bogalusa Civil Rights museum.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “It was my family house. I mean, that's where I grew up. That's where all the civil rights activity took place so when I walk in the house I see the family standing in the living room on Sunday morning with my father giving the Sunday morning prayer before we go to church. I see that and I see our bedrooms and I see mom in the kitchen and all of that. Then on the other hand, I see the fear, I see the struggle, I see where we had the men from the Deacons for Defense and Justice with guns all around to protect the civil rights workers who stayed at our house and to protect my father wherever he went, to protect the family. So, seeing the house in two different points of view or feeling two different ways. Based on that, I want to show in the museum what we went through as a part of the movement and then maybe they can understand how difficult it was. That this way of life was not the way it should have been for any American.”

This future museum, this house made into a museum, will interpret what happened inside and outside against the wallpaper of a domestic scene. For Barbara Hicks-Collins and her family, a closed front door didn’t close out the world around her. The radio -- which was necessary because the city would monitor and occasionally shut off the phone lines -- could come on at any moment. For all the other interpretations that the museum will present, the Klan’s threat to daily life is maybe the most powerful.

So what’s the process of getting from here to there? For Hicks-Collins, it started with making small, periment changes to Bogalusa landscape that will pave the way for the museum.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “From the idea of having a museum with the history preserved, then I started going through the process. I think the first thing that I did was to go to the zoning commission to make sure that it was zoned for a Civil Rights Museum. That was a little complicated. You have to know Bogalusa. I had people to come in to support the idea and finally they approved the area for a Civil Rights Museum. So the second thing was to rename the street where the Hicks family lived. To rename that street Robert “Bob” Hicks Street. That took some doing. Eventually, it happened and so the entire street is named after my father. By this time, we had the Robert Bob Hicks Foundation, made it a 501(c)(3) organization. And from that point we were able to move to getting a land marker and by the way, the land marker is right in front of the Hick's house. What's interesting about that is that they never had a land marker for an African American in Washington Parrish. Never. This was the first one. So we thought that was a great success.

The Robert Bob Hicks Foundation is building support through fundraisers, a small grant through the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, and volunteer efforts to physically prepare the house for the museum. Hicks-Collins also recently secured a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services to record interviews with members of the Deacons, civil rights lawyers, and others.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “But the whole thing that I want to say to you about this whole process and having a dream and staying on courses though is something you have to believe in because it's not easy but it's possible. It's definitely possible. It's not going to occur overnight. Just like the struggle for equality in all these little, small, country towns and in America as a whole, it didn't come overnight. So you have to be committed and you have to stay the course even though some people may not be with you, you still have to stay the course because you know the end result. You know you're going to give this generation and generations to follow something that was so valuable. If you don't go about it with that mindset, you'll lose it.

Hicks-Collins is working build the museum in time so that the few civil rights workers and foot soldiers who are still living, will be on site, giving tours and answering questions.

The museum project is entering what Hicks-Collins calls phase II: restoring the house to make it suitable for a museum: rewiring the stolen electrical system with updated codes, installing a security system, and building the Legend Gallery with surround seats in the carpark. You can find out more information about Robert Hicks and the status of the museum by visiting roberthicksfoundation.squarespace.com and you can donate to the foundation at roberthicksfoundation.squarespace.com/donate.

Barbara Hicks-Collins: “Let me tell you this. On Martin Luther King's birthday we have the ROTC students to come in and they help do the volunteer work. I started explaining to them before they started doing any work that this is going to be whose house it was and this is going to be a museum, the whole spiel there. I asked this girl, I said ... teenagers, junior, sophomore at the time, I said, "What museums have you been to?" And she said, "None." I said, "No. I mean, have you been out of Bogalusa to go to a museum anywhere? Not just in Bogalusa. And she said, "No. I haven't been. I've never been to a museum." It was ... how could that be? She was a junior. How could that be a thing, a junior, almost a senior, never been to a museum? And she worked harder than anybody else and so I just hugged her say, "So you're one of the people that I'm working for. I'm working so you can have a museum and you can let your children know that you were a part of this." That gives me more courage to come in. We need to make sure that their stories always, already, always here and what better there other than a museum?

This has been Museum Archipelago.

[Outro]

54. Buzludzha Is Deteriorating. Brian Muthaliff Wants To Turn It Into A Winery. Nov 19, 2018

High in the Balkan mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past.

Architect Brian Muthaliff wants the building to evolve along with Bulgaria. His master’s thesis on Buzludzha describes a re-adaption of the site to subvert the original intention of the architecture, including installing a winery and a theater.

Unlike architect Dora Ivanova’s Buzludzha Project, which we discussed at length in episode 47, Muthaliff’s plan only calls for a single, museum-like space. In this episode, we use Muthaliff’s thesis as a guide as we go in-depth on what a museum means and discuss the best path forward for this building and for Bulgaria.

Image: Rendering from R.E.D | Reconstruction in an Era of Dilapidation: A Proposal for the Revitalization of the Former House of the Communist Party by Brian Muthaliff

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 54. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Ever since I visited earlier this year, I can't stop thinking about Buzludzha.

Buzludzha, an enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria, celebrates the grandeur of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

Rising out of the back of the disk is a tower, 70 meters high, and flanked by two red stars. The building was designed to look like a giant wreath and flag. During its construction, the top of the peak was blown away with dynamite to make way for the building. Today, it's hard not to see a giant UFO. Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova says that the building's daring design was, of course, intentional.

Dora Ivanova: It was built to impress. It was built as part of the political propaganda and education as they called it during this time. Its shape looks like a UFO, actually. This is also on purpose because it had to show how the socialist idea is contemporary, it’s the future.

The building is deteriorating, making its futuristic design all the more striking. Buzludzha was completed in 1981, but just 10 years later, the Communist party collapsed. As the regime changed and Bulgaria headed towards a democratic form of government, Buzludzha just sat there. Parts of the structure became exposed to the elements. On the top of the mountain, the building was whipped by strong winds and frozen by temperatures as low as -25 °C. Today, the building has been a ruin way longer than it was a functional building.

Brian Muthaliff: The interiors were everything that I had imagined while approaching it from the exterior, in this kind of derelict state. When on the interior, it was completely dark when we got there. Our flashlights couldn't even get very far, and we were kind of all holding hands, you know, taking the next step carefully. You could see chunks of concrete falling off in certain places.

This is Brian Muthaliff, a Canadian architect who first visited Buzludzha with his Bulgarian fiancée.

Brian Muthaliff: All right. Hi. My name is Brian Muthaliff. I am an architect in Ontario, Canada, who has his master's thesis focused on the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria, and the re-adaption of it.

Buzludzha is deteriorating. The question is: what should we do about it?

Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova has a plan to turn it into a museum. We highlighted her work, called The Buzludzha Project, in episode 47 of this program.

The Buzludzha Project aims to repair and preserve the building and interpret what it means. Bulgaria lacks an interpretive museum about the decades of communist rule under the thumb of the Soviet Union. What better place to put that museum but inside Buzludzha?

Ivanova is under no illusions that a painstaking restoration of the building to its original form could give the impression of celebrating the the building’s original ideologies. She thinks that adapting or repurposing the monument would be forgetting or disguising its original intention.

But Brian Muthaliff respectfully disagrees. He wants the building to evolve along with Bulgaria.

Brian Muthaliff: There are two types of museums, I think, that occur in the contemporary world. One, the museum that's built anew to house artifacts. And the second is when buildings get turned into museums as artifacts. Both of them are appropriate in certain circumstances. This is not the case. I think this building speaks to a much broader question than just mere artifact.

Muthaliff also could not stop thinking about Buzludzha after he visited for the first time. He focused his master’s thesis on changing the meaning of the building and what it could be used for in the future -- a process he calls “reprogramming.”

Brian Muthaliff: The moment we left that building there was this kind of lingering thought about this particular monument. It felt like there was a real potential for the building, and faced with the project of figuring out a thesis, this building stayed in mind. And it wouldn't leave me. So, I decided to make it the focus of the thesis. I think the scope's expanded beyond the building at that point, it became a conversation about the culture in Bulgaria, and this building as a reflection of that culture, and how I could tie the two things together. The thesis became about reprogramming the building as a means of reconciling with their past. And beyond that it became about what type of program, then, is appropriate for this project? What type of program could maybe speak to the Bulgarian history, which is centuries long, I think it's almost 5000 years, and communism makes up a very small fraction of that piece. So when we're talking about the nation's identity, what is that identity? And how can a program, and a building, reconciled, represent that, the nation?

This is the good stuff. This is what Museum Archipelago is all about. Should this building become a museum, or something else all together? Bulgaria has plenty of communist era monuments -- listen to episode 25 about the Museum of Socialist Art for a fascinating discussion of a museum where statues of Lenin decorate a slightly overgrown field -- but Buzledga is the only monument that you can occupy. For Muthaliff, this is an invitation for people to participate with the architecture.

Brian Muthaliff: I wanted it to be something that people can still participate in, without having to kind of mentally prepare before visiting the building that actually they are going there to learn, in the very traditional way of learning, which is just kind of, you know, reading or being distanced from the object.

And the means of participation? A winery, of course.

Brian Muthaliff: So the building, in my view in the thesis, ends up being this winery that's open to the public. It cultivates the land. The metaphor there is that it's a productive tool, and production is a kind of means of creating the future. So it's not something that kind of stops, it's not something that you're distanced from, it's not something that you read or that you look at. It's something that you participate in. And through participation, through action, you kind of reconcile your histories. Programmatically, the winery needed to be the thing that draws, that makes the building productive, and then it holds up this kind of shield for the people to sort of celebrate it.

Part of what the redesign accomplishes is subverting the original intention of the building. The building is designed with one entrance underneath to the main dome, which focuses the visitor experience into the grandeur of the building and, by extension, the Bulgarian communist party.

Muthaliff calls for terraforming the peak so it reaches back to its original height before it was levelved off, leaving some of the building underground. What is now a series of enormous windows high around the dome, providing views of the entire county, become entrances, inviting people in from all corners of Bulgaria.

Brian Muthaliff: It meant to remove the type of procession that was intended from the beginning, which is you kind of ascend in to this halo-ed space. And use the kind of elongated windows that band the circumference of the building as entrance points, as this kind of democratic platform that would invite everybody from around the entire country. And that's, by virtue of the way they placed it in the country, dead center … And then these windows in a circle so kind of have a view to every point of the country, and I thought, they are all portals in to the building. And so if we terraform the mountain top to be what it was, to meet that level, so that people could approach it and enter that space publicly, that again was a kind of subversive move to the architecture political agenda of the building, which is this one kind of procession through this space. Now it would be multiple kind of entries, multiple ways of experiencing the wreath. And then finally hitting or ending up in this kind of celebratory space. Which is at the top of the mountain.

I can’t help but be delighted at subverting the original intention of the building. Muthaliff notes that his proposal reminds him of a traditional Bulgarian dance called the horo: it’s a circular dance that starts off with just a few people. As the dance goes on, the dancers develop a kind of gravity, pulling in people from every which way, and then all of a sudden it's this massive circle, and then it's a spiral, and then it's a kind of a crowd of people all circulring. It’s something a Bulgarian grandmother would approve of.

And speaking of Bulgarian grandmothers, Muthaliff’s thesis does leave room for a single museum-like space. In this case, he describes it as another subversive tool.

Brian Muthaliff: Post the fall, post-1989, there was an initiative to collect letters, and memoirs, and autobiographies, and photographs, of people throughout Bulgaria during the communist period. How great is it as a kind of subversive tool to describe this particular history during this time, through the eyes of the people in this building that was designed kind of from top down? And in the ring that they used as a gallery space to block out the sun, to kind of create the halo of the sickle and hammer, like it all just kind of makes sense as an architectural move that would both pull in the sense of life during communism, so it's in a way directly speaking about communism in this communist building, but about things that I think are far more profound than the kind of political agenda of the communist period. In some of the stories it would talk about grandmothers, I guess, that are grandmothers now but they weren't at the time, where they got their food, and I thought these histories were far more compelling than perhaps talking about how the building was built. So these are the kind of things and threads that I wanted to pull on, rather than a kind of topical history of communism. And so I think it made for such a great program as the only type of traditional museum piece in the building. I think in my mind, and again the program of the winery, perhaps there's more appropriate programs that could affect the building, but in my mind, it has always been a gathering space.

I’m mesmerised by Muthaliff’s thesis. As Buzludzha continues to deteriorate, both Dora Ivanova and Brian Muthaliff agree that now is the time to act.

Brian Muthaliff: Dora's approach to moving the project forward is absolutely what the country needs. A lot of people are saying, you know, this is the moment now. This is the time we need to take action and we need to do something, 'cause if the country's not moving, then either people are moving out of it or something, or nothing's happening and things are dying. Everything's always dying, right, and we have to kind of maintain our lives to kind of keep the energy going. And so the energy that Dora's putting in to it is absolutely fabulous, and it's exactly what we need for the building.

As a Bulgarian citizen who is too young to remember the period of communism, I am constantly frustrated by the generall cultural unwillingness to talk about that period. The physical remains of that era and ideology are scattered around the country, but most people I talk to in Bulgaria seem content to quickly move on.

Brian Muthaliff: On an kind of end note, when I presented the thesis to the university, a note that my thesis advisor brought up was that, because I did have an architect on my panel that was critiquing the thesis, that was Romanian. And he was absolutely appalled that anybody would even touch the project. He was more in line with building a glass box beside the building and sipping wine while watching it decay. He carried all these emotions with him, and something that was brought up, there was a young Bulgarian there and then there was this old Romanian architect, and the young architect mentioned that there's been this massive gap, and people, or the country really needs change, and the only people who are gonna do or affect change are us, are the ones responsible now.

I think it all comes down to what we make of museums. Museums shouldn’t be the places where we sip wine and watch objects in glass decay. An interpretive museum could be just as subversive to the original architecture even as it restores it. And there’s no reason why museums can’t be gathering spaces just as engaging as wineries or dance halls.

So if I had a say in the decision, I think I would prefer to build an interpretive museum in the space along the lines of what Dora Ivanova’s Buzludzha Project proposes. But we should take Muthaliff’s thesis, and critique of architecture frozen in time, to heart.

The debate about what to do with Buzludzha continues, and I’m happy to say progress is being made. Just recently a team of experts from the European heritage organisation Europa Nostra conducted a survey of the building. I hope, in my own way, to work on whatever the building becomes.

Muthaliff’s complete thesis, called Reconstruction in an Era of Dilapidation, is available in the show notes. It’s full of fascinating diagrams, well-thought out readings, and intricate renderings. Give it a read.

[Outro]

53. Tribal Historic Preservation Office Helps Students Map Seminole Life for the Ah-tah-thi-ki Museum Nov 05, 2018

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum, on the Big Cypress Reservation in the Florida Everglades, serves as the public face of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. But the museum collaborates with the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) next door to preserve the tribe's culture, working for and with the community through various shared projects.

One of the projects is called Are We There Yet: Engaging the Tribal Youth with Story Maps, which is now on display in the museum. Quenton Cypress, Community Engagement Coordinator at THPO, and Lacee Cofer, Geo Spatial Analyst at THPO, started the project with Juan Cancel, Chief Data Analyst at THPO. The team taught 11th grade students at the Ahfachkee School (the school on the Big Cypress Reservation) GIS mapping software and helped the students create their own maps about a Seminole or Native American topic.

In this episode, the THPO team talks about the process of teaching the students how to use geospatial software, the Story Maps that the students created, and how the students reacted to seeing their work in the museum gallery.

Image: Lacee Cofer, Juan Cancel & Quenton Cypress presenting thier project at the Esri User Conference in San Diego in 2018.

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00:00: Intro
00:15: The Big Cypress Reservation & Quenton Cypress
01:05: Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki on Episode 16 of Museum Archipelago
01:48: The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office
03:00: Lacee Cofer
03:30: Are We There Yet: Engaging the Tribal Youth with Story Maps
03:58: Juan Cancel
04:50: “But how does that serve the tribal community?”
07:09: The Topics Students Choose
08:58: Students Seeing Their Work at Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki
10:32: Why Mapping?
11:46: Outro / Watch Making-Of For Free on Patreon

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast for free to never miss an episode.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 53. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

To get to the Big Cypress Reservation in South Florida and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum inside it, you drive an hour into the Florida Everglades. By the time you arrive, you’re isolated from almost everything else.

Quenton Cypress: Here in Big Cypress, it's just us. There's a convenience store that's open till 11 o'clock at night. There's no Walmart, no Publix, no Walgreens. Anytime we need just some toilet paper, we have to drive an hour. And we have to make sure we get everything.

This is Quenton Cypress, Community Engagement Coordinator at the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

Quenton Cypress: My name is Quenton Cypress, and I'm the Community Engagement Coordinator. And I'm actually a tribe member. I'm from this reservation that we work on. My job is to make sure the community works with us.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, or THPO, where Quentin works, is separate form the The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum.

We’ve talked about the museum before: on episode 16 of Museum Archipelago, I interviewed Carrie Dilley, Visitor Services and Development Manager at Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki, about the high percentage of museum visitors from outside the U.S. Through these visitation trends, the museum serves as the public face of the tribe to the outside world.

But the museum, more importantly, serves the tribal community. Quenton and the THPO work to preserve his culture, and ensure it is not exploited. And this means a strong connection between the museum and tribal members.

Quenton Cypress: There are a lot of things that we can give out to the public, but there are certain things that we can't. It was actually our chairman at the time, James Billy, who wanted to build the museum to talk to the tourists and different folks that came around to tell them more about the Seminole history. So it started off very community involved. And we had several community members that were running the museum. And just over time different things happened and they started working somewhere else.

And then the museum became more non tribal populated. And that connection between the museum and tribal members, it just kind of fell apart in a way. Not so much in a bad way. They just didn't have no more tribe members working here to full connect us with the museum. Sometimes tribal members don't feel comfortable coming and talking to a non tribal. And telling them their history, their family's history, and different legends and things we have from our culture.

And so in more recent times, I've seen a lot more involvement with the community again. And we got different tribal interns. The tribe offers working programs. So we've got some tribal member kids coming to us, and working for us, through that program. And we got different kids coming to us to fill their community hours for school to graduate..

Lacee Cofer: For a long time they didn't really associate with each other or work together very much. And in recent years that's really changed.

This is Lacee Cofer, who also works for the Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

Lacee Koffer: Yes. My name's Lacee Cofer, and I am the Geospatial Analyst for the THPO. Both the museum and THPO have the goal of cultural preservation. So we perform very different roles, and do it in very different ways. But we still have that common goal to preserve the culture, and to work for and with the community.

Today, both the THPO and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum share a campus -- their buildings are connected via a boardwalk. Both offices have been working on finding new projects that serve their common goal. One of these projects is called Are We There Yet: Engaging the Tribal Youth with Story Maps, which is collaboration of the THPO, the museum, and Ahfachkee school, which is the school on the Big Cypress Reservation. Both Quenton and Lacee created the project with Juan Cancel.

Juan Cancel: Hello. My name is Juan Cancel. I'm the Chief Data Analyst at the Florida Tribal Historic Preservation Office. I manage the archaeometry section. With my team Quenton and Lacee. Pretty much we manage all the mapping, GIS work that goes on in the office.

The project involved teaching the Ahfachkee School’s 11th grade students the GIS mapping software, having the students develop and create their own maps about a Seminole or Native American issue, and finally, presenting those maps in a gallery at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum. It started as a way to encourage young tribal members to get involved in the community. For Juan, that meant starting by thinking about how Quenton, a young tribal member, and Lacee, who was becoming skilled in GIS, could get even more involved at the museum.

Juan Cancel: And what they both do and represent for me at least, is breaking that mold. Together we've been working on developing GIS. Developing mapping to track our information a little bit better. Tracking our information more, location and data and put it all together. But that's good well and all for our office, but how does that serve the tribal community? What we saw a couple of, maybe nine years ago, we went to a mapping conference. It was a international conference. And one of the most impactful presentations we ever saw was, this gentlemen went out into the Amazon, and was mapping with the community out there. With the indigenous tribes out there. But he was doing it with them. He was having them point to a map or explaining what this is. And they together came up with that. And that's where this idea of participatory mapping came about. And it's not a hard idea, it's something they did and we're like, that's genius. But we just took it as well. We're like, you know what? We're gonna apply this here.

To create the program, the team had to create lesson plans for the 11th graders. Lacee thought that students would have a harder time learning how to use the GIS mapping software than writing a research paper.

Lacee Cofer: And it was the complete opposite. So teaching them our GIS online, they caught onto it so quickly. And choosing symbology and uploading images. And just navigating the whole interface was so easy for them. But them I'm like, "All right, we're going to cite our sources using APA," and they're like "What are you talking about?" So it really threw us for a loop. But then the more I think about it I'm like, duh. They use this stuff all the time. They're on their computers and their smartphones and their iPads literally all the time. So I don't know why this surprised me. But it really reinforced the idea that getting to them using technology is a super effective way to do it with teenagers. So it just bridged the gap and really helped us teach them the important of place and topics. And using the science to preserve their culture. And since it was technological and something they used all the time, it just clicked. So it was helpful. And it was good.

The students could choose topics that interested them, as long as it touched on a Seminole or Native American issue. The team helped the students figure out a geographic aspect to their topics and present it all in a story map.

Juan Cancel: It could be any subject, so Lacee prepared a list with Quentin and I on what we want to hit on and some examples of like history, historical figures, sports, fashion, politics. I think they kind of chose the things, I guess ... It's funny they found things that they were really interested in.

Lacee Cofer: Yeah. We had one who is really into hip-hop music, and so he created a story map that talks about different Native American musicians and it was really cool and he was really passionate about that topic and I learned about a lot of musicians that are Native American I didn't know about, and then something that's really important to the tribe is the cattle industry and one of our students discussed the cattle industry and how it played such a pivotal role in the current economic state of the Seminole tribe, and then we had another girl who at the time was participating in the Seminole Princess Pageant, and so she did her story map on Seminole princesses of the past and talked about the pageant and how it got started and how it was important to the community.

Quenton Cypress: All year long, whenever we were talking to these kids and doing this project, we would always tell them, "Hey, this map that you're creating is a chance to tell our history, our culture, and you're gonna be telling it to people all over the world." They couldn't really quite grasp that concept because we're here at the museum an hour into the Everglades by ourselves. So, whenever we were trying to explain it to them all year long, they just kinda gave us a smirk.

Finally, after a semester of work, the students got to see their projects in the gallery at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum. As Quintin explains, this shift in medium changed the way the students saw their projects.

Quenton Cypress: It wasn't until that reception day that they walked in and seeing all this work we here at the museum put together to present their story maps to the public. It wasn't 'til that day that they walked in there and seeing the iPads up on the wall and their stories on those iPads. They were fully engaged into those iPads. They were smiling, talking, laughing, and a couple of them were like, "Man, I feel bad that I didn't add on more stuff that I could have added on now." You know, along the way, there was a couple of students that didn't get to get their work to us and they felt guilty that day. It's bad, but it's good at the same time because now they get to see, "Hey, we were being serious. This is gonna be in the museum. This is gonna be on display for the world to see." One of the kids. He was really quiet the whole year, barely talked to us. I think he talked to us maybe like three words and he would never smile, and that opening day, that day we did the reception, he could not stop smiling. He was smiling the whole time. He was laughing. He was talking about the exhibit. to see him acting like that was a really big deal for us, and then for the rest of the high school to see their work on display, we hope that's more encouraging for them, so now they get to see the end result of the whole project and all of the work that goes into it. So if we get to do this project again in the future, we're hoping they're more motivated and they now know that, yeah, their work is gonna be on display. It is gonna be open for the world to see.

The team presented this project in front of other GIS professionals and educators at the 2018 Esri User Conference in San Diego. For all the improvements in mapping technology over the last 20 years, it’s the democratization of the tools of map-making that is the most relevant to museums. There is not one canonical map in the way there is one canonical planet.

Juan Cancel: There's a tribal understanding of the land. The community understands this area. They've been here forever. They've always been in Florida. We don't see mapping the same way. So if I call a road, like, oh did you go down the C130 canal or something like that. Quenton, he's like, "Oh, you mean the fishing spot, down the road near my uncle's house?" So it's a very different perspective.

The project has been a success. The gallery with the student’s maps will remain open in the museum until January 8th, 2019, and the team plans to continue the project with other students in the Big Cypress reservation in coming years.

Juan Cancel: And I think story mapping was the Ideal vehicle, so to say, that transitioned both current technology, online technology, accessibility to the tribal youth. And an avenue to get them started to understand what we do a lot better.

52. Paula Santos Dives Into The "How" of Museum Work on Cultura Conscious Oct 15, 2018

By day, Paula Santos is Community Engagement Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. By night, she hosts the excellent Cultura Conscious podcast.

On Cultura Conscious, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary, Santos interviews cultural workers on their work with justice and equity. The discussions dive deep into what Santos calls the "nuts and bolts" of museum work.

On this episode, Santos describes her thoughts about the relationship between cultural institutions and the communities they identify as “underserved,” gives examples on how institutions can cede power, and explains how the idea for her podcast came out of a cultural worker discussion collective she was a part of in New York City.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00 Intro
00:15 Paula Santos
00:53 Cultural Institutions and Communities
04:14: Cultura Conscious
05:27: The Idea for the Show
06:55: Nuts and Bolts of Museum Work
07:58: Subscribe to Cultura Conscious
09:50: Outro & Club Archipelago

Museum Archipelago is a fortnightly museum podcast guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums and surrounding culture. Subscribe to the podcast for free to never miss an episode.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 52. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Paula Santos and I have some things in common. We both work in the museum world during the day, and by night, we both host podcasts about museums.

We even describe our day jobs in the same way: we are programmers. I am a computer programmer, writing the code that runs interactive media displays in museums. And Santos, as Community Engagement Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a museum programmer, managing programs and events.

Paula Santos: Hello, I’m Paula Santos, I’m a podcaster, museum educator, and community organizing learner.

Over the past year or so, Santos has been thinking about the assumptions cultural institutions make about the communities they identify as “underserved.”

Paula Santos: We don’t always have to lead with our audiences need x, y, z, these people are underserved for x, y, z reasons. Our communities have social capital, they have art, they have their own resources, that us as institutions can absolutely build with, and that understanding that it isn't just a top down effect, where here we have a huge grant, and now we're going to fly a helicopter over this community and throw art supplies around.

When we spoke, Santos was a day away from presenting a culminating event of a show, and acknowledged that not just helicoptering in made a lot of people, including herself, nervous.

Paula Santos: We as an institution can build with a community and that means also ceding our power. And that makes a lot of people very nervous at a granular level. As a programer, it does make me nervous. For example, I have this program tomorrow where I really try to the best of my ability to cede the floor to an organization of young queer people to put on a culminating event for a show that we have at one of our satellite spaces. I'm nervous. I'm nervous not because I don't believe in them, I totally believe in their vision, and they will be there, and they’re going to follow through, but I'm nervous because I ceded that control and I don't know how the institution will respond in the long run. When it's actually happening, that is totally relinquishing of control, as much as I can give.]

Santos’s nervousness is part of her conscious effort not to take the easy route in her work. Her critique is that many institutions, when attempting to serve as many people as possible, take the easy route -- and helicoptering in is easier than actually ceding control.

Paula Santos: We make a lot of choices in who we serve, why we do what we do, what kind of money do we pursue for our programs, where we are going to bend for funders, and we are entirely part of the larger machine of what makes things unjust and oppressive. So I feel like that's where I stand. It's not so much, we have a civic duty of justice, but more like we are members of society and how can we do cultural work in a way where we can truly work with all aspects of society, and not just the ones that are most convenient or the ones that are most privileged, or the ones that are easiest. A lot of the decisions when we think about justice and all those sorts of things, it isn’t so much that people are making ideological decisions a lot of times they’re making decisions based on time.

Santos is particularly interested in how the work we do in museums, non-profits or other cultural organizations intersects and is informed by larger questions of race and inequity in society. The work that Santos does, and her honesty discussing it, is what makes her podcast so compelling.

Paula Santos: My podcast is called Cultura Conscious, where I interview cultural workers on their work in community, on their work with justice and equity.

Santos chose a title that gave her enough room to explore many types of topics with many cultural producers.

Paula Santos: I think that I wanted to show a little bit of the fact that I'm bilingual, that I'm a woman of color, and that this was going to be really thoughtful about culture. I was like, Culture Conscious and I was like ugh, does that sound like an after-school special? So then just putting it in Spanish finally landed in a place where I was like this is not super heavy as a name, it’s not like I’m toeing around a name that’s like, oh my god, I have deep cultural knowledge, but maybe could allow me to explore many types of topics.

The idea for the show came from a cultural worker discussion collective which Santos was a part of when she lived in New York.

Paula Santos: Talk about a really formative experience. A group of colleagues, really spearheaded by Kiana Hendricks, who was my first guest, she started a collective of cultural workers in New York. All of us had kind of overlapped at the Brooklyn museum in some way or another. This group really helped me figure out what I really had to say and contribute about cultural work in general and also even just realizing that I did have something to contribute, period. Essentially what we we were doing was a collective of professional development. It would be anything from marketing and branding to talking about critical race theory or whatever it may be. Now that I think about it, thinking about grassroots and community work — we have each other and we build together, that we don’t have to wait for institutions or wait for other people to deem us worthy of granting us some form of knowledge. We can build that ourselves. And my conversations with collective members were so fruitful and so insightful. I was like I want to start this podcast, and everyone was so supportive.]

Cultura Conscious just celebrated its year anniversary. Santos says that she wanted make sure that all her guests for the first year were people of color, a trend which will for at least the next few episodes. The podcast comes directly out of her interest in what she calls the nuts and bolts of museum work -- where she sees the justice work museums and individuals need happening.

Paula Santos: All this nitty gritty stuff that you wouldn’t find in a journal article, or on a blog post about a culminating thing about a program, but just the day to day. There are people who are doing everyday, nuts and bolts work that are very invested in justice work, and they’re not the people who are leading the national conferences or the keynotes. I’m far more interested in that nuts and bolts aspect, which is probably why my interviews are so long.

That is why Santos and I only have some things in common.

Cultura Conscious is an excellent podcast, and you should subscribe and listen at culturaconscious.com. There’s a theme to Santos’s work: we don’t have to wait for institutions or wait for other people to deem us worthy. The whole structure of podcasting is an exercise in not waiting for permission from someone else. And crucially, it’s a reminder to those working within institutions that arts and culture creators don’t wait for permission either.

Paula Santos: The power of what happens when people come together that excites me so much, and I’m trying to reconcile that with being at a major institution, certain decisions that have to be made because of the way things are run, that make it very difficult at times to really keep up the momentum of community work, and many times even just be responsive to community in that moment in time. So I'm really grappling with this conflict of yes, community work! Let's do it! But then also releasing the churn of nonprofits and institutions. What I will say is that my work, I hope I can create programs, create collaborations, create partnerships where we really open ourselves up as institutions. And like I said in the beginning, really cede the floor cede our power, let community show us what they create and make the focal point of our work.

51. Yulina Mihaylova Presents a Moral Lesson at the Sofia Jewish Museum of History Oct 01, 2018

The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's Mosque. This clustering of places of worship — it's hard to find another example of this in Europe — is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria.

While the museum tells the full story of the Jewish people in Bulgaria from ancient Roman times to today, Yulina Mihaylova of the Jewish Museum of History says that the culmination of the story is the rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria from deportation to Nazi death camps during the Second World War. The museum takes on the complexities of this story, including the fact that not all Jews in Bulgarian-controlled territories were saved from deportation, and uses it to challenge young visitors.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00 Intro
00:14 Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria
01:10 Yulina Mihaylova
01:50 The Sofia Synagogue
02:10 Jews in Bulgaria in the Early 20th Century
04:00 Jews in Bulgaria During World War Two
04:50 The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria
09:44 Jews in Bulgaria During Communist Times
10:45 Educational Programming Moral Message
12:05 Outro / Join Club Archipelago

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 51. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Sometimes in the Museum Archipelago, museums are isolated from other institutions by vast bodies of water, and sometimes, points of interest are clustered in dense island chains.

The Jewish Museum of History in Sofia, Bulgaria is one of the latter. The museum is housed on the second floor of the Sofia Synagogue in the center of Bulgaria's capital, just steps away from an Orthodox Church, and Sofia's main Mosque. This clustering of places of worship -- it's hard to find another example of this in Europe or the rest of the world -- is part of the unique story of Jewish people in Bulgaria.

Yulina Mihaylova: It's very unique because it makes this triangle of the three religions. The combination and interaction between the ethnic groups together shows this very rich historical past when the Jews live among the others. It's also part of our unique narrative which we try to say in the museum itself.”

This is Yulina Mihaylova.

Yulina Mihaylova: Hello my name is Yulina Mihaylova, and I'm working for the Jewish Historical Museum in Sofia for the past 15 years. My job combines working with visitors and. Our main task is to represent the history of the Bulgarian Jews back 2000 years. It’s just not the story of the Jewish people. It’s more than it because we try to say the story of the interaction of the Jewish people and the Bulgarians also.

The Sofia Synagogue is the third largest in Europe. This particular Synagogue, built on the site of earlier Jewish prayer houses, opened in 1909, with a ceremony that included Sofia's political and religious elite. The opening ceremony took place 31 years after Bulgaria's liberation, which guaranteed equal civil rights to minority religious groups.

Yulina Mihaylova: We speak about the early time of the early 20th century, and just to make comparison to what happened at that time in Europe, mainly in Eastern Europe, in Russia with the persecution of Jews there, and on the same time we have in Bulgaria quite a good relation between the regime and the Jewish community. I mean, not everything was so idealistic of course. But in general we can say that the Jews, after the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turkish domination, gained equal rights with other minority groups who lived in Bulgaria, which was guaranteed by the Bulgarian constitution. Means that it actually gave push to the development of the Jewish communities in Bulgaria, on a new ground. The fact that we have communities and synagogues in almost every Bulgarian city, and there was almost 30 communities all around Bulgaria. So the opening ceremony was a remarkable event. The fact that actually, the political elite was invited to [participate] in the ceremony, was a very important sign for the connection between the officials at the time and Bulgarian Jewish community.

While the opening of the Sofia Synagogue represents the high water mark of the relationship between Jews living in Bulgaria and the rulers of Bulgaria, one of the main tasks of the museum is to represent the historical trace of Jewish people on the Balkan peninsula from ancient Roman period, to the present day. In the museum, this is achieved through a permanent exhibit called Jewish Communities in Bulgaria. A section of the exhibit is an ethnographic display which shows the daily life of the Jews from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and ritual artifacts from synagogues across Bulgaria.

The other permanent exhibition is about Bulgarian Jews during World War II, the topic that Mihaylova says is at the front of mind of most visitors. For a summary of Bulgaria’s early 20th century political history up to World War II, listen to episode 49 of this program, about the Bulgarian Museum of Military History, but here are the important section for this story:

Anti-semitism notably increased across eastern Europe after the introduction of the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany in 1935, and by the late 1930s, anti-Jewish propaganda gradually intensified within Bulgaria with Bulgaria's rising economic and political dependence on Nazi Germany.

The exhibition itself is called The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria, and, as Mihaylova explains, this title is overly simplistic.

Yulina Mihaylova: The story of what happened during the years 1941 and 1943. This is the culmination of the story, of the long existence between both two people. The first time when the Jews were tried to be divided from the rest part of society came during the World War II, when Bulgaria connected to Nazi Germany and it began to be connected to Nazi policy. What happened in brief: during the war, it was official policy with special legislation passed by the Bulgarian government after 1941. We treated Jews in a different way on economic, social, culture and political range, with a limitation of their rights, and this law became even more severe in 1942 when already there was an institution which was arranged for trying to organize the life of the Jews and confiscated Jewish property and also starting the organization of the deportation of Bulgarian Jews, which in 1943 started already with the Jews from the so-called new territories of Macedonia and Trace. This part of the story is not easy to explain, because usually it is good to think about the bright side of the story, and to neglect this part. It's important on one hand because this was part of the official policy of the Bulgarian government and this territories was part of the administrative territories of the Bulgarian at that time. Unfortunately, almost 12,000 Jews were deported from the territories of Macedonia and Trace, only to be the first stage, which had to continue with the Jews from Bulgaria, also.

The Jews from the territories of Macedonia and Trace were sent to Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. But these deportations, intended to be the first of many, would be the last. No other Jews were deported from Bulgaria or Bulgarian-controlled territories.

Yulina Mihaylova: But what is important is that when it came to Bulgaria we saw something very unique. Already, when they started discussions of law in 1940, it became clear that it wasn’t going to pass in peace, because there began to be very strong civil opposition against it from the many different circles of the Bulgarian society. It already give a clear sign that the Bulgarian society in general, it was not ready to accept this sort of policy against their Jewish fellows in Bulgaria. We see in 1943 when the plan for deportation started to be clear, even in Bulgaria, it actually faced a very strong opposition, even from the right and from the left and we see this opposition even in the circles of the Bulgarian political majority. On top of it was the vice-chairman of the Bulgarian government, Dimetre Patechiv, who organized this opposition and also managed to put pressure on the government between the crucial time.

All this civil pressure made the government have to postpone, ultimately indefinitely, the deportations to Nazi extermination camps. While Bulgarian officials remained differential to their German contacts, internally, they delayed and delayed, citing the need for Bulgarian Jews to remain in Bulgaria to work on Bulgarian infrastructure projects.

Yulina Mihaylova: Bulgarian example is very unique, and sometimes they try to compare this to the Danish Jews, the Jews there were saved by the locals. But Bulgarian example is the Bulgarian example. It’s a combination of facts. There was the one hand there was policy against Jewish minority, but on the other hand we have full mobilization of civil power in 1943 which became one of the major factors of saving the live of the entire Jewish community who live within the Bulgarian borders during the war. That's very important to say. It's good example and good lesson for us to understand what we can understand from this is what we can learn from this, is that it's actually a very good idea to raise your voice, even when you think that it's actually desperate.

The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria is an example of an exhibit about a topic that can’t be neatly summarized -- and any attempt to tell a positive story without including the deportation of the Jews from the Bulgarian-controlled territories of Macedonia and Trace is wrong. To resist the simple story, or the comfortable narrative, is what we rely on museums for.

Towards the end of the war, the synagogue roof was badly damaged by an American bombing raid on Sofia and the building remained in bad condition for many years. After the war ended Bulgaria was under control of a Socialist government, and many Bulgarian Jews, in fact the vast majority, immigrated to Israel.

Yulina Mihaylova: More than 90% of the 50,000 Jews who live in Bulgaria immigrated to Israel after the war, and most of the artifacts from the other synagogues were replaced to Sofia, and are exposed to our museum also so this is part of our story to tell, the entire story of Jews in Bulgaria not just from Sofia. During the communist time, the community shrunk to some very crucial number of several thousand people, but it's very important to say that it's not true that everything stopped after the war. Although, of course, the communist regime didn't encourage so much the religious activity,but still there was a small flame which keep the Jews who remained in Bulgaria, but they actually gave the push, after the collapse of the communist regime to try to revive the Jewish life.

Today, the Synagogue is fully active, and the museum on the second floor presents the sweep of Jewish history in Bulgaria. But the museum also offers a strong moral message to visitors through its educational programing.

Yulina Mihaylova: I try to say to my audience, which is on one hand tourists from many different countries, mainly from Israel, from the US, from Europe who are guests in Sofia, but on the other we have many students from Jewish high schools, from universities who are actually interested in the topic. For me, the great challenge is to speak before young people and try not just to tell them the story but to ask them questions and try to challenge them to think about the story, if they were on this place and how they could react in this moment. It's not an easy task. Sometimes because we are a small museum, our programs are not so well developed, but we are very limited in staff, but I think this is the only place in Bulgaria where you can hear the full story of the Jewish presence in Bulgaria, with the story of the Bulgarian Jewish [experience] in World War II and till present days.

50. Allison Sansone Connects Writers and Readers at the American Writers Museum Sep 17, 2018

When the American Writers Museum opened in Chicago in 2017, it became the first museum in the US to celebrate all genres of writing. Early in the planning phase, founder Malcolm O’Hagan made a couple of key decisions: no artifacts and no single curator.

In this episode, the museum’s programs director Allison Sansone explains how these decisions continue to shape the museum, from a timeline of 100 significant authors of fiction and nonfiction to galleries honoring the craft of writing.

This episode was recorded at the American Writers Museum in Chicago, IL, USA on September 2nd, 2018. This episode was released in tandem with Club Archipelago 5. 50th Episode Extravaganza 🎉.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00 Intro
00:15 Museum Archipelago's 50th Episode 🎉
01:50 The American Writers Museum
02:00 Programs Director Allison Sansone
02:15 Museum Founder Malcolm O’Hagan
02:50 Early Decisions
03:45 American Voices Exhibit
05:30 The Mind of a Writer Gallery
06:45 Story of the Day Exhibit
08:20 The Craft of Writing the Museum
09:11 Outro

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 50. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Well, not quite. This is the 50th episode of Museum Archipelago, and I’m celebrating by compiling this message, from listeners like you.

[Message from Museum Archipelago listeners]

Thanks so much for being a listener for these first 50 episodes. It really means a lot. If you can’t sill get enough, support the show directly by becoming a member of Club Archipelago on Patreon. You get access to a bonus podcast feed, where I just posed a retrospective on the first 50 episodes of the show, and how the podcast media and museum media landscape have changed since the first episode.

Now, onto the next 50. Let’s really get started.

Allison Sansone: The idea is to highlight the impact that writing can have on the culture and in our daily lives. My Name is Allison Sansone, I’m the programs director here at the American Writers Museum.

The American Writers Museum opened in May of 2017 on the second floor of a stately but nondescript building on Michigan Ave. But the story of the museum begins decades ago, when the founder of the museum, Malcolm O’Hagan, immigrated to the United States from Ireland.

Allison Sansone: He is a lover of literature and a fan of American writing, and after a visit back home to Ireland, to the Irish writers museum in Dublin, he came back to DC and asked around about where the American Writers Museum might be. Hearing that we didn’t have one, he said, I’ll fix that, and 10 years later, here we are.

Those 10 years were filled with decisions about what to include in the museum — and what to leave out.

Allison Sansone: Malcolm made a couple of decisions that are very important in the design of the museum. The first is we are not to make this an artifact-based space. Malcolm tells this great story: he’s a docent at the Library of Congress and he’ll take people over to see the Gutenberg bible. It’s in a glass case, so you can’t touch it. It’s in German, so you can’t read it. People absorb a snippet of information about it, they take a selfie with it, and they leave. He really wanted this to be a place where people could really dive into the writers and their works and learn something. The other decision that was made really early on was to not have a single curator. We had more than 40 subject matter experts from all across the country, all different literary and ethnic backgrounds from all different traditions, who over the course of 7 years, met and discussed and argued and debated over who should be in this museum and what the themes should the museum address.

You can see the work of these subject matter experts in the museum’s largest exhibit, a long chronological timeline of 100 “significant” authors of fiction and nonfiction called “American Voices.”

Allison Sansone: They’re not the 100 best or the 100 most important, but they are 100 people who have moved American literary traditions forward, so they were important in the development in what we think of as the American identity and the American voice. You have writers in that timeline from pre-colonial exploratory narratives all the way to almost the present day. Throughout it all, there are names you would expect to see there. Mark Twain is there, Hemingway is there, Laura Engel Wilder is there, so is Sophia Alice Callahan, the Native American novelist who is a contemporary of hers. And it begins in Spanish and it ends in Spanish. Because it starts with DeVacca who’s a Spanish explorer and wrote a narrative of very, very early North America and it ends in Spanish with the great novelist Oscar Hijuelos, who wrote “The Mambo Kings [Play] Songs of Love.” One of the thorny questions they had to settle on what who was an American writer? Do you have to be born here? Do you have to have written in English? Do you have to have lived here your whole life? There are writers in this museum who don’t fit that criteria. So what makes them American? Well, what makes them American is that they say that they are.They claim us, so we claim them right back. It was incredibly critical that this museum look like America, and it not be either an academic vision or a popular vision, that we not have that box.

It’s clear that the focus of the museum is on the words themselves — it’s not the American Book Museum or the American Authors Museum. Aside from the American Voices gallery, much of the rest of the museum is focused on the craft of writing and reading. There’s a gallery called The Mind of A Writer, where visitors, mostly through interactives, scroll through insights into how writers think.

Allison Sansone: Our Mind of a Writer Gallery really focuses on the process of writing and how you write. It’s important to us to honor not just individual achievement, but also the work that went into that. It’s important to point out to people, especially to aspiring writers, that these writers achievements were not things that happened because they sprang full-form from their heads. Jack Kerouac typed “On the Road.” On a digital scroll we have here in the museum, you can see the entire manuscript, but you can also see his editing marks where he crossed things out, where he changed his mind, he moved things around. The writers had to work at this, and we wanted to be able to honor that work.

I’m tickled about the focus on words and the process of writing. The gallery manages to honor the craft of writing, while not putting it out of reach to a museum visitor. There’s an exhibit called Story of the day, which is made up of typewriters, chairs, and at the beginning of the day a single opening line. Visitors are instructed to write the next line, then the next throughout the day.

Allison Sansone: Story of the day, our typewriter exhibit where people can continue other people’s stories, that initially had started out as a giant scroll of paper on which people wrote in pencil suspended from the ceiling. It obviously looks very different now. Part of the joy of that interactivity is that it takes activities that are very solitary, reading and writing, we think of the author alone in his garret and his quill pen, working by himself. And you see the reader alone with her book. What our Story of the Day exhibit allows us to do, what our featured works and our Wordplay tables allow us to do is to make reading and writing about community, to enjoy words together. This is how we encounter each other in the world, we read and we write now more than we ever have. We don’t think about it a lot because it is done on something like this, it does on a device or its done on a tablet, but that’s writing. And that’s reading. And to be able to use that to connect with each other is a very powerful thing about that gallery.

Some modern museums go out of their way to present as little text as possible with the assumption that visitors won’t read it. At the American Writers Museum, believe it or not, there’s a lot of text.

Allison Sansone: There is a lot of text. If you’re the type of person who reads every word on the wall of a museum, you’re going to be here a while. But we think that’s a good thing.The craft of actually writing the museum was something that took a great deal of time. We approached it with a lot of respect for the writer’s work: we didn’t want to trivialize. We figured early on that this museum would attract readers, that it would attract people who loved words, so we weren’t afraid to challenge visitors with maybe a little bit more information than they might be getting from their typical museum visit.

And, with the American Writers Museum’s broad definition of writing, there’s not reason that the gallery text itself couldn’t be featured in a future edition of the museum. And that’s kind of neat.

[Outro]

49. Deyana Kostova Centers ‘The Little Man’ in War at the Bulgarian National Museum of Military History Sep 03, 2018

The campus of the Bulgarian National Museum of Military History in Sofia is defended on all sides by a garden of missiles and tanks. But as Director of Public Relations Deyana Kostova points out, many of the exhibits inside focus on the consequences of war rather than the tools of warfare.

One of these exhibits, called 'The Little Man in the Great War', explores the Bulgarian World War I experience through overarching emotions. In this episode, Kostova gives a tour of the exhibit, explains how the museum contextualizes Bulgarian and world history, and describes the mission of the museum to present history from multiple points of view.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:40: Diana Kostova, Director of Public Relations
01:40: Bulgaria in World War I
02:05: 'The Little Man in the Great War'
05:28: Vasil Levski's Hair
06:34: Bulgaria in World War II
08:00: Lopsided History During The Period Of Socialist Rule
08:25: The Mission of the Museum To Present History From Multiple Points of View
09:09: Museum Archipelago’s 50th Episode: Submit Your Audio
This episode was recorded at the National Museum of Military History in Sofia, Bulgaria on June 8th, 2018.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 49. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

[Intro]

I don’t really know how I’m supposed to feel at a military museum, particularly those that have gardens of comically oversized missiles and tanks.

The Bulgarian National Museum of Military History is one of these museums, but Bulgaria is a country that has spent much of its recent military history buffeted and whiplashed by bigger powers.

And that makes for a different experience wandering through these giant tools of war.

Deyana Kostova: Hello, my name is Diana Kostova, and I am director of museum marketing, public relations [at the] National Museum of Military History. The museum was established in 1916, in the course of the first world war. So the first exhibitions that came to the museum were directed straight from the front line to the museum. The first one was probably not so interesting, it is a document, but the fifth one was a crashed airplane, actually, and it is displayed in our permanent exhibition even nowadays and it can been seen as a way to remember these horrific days of the war.

The time frame of museum’s modern galleries, a campus of buildings in the middle of that garden of military hardware, actually begins much earlier than World War I, in the 4th millennium BCE. The museum displays the sweep of Bulgarian history since then, in which the Balkans have played host to a dizzying array of battles, conquests, rebellion, and centuries of rule by the Ottoman Empire.

By 1914, Bulgaria, liberated from Ottoman rule, had recently fought in the Second Balkan war and was about to enter World War I.

Deyana Kostova: Here we entered the First World War. It turned out that we entered on the wrong side, because at this moment Germany was telling us that choosing Germany would be the thing that would give us justice and will give us these territories that we lost in the Second Balkan War.

Instead of displaying the sweep of the events World War I, an exhibit called the Little Man in the Great War divides the Bulgarian First World War experience into four overarching emotions: hope, what you hold onto, self-preservation, and collapse.

Deyana Kostova: So this is our previously-launched exhibition. It is called the Little Man in the Great War. And the idea was to show the fate of the ordinary people, the small people who actually make the army, because the army is not the commanders in chief, it is not the generals, it is the numerous people without names, who actually perished at the battlefields, and they all had families, and they all had hopes, and the idea was to show the emotions during the war. So here we begin, with the very first emotion when the war was declared: it was the hope. The hope that this war was not going to be a long one. The hope that choosing Germany will bring justice, the hope that at the end, we will be victorious, we will have what is supposed to be ours, we will go back to our homes alive at the end. This was probably the most important.

The next emotion is hard to translate into English.

Deyana Kostova: There isn’t an equivalent in English. When I try to explain it, it means the things that you hold to. We wanted to show that even though it was a war, the life didn’t stop. There were weddings during the wartime. People were writing letters to their loved ones.

Then comes self-preservation.

Deyana Kostova: It was all the ways the soldiers had to keep themselves sane. The friendship that formed in the front lines. They tried to do these very temporary houses to resemble their homes, they were planting flowers, here you have watermelon at the front line, some of them had pets, like this small dog. They were making theaters at the front line, just to keep the spirit of the soldiers a bit higher.

And finally, collapse.

Deyana Kostova: We finish with the collapse: the collapse of all illusions, the collapse of all hope, the entire cynicism of the war. Here is a young beautiful boy. In our permanent exhibition you might see him again. There he is displayed as a symbol of the Bulgarian heroism, a symbol that even the youngest wanted to carry guns and to defend what was right for Bulgaria. But here we try to show it in a different perspective. To say okay, but this is a boy, this is a child. It is in the front line. It is not how it is supposed to be. We have all these eyes that are looking at us with some kind of a blame, that we as a humanity made this happen. It’s not a happy exhibition.

The Little Man in the Great War is really effective at telling a historical narrative through emotions. It works because you as the visitor are experiencing the emotions in chronological order, the order that ordinary Bulgarians would have felt them during the war. It’s a powerful contrast to the very inhuman tanks and missiles just outside

Other galleries in the museum also highlight the sentimental and emotional in the middle of conflict. Bulgaria fought for its liberation in the 19th century against the Ottoman Empire. One of the chief strategists (and martyrs) of the Bulgarian revolution is a man named, Vassil Levski, widely considered to be a national hero.

Deyana Kostova: Our museum displays his hair, which is kind of strange probably from a foreign perspective, but he was a monk, and it was him who cut off his hair when he decided that he doesn’t want to serve to god anymore, he wants to serve his people, to their freedom. So he cut off his hair and gave it to his mother and said, “you should keep my hair because one day probably I wouldn’t have a grave, and you may need to bury my hair.” And it is what actually happened. She didn’t know where he was buried, but she gave his hair to the county. And now there are so many little children who come to the museum and paying respect to this item.

Other galleries deal with more recent history, like the Bulgarian experience in World War II, which Kostova describes in similar language to World War I.

Deyana Kostova: And once again we chose Germany. We didn’t actually have choice. We made this exhibition three years ago now about the Second World War and we named it the War That We Could Not Avoid. The idea was that this was the war that we never had the chance to choose whether to participate or not in. Because at the moment we signed our participation in the tripartite pact, German troops were already marching inside Bulgaria. So it was either “with us or under us.” This Second World War turned out to be the point that changed everything in our history, because only three years later in 1944 another army was at our border. It was the Soviet army. Once again we didn’t have the choice. We were trying to declare neutrality again but it wasn’t an option at the end of the war, and we didn’t want to declare war to Germany because many many Bulgarians soldiers were surrounded by Germans, and the Soviets were marching on our streets three years after the Germans. At this moment, the political situation changed as well. And it changed the political regime to communist one, later on to socialistic one.

It’s important to remember that the official narratives of Bulgaria’s entire military history were pretty lopsided during the socialist period, up until the political collapse about thirty years ago. Since then, the country, and the museum, has had much more room for nuance in describing the motives of historical actors. The missiles and other pieces of military hardware are still there, but so are more emotional historical narratives.

Deyana Kostova: Our main mission in the museum nowadays is to try to tell the story with all the versions that are possible to be displayed. When you learn when you are young that there are different points of view of history, it is much easier when you grow up. These days, especially young people don’t have an idea of what war is, they think it is something cool that it is done for the right causes, and if you do it for the right cause, which is your right cause of course, then you’re a hero, you’re very brave. They are missing all of this, and we just wanted to show it.

In just two weeks, Museum Archipelago will reach 50 episodes. To celebrate, I’d love to hear from you!

To get on the 50th episode of the show, record yourself saying where you listen to Museum Archipelago and why you keep listening. You can say something funny, or, if you insist, something heartfelt. Then send me a link to your recording using the contact forum at museumarchipelago.com. If you’d prefer to leave a written comment, that’s great – I’d love it if you wrote a review on Apple Podcasts.

It feels good to get to 50, and it’s all thanks to your support. So thank you.

[Outro]

48. Museums Are Really Sensitive To Critique. Palace Shaw & Ariana Lee Decided They Don’t Care. Aug 20, 2018

Ariana Lee and Palace Shaw create The Whitest Cube, an excellent new museum podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or casual admirers. The podcast interrogates the city of Boston and its museums through the lens of race.

In this episode, Lee and Shaw talk about the reasons for starting the podcast, what diversity in museums really means, and how to pressure cultural institutions to change. If you’re interested in museums, you should subscribe to the Whitest Cube on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Instagram. You can support their work directly on Patreon.

Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. Join Club Archipelago today to help me continue making podcasts about museums (and get some fun benefits)!

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: “Supposedly, These Institutions Are Trying To Diversify”
00:36: Palace Shaw & Ariana Lee Create The Whitest Cube Podcast
01:14: The White Cube Display Method
01:59: The City of Boston As A Case Study For Talking About Museums And Race
04:09: Palace Shaw’s Experiences Working At Art Institutions
07:17: Art Museums And Other Museums
08:11: “People Believe That Museums Tell The Truth”
09:20: There Are Not Enough Voices Challenging Museums
10:00: Subscribe To The Whitest Cube
10:20: Why We Need An Active Effort To Shift The Culture
11:05: Museum Archipelago’s 50th Episode: Submit Your Audio
This episode was recorded at the PRX Podcast Garage in Allston, MA, USA on August 13th, 2018.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 48. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

[Intro]

Ariana Lee: Supposedly these institutions are pushing to diversify. What does it mean to diversify? You could say that if you take stock of all of the museum’s employees it is a very diverse workforce because you may very well have many people of color working in your janitorial services. But they are not at any kind of seat of power.

This is Ariana Lee. Together with her co-host Palace Shaw, she founded the Whitest Cube, an excellent podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or simply casual admirers.

Ariana Lee: Hello I’m Ariana Lee, and I’m a cohost of The Whitest Cube podcast.

Palace Shaw: Hello, I’m Palace Shaw and I’m the other host of The Whitest Cube. Each episode we unpack different things we’ve been thinking through, so the first episode is about access to museums from the perspective of race and class and our second episode is about…

Ariana Lee: Beyoncé and Jay-Z and their music video for Apeshit in the Louvre and also their relationship to museums.

The name the Whitest Cube comes from a common art museum display method called the White Cube. It’s a clever name for a podcast that works on multiple levels — and their explanation of the name on the first episode was what got me instantly hooked on the show.

Podcast Excerpt: The method is as simple as it sounds: four white walls and good lighting to act as the void in which we situate art. Prior to the White Cube, museums displayed all of their artwork, not just a select few pieces for your consideration. This created the esteemed position of the curator: the person whose job it was to decide what remained in storage and what was seen by the public.

The White Cube display method was first introduced at art museums in the city Boston. Lee and Shaw live in Boston, and so do I. As hosts of the Whitest Cube, Lee and Shaw interrogate the city’s cultural institutions through the lens of race.

Palace Shaw: We try to bring in Boston as a case study because it is kind of the perfect city to be having this conversation [in] because Boston is a city that is really controlled by its institutions, whether that’s hospitals, universities, whether that’s museums.

Ariana Lee: It’s also a really amazing place to be having a conversation about race because I think that Boston is somewhere where people say Boston is just an incredibly white city. But Palace actually pointed to me early on in this process that actually there are more people of color in Boston than there are white people which actually speaks to some of the structural violence that’s going on in institutions.

Palace Shaw: And how segregated this entire city is.

Lee and Shaw realized that podcasting was a way to broaden their conversations about museums without having to go through any of Boston’s institutions.

Palace Shaw: I was like, okay cool. I’m not feeling museums right now, but I am feeling the conversations we’re having about them. A podcast was a natural medium to have these conversations in, especially because it is conversational. At least when we come up with ideas. Maybe when it comes to actual episodes it is a bit more constructed, but it was mostly like we’re having a conversation that needs to be heard.

Ariana Lee: In terms of audience, I think that’s something that’s really interesting in having a podcast that’s about race and art institutions and being people who have been in the role of not feeling powerful in their ability to communicate about these things. It’s almost what you wish you could say It makes me feel when you see a docent do x, y, or z and expressing that to people who may not be willing to hear that or may have defensive first reactions, right?

Palace Shaw: Or respond to it as if it is an emotion issue rather than an issue of systemic racism, which is not a personal problem, it’s a much larger issue.

Palace Shaw has worked at art institutions in the city of Boston. Her experience with these institutions, particularly how sensitive museums are to criticism, comes through in the episodes. One of the tag lines of The Whitest Cube is “Museums are really sensitive to critique. We decided we don’t care.”

Palace Shaw: This is the field that people are working in where you can’t criticize the institutions that you work for. Which I think is pretty dangerous for institutions that are meant to educate and that are meant to be spaces for open dialogue. And if your staff doesn’t have the ability to talk about these things in a really real way and there’s no space for some of the emotional harm that can happen in these environments… I think that these conversations are being had, but I feel like they are being had in a way that is not considering what the institution actually is and the space that museums occupy. I’ll give an example. In one of my meetings, people had said they were having a really hard time talking about a particular piece and that piece depicted a mutilated black body. Very hard to talk about, especially for young white folks who may not have the language to navigate something like that — totally understandable. We had a meeting about this specific piece, and we had almost the entire meeting without naming that this was what was making them uncomfortable. This meeting was called to have a difficult conversation about this specific work, but it when it came down to it, I literally said, “is everybody looking at the same thing that I’m looking at? Do you see a body there? Can you understand that this is a black body?” And everyone was like, “yes.” And I’m like, “Okay, now we’re talking about what is really hard to parse through.” And I strongly feel like that shouldn’t have been my responsibility to bring up. I feel like if you’re going to call a meeting about something that is really hard to talk about, it’s your role as the facilitator to get into the hard stuff.

Ariana Lee: The difficulty is that as a facilitator in that situation, you want to create a setting in which someone’s situated knowledge, the knowledge that they have from just being who they are, in the world, being affected by the social structures that they are affected by, where they can use that and be an asset to the workplace. But saying the reason we are all uncomfortable is because there’s a mutilated black body here, which is something everyone can see with there eyes, is not an example of using your situated knowledge.

Palace Shaw: Yes, I was not saying because of my personal experience, I can tell you this is a black mutilated body, I’m literally talking about material and form and language that we all have to talk about art in this specific educational context. It did end up falling to me.

Art museums are the focus of The Whitest Cube podcast. Both Lee and Shaw came into museums first with a passion for art, contemporary art specifically. But of course, the entire archipelago of museums institutions, children's, science, art, expanding to museum education, museum conferences, all have structural similarities.

Palace Shaw: We do use museums really generally, we’re not always really saying art museums, which is sometimes an oversight, but also not untrue that museums outside of art museums have this similar structure. Because it is about the function of a museum. And what is the function of a museum but to educate the masses and who is in the position to do that? As a whole, when we were interviewing people about museums, we just were like why are museums important? And what we got from that is that it is a widely held belief that museums tell the truth, that they are a direct shot from the heavens. This is exactly how it is. I think there is a lack of acknowledgment that there are people that are actually controlling the narrative of what you’re learning and that maybe the full truth isn’t being shown.

Isn't it funny how that sense museums tell the truth is true even today, when almost everything else is not widely considered to tell the truth? People don’t trust newspapers, and yet if you put something in a gallery… the medium just does something to you. I don’t know how long this is going to last.

Palace Shaw: I’m really glad you bought it up because definitely when I think of the Whitest Cube and I’m thinking about how museums are one of the last media institutions, because it is a media institution that people trust without question. I don’t think there are enough voices challenging that. I think that what we are trying to do is bump up against that fragility, and bump up against something that hasn’t been challenged.

Ariana Lee: There’s sort of this lack of connection between what feels unjust in the setting of museum politics, and quote unquote the real world. There’s a divorce between the museum and the real world I think in many people's minds, certainly in mine before I was working on this project to some extent. Where’s that pressure going to come from?

If you’re at all interested in museums, and I think you might be if you’ve made it this far, you really should subscribe to the Whitest Cube. It’s on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, and instagram at whitestcube. There are links in the show notes.

Where is that pressure going to come from? Well, I would argue, independent podcasts like The Whitest Cube.

Palace Shaw: Something we return to again and again is what is the value of the museum? And who determines that value? I think returning to that questions is really important, because I don’t think it gets considered enough, especially with regards to changing the field. I feel like there’s a lot of really shallow attempts at figuring all of this out. I think there’s a lot of acknowledgement that needs to happen, in terms of what museums are and what they have been historically and the fact that there needs to be an active effort in shifting the culture.

In just a month, Museum Archipelago will reach 50 episodes. To celebrate, I’d love to hear from you!

To get on the 50th episode of the show, record yourself saying where you listen to Museum Archipelago and why you keep listening. You can say something funny, or, if you insist, something heartfelt. Then send me a link to your recording using the contact forum at museumarchipelago.com. Send those files to me in the next three weeks, by September 10th to get on the show. It feels good to get to 50, and it’s all thanks to your support.

[Outro]

47. Buzludzha is Deteriorating. Dora Ivanova Wants To Turn It Into A Museum. Jul 23, 2018

High in the Bulgarian mountains, Buzludzha monument is deteriorating. Commemorating early Bulgarian Marxists, it was designed to emphasize the power and modernity of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Buzludzha is now at the center of a debate over how Bulgaria remembers its past. Some people want to destroy it, some people want to restore it to its former glory, but Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova has a better idea.
Ivanova wants to turn it into a museum, and she founded the Buzludzha Project Foundation to do exactly that.
In this episode, Ivanova describes how the city of Berlin inspired her plan for the preservation of Buzludzha, how to preserve the past without glorifying it, and the next steps to making her plan a reality.

Topics Discussed

00:00 Intro
00:15 Buzludzha's Opening Ceremony
01:04 Buzludzha Today
01:38 Buzludzha As Propaganda
02:00 Dora Ivanova
02:20 "The Cathedral of Socialism"
02:45 Ian's Buzludzha Visit
03:30 Ivanova on Perserving Buzludzha
04:22 What To Do With Old Monuments
04:59 Ivanova's Museum Proposal
06:20 Tower Elevator
07:05 Next Steps
07:56 Inspiration From The City of Berlin
09:22 The Buzludzha Project Foundation
09:37 Outro - Join Club Archipelago

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 47. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

In 1981, on top of a mountain in the middle of Bulgaria, high-ranking members of the Bulgarian communist party gathered to celebrate the opening of a new monument.

The monument, called Buzludzha Memorial House, was erected here to commemorate the 90 year anniversary of the first illegal meeting of Bulgarian Marxists. The communist dictator of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, dedicated the monument.

[Audio of Zhivkov’s speech in Bulgarian]

“Let the pathways leading here, never fall into disrepair,” he said.

Of course, it did fall into disrepair. Eight years after opening, Todor Zhivkov was deposed from office by his own party, and soon after the rule of the Bulgarian Communist Party crumbled.

Buzludzha is in an eerie state of decay. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s mostly in the shape of a flying saucer — an enormous round disc of concrete. If a particular alien culture had a fetish for brutalism, this would be their spaceport. Rising out of the back of the saucer is a tower, 230 ft high, and flanked by two red stars. The communist party claimed that the red stars, illuminated at night by spotlights, could be seen from as far away as the Romanian border in the north, and the Greek border to the south.

Dora Ivanova: It was on purpose built like this. It was built to impress. It was built as part of the political propaganda and education as they called it during this time. It’s shape looks like a UFO, actually. This is also on purpose because it had to show how the socialist idea is contemporary, it’s the future.

This is Dora Ivanova.

Dora Ivanova: Hello, my name is Dora Ivanova, and I am the founder of the Buzledzha Project Foundation, which aims to preserve the Buzludzha monument. The first time I visited Buzledga was in 2014. I was amazed. It’s a really powerful place. It felt like being in a cathedral. The cathedral of socialism, I’ll call it. I found that it is in not that bad condition, that it can still be saved. I was thinking that it is defiantly worth saving. But later, with my next visits, I got more sad and sadder about the condition. Seeing every time that the condition of the construction is worse and worse, it is really hard for me.

I visited Buzledzha in the summer of 2018. The glass is gone from its windows, the red stars have been shot at and smashed, and there are worrying holes in the concrete structure.

The monument has been left to decay — mostly sitting in limbo as the Bulgarian socialist party and the Bulgarian government argue over what to do with it. The only new development was that in January of 2018, a guard has been posted at the site to prevent people from entering and seeing the atrium or the crumbling socialist mosaics inside. He said he was not allowed to do an interview.

Both Ivanova and I are too young to have lived under Socialism in Bulgaria directly. My association with that period of time has been almost exclusively with the old monuments scattered around the country.

Dora Ivanova: In my opinion, the building should be preserved in its present condition. It defiantly should not be restored. To restore it would restore its meaning, and for many people it means to restore the glory of the socialist party. And this is defiantly something we don’t want to do. Many other people want it to turn into something different or imagine having a different function. But I think Buzledzha is interesting with what it is, what it stands for, and what it has already. I don’t think we need to put additional meaning or function to it. If we explain what is already there, if we explain the history which is behind this structure, this is the most powerful and meaningful solution.

Museum Archipelago has explored the theme of what to do with these old monuments before, particularly monuments that are symbols of repressive ideologies.

Episodes 5 and 35, about Stalinworld in Lithuania and The Museum of Socialist Art in the Bulgaria deal with these issues directly.

But Buzledza is such an extreme example, and the debate around it, as far as I have heard, ether centers around completely destroying it or returning it to its former glory.

Ivanova has a different idea. After visiting for the first time, she knew that she wanted to devote her Master’s thesis to an in-depth proposal to transform the site into a museum.

Dora Ivanova: My proposal is to explain the ideology in a very powerful way. To explain all the mosaics, and they are different images. If they are all presented in a very objective and critical way, this will give an understanding of the whole period. And there are aspects like the culture and the role of the women in this period that can be explained to the public.

In the underground levels, they can be a gallery that explains the history of the monument itself. Starting with the history of the place, the planning process, the construction, which was amazing achievement. Also how the building was used, why it was abandoned, how it was destroyed, and hopefully, how it was preserved.

The proposal works for me because it uses the space as it is. The building was built as a gathering space — and in addition to the interpretive elements, Ivanova envisions that the interior atrium, which seats about 400 people, can still be used for cultural and scientific events.

Dora Ivanova: The only thing I would like to add to this building is a glass outside elevator that can bring the visitors to the top of the tower. There is a 70 meters tower on the top of the mountain and there is a wonderful view from there. This is the only addition. I really strive to keep it intact. This is a proposal to add an observation deck to the top of the spire. From there, people could enjoy the wonderful view.]

The Project which began as Ivanova’s master’s thesis seems to be gaining steam. Ivanova says that she has come to the conclusion that the best way to save Buzludzha is to harness the interest of the site that comes from outside Bulgaria. Just recently, the site has been recognized by Europa Nostra – Europe’s leading heritage preservation organization, as one of the seven most endangered heritage sites in europe.

Dora Ivanova: And with this, it’s a win, actually. A rescue mission of European experts that will come to Bulgaria and will make a report and expertise us about the building and how it can be preserved. It is very important is to do a structural survey and a business plan and we need finances for that. But of course, all of this is at a very high political level and it is a political decision and I really hope it can be resolved soon.

The site is truly amazing, even as a ruin. But I really want to visit the Buzludzha that Ivonva proposed. Bulgaria doesn’t have an intertrprive museum that explains the year of Socialism. I can think of no better place to put it than in one of that periods most daring symbols right in the heart of the country.

Dora Ivanova: I guess I was inspired by Berlin, which is the city of dark history, the city of division and of the Second World War and the cold war. We have all the evidences here. What if Berlin decides to demolish all that and to say it never happened? I think that is not a good solution. I am very inspired by the way they present that for education and how people are first knowing their past and second presenting it to the others. And this attracts so many tourists and this makes Berlin what it is now. I really would like to take this attitude of knowing, understanding, educating, and try to implement such a project in Bulgaria where, it is a difficult past, and it is traumatic for many people, it is still memory and not history, but now is the time to action before the evidence is demolished and until people still remember it and still can write history from a personal view. Buzludzha can be this place. It is already the place that shows the problem. It think and I hope that it can become the place that shows the solution of the problem.

You can find more about the Buzludzha Project Foundation, and see the pictures of what it is now, and renderings of what it might look like, at buzludzha-monument.com/project.

[Outro]

46. Vessela Gercheva Directs Playful Exhibits at Bulgaria’s First Children’s Museum Jul 09, 2018

There were no children’s museums in the Balkans before Muzeiko opened in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2015. Days before Muzeiko’s historic opening, I interviewed Vessela Gercheva, the museum’s Programs and Exhibits Director. Gercheva talked about the challenges of opening the museum, not the least of which was how few people actually knew what a children’s museum was.
Today, almost three years later, Gercheva says things have changed. Muzeiko is packed with kids, careening through exhibits designed just for them. Gercheva and Muzeiko are at the forefront of a shifting attitude towards children's education in Bulgaria.
This episode was recorded on May 28, 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Club Archipelago 🏖️

If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. Join Club Archipelago today to help me continue making podcasts about museums (and get some fun benefits)! This episode pairs with Club Archipelago episode 4, which features a behind-the-scenes tour of Muzeiko with Vessela Gercheva.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 46. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Vessela Gerchva: Hello, my name is Vessela Gerchva and I’m the exhibits director for Muszeko.

Muzeiko, which means little museum in Bulgarian, is the first children’s museum in the Balkans. Before it opened in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 2015, all museums in the country where of the artifacts-behind-glass variety.

I first interviewed Gercheva in 2015, just before Muzeiko opened. In that interview, she said that the concept of a children’s museum was still new to Bulgarians.

Vessela Gerchva: Nobody knows here what a children’s science center does. It is a very abstract concept. What does it do? Does it display children? What does it do?

Today, almost three years after opening, Gercheva said that initial confusion — that nobody knew what a children’s museum was — has been resolved.

Vessela Gerchva: It has been crossed. The barrier now is more of what should we do inside if we don’t have to look at objects behind glass? We have been doing a lot of explaining about the importance of play about the importance of time together between children and parents. I assume this will continue at least some time because this is very new.

Gervecha says that the main reason why it has taken so long to build a children’s museum in Bulgaria was because of the style of learning during decades of Communism in Bulgaria, a style that focused on memorization and heavily deemphasized playful learning.

I remember visiting Bulgarian museums when I was a kid the ‘90s. They were cool for a young museum nerd like me, but they were certainly not for kids. Most of the signs said not to touch anything. And I vividly remember being the only one there, adult or child.

Now things have changed.

Vessela Gerchva: First of all we opened. There was a big change. It was received in several ways, I can’t describe in one word. First of all in numbers, it was received pretty well. In the beginning especially we had days where we had a lot a lot of visitors. We were making the organization of the days so that we could close for a while — then we would open for the others to come In terms of how people feel about it, there are several different layers. First of all there is a group of parents, teachers, — people who even before we opened were extremely interested in providing new environment for children. So naturally, these people came even before we opened. There is a second kind of circle that it is a little more distant. These are teachers that are interest to get new experience to kids, but find it very difficult in the current educational environment in Bulgaria which is quite restricting. Gets teachers in a lot of administrative work so it is really challenging to get kids outside of the school and to get them interested in science. So in many ways, from very exerligratering-ly received to not understanding what this, why should I bring my kid here. In this range, all the emotions, we have had them all.

Gercheva has a good answer to “why should I bring my kids here”? Muzekio’s exhibits, like the exhibits of many children’s science centers in the United States, are based on the theory of learning through play and applied activities.

Vessela Gerchva: We have exhibits where we invite the visitor to be in first person, to imagine themselves as an archeologist or as a geologist. But there are also exhibits in which we invite play which is thematic. Because we believe — it’s not only our belief — that playing itself excites children and makes them want to learn more, even if they are very small. We see this for example in the Toddler’s Days. It is still early of course to say if our toddlers are becoming astronomers, fingers crossed for that and if this happens it will not just be Muzeko to blame. But in the Toddler’s Days we have very young visitors — one two years old who get to play with the physical exhibits even if they are too young for the scientific concepts and any kind of information that is provided to them.

The exhibits are a mix of digital and physical exhibits. The digital exhibits, which themselves are mostly new in the Bulgarian museum landscape, were made by a game studio in Sofia, and many of them have game-like elements.

Many of the physical exhibits are also interactive. In an exhibit called Constructed World visitors turn cranks and pull levers that move various elements of a city model — water through pipes and traffic through roads.

Vessela Gerchva: Conceptually, the digital exhibits and the physical exhibits have been planned together, so they are very closely interlinked. For example, in the geology exhibit, you would have the physical exhibit that show how tectonic plates are collide to form different reactions that we see on earth. And the digital exhibit would talk about caves, and how people inhabited caves and left traces of art, even in very distant times. Because they were planned together, they don’t stand apart. They form a part of a joint concept.

In the beginning we had parents that were like, “we don’t really want the kid to be at the computer because he or she is on the computer all the time” but they very quickly understood that we’re providing content that is inseparable from the other exhibits and digital exhibits will make kids explore the physical ones and vice versa. I believe we haven’t put a big stress on digital exhibits, so that parents feel threatened by the brainwash … this quickly went away. We don’t have this concern anymore from parents.

Muzeiko’s colorful and modern facade stands out in a city full of drab gray buildings. But if you stood it side by side with other children's museums around the world, it would fit right in The concepts illustrated inside would fit right into other children's science centers around the world.

Even though the science presented is of course universal, there is a tie in to Bulgarian contributions.

Vessela Gerchva: Actually, there is a Bulgarian point in many of the exhibits, almost all of them. It is ether a Bulgarian invention like the first computer, or the Bulgarian greenhouse that traveled to the International Space Station. Or it can be a Bulgarian scientist or cosmonaut, we try to make a Bulgarian point in almost every exhibit. It was not the point to have at all means a Bulgarian touch in the exhibit. It was the point to show that science is universal, and even if Bulgaria is a small country, there are points at which Bulgaria made a big contribution. There are others in which we have worked in teams, and in those areas we have shown something else or some other achievement. The point here to make is that science is universal and that people make achievements when they work together.

The way that Gercheva talks about children's museums is very similar to the way that Margaret Middleton describes the process of making children’s museums in the United States. Middleton, an independent museum designer based in Providence, RI, USA, says that for adults, there are learning outcomes, but for kids, there are visitor outcomes.

Young me would’ve LOVED Muzeiko. I think about myself as that lone kid wandering a museum full of objects behind glass, and how much I would’ve loved to touch the objects, push buttons, pull levers, and explore in a three-dimensional world.

But it’s not just about my experience visiting Bulgaria as a kid. Muzeiko represents an optimism that wasn’t present in Bulgaria years ago. A successful children’s museum needs children to visit, and right after Communism fell in the late 1980s, many families left Bulgaria. People weren’t having kids, kindergartens closed, the average age kept increasing.

But things have changed. Bulgaria is now a place where people want to stay and start a family. There’s a sense of hope for the future, and that’s represented in this museum for children, full of young people careening through its exhibits designed for kids. And it isn’t just Muzeko. Gercheva says that the museum is working with other museums in Bulgaria, emphasizing new pedagogical methods to help convey their message to children more clearly.

Vessela Gerchva: There is a lot of knowledge in Bulgarian museums and the people who work there. These are incredibly well-prepared specialists in their areas. Just as any well prepared specialists, it is very difficult for them to limit the message and the story to one thing. Methodologically, we have been taught that we have to give a whole bunch of information and we now know, that children CAN’T get it all. For me, from the perspective of working with children, a lot more stress should be placed on the concept and on the content. I believe we should specialize more in telling stories.

If you’d like to learn more about Muzieko, you can listen to my first interview with Gercheva before the museum opened in 2015 in episode 6 of this program. To hear Margaret Middleton describe working on Children’s Museums in the United States, head to episode 45.

[Outro]

45. Margaret Middleton Designs Museum Exhibits for All Ages Jun 25, 2018

Margaret Middleton is an independent exhibit designer and museum consultant based in Providence, RI, USA. Middleton recently completed the design of the children's exhibits at the Discovery Museum in Acton, MA, USA. Driven by a background in industrial design and queer activism, Middleton is passionate about creating visitor-centered museum experiences, and writes and speaks about inclusion in museums. In 2014 Middleton developed the Family Inclusive Language Chart, now widely used in museums across the country.

In this episode, Middleton describes what makes exhibit design for children's museums so unique and exciting and what other types of museums can learn from children's museums.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Margaret Middleton, Independent Exhibit Designer and Museum Consultant
00:25: Middleton’s Favorite Thing About Children’s Museums
01:48: Focusing on the User/Visitor
03:55: What Other Museums Can Learn From Children’s Museums
06:10: Middleton’s Family Inclusive Language Chart
09:10: Making Museum Conferences More Accessible
10:10: Learn More
10:30: Outro

44. Vassil Makarinov Presents Technology and History at the Bulgarian Polytechnical Museum Jun 11, 2018

The Bulgarian National Polytechnical Museum is a science museum that also tells the story of Bulgarian and world history. The building itself once housed a museum of a Bulgarian communist leader, and the technical artifacts on display, from simple machines to Bulgarian-made computers from the 1980s present both scientific concepts and the political contexts in which they were developed.

In this episode, curator Vassil Macaranov describes how the increasing role of technology in our lives underscores the importance of presenting scientific and technological artifacts with their historical contexts.

This episode was recorded at the Bulgarian National Polytechnical Museum in Sofia Bulgaria on June 8th, 2018.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Vassil Makarinov, Curator
00:28: Early Childhood Museums
01:09: Bulgarian National Polytechnical Museum
01:50: A Brief History of Bulgaria
05:23: Early Bulgarian Computers
07:15: Educating Bulgarian Children
10:09: Technology Within Historical Contexts
10:52: Outro - Made possible by listeners like you. Join Club Archipelago today.

43. Blake Bradford Aims To Increase Number of Black Museum Professionals with Lincoln University Program May 28, 2018

In episode 36 of this podcast, Bill Bradberry, Chair of the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Area Commission, described encountering the glaring lack of cultural diversity within and around the museum industry, particularly in leadership. He cited the new Museum Studies program at Lincoln University as an example of a program that addresses the problem directly.

Blake Bradford is the director of that Museum Studies Program, a partnership between Lincoln University and the Barnes Foundation. In this episode, Bradford describes ways to change museum institutions that already consider themselves successful. He also talks about museums as public-facing institutions, inviting his students to think critically about how truth is established through museums, and what surprises him about his students.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Blake Bradford
00:53: Museums Accountable to The Public
01:49: Convincing Museums to Do The Right Thing
02:24: Museum Studies Program at Lincoln University
03:20: “Safe” Diversity is Not Diversity
04:30: Critical Analysis Curriculum
07:10: Taking The Magic Out of Exhibit Production
08:36: Post-Museum Students
11:01: Outro

42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans May 14, 2018

Until a few weeks ago, one of the only places in downtown New Orleans acknowledging the city’s slave-trading past was a marker in Congo Square, erected in 1997. The New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade has since put up two new markers, one on the transatlantic slave trade along the Moonwalk and another on the domestic slave trade at the intersection of Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street. Author and historian Freddi Williams Evans and activist Luther Gray are the two original co-chairs of the committee.
In this episode, Evans and Gray describe New Orleans’s past as the center of the overlapping international and domestic slave trades. They also discuss their conservation efforts at Congo Square, the logistics of erecting the markers with a sankofa bird instead of a pelican at the top, and the Maafa ceremony, which will host the unveiling of these markers later this year.
This episode was recorded on May 10, 2018 in New Orleans. Committee members mentioned in this episode are Guy Hughes, Leon Waters, Ibrahima Seck, Erin Greenwald, Joshua Rothman, Joyce Miller, and Midlo Hall. Steve Prince designed the logo for the transatlantic marker.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

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Guests:

Freddi Williams Evans
Luther Gray

Topics Discussed:

00:00: Intro
00:14: The New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade
00:35: Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray
01:13: Origins of the Committee
01:45: The History of Gatherings in Congo Square
03:30: The International Slave Trade and the Domestic Slave Trade in Louisiana
06:20: The Lack of Documentation of African Presence in New Orleans
07:00: The Preservation of Congo Square
08:02: The Logistics of Setting Up Markers
10:34: Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project
11:11: The Maafa Ceremony
12:43: Outro

41. 16,000 Years at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter with David Scofield Apr 30, 2018

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As the oldest site of human habitation in North America, the Meadowcroft Rockshelter has a challenge: how to convey its mind-boggling timescale, spanning from prehistory to the 19th century? David Scofield, director of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, describes how the museum is designed to connect the big changes in how people lived through 16,000 years of history.
The Meadowcroft Rockshelter opens for its 50th season on May 5th, 2018. It is part of the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pennsylvania.
Made possible by listeners like you. Join Club Archipelago today.
Guest:
David Scofield
Topics Discussed
00:00: Intro
00:14: David Scofield, Director of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village
01:02: What Else Was Happening 16,000 Years Ago?
01:30: Discovery
04:20: Beringia
05:44: Expressing Large Timescales in Museums
08:55: Meadowcroft’s 50 Season
09:14: Outro

40. Conserving Digital Photos with Jenny Mathiasson and Kloe Rumsey Apr 16, 2018

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Jenny Mathiasson and Kloe Rumsey started The C Word: The Conservators’ Podcast to broadcast their friendly and professional discussions about conservation. Each episode features a different hot topic in the conservation world, and the podcast stands out for its hosts willingness to tackle complex topics.

In this episode, the hosts discuss whether photos are data or objects, the Digitized Photograph Project at the Rwandan Genocide Memorial Centre, and museums asking people to bring in their own objects.

For new listeners, Mathiasson and Rumsey recommend starting with S01E01: Demographics.

Made possible by listeners like you. Join Club Archipelago today.

Guests:
Jenny Mathiasson
Kloe Rumsey

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Jenny Mathiasson and Kloe Rumsey
00:45: The Origins of The C Word Podcast
01:45: Photos As Data Or Objects
04:25: Digitized Photograph Project at the Rwandan Genocide Memorial
06:03: Privacy and Data
08:10: Queer Britain
09:00: Best C Word Podcast Episodes to Start With?
09:25: Outro

39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum with James Delbourgo Apr 02, 2018

Over the course of his long life, Hans Sloane collected tens of thousands of items which became the basis for what is today the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, he assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world.

James Delbourgo, professor of History of Science and Atlantic World at Rutgers University, is the author of Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. In this episode, Delbourgo describes Sloane’s formative years in Jamaica, how his collection was an attempt to catalogue the wonders and intricacies of a divine creation, and how the British Museum, which opened in 1759, came into being as a result of the terms Sloane laid down in his will. Delbourgo also discusses how Sloane’s idea of universal public access to his collections remains radical to this day.

Guest:
James Delbourgo

Book:
Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: James Delbourgo
00:40: Hans Sloane
02:10: Sloane in Jamaica
02:58: Earliest Transcription of African Music in the Americas
04:21: Sloane in London
06:58: Universal Public Access at the British Museum
10:40: Admission Charges at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
11:27: Recommendation: Museums in Strange Places
12:00: Outro

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 39. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago is your audio guide through the landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

James Delbourgo: My name is James Delbourgo. I am a professor of history of science and the Atlantic world at Rutgers and I'm the author of a recent book, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. It's a book that tells the story of Hans Sloane and how the British Museum came into existence in the 1750s.

Hans Sloane was born in the north of Ireland in 1660, and he moved to London at the age of 19. He trained as a botanist and as a physician.

James Delbourgo: But in 1687, he becomes physician to the new governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Albemarle, and he set sail with Albemarle really for two reasons. Of course, this is in part fortune seeking and Sloane hopes to become wealthy by sailing to Jamaica, which is just at this time becoming intensively converted to slave labor and sugar cultivation. Sloane goes to Jamaica really when Jamaica is beginning its rises through sugar and slavery, what will become one of the most lucrative colonies of the British Empire in the 18th century. So he has material incentives, but also botanical incentives and medical incentives, hoping to find new drugs that Europeans don't yet know about and also hoping to collect, record, note down information about as many new exotic plants and potentially animal species as he can. It's a very particular moment where scientific ambition and personal ambition coincide with the opening up of these new lucrative island colonies in the Caribbean by the British through sugar and slavery at the end of the 17th century.

In Jamaica, Sloane began writing his two-volume book, Natural History, and became deeply embedded with Indian slaving plantocracy.

James Delbourgo: You have Sloane who is the friend of planters and will ultimately marry into a plantocracy by marrying a Jamaican widow by the name of Elizabeth Langley Rose from whom he receives money from sugar plantations that ultimately feed his collecting. Sloane is part of all of that, and indeed in his Natural History, he justifies and defends the use of violence to maintain the profitability of slavery.

Sloane's Natural History was mostly a collection of what plants grow in Jamaica and what could be profitably extracted from the land. He took as much of it as he could to add to his growing collection. But it wasn't just plants.

James Delbourgo: Also in that book, recorded on staves, extremely rare for this period, is musical notation that is a version of musical performance executed by enslaved west Africans in Jamaica in the late 17th century that Sloane claims to have witnessed. There are very few other travelers who go to these empirical lengths to record the music played by enslaved Africans and indeed to collect their instruments, which he does, and he brings their banjo like [inaudible]. That's the term he uses for them in his Natural History.

James Delbourgo: There's an extraordinary contradiction or tension between acts of exploitation and acts of preservation. This is in no way to condone or justify or sympathize with those kinds of justifications for what was, of course, a brutal legalized stem of violence in the pursuit of profit. His curiosity is a very complex, generative curiosity because it is this universalistic form of natural history that has a reach into many different domains that will later become specialized in distinct in the 19th and in the 20th century.

After he comes back to England, he never leaves again, and yet he continues collecting. Here he is, he has book wheels.

James Delbourgo: Yes.

Books upon books, which he's writing down, keeping track of all of this. He's doing so without a computer. He's doing so in a way that I think many of us who use computers all day are familiar with, but he's doing so in the context of the late 17th century. Did you ever have that thought when you were looking through his collection about how modern his problem was? His problem being, there's a lot of stuff that I need to catalog.

James Delbourgo: Well, it did occur to me after a while. You're quite right, I think, to point to something that looks very familiar to us, which is the classification and the categorization of many different kinds of information. We attempt to manage this challenge electronically and Sloane attempted to manage this project on paper through correspondence, through applying paper labels with inked numbers to specimens and curiosities, putting them in certain parts of his house, which doubled as his private museum. Each number on each thing, linking them to an entry and a catalog. What these European naturalists saw themselves as doing was somehow cataloging the divine creation. There was a religious idea that there was a unity to the world that was a divine unity. That was a reflection of the omnipotence and wisdom and divine design.

James Delbourgo: Of course, I didn't mean that somebody like Sloane was not also pursuing profit and interested in drugs and food stuffs that could be turned into commodities. That's absolutely the case at the same time so both of these things are true. And in that sense, the commercial management of global information, the global management of commodities reduced to short descriptions, this is not a bad way at all to characterize what Sloane was doing on paper. Something that goes on in our own time in electronic form so Sloane is part of a long history of that. But at the same time, he's also sorting what he sees as the creation into discreet catalogs of kinds of things as God designed them: fossils, birds, eggs, plants, fish, artificial curiosities, and so on and so forth. I

I would like to turn my attention and my question to that legacy of founding the British Museum. How much of our understanding of a big museum like the British museum actually owes to this one sentence that Sloane wrote that he wanted his collection to be free and universally accessible and how much of a problem that was?

James Delbourgo: Well, you touch on an absolutely fundamental theme, which we could say is the theme of the public museum. Sloane, like many collectors, was very preoccupied with what would become of his life's work. He had already during the course of his lifetime absorbed collections by a number of other collectors. Really during his life, he evolves into a kind of human living repository of other people's natural history collections.

James Delbourgo: Don't forget he's extremely wealthy for many reasons: Income from the Jamaica sugar plantations, salaries and various other things. He's very long lived. Lives to be 92. What that means is he is able to collect the collections of people who are friends and acquaintances. It almost becomes proverbial that in London, center of an expanding empire at this time in the early 18th century, if somebody pops off and they had a great collection, that collection should go just to the hand Sloane because he's already evolved into this holding operation, a guardian on behalf of the public. That idea of public access to collections doesn't really exist in the first half of the 18th century in a very robust way.

James Delbourgo: He's one of the people that's going to invent that. There is something extraordinarily significant about the language in his will, which you have quoted, which then becomes the basis of the British Museum Act, which creates the British Museum as an institution where his collections along with certain others that get added to them will be publicly accessible in a very interesting way. Even more interesting is the reaction of many, not all, but many curators, early curators at the British Museum in the 18th century. They say to themselves, "Oh, my God. Now here comes the public. We've got to let the great unwashed in to see all these things. How are we going to do this? How are we going to manage this?" A number of them, and I quote the evidence in the book, are extremely vexed by the idea of what to them is a radical departure where we will allow the different classes and genders to mix in the museum.

James Delbourgo: That was not an easy idea. That ran into... Sloane set this up and then he died. He didn't have to deal with it. The curators did, and they balked at it. That then becomes a much longer story of really what is a public institution? Who really does have what kind of access under what kind of conditions? It is always mediated inevitably. I think that's always a question worth asking, and it's a long story even to the current day. As we know, for example, the Metropolitan Museum in some sense is a descendant of the universal encyclopedic tradition in New York found in the 1870s has decided to introduce admission charges for people living outside New York state.

James Delbourgo: The conditions of public access are never finally resolved and they can become more liberal or less liberal as time goes by, and I think that's a question that we all have to watch. I think Sloane is setting that up through his legacy in an extraordinary way and we are all to some extent I would say the heirs of such a tradition. But there's no guarantee that it will continue to liberalize. In fact, it may become subject to greater constraint and you could say that given the economic situation we're living in today, we are looking at potentially more constraint on our access to these public institutions.

IDelbourgo's book is called Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. It's a great read and you can find it in the show notes for this episode.

No surprise that I'm a huge fan of podcasts and I'm always interested in new ones. If you like Museum Archipelago, you should also download Museums in Strange Places, a podcast about Icelandic museums by Hannah Hethmon. Hannah was featured on Episode 33 of this show, talking about her work cataloging Icelandic museums. For new listeners, Hannah recommends starting with Episode 11 about how seals are saving Hvammstangi. Go find Museums in Strange Places wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

This has been Museum Archipelago. If you like the show, you can support me by joining Club Archipelago. In exchange for your support, you'll get access to a new premium audio feed that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. You can join the club by going to patreon.com/museumarchipelago or looking in the show notes for this episode. For more information or to submit feedback, go to museumarchipelago.com or museum_go on Twitter. Next time, bring a friend.

38. Conservation in the 21st Century with Sanchita Balachandran Mar 19, 2018

Image: Sanchita Balachandran. Photo Credit: James Rensselaer.

Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, hopes to see the field of conservation develop into more of a social process, rather than simply a technical one.

From her 2016 talk at the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting, to teaching her students how to interrogate an object in person, to her Untold Stories project, Balachandran has thought critically about the role of conservators. In this epsiode, Balachandran talks about her early formative experiences in the field of conservation and how whether or not someone’s history is worth preserving is a deeply political decision.

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Topcis Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:14: Sanchita Balachandran
00:30: What Does a Conservator Do?
03:10: Early Formative Experiences
03:35: The Needs of Objects
05:35: Race, Diversity and Politics in Conservation: Our 21st Century Crisis
10:30: Objects vs. Data
13:03: Outro

37. The National Public Housing Museum with Robert J. Smith III Mar 05, 2018

It would have been much easier to build the National Public Housing Museum from scratch instead of retrofitting it in the last remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes, the first public housing development in Chicago. But doing so would have undermined one of the core principles of the museum: that place has power.
Robert J. Smith III, the associate director of the National Public Housing Museum, describes the mission of the museum as preserving, promoting, and propelling housing as a human right. In this epsiode, he describes the history of the Jane Addams Homes, how national public policy connects to the lives of public housing residents, and some ongoing decisions about what the museum will look like when it opens next year.
Museum Archipelago is a fortnightly museum podcast guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums and surrounding culture. Subscribe to the podcast for free to never miss an episode.

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Topics Discussed:

00:00: Intro
00:14: Robert J. Smith III
00:24: The Mission of the Museum
01:00: Preserving a Building of the Jane Addams Homes
02:18: The Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation
03:05: Deverra Beverly
04:41: Beyond Preservation
06:25: Docent-Guided Tours
07:00: Apartment Tours
9:50: Demand the Impossible
11:05: Housing as a Human Right

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 37. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Robert Smith: Good afternoon. My name is Robert Smith and I am associate director of the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. So the mission of the museum is to preserve, promote and propel Housing is a human right, and we do that through exhibitions, public programs and by bringing arts and culture together with public policy to create, You know, we hope for creative and lasting solutions of housing in security.

The National Public Housing Museum, which is not yet open, was founded in 2007 as the result of years of organizing by public housing residents. The original intent was to save the last remaining building of the Jane Adams Homes, a public housing development in Chicago, from demolition and preserve it as a museum.

Robert Smith: So the Holmes is one of the first developments of public housing built in Chicago. They were opened in 1938 as part of the Public Works Administration, and the goal of the Public Works Administration was to basically spend money to stimulate the economy. Public housing, construction. Have you had a benefit? Of course? Housing, poor and working class families who were suffering in a really serious housing crisis that gripped the country and the genetics homes sort of contrary to the typical understanding of public housing is mostly served on white, working class families. Eventually, by the time it closes, it houses nearly all African American families. And really, you know, the story of race could be charted in the ways that the Jane Adams homes change over time, from a place that house mostly white immigrants to a place that houses mostly the black urban poor and the Janus Holmes is made up of rage building 52 rowhouses, all of those air demolished. But for 13 22 West Taylor Street, which is the building man, will be the National Public Housing Museum.

The Jane Adams Holmes was targeted for demolition by the Chicago Housing Authorities Plan for Transformation

Robert Smith: n Chicago under the second Mayor, Daley Richard J. Daley, the conventional wisdom of the state and the philanthropic sector. The private sector was to launch something called the plane for transformation, which resulted in the demolition of all of the quote unquote notorious public housing developments on 25,000 units of public housing came down. 25,000 units of public housing were supposed to be created. So much of the plane for transformation happened without the involvement. It’s your involvement of public housing residents and you know it all goes back to the public housing residents from Saul’s S O Mr Vera, Beverly Waas, a public housing residents in the opera homes of which the Jane Adams Holmes is one. And she was one of the leading activists and organizers in her community. And when the Jane Adams Holmes came down, she was one of the leading voices that one of the buildings ought to be preserved as a museum. So I would say the seat is really you know, Mr Vera, Beverly and the group of activists, mostly African Americans, mostly African American women who are really instrumental in fighting to preserve the building, who sort of organized allies and foundations and academics to do the work to preserve the building and say that

The fact that they chose to preserve this one building this one address that used to be part of this particular development serves the whole message of the museum. I am the primacy of place.

It’s frankly, would have been much cheaper. To build a museum from scratch on the open land that once was the Jane Adam’s homes, then to go through the trouble of saving the last remaining building, you know, getting it of its asbestos of It’s like paint on building an institution inside of it. But for us, you know, the power of places so important that was really important for folks to, you know, walk through the look and feel.

Since the initial idea, the museum has evolved and this still evolving. You can tell by the mission statement that the point is not just preservation. So how does the museum figure out what to focus on and how to present to the world?

Robert Smith: You know, this is a museum founded by public housing residents on Dove course, public housing residents. You ought to have a say in the way their stories air recorded and shared. So our board, about half of the people on the board either currently or have lived in public housing right now, I would say about three of 20 live in public housing right now, it’s really important to us both as a organization that’s representing and sharing the stories and objects of public housing. Residents Teo be co creators and collaborators with folks in the community, but also because they could pull this accountable off and they get to tell us what’s up. They can tell us when we, you know, make a wrong turn, but also for the connect us and the ambassadors to an incredibly diverse, enormous community where there are some kind of key institutions. But once of all the buildings are so many of the buildings came down. People are really dispersed, you know, to the four corners of the Earth and in terms of the the museum itself. You know, Mike, my boss exactly of Director Lisa Lee always says, You know, we’re building the most exciting cultural institution in America, and I think she’s totally right. Of course, there’s still some decisions are still making about what the museum will look like when you open next year. One key decision is that all of her tours will be landed by Justin’s, who are current or past public housing residents. You know, we’ve made a big commitment. Teo threw in a community benefits agreement, and you’re all over conversation actions with our public housing residents, stakeholders. Your museum is a museum of objects, but also importantly abusing. The story’s visitors will encounter the stories of public housing residents across the country on Meet Their Particular. Doesn’t you really want the apartment? Worse?

The apartment tours will feature three furnished apartments made toe look like they would have looked for three specific families that lived in the complex at different times. These are the Toro It’s Family, a Russian Jewish family that moved into the complex in 1938. The reason. Family on Italian American family that lived there in the 1950s and 1960s, when the neighborhood was becoming heavily Italian. And then the Hatch family, an African American family that lived there in the 1970s.

Robert Smith: and in his apartment tours, a meal encounter, objects, reproductions and vignettes that really connect the national public policies that shaped that shaped the lives of the public housing residents on everything from the Housing Act of 1937 to the policies, like the plan for transformation that brought the buildings down here in Chako eso you’ll you’ll injure thee turn. It’s the door apartment who are one of the first residents of the Jane out of this homes. And you know you’ll hear the story about the excitement of the tournament’s family to be living in apartment that had never been, you know, changed. It’d buy pork eso so the Target’s family never needed to go through the kind of exhaustive cleansing rituals, a certain kind of Judaism who requires to keep a kosher kitchen going through the hatch, merely apartment and think and talk about the kind of relationship did of the black church to the black community in Chicago and elsewhere. You know the incredible role at musicians played in public housing and dangle the incredible musicians who emerged from public housing and John out. And they all had a distinct sense of style. They all transmitted their culture through the food, they to have a decorated into the light of Jesus poster in one apartment to the missus on another to the Christmas tree, and another, you know, these were the ways that people dilts, you build a life that was both remarkable. And every day and once you could have passed through the three apartment exhibitions that connects you. National public policy, chew the lived experience of public housing residents. You’ll you’ll hear the rest of the story were, and then you’ll move into the final galleries upstairs, where you will experience and learn about. You know, what happened to the seventies eighties, the nineties, the two thousands. You know what happens at the urban crisis in the urban crisis? What happens through deindustrialization through the retreat of the state from from public services and what happens when the building’s come town. And importantly, you’ll end your museum tour experience in a room that we’re not calling demand the impossible. You know, there have been lots of court, including possible policies. You know, we might have thought about being our work day. It’s one time impossible, and we’re interested in introducing our museum audience tippling policies that might seem equally impossible today. They’re worth considering our worth putting out into a civic space and debating, you know, things like housing first policies that provide Holmes first to do home people on Dollhouse services to be wrapped around folks instead of criminalizing homeless, where things like a universal basic income or other models of ownership on DH enterprise like the worker cooperative like co operative housing like the Community Land Trust, you know different ways of thinking about the economy and knew the public housing residents have, frankly been innovating for a really long time.

Robert says that the National Public Housing Museum is tentatively scheduled to open in September of 2019 with a firmer opening date to be finalized soon, he and his team see museums as the right medium.

Robert Smith: Oh, yeah, I don’t think it’s that controversial to demand or argue that housing is a human right? Of course, there are so many policy approaches to that kind of question, And for me, the museum is a kind of civic space not to debate if housing is a human right, but to figure out how to get there. Oh, and we hope, as an institution that can bring people together to not necessarily agree, but to engage in a civic dialogue and, frankly, you know, with the news media as polarized as it is, um, with the published here such that it is today so fragmented. We think the museums have a particular potential, and we believe your responsibility to be places of convening to help solve the problems that are facing our society. And I think it’s really important, especially as a museum that is a national public housing museum to do that for the country, but also the one that decided in Chicago, which is where so many of the issues of segregation of racism reached their height. You know, reach their kind of ugliest conclusion. It’s really important for us to be an open door to convenience conversations in this city.

36. The Underground Railroad in Niagara Falls with Bill Bradberry Feb 19, 2018

Bill Bradberry, the President and Chairman of the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Area Commission, thinks of the entire city of Niagara Falls, NY as an open crime scene from “the crime of holding people in bondage, and the man-made crime of trying to escape.” With Canada just across the Niagara river, the Commission conducts research on the Underground Railroad as it relates to Niagara Falls and the surrounding area — for some, the last terminus in the United States.

The Commission will open the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center on May 4th, 2018. Bradberry hopes that the center will show the full story, from black waiters at hotels helping enslaved people escape while serving their enslavers with duplicitous professionalism to massive brawls breaking out between abolitionists and bounty hunters.

In this episode, Bradberry talks about situating previously unknown stories into our understanding of the Underground Railroad, discovering the lack of non-white faces in the museum world he has recently entered, and his plan to change that.

Guest:
Bill Bradberry

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Bill Bradberry
01:10: The Geography of Escape
02:05: The Cataract House Hotel
04:25: John Morrison
05:10: Historical Research
06:12: Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center Opening
07:10: The Lack of Non-White Faces in the Museum World
11:11: Introducing Club Archipelago

Museum Archipelago is proud to announce Club Archipelago, a new, members-only podcast that reviews interactive museum exhibits. To subscribe, support the show on Patreon.

35. Cartoons from the Museum Floor with Attendants View Feb 05, 2018

Attendants View is a blog of hand-drawn, single page cartoons that capture a slice of a museum attendant’s day. The comics show confused visitors, tourists asking the same questions over and over again, and museum board members flouting the rules.

The writer and illustrator behind Attendants View has been creating comics about her experiences in museums for the past seven years. About 60% of the comics are about something that has happened to her or around her personally, and the rest come from stories colleagues and others have told her. She wants anyone to feel comfortable sharing their experiences with her; for this and other reasons, she has chosen to remain anonymous for this interview.

By sharing experiences through the medium of comics, Attendants View hopes to demystify various museum jobs. In this episode, Attendants View talks about her creative process, the changes in her professional role, and voluntarism in museums. To read her excellent comics, visit the Attendants View blog here.

34. Erotic Heritage Museum with Dr. Victoria Hartmann Jan 22, 2018

The Las Vegas Erotic Heritage Museum is the largest erotic museum in the world. Sex scholar Dr. Victoria Hartmann has been the museum’s director since 2014, and her mission is to create a space for people to safely explore and engage the topic of human sexuality.

Dr. Hartmann thinks museums too often tell the visitor what to think. She would rather use visitors’ responses to the galleries as a starting point to further discussions.

At the Erotic Heritage Museum, there is a lot to react to: a statue of Donald Trump next to a galley of political, religious, and celebrity personalities connected to sex scandals; a huge collection of erotic artifacts from around the world; and a wall full of posters from the January 21st 2017 Las Vegas Women's March.

In this episode, Dr. Hartmann talks about the inherently political nature of sex, exhibit development with a diverse staff in positions of authority, and what visitors imagine when they hear the word museum.

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33. Icelandic Museums with Hannah Hethmon Jan 08, 2018

Iceland has many more museums per person than the UK and the US. The country is also in the middle of a massive tourism boom: there are several times more tourists than residents. Hannah Hethmon, an American museum professional and Fulbright Fellow living in Reykjavík, was interested in this abundance of museums and the nature of museum tourism in Iceland.

Her Fulbright project is the podcast Museums in Strange Places, which explores these and other Icelandic museum topics. In each episode, Hannah brings listeners through a different museum through the stories of the people who work there.

In this episode, Hannah talks about what the tourist boom means for Icelandic museums, what makes museums on this island unique, and what is next for her podcast.

For new listeners, Hannah recommends starting with episode 3: A Writer’s Home.

Guest:
Hannah Hethmon

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Hannah Hethmon & Museums in Strange Places
03:25: Tourist Boom in Iceland
05:40: Icelandic Museums Serving Locals and Tourists
08:40: Why Podcasting?
10:05: Giving the Project its Boundaries
11:30: Where Should People Start with Museums in Strange Places?

32. What a Museum on the Moon Might Look Like With Michelle Hanlon Dec 25, 2017

Image: The Lower Half of the Apollo 17 Lunar Lander in a debris field in the Taurus–Littrow valley. This view was captured minutes after the last humans left the moon and it would look exactly the same today.

What humans left behind on the moon are part of our human heritage, on par with Laetoli and Lascaux. Unlike human heritage sites on earth, the lunar landing sites are pristine, completely untouched by natural erosion or human disruption. But the lunar landing sites are also unprotected. On earth, protecting heritage sites is a national affair: countries nominate sites within their own territory to be recognized by UNESCO. Sites on the moon are technically nobody’s territory, so no country can nominate the landing sites, including the six Apollo bases.
The people behind For All Moonkind are designing the legal framework to protect and preserve these human heritage sites. Today, we talk with Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer who volunteers with For All Moonkind, about what it will take to protect these sites them for future generations -- and speculate about what a lunar museum might look like.

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Topics and Links

00:00: Welcome to Museum Archipelago
00:14: The Lunar Liftoff of Apollo 17
02:10: Induction to Michelle Hanlon
03:00: For All Moonkind
04:10: Protecting Heritage Sites on Earth
05:42: Outer Space Treaty
06:50: Apollo Landing Sites Today
08:45: Proposals for Lunar Museums
11:30: What Story Should Lunar Museums Tell?

31. Habemus with Romina Frontini & Christian Díaz Dec 11, 2017

Habemus is a Spanish-language radio program about museum topics broadcasting out of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. Every Friday from 9 to 11pm, team members interview museum people and promote an ideology of fun and hacks in museums.

The title is a play on words — linking the Spanish word “museos” with the Latin verb “we have.” Since the show is on a popular radio station, Habemus team members Romina Frontini and Christian Díaz say it’s up to them to introduce museum topics to a general audience.

In this episode, Romina Frontini and Christian Díaz talk about their project and their ideologies. After listening to this podcast, you can stream their program at http://www.urbana939.com.ar.

30. Visitors of Color with Dr. Porchia Moore Nov 06, 2017

Dr. Porchia Moore, Inclusion Catalyst at the Columbia Museum of Art, started Visitors of Color with nikhil trivedi in 2015.
Visitors of Color is a Tumblr project that documents the perspectives and experiences of marginalized people in museums. It is a record of what the museum experience can be like for people who are often discussed but whose voices are rarely privileged, people that don’t feel welcome in museums, and people that don’t feel like nearby museum spaces are for them.
In this episode, Dr. Moore discusses the Museum Computer Network conference where the project launched, the museum-visiting habits of freshmen at a Historically Black College, and how Visitors of Color has been received by the wider museum community.
Special thanks to Dr. Moore for taking the time for the interview.
Guest: Dr. Porchia Moore
Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:14: Dr. Porchia Moore
00:36: “A Librarian Who Studies Museums”
01:11: Survey of College Freshmen
03:43: Visitors of Color Launch
06:35: Gathering Stories for Visitors of Color
07:30: Visitors of Color as a Counternarrative Project
08:45: The Power of Museums as Cultural Heritage Institutions
09:45: Response from Institutions Across the Country

29. A Digital Approach to Museum Maps Oct 23, 2017

Image: An example of a digital mapping tool, Mapbox Studio Classic.

Everything happens at a time and a place. In a museum, that coordinate system can help keep a story straight, even if it is not at the forefront of a gallery. And when designing maps for museums, we should keep in mind how humanistic digital tools are — and how helpful they can be to museum visitors.
We should pay close attention to mental map matching. Museum visitors have a sense of geography marked by their own lived experiences. What feels like an important city landmark to one person isn’t even on the radar for another.
To account for this, museums should approach maps in the same way that an online mapping service does: by making rules about what categories of landmarks appear at different zoom levels, and then letting the software take over.
With the help of digital tools, we can work toward a map that draws on a hierarchy of categories instead of our personal experience.

28. Leaving the Museum Field with Marieke Van Damme Oct 09, 2017

Executive Director of the Cambridge Historical Society Marieke Van Damme affectionately calls anyone working in the museum field “Museum People.” On her excellent podcast of the same name, she interviews museum people every episode. Many museum people are museum workers.
In 2016, together with other noted museum professionals (Sarah Erdman, Claudia Ocello and Dawn Estabrooks Salerno), Marieke asked why museum workers leave the field. Last month, they published a summary of the findings titled, Leaving the Museum Field.
As Marieke explains, she always knew that working in the museum field is hard. Museum workers face difficult conditions, and some of the very same things that make working in the museum field desirable (passion for the mission) contribute to the bad (discriminatory societal and economic systems, student loans, intense job competition).
Marieke has had countless conversation that begin, “I love working in museums, but I don’t think I can do it anymore because of [insert reason here]”.
Leaving the Museum Field is now the most-viewed article on the AAM Alliance blog since it launched a year ago.
Through her research, Marieke tries to better understand the difficult conditions museum workers face. Though her projects like Joyful Museums, she provides resources and writings about creating a positive workplace culture.
Guest: Marieke Van Damme

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27. Yo, Museum Professionals Sep 11, 2017

Yo, museum professionals: exhibitions aimed at kids should not include interactive screens in galleries. You're undermining your mission!
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) September 4, 2017

Notably missing from discussions like these is a willingness to defend the interactive screen. The defense is simple: concepts that museums are tasked with teaching aren’t tangible anymore.
Today’s students learn complex concepts that kids weren’t exposed to a generation ago. Even basic knowledge of science today requires a deep understanding of systems and ecosystems and how they interact at different scales. Interactive screens provide the conceptual tools, like rescaling and simulation, that help with that understanding.
In this episode, I describe how an interactive screen can teach global climate change in ways an object can’t.

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26. Arab American National Museum with Devon Akmon Aug 28, 2017

Image: Arab American National Museum photo by knightfoundation CC BY-SA 2.0.

Before the Arab American National Museum opened in Dearborn, MI in 2005, there wasn’t a singular museum telling the Arab American story.
The museum defines the Arab World as 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Southeast Michigan has the highest concentration of people from the Arab World in North America, and much of the social, religious, cultural, and commercial enterprises are centered in Dearborn.
In this episode, museum director Devon Akmon describes the process of using arts and culture as a mechanism to build greater community and to share the complexities of the stories with the wider public.
Devon also talks about how his institution relates to other museums on issues of equity and justice.

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Guest: Devon Akmon
Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: Devon Akmon, Director of the Arab American National Museum
00:45: Why Dearborn, MI?
02:53: Displacement in the Arab World
03:30: Using Arts to Build Community
04:04: Building the Museum
05:07: Exhibitions and Space
06:40: Feedback Mechanisms
07:35: Different Audiences
10:01: Talking to Other Museums

25. The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia, Bulgaria is Figuring Out What to Do With All the Lenins Jul 17, 2017

After the fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989, statues of Bulgarian communist leaders, idealized revolutionary workers, and Lenins were taken down all over the county. Some of these statues are now in the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia. Bulgaria doesn’t have a history museum that explores its communist past. The Museum of Socialist Art doesn’t fill that void, exactly: it is an extension of the Bulgarian National Gallery of Art.

In this episode, museum director Nikolai Ushtavaliiski and art historian Elitsa Terzieva talk about organizing the past by focusing on art. The outdoor sculpture garden, above, is unorganized, with statues placed wherever there is room. The indoor galleries, by contrast, are organized by exhibitions exploring specific themes. Even though the museum stays as far away from politics as possible by focusing on the art, these exhibitions provide the framework to start interpreting the era. At some point, there will be a museum that explores the communist era in Bulgaria, but until then this collection of artwork gives you a lot to think about.

Links

This Episode was recorded at the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia, Bulgaria on July 6th, 2017.

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Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 25. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

I'm standing at the museum of socialist art and Sofia, Bulgaria. Standing next to me is art historian Elitsa Terzieva. We're surrounded by Soviet era statues. These statues were erected in various public squares in Bulgarian cities and have since been collected at this museum in an outdoor garden. There are statues of good-looking workers, heroically turning a crank. There are statues of important bespectacled leeders, and there are quite a number of Lenins keeping watch over everything with what I can only assume is a dignified expression.

I ask Elisa what these statues of Lenin mean to her.

Elitsa Terzieva: Well, for me it's a bit controversial because, as a young person. Am I young? I'm 26. Maybe. I have heard about him from my grandparents, from my parents, but it's something like a horror movie, I've heard of, but I haven't even watched it. The other side of my perception is an art historian, because I have studied everything in detail, so I know much more about it compared to if my profession was, something else.

The statues were obviously made with a great deal of technical skill and they look like they were built to last forever.

Elitsa Terzieva: They were made by the best sculptures and artists at the time. They were forced to make them, they couldn't make the things they were used to.

Elitsa Terzieva: So if they wanted to be sculptures and artists and painters, they should get used to the new regime and everything that goes with it. It is like you say, that they could last forever. Like the pyramids. That is some parts of the aesthetic dogmatism of the periods they had to lork monumental. And that is not just the vision, but a material that they're made of.

The museum of socialist art is about art. During the period of communist rule in Bulgaria 1944 to 1989, it only focuses on the art itself. The museum is actually an extension of the Bulgarian National Gallery of Art. According to museum director Nikolai Ushtavaliiski, that makes this museum unique among museums about communist times in other Eastern European countries.

Nikolai is the one speaking Bulgarian. Elitsa was kind enough to translate into English.

Nikolai Ushtavaliiski: This of the few, if not the only one in Europe, but the museums that focus on the art side of things because. Most of the museums and there were very few in the other countries are centered on the historical side of things, not visual material, just history, the political side.

The communist period is not well represented by museums in Bulgaria, but at some point when the era becomes less about memory and more about history, museums and Bulgaria will cover this period.

I asked Nikolai about how he sees the interpretive role of this art museum.

Nikolai Ushtavaliiski: He thinks that we doubt a simple historical base, it is impossible to get into things, although we have texts or something else because we are in the field of art history. So we cannot, make things look another way. We work with these things so we can understand the main things to these, but it's not enough. Here comes their own education, but it's not around the visitors. It's not very well organized. Especially for this period.

Nikolai Ushtavaliiski: It's a pity that it is not well organized in the education because you know that we were under Turkey yolk and liberation was 1878, so you can count from then to now how many years we have. And such a big part of our history as a new born country, were under this period.

I see this feeling in other Bulgarians I know. Because Bulgaria is such a young country, those years of communist rule, in addition to everything else they took away, took away the formative years that could have helped solidify an identity. My Bulgarian grandfather would always subtract 45 years from his age whenever he was asked, because to him, those years under communism were lost years.

While I was at the museum, Nikolai was doing interviews with the Bulgarian Press for the opening of a new temporary exhibition that he curated called Mythologoligins of the Heroic. This exhibition lives in an inside space of the museum consisting mostly of paintings, contrasting the outdoor sculpture garden. While the outdoor sculpture garden was presented without any organizational hierarchy, just sculptures placed wherever they would fit from places around Bulgaria, the Mythologoligins of the Heroic exhibition had an organizing theme. The pieces were presented by the values they represented, courage, determination, sacrifice, and self-denial in the name of freedom.

Even though the museum stays as far away from politics as possible by focusing on the art, exhibitions like the Mythologoligins of the Heroic provide the framework to start to interpret the era.

Even if Bulgaria still doesn't have an in depth museum about the communist period, seeing the artwork organized like this can help give you a sense of the era.

Nikolai Ushtavaliiski: For this period, the aesthetical perhameriters were not that big like we're used to. Because we know that these were a very powerful tool for the politicians to program the minds of the people. So it has to be explained. It's not beautiful. It's something that you should see. It should make you think about something else.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

24. College Hill and the International Slave Trade Walking Tour with Elon Cook Jul 03, 2017

Elon Cook created the College Hill and the International Slave Trade Walking Tour in Providence after researching the crucial and massive role that Rhode Island played in the history of slavery.
The walking tour covers an an area of about one square mile in and around Brown University. Here, wealth and stability were created off of the buying and selling of enslaved people in Rhode Island and elsewhere.
The built landscape of Providence serves as a museum without walls, and Elon considers each of the stops on the tour to be a different mini-exhibition.
In this episode, Cook talks about creating the walking tour, the glossing over of local history, and tracing her ancestors’ genealogy before the 1860s.
Elon Cook is the program manager and curator for the Center for Reconciliation, a non-profit focused on educating the public about the United States’ history of slavery, slave trading and resistance.
This episode was recorded immediately after a walking tour on June 22nd, 2017. Tickets to the next walking tour on July 14, 2017 can be found here.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

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Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:14: Elon Cook, Program Director and Curator at the Center for Reconciliation
00:40: Slavery in Maryland and Local Education
01:50: Learning Rhode Island’s Role in the International Slave Trade
03:10: The Way Slavery is Taught
05:10: The First Walking Tour
06:00: Future Museum
07:00: Using the Built Landscape of Providence as an Exhibition
08:15: Genealogy Before the 1860s

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 24. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

Elon Cook: My name is Elon Cook and I am the program director and curator at the Center for Reconciliation, consultant for the Robin's House African American historic site in Concord, Massachusetts. And I am the creator and lead guide and only guide at the moment for the College Hill and the International Slave Trade walking tour in Providence. So I'm originally from Maryland. Border state. Never learned that as a border state, that also meant that there had actually been slavery in the state of Maryland because I like most kids, don't learn about local history. My school just didn't teach it, but let's see. Right before I moved here, I had actually been working at the Smithsonian, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And I was working in the education department. I had been trying to get into the curatorial department, found out that the Smithsonian's pretty hierarchical and they love degrees and if you don't have certain degrees, the likelihood of you getting, you know, advancing to another level is extremely slim, unfortunately. And so I was looking for scholarships, found the John Nicholas Brown master's fellowship for the study of the public history of slavery. And I got up here and I was still trying to figure out, I still don't understand why Brown University of all the Ivies, of all the schools in New England, of any university, why do they have this fellowship for the study of slavery in Rhode Island? And it wasn't really until I got up here that I started shifting focus, because I'm a genealogist and I'd been focusing a lot on the development of racial ideologies in the Americas. So I thought everything that was happening was in the south. Like Virginia, my parents are from Georgia and Alabama. So I was trying to figure out why would I do that. Got up here and over the course of the two years, and then also learned a lot more once I graduated, realized that Rhode Island was connected to 60 to 90% of all of the American colonial and post colonial slave trading, international slave trading and just blew me away.

Yeah. And all that wealth that's generated from that is just insane.

Yes.

That story of not really being sure about the north and like, I just moved here from North Florida and I also had the sense that in the north it just didn't feel like the history of slavery would be so acute up here. I just thought that, to even realize that there was any ... I think people up here, we do a pretty good job of hiding that.

We do. But it's not just New Englanders or northerners that hide it. A lot of it I think is just the way we're taught about slavery, the American educational system. And I've now noticed that this is the pattern kind of around the world that especially for younger kids, you distill everything down into these really simplified narratives. There's good guys, there's bad guys. It's all about putting people on opposing sides of a story. And then maybe there's a unification or maybe there's a complete splitting. And you know, there's the beginning, a middle and the end. And the way I was taught about slavery was that slavery was a southern thing. It had a lot to do with Virginia and South Carolina and Georgia and Mississippi. And then there was some dude named Frederick Douglass and some lady named Harriet Tubman who tried to free some people. Never bothered to tell us that the state of Maryland where we were from, that's where Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were from. That connection was not made.

And then Lincoln happened. And then everything was fine.

Yeah. And then everything was cool. And then World War II and then the civil rights movement, and then everybody's equal in school. The end of the story and something about women getting to vote or whatever. So there's like a lot of glossing over a lot of things. And the way my school taught history was war by war by war. So Revolutionary War, War of 1812. A lot of things happen between the Revolution and the Civil War, but we didn't really focus on much of that, if any. And definitely not really anything that had to do with slavery. And the only thing I remember about slavery that I learned in high school was there was like a pop out box in the textbook that had black people in a field picking cotton. And like, that's all I really remember learning during that time.

Right after I graduated from Brown with my masters in public history, I was struggling to find a job. It felt like no one wanted to hire someone who had spent two years studying slavery. I wonder why. And I was just having a really hard time. But the Slavery and Justice Center had a group of international visitors who were here specifically to study slavery for like, two weeks for a conference. And they asked me to walk people around, give a walking tour. They knew I did stuff like that. So they said, you know, since I had been studying this history, would I mind putting together a little walking tour of the local history of College Hill related to slavery? And about three days later, I had developed the initial version of this tour, which was only about an hour. And we didn't get to go in any of the stops cause I didn't know how to do, how to organize any of that. Through the process of doing the research, I came across a lot of these very local stories and realized that these super local stories had an impact across the state, across the region, across the country, across the world.

You mentioned that the walking tour will be a part of whatever comes next. But when you're at work, when you're thinking about these kinds of things, why does a museum seemed like an appropriate way to present this information and how does kind of the walking tour fit into that?

Elon Cook: So with the Center for Reconciliation, since we're in the process of developing a museum space in the Cathedral of Saint John here on North Main Street, we recognize that we are currently a museum without a ready building.We're still trying to figure out even how to use the space in there exactly. And if you look at a lot of museums, the Smithsonian, for instance, the National Museum of African American history and culture was doing exhibitions before their building was remotely, before they even broke into ground, they just had to use other spaces. So, this walking tour allows us to use the built landscape of Providence as a museum. So, I think of each of our stops as a different mini exhibition. So, we go in the John Brown house, we see the Sallie gallery. We'd go to the John Carter Brown library and we see another exhibition of original historic artifacts. We go to the Stephen Hopkins House and suddenly you're walking into a room where enslaved people lived and worked. And then you come to the Cathedral of Saint John, where at least three and slave people worshiped, along with their owners. So, it's really about using what we currently have until we have our own home. But this tour is going to keep going, even once we move into the cathedral.

And that was another fascinating theme of the tour was how little we have.

Yes.

How little records we have to work with. And I thought you made a very effective point what records we do have are through the eyes of the owners of enslaved people.

Elon Cook: That's the hard part of doing historical research unfortunately, is that, or when you're researching enslaved people and kind of researching people of color in general, it can be really hard the farther you go back. In my genealogical work, it took a long time to get over the hump from 1880 to 1870 to 1860, because then suddenly you're crossing from freedom, past the Emancipation Proclamation, into the point where nearly all of my ancestors are enslaved. And then going back further and further and further and further and still trying to figure out how do we find these people, when they suddenly go from being Tom Magby to a boy, age 10 to woman? That's it. Or, to just like a hash mark or to just a number, 20 enslaved people on a census record. It makes it so much more difficult to do that work. And it's so hard to trace anyone. So I actually, in order to do my ancestry, in order to get back after the mid 1800s or the early 1800s, actually I had to switch to the white side of my family and trace my ancestry through the owning side and then trace back down and say, oh, well now that I know who the owners are, I can find more information through their diaries, their wills, all kinds of personal documents and finally get names back. If you want to understand why we have all this violence related to race in this country, you have to go back to the history. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense. It's just crazy. It's just random violence for no reason. That's just so mysterious. And when you hear, when you learn the history of like, oh, there's links in a chain going all the way down from these individuals in the 1700s or the 1600s all the way down to right now.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

[Outro]

23. Museum-Metro Station Hybrids Jun 05, 2017

Image: An early rendering of the Serdika station in Sofia, Bulgaria, displaying Roman ruins on the first level underneath the street.

During the planning stages for the Sofia Metro in Bulgaria, ruins of an old Roman fortress and city wall were discovered at the network’s proposed Serdika station. This wasn’t a surprise. People have been living in what is now Sofia for at least 4,000 years, and when you dig a tunnel, you’re bound to find something.
The agendas of archaeologists and metro builders are often contradictory. Metro builders want to proceed quickly, while archaeological examination can be extremely time consuming. After the construction finished, however, Serdika station resolved these differences into a museum-metro station hybrid.
Serdika station is just one example of this museum-metro station hybrid. Metro systems in cities like Mexico City, Istanbul, and Rome have stations featuring artifacts unearthed during their construction. Museum Archipelago tries to make sense of these museum-like spaces.
Links:
Problems of Cultural Monuments' Preservation Connected with the Construction of the Sofia Underground
MISC | Archaeology & Subways

22. Guide Training at Akagera National Park with Lisa Brochu May 15, 2017

I met interpretive planner Lisa Brochu in Akagara National Park in Rwanda. I was there as a tourist, and she was there as a guide trainer.

Lisa’s teaching stresses that the best way to communicate with the visiting public is by having strong, central theme.

At Akagara National Park, park-employed and community freelance guides are the ones doing that communication. By working with them, Lisa hopes visitors’ experience in Akegara will stick with them longer. Lisa teaches that instead of rattling off a list of facts, guides should bundle them together with a strong, central theme. Repeating the theme throughout the tour builds an emotional connection that standalone facts don’t.

In this episode, Lisa explains the importance of “going beyond the wow,” particularly for institutions like Akagara that have plenty of cool experiences to offer visitors. The “wow” doesn’t last, but a good theme will leave visitors with something to reflect on afterwards and then hopefully stimulate the visitor to make to make a commitment to the park’s conservation.

Guest: Lisa Brochu

21. Apollo 11 Historic Site May 01, 2017

Even before I started working in the museum field, I was thinking about the future museum at the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base on the moon.

The site is special. No matter how the human experiment turns out, the site will represent the first step off earth. Now Tranquility Base is a pile of historical artifacts in their original context. Even the astronauts' footprints in the delicate, powder-like dust of the lunar surface are still there.

How should we treat this well-preserved historic site? What will the museum at the site have to say to future visitors, all of whom took the same journey as the Apollo 11 astronauts?Museum Archipelago has some ideas (and more questions).

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20. Universal Design at the White House Visitor Center with Sherril York Apr 18, 2017

Dr. Sherril York, executive director of the National Center on Accessibility, was part of the team that renovated the White House Visitor Center in 2012. Design priorities included making the experience accessible for all visitors.

The new visitor center features raised line floor plans, tactile 3D models, and physical directional keys adjacent to touchscreens.

In this episode, based on her case study for the fall 2015 issue of the Exhibitionist, Dr. York describes the process of working on alternative navigation methods, explains the difference between accessability and universal design, and underscores the importance of not thinking about accessibility and universal design as an afterthought.

Guests:
Dr. Sherril York

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

19. Remembering the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre Apr 03, 2017

When the Kigali Genocide Memorial was first built in 1999, it was a burial site outside the Rwandan capitol city for thousands of victims of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi. Rwandans came to visit the final resting place of friends and family. Today, the city has expanded to envelop the memorial, which has also expanded to include a museum and archive.

We talk with Honoré Gatera, the manager of the memorial, about what the center means to the city and country in 2017 and why a museum is the right medium for the center.

This podcast was recorded at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre on March 24th, 2017.

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Guests:
Honoré Gatera

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:14: Honoré Gatera, Manager of the Memorial
01:00: Burial Site
01:45: Visitor Experience / Opening Film
04:00: Individual Stories Lead to Community Stories
04:50: Video Is In Two Parts
05:25: Pre-Colonial Period
07:10: Why is a Museum the Right Medium to Tell the Story?
09:06: School Groups / Educational Outreach
11:07: Photographs in the Museum
13:00: Genocide Archive

18. Maps and the 20th Century at the British Library Feb 27, 2017

Image: Two propaganda maps at the Maps and the 20th Century exhibit at the British Library.

The Maps and the 20th Century exhibit at the British Library is quick to get to central theme of the exhibition: in order to understand a map, you must understand how and why it was made. Maps are not neutral.

In a museum context, however, it can be tempting to present a map as the source of truth.

Topics Discussed:

00:00: Intro
00:14: Maps in Museums
01:08: Limiting the Gallery to the 20th Century
01:45: “Global North”
02:15: Propaganda Maps and Globes
02:40: German Map of European immigrants living in the US

Links:
Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line

17. Entertainment and History at Disney's America Feb 06, 2017

Image: A Civil War-era village that would have served as the hub of Disney's America. Image (c) Disney

In 1994, Disney was hard at work on a new theme park called Disney's America. The park, which would open in Virginia not far from Washington DC, would showcase the “sweep of American History.”

Confident and enthusiastic, Disney executives were walking a tightrope between entertainment and history.

Topics Discussed:

00:00: Intro
00:14: Disney's America
00:37: "The Complexity of the American Experience"
01:24: Themed Lands at the Magic Kingdom
01:50: Themed Lands at Disney's America
03:10: "Serious Fun"
03:50: Courtland Milloy
05:10: Theme Park Design
05:50: Marc Davis

Links:

DISNEY SAYS VA. PARK WILL BE SERIOUS FUN - The Washington Post

HELPING DISNEY, HURTING AMERICA?

SLAVERY IS NOT AMUSING

Disney Avenue: Imagineers Remember Creating Pirates of the Caribbean

Passport to Dreams Old & New: Marc Davis

16. Visitation Trends at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum Jan 16, 2017

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum is commemorating three anniversaries in 2017: the 200-year anniversary of the first attack of the Seminole War, the 60th anniversary of federal recognition of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the 20th anniversary of the opening of the museum.

Carrie Dilley, Visitor Services and Development Manager at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum, compiles data collected from visitors. Last year, she discovered that visitors from one third of countries visited the museum, including a surprising number of Europeans.

In this episode, Carrie discusses possible reasons behind the visitation numbers, some museum goals for the next year, and Seminole history.

Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:14: Carrie Dilley
00:48: Three anniversaries in 2017
03:30: Overall Visitation Numbers
04:44: What a Wonderful World Blog Post
05:25: Why the interest from Europe in general and Germany in particular?
07:30: Museum guides in multiple languages
08:00: How much do Europeans know about general American history?
10:30: New exhibits on the way

Guest:
Carrie Dilley, Visitor Services and Development Manager at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum.

15. Tamar Avishai's The Lonely Palette Jan 02, 2017

The Lonely Palette is the best museum podcast out there. Host Tamar Avishai wants to make art more accessible and to help people feel more comfortable talking about what they see in museums. She uses her experience as a Spotlight Lecturer at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston as a jumping off point for her relaxed and unconventional approach to art history.

Topics discussed:
00:00 Intro
00:16 Tamar Avishai
00:29 The Lonely Palette
01:26 Museum education as a recent addition to the museum experience
02:04 Museum education making visitors feel welcome
02:49 Spotlight lectures at the MFA
04:14 A tour nobody asked for
06:05 The intro, by museum guests, in the Lonely Palette
10:10 The problem with audio guides

Guest:
Tamar Avishai

14. Early Interpretive Planning at the National Museum of African American History and Culture Dec 12, 2016

Image: Guard tower from Camp H at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola at the National Museum Of African American History And Culture

The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened in September 2016. Today we will talk to some of the people who were thinking about the museum in 2007.

Sara Smith and Andrew Anway were part of the Interpretive Planing team. They discuss NMAAHC director Lonnie Bunch's guiding principals for the museum as a whole, trips to other museums during the planning process, and the mission to show that what is happening in culture today is rooted in the past.

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Topcis Discussed:

00:00: Intro
00:30: Sara Smith and Andy Anway
01:12: National Museum of the American Indian
02:59: Guiding Principles of NMAAHC
06:59: Guard tower from Camp H at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola
08:50: Where in History Does the Museum Start?
09:44: The Museum Today
11:24: Getting The Museum Built

13. Museums at a Crossroads with Rainey Tisdale Jun 23, 2016

Curator Rainey Tisdale sees two possible futures for museums: they play a more interdisciplinary role for their audiences or keep going down the same path they're on, becoming less and less relevant each year.

Why should it be the job of the museum to enter the domain of other traditional institutions? And how can museums engage the public in new ways?

By bringing together brain, body and spirit.

Notes:

- City Stories
- @raineytisdale

12. Dead Bodies in Museums Part 2 May 24, 2016

Image: Lenin's mausoleum, Moscow. CC by Veni

The American Association of Museums (AAM) has this to say about human remains in its code of ethics: “The unique and special nature of human remains and funerary and sacred objects is recognized as the basis of all decisions concerning such collections collections-related activities promote the public good rather than individual financial gain.” When AAM uses the word “special,” it means that every instance of a dead body is special, not a special body from a special person. What is different about displaying the everyman?

In the second half of this two part series about dead bodies, we look at how cultures view their own dead from museums to mausoleums. We explore the Body Worlds exhibits, which bring visitors face-to-face with dozens of dead bodies, all identifying markers removed. We also discuss a landfill in Staten Island, where much of the sorting of museum artifacts and human remains from rubble took place after the September 11 attacks.

NOTES:

Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo

Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum - The British Museum creates guidelines for displaying dead bodies.

Code of Ethics for Museums - AAM

11. Dead Bodies in Museums Part 1 Apr 22, 2016

Image: A rendering of Minik in the New York World

When Robert Peary brought six Inuits from Greenland back from his Arctic expedition, they landed in the care of the American Museum of Natural History. Among these people were an eight year old boy named Minik and his father Qisuk.

After Qisuk became ill and died, the museum staged a fake burial and put his remains in the museum as artifacts.

This is part one of a two-part series on dead bodies in museums.

NOTES:

Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo - The work on which most of this episode is based.

Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum - The British Museum creates guidelines for displaying dead bodies.

American Experience . Minik, The Lost Eskimo | PBS

10. Framework For Engaging with Art Apr 04, 2016

At an art museum, would you rather listen to a detailed guided tour or just enjoy the art without any interpretative support? Are you more comfortable visiting with a friend, or do you prefer being in a group of interested strangers?

The Dallas Museum of Art has determined that visitors fall into one of four clusters, based on their preferred learning styles. While she was director of the museum, Bonnie Pitman applied the results of the survey to make the museum more engaging to all types of visitors.

In this episode, we take a look at the four clusters, analyze the study, and talk to Bonnie Pitman.

Notes:

Ignite the Power of Art: Advancing Visitor Engagement in Museums (Dallas Museum of Art Publications) by Bonnie Pitman and Ellen Hirzy

Dallas Museum of Art: Home

Dallas Museum of Art on Twitter

Framework for Engaging with Art | Dallas Museum of Art

9. The Museum Selfie with Dustin Growick Mar 11, 2016

Dustin Growick is in charge of audience development and the team lead for science at Museum Hack. Growick and Museum Hack treat a museum as a platform to build something more personal and fun.

One of the tools that they use to make it more personal and fun is the museum selfie. The theory is that taking selfies is easy way to put yourself literally and figuratively in the context of the museum.

In this this episode, Growick discusses the philosophy (as well as some dos and don'ts) of museum selfies.

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Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 9. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Dustin Growick: You take a photo of yourself in a museum, you look smart, you look cultured. The lighting is often pretty sexy.

Dustin Growick is in charge of audience development and the team lead for science at Museum Hack.

Dustin Growick: We run subversive, nontraditional, incredibly fun, two hour museum adventures at the museum of natural history and the metropolitan museum of art here in New York City.

When talking to Dustin, you realize that he treats a museum as a platform to build something more personal and fun and one of the tools that he uses to make it more personal and fun is the museum selfie.

Dustin Growick: We find that not just selfies but using phones and taking photos and sometimes selfies as well. It's actually when given the right context is a great way to give people a personally engaging experience within a museum that isn't necessarily thought of as a context for them or a place for them or relating to them and doing. Taking selfies is easy way to put yourself literally and figuratively in the context of the museum.

Part of the curriculum of museum hack is to encourage tour goers, to take selfies in a way that feeds back into the tour. For example, in the museum of natural history tour, Growick get a tiny dinosaur and they have to go on a fossil hunt to find their species of dinosaur

Dustin Growick: and then approve. They found it. They have to take a dino selfie and then also learned one thing about it and then we come back and share out the things that we found in our, our stupid silly selfies, but it's part of a larger experience. Again, it just gives people like a personal inroads to make connections in a room or space they might otherwise just breeze through.

For Dustin, it's all about the context.

Dustin Growick: If you're just walking into like, I'm taking yourself and then walk over there and take yourself. You'll walk over here and take yourself, but you're right. Like there's, that's not really going to add to the experience, but when it's part of a larger context that we really think through and set up sort of ways to give people just easier ways to get personally connected to the experience. I think selfies are one part of that that can help facilitate that,

But the context is not just making sure that a selfie can be meaningful and fit into a larger pedagogical structure. There also must be times when it's completely inappropriate to take a selfie. I ask Dustin if there was a difference between taking a selfie in the art museum where it could be just another form of expression or a history museum where there's less room for a reverence. He said it's something they think about a lot.

Dustin Growick: I don't think it's necessarily history versus art as much as, again, like this specific person or thing with which you're interacting. So at an art museum, there are things that are going to be less kosher to take selfies with if they're depicting, you know, genocide or war or something like that. Slavery, um, or like a disenfranchised or marginalized people versus, there's not much threatened taking a selfie, a dinosaur. So I don't think it's necessarily like art or versus science versus history. I think it depends on exactly what you're doing. The selfie within that and how you're taking this off.

Is it the museum visitor who should be considering the appropriateness of taking a selfie or is the institution itself? Dustin thinks it should be a combination of both, but he thinks that institutions should do a better job of guiding visitors through participatory activities, whether it's a selfie or some other prompt.

Dustin Growick: I also think that museums are afraid of like pigeonholing people into doing a specific activity, isn't it? They're like, Oh, we want people to be able to interact and observe and participate however they see fit. And we would never tell them to do it this way, do it that way. But that's all often a nonstarter. Like if you're just like, Oh go and draw something. I'm like, all right, maybe I don't know what I'm a draw. But if you give like a very specific context within like in which I can contribute something to some sort of framework that's already kind of set for me at least, that's a much better prompt cause we've actually gonna do stuff more. And definitely if you're really smart about that context that you set up, you can usually nip in the bud a lot of the stuff that museums are afraid of in the first place. But it's not easy and you have to be willing to relinquish a little bit of control, which is not so easy to do for a lot of people whose job is literally to curate stuff. And then you're like, Oh let these other people come in and do part of that in a certain regard. So it's, it's a thin line.

You'll find the full transcript of this episode along with shownotes at Museum Archipelago dot come. Club Archipelago members get access to a bonus podcast feed that sort of like the director's commentary to the main show. Subscribe at patrion.com/museum archipelago if this is your first show, don't forget to subscribe for free in your favorite podcast player. Thanks for listening, and next time bring a friend.

8. Calatrava and the Museum Icon Feb 10, 2016

This week, we visit two museum works by architect Santiago Calatrava: the Prince Felipe Museum of Science in Valencia, Spain and the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, USA. Both museums look nothing like the museum icon on maps and in mapping programs. Do these facades have anything to say about about what the museum icon might look like in 50 years? Do these buildings even make good museums?

Correction: This episode misidentifies the Milwaukee Art Museum as the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Notes:

Santiago Calatrava - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

City of Arts and Sciences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Milwaukee Art Museum | Museum Info

7. What Happens to Dead Amusement Parks? Jan 27, 2016

Most of the time, nothing.

This week, special guest Carole Sanderson of the National Roller Coaster Museum and Archives describes the process and challenges of documenting the entertainment industry.

Notes:

Six Flags New Orleans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

National Roller Coaster Museum: Welcome

Matterhorn Bobsleds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Special thanks to Carole Sanderson

6. Muzeiko Sep 30, 2015

Until Muzeiko opened in Sofia, Bulgaria on October 1st 2015, there were no children’s museums in the Balkans.

One of the reasons for the lack of children’s museums was a cultural attitude towards childhood education during communist times, according to Vessela Gercheva, the Programs and Exhibits Director for Muzeiko.

In this episode, Museum of Museums visits Muzeiko to find a shifting attitude towards children's education.

Notes:

Muzeiko - Official Site

A Children’s Museum Comes to Bulgaria - NYT

5. StalinWorld Jul 24, 2015

Image: Monika Bernotas and her family interact with statues of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that were previously located in the cities of Lithuania at Grutas park.

Go to the central square of any Soviet influenced country like Lithuania, and you will find empty pedestals.
The pedestals used hold monuments to Soviet leaders. Where there once were statues of Lenin and Stalin, you now find overgrown bushes and pop-up cell phone stores.
Where are the statues now? In Lithuania, they are in a pseudo-theme park called Grūtas Park or, unofficially, Stalin World.

With special guest Monika Bernotas.

Notes and Links:

Grutas Park and the Fate of Soviet Statuary in Lithuania

Grūtas Park - Wikipedia

Music composed by Adam Emanon from his album for rest (2008). Used under a Creative Commons licence.

4. Bison Hunt on Horseback May 27, 2015

Built in 1966, the Bison Hunt on Horseback diorama at the Milwaukee Public Museum is a throwback to an older style of exhibit, without projectors or screens. In this epsiode, Dr. Ellen Censky, Senior Vice President and Academic Dean at the Milwaukee Public Museum, talks about the diorama and modern exhibit design.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

3. Museum Authority in a World of User-Generated Content with Seb Chan May 05, 2015

As one of the nation's most-trusted category of institutions, museums project an enormous amount of authority over their subject matter. In this episode, Seb Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Technologies at Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, talks about the ways that museums can share that authority with museum visitors comfortable with a less top-down approach to authority.

For discussions on how museum's got to amass so much authority, stay tuned to Museum Archipelago.

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If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 3. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

[Intro]

When we walk into a museum, we trust that the objects laid out across the table are done so with some expertise. Who gets to decide where those objects go? In a school, the teacher is the authority. In a household, the parent might be the authority. And sometimes the museum can lend the parent some authority.

Seb Chan: When I was working in a science museum, we would always talk about making sure that the labels had enough nuggets for the parents to feel smart.

This is Seb Chan, Director of Digital and Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Seb Chan: The kid would ask, "What is that, mom? What is that, dad?"

Seb Chan: And mom or dad would look at the label and they would need to be able to glean, in a second or two, two or three main points about that thing and one that would make them seem really smart to their kid.

That's delightful.

Seb Chan: And it was a tactic that you know you employ in museums because you're not designing it for the kid to read, you're designing it for the parent to read, and the parent needs to feel that they are smart in conveying this information to their child. They also need to feel that they can trust that.

Our topic today is museum authority, specifically museum authority in a world increasingly comfortable with user generated content. Our story begins in 1994 at the National Air and Space Museum. The museum plans and exhibit on the Enola Gay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Critics of the planned exhibit, particularly U.S. Veterans Groups charge that the exhibit focused too much attention on the Japanese casualties inflicted by the atomic bomb rather than on the motivations of the bombing or the discussion of the bomb's role in ending the conflict with Japan. Who gets to decide? In the earlier age, this decision is simple, it's the authority of the state. The official reason for dropping the bomb was what would be reflected in the museum. In 1994, you had the debate over the moral and military reasons for dropping the bomb play out in the context of an exhibit that hadn't opened yet. The Smithsonian canceled the exhibit and the Director of the National Air and Space Museum resigned.

Seb Chan: I mean, the Enola gay at the Smithsonian is one of the canonical examples in museum studies. I mean, everyone who studies museums looks at that and looks at it almost as a cautionary tale of what happens in a politicized situation.

This is Seb Chan again.

Seb Chan: But I think what is important going forward and particularly in a time where more people have more voices and we can hear global perspectives. There are alternatives to traditional mainstream media. There are alternative political viewpoints available to us, perhaps not always accessed and utilized, but available to us at least. Museums more than ever need to be confident in presenting and arguing potentially controversial and difficult subject matter and they need to stay the course, I think.

Why I like this story is that the controversy happened before the idea of user generated content was widespread. What would it look like today? Today, many museums allow visitor input. It doesn't have to be fancy. Sometimes it's a pile of pens and the stack of sticky notes on which visitors are invited to write about the memories of the Kennedy assassination like they are at the Newseum in Washington D.C. Sometimes it's a more elaborate system like the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City where visitors' stories are displayed elegantly on the wall. We call this a participatory museum, but where does the authority come from in a participatory museum? Surely, we don't want the person next to us telling us about history. We don't want the creationists telling us about how evolution works.

Seb Chan: And I was thinking about this when I was traveling through Arizona and Utah, traveling through those areas, and I came to the Natural History Museum in Utah, a fabulous museum, one of the best museums with fossils and dinosaur skeletons. And you think about that area and you think about the deep time that is evident as you pass through it, and the museum is providing tangible proof for evolution and tangible proof for a very old earth.

So there is authority in the size of an exhibit space. Thinking of exploring a giant virtual world, I asked Seb about authority in video games. Perhaps there is some authority in the game system. It certainly feels super special when you find a hidden room or a secret passageway in an environment.

Seb Chan: A player who gets immersed in a game, tries to figure out the rules, and so when I'm playing a video game or I watch my kids playing video games, they are testing the boundaries of the world and trying to figure out how the rules work in it and how to figure out the story, how to figure out the story and the game mechanically. The museum is itself like a video game. There's a series of rules and once you learn the rules of the museum, you can understand it, you can have a mastery of playing museum. You can learn the words that art curators mean when they say things on those object labels. You can interpret that. That's mastery of museums. You can do exhibitions well, you can understand what a non kind of linear narrative really means.

Seb Chan: I think it's actually very hard to build a mastery of museums because museums don't often consciously worked towards making those rules explicit in a way that visitors can understand them.

A participatory museum can also be thought of as analogous to Web 2.0, the idea that software gets better the more people use it. But Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and the author of the book, The Participatory Museum, argues that participatory museums only get half of Web 2.0 right. She says that there are two tent poles to Web 2.0. The first is that users do something that generates information like uploading a picture or editing a post. This is what museums do now by allowing visitors to upload their own experiences. The second tent pole of Web 2.0 is that the system adapts to those changes to create a better experience. Think of how YouTube will always generate a new recommendation, a recommendation compelling enough for you to click on. Museums don't make it clear how the information you're uploading will be used. Nina Simon says that's as if Netflix encouraged its users to rate movies they've seen but not provide better recommendations based on their input.

Without the second tent pole of Web 2.0, the majority of visitors, the visitors who don't think they have anything to add, are underserved by the exhibits that invite you to add your own voice. Who wants to drop a slip of paper into a comment box? But now let's imagine a share your own story exhibit that acts in the way that we're already comfortable with acting on the web. The most interesting stories would land at the top providing a much better experience for the majority of visitors who have no intention of adding something to the conversation. So let's take this one step further. Instead of just being able to rate user contributions, there's now a robust tagging system, the type that museum visitors have already been comfortable with on the web for over a decade.

For our modern day and Enola Gay exhibit, let's picture this tagging system. Users can add whatever they want, whatever opinions they have, and thanks to rating and tagging, the opinions slowly organize themselves along axis from pro atomic weapon to anti atomic weapon. Like video games, the authority in the museum should come from users trusting the system, not the institution itself. Wikipedia has authority because we trust the way the system works, not because we trust the people contributing to it. There's no reason why museums should be any different. If your job is to display only one quote, you have to choose a well rounded quote. How do you choose a well rounded quote for dropping an atomic bomb? But if you display multiple extreme points of view, you won't have a well rounded quote, but you will have a well rounded exhibit.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

[Outro]

2. Labels Apr 15, 2015

Early 20th century cartoons showed exhausted visitors craning their necks to read labels and stopping over to examine artifacts. What's the story 100 years later?

Topics and Links

Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach by Beverly Serrell

MUSEUM FATIGUE, 1928, JAMA

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

1. Lobby Apr 03, 2015

The lobby is where you transform from an ordinary person into a museum visitor.

In this first episode of Museum Archipelago, host Ian Elsner introduces the show and describes the transformative power of the museum lobby.

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 1. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I’m Ian Elsner.

Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes. So let’s get started.

In his architectural study of the British Museum, J. Mordaunt Crook says that the modern museum is the product of renaissance humanism, 18th century enlightenment, and 19th century democracy. This project takes aim at this widely held sentiment.

The landscape of museums has always been shaped by the people who created them. They institutionalize their biases, filled the collection with objects looted from far away places, as part of European colonialism, and presented themselves as enlightened luminaries in a world of superstition.

Today, the landscape of museums is changing. With each episode, Museum Archipelago brings you to a different museum around the world, highlighting fundamental museum problems and introducing you to the people working to fix them. So why museums? Well museums are the only buildings, aside from maybe a school house, where you enter expecting to learn something. You might even be open to experiencing something new. For many, they still feel like a trusted institution. Even when almost nothing else does.

The medium of a museum has proven powerful, and it all begins in the lobby. This is where you first see the admission price, if there is one. This is where you first judge how busy the museum is today, and what you can expect from the quality of the exhibits. This is where way finding is introduced. This is where you come in from the outside. The lobby is a transformative space that turns ordinary people into museum guests, and at the end of the day, museum guests into ordinary people.

This is done through a series of transformations supported by the services of the lobby. As part of a study on museum lobbies, Erik Kristiansen, et al. noted that at a particular German museum, many people would try to get as close to the information counter as possible, to get information about the prices without yet coming in contact with the staff behind the counter. These people are dividing the lobby as a transformative space into the exact point where the transformation happens.

As a retailer will tell you, people are more likely to buy an object in a store if they’ve already touched it. Once the outside person comes in contact with a front desk staff, the transformation to museum guest is almost complete. We can think of extending the transformation point as long as possible.

When Walt Disney built Disneyland in California in 1955, visitors would go through the ticket purchasing counters immediately before entering the park. By the time the Magic Kingdom opened at Disney World in Florida in 1971, the lobby, sort to speak, was extended out several acres. Guests would buy a ticket but they still weren’t in the park. Instead, they would hop on the monorail or a boat to get to the park. A journey that takes at least a few minutes and a few miles. This journey serves to lengthen the transition time between person and guest. To make the guest feel the feeling of being whisked away from the real world and into the fantasy world. By the time visitors actually entered the park, having disembarked the monorail or boat, the rather unhappy experience of buying a ticket was now literally miles away. The lobby transforms you. Welcome to the show.

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