The Winds of History

What a week it was...and the word history certainly appeared everywhere. At the end of such a historic week I thought a bit about both the ways in which history was used this week and about what this election might mean for those of us who work in local history organizations in the future.

Tuesday night ended with both candidates using history to make their point. McCain, evidently a practitioner of the Great Man approach to history, used Theodore Roosevelt's White House invitation to Booker T. Washington to make a point about the importance of the election. Barack Obama took the same bottom up approach he used as a community organizer--a social historian's approach-- and used the story of a single person to make a larger point. For him, 106 year-old Ann Nixon Cooper was a lens for understanding a century of change.

This week, I've spoken to so many people who were a bit stunned, in a way, to find themselves participants in history. My daughter, voting in her first election, described Philadelphia on election night as a "joyful riot." Another friend told my husband that it was one of the high points of his life; still another friend, who grew up attending segregated schools in Oklahoma, called from the road on Tuesday night in happy tears at Obama's election. Whether you voted for Obama or not, the chance to participate in a historical moment that was about joy and progress, not sorrow, was an amazing opportunity.

But what does the future hold? Can the election of an African-American president really change the work we do in historical organizations? Maybe, but only if we make a real effort to do so. It would thrill me if this election meant that boards started looking to represent their entire community in their membership; that all sorts of stories and audiences were welcomed in institutions. One thing this election tells me is that individual stories matter--but equally, individual commitment to a collective idea matters as well. Change in the way that we present and promote history that will only come if all of us who do this work make a deeper, stronger commitment to have organizations that really do represent our communities.

Specifically, what could organizations do?

• Boards could spend some time looking at the demographics of their community (found easily online at www.census.gov) and thinking about how well their community is represented on the board. Seek out new board members that really represent your community--and develop a strategic plan that gives the entire community a compelling reason to participate.
• Spend time in a board/staff session considering your core values. What does the organization really value? Does every part of your work exemplify those values?
  
• Program developers could consider different times for programs--and even for opening times. If, like so many communities, a majority of your audience is composed of families with two working parents, why not have early evening hours? Don't just do it the same old way.
  
• Survey! ask your audience (including those people who don't visit your museum) what they're interested in. Try using Survey Monkey. And then, of course, evaluate.
• Get out there--become a presence in your community. Instead of presenting a lecture series that draws the same audience over and over again, get out to community events. Develop a small table-top exhibit or great selection of hands-on activities and invite yourself to fairs, festivals and the like.
• It's a tough financial time for many--consider free admission.
  
• Don't just pay lip service. Connecting with new audiences is hard, sustained work. As a board, understand that this takes time and money; as a staff, don't get discouraged, but keep trying to connect--and always, keep listening.
  

One thing is for sure, however. One hundred years from now, there will be an entire generation of curators sighing deeply as they open yet another box with yet another copy of a newspaper from November 5, 2008; joining all those man landing on the moon magazine covers. To my colleagues in the future--good luck with that!

What Is a Museum?

This past week, several news pieces brought my attention to several museums that are, to put it gently, are out of the mainstream--but still very much worth thinking about.

Above, the director's "office" at the Homeless Museum of Art," an installation set up by artist Filip Noterdaeme. What did he do? The New York Times describes his museum,

In the course of an afternoon, bankers, artists, teenagers, poets and homeless men and women sat on the chair he provided, talking to him during what he called one-on-one “encounters” and “confessionals.” Many spoke about their experiences inside the contemporary art museum, as well as its proximity to the Bowery Mission, which has provided shelter, food and spiritual guidance to the needy since 1879.

“It’s a performance,” Mr. Noterdaeme said of his project, explaining that through it “we are made more aware of who we are and why we are there. I am the strange character opening minds and eyes to these complete separate realities.”

Mr. Noterdaeme’s sidewalk museum, which he dismantled over the weekend, was open every Sunday for five weeks. He spent the time talking to passers-by and handing out signed copies of his tongue-in-cheek “official” letters on the nature and purpose of art, addressed to, among others, a neighborhood resident; Jesus Christ; and Amy Mackie, 34, an associate curator at the New Museum.

In Munich, according to Canadian news sources, a museum opened in a former public toilet, drawing more than 800 visitors its first night. It featured mostly graffiti work, and from reading the article, perhaps more a gallery than a museum--but what made Mathias Koehler, the originator of the project, call it a museum? Did it give it a more serious tone?

More compelling is the newly redone Mind's Museum in Rome (as described in the New York Times) The renewed exhibits were done by an artists' studio that specializes in high tech and immersive environments. “The idea was to make it extremely participatory, a museum that can register and note the impressions of the visitor,” said Paolo Rosa, one of the artists. The museum is now targeted towards students and includes experiences such as one where visitors put their hands over their ears and hear voices; another where visitors sit for a photograph that is then projected next to images and stories of former residents of the former pyschiatric hospital turned museum.

One visitor shared her perspective, "The point the museum makes is that mental illness is a disease," she said. "It doesn't give a moral or a political judgment." But I can imagine the many, many conversations that take place at this museum. It reminds me of a long ago conversation with my daughter and two friends--they were probably ten or twelve, and engaged in a long, thoughtful, exploratory conversation about what made something normal. I think young people long for these kinds of conversations and love the idea of a museum that encourages them.

What all three of these museums say to me is that the idea of a museum still holds real power. But perhaps the power is beginning to shift away from the power of authority to a different kind of power--the power of being a convener, a place for discussion, a place for exploration.

Read more about both the Homeless Museum and the Mind's Museum in the New York Times.

Top: A visitor listening at the interactive sound table of the Mind's Museum in Rome. (Fabio Cirifino/Studio Azzurro Produzioni) Center: Filip Noterdaeme at the Homeless Museum, Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Deep Listening

Studs Terkel's death last week made me think about the oral history interviews I've done--far fewer, of course, than his, but as I thought about them I realized that for me, they've been an incredibly strong part of shaping how I approach my work. The first oral histories I did were in college, when as part of a volunteer project at a local historical society, I interviewed people about childhood games. An interesting project, and one that involved interviewing both senior citizens and people my own age.

While at the Delaware County Historical Association, I was lucky enough to work with a couple amazing folklorists, Doug DeNatale and Joyce Ice, whose interviewing skills and passionate commitment to their work made each project they worked on a place where everyday people had a voice in each exhibit we developed.

Since then, I've conducted many different oral histories--about vacationing in the Finger Lakes, about factory work, about farm work, and much more. There are several informants whose words still stick with me to this day: the Japanese-American scientist, who only at the end of the interview, tells me about his time in an internment camp during World War II, when he was forced to drop out of college; the Italian-American woman who remembers, decades later, the sting of an employer telling her, because her family was Italian, that she couldn't put American in the space for nationality on her job application; the African-American migrant worker who began coming up on the season in 6th grade--and in his fifties, it's all the work he'd ever known; the woman who shares her stories of starting a union at her work place; and the many, many stories of work on factory and farm--those stories of dangerous, hard work that were almost always equally balanced by affectionate stories of family and community.



Why do I remember these people? Because each one of them gave me a glimpse into a life very different than my own. But at the same time, each and every one also showed me that we are all human, and that what connects us is considerably more than what divides us. So in my work today, my goals are often pretty simple--to find those threads that connect us, past and present, no matter who we are.

Top: Apple picking in western New York, photo by Drew Harty
Bottom: Women workers at Belle Mills, Sayre, PA

Another View of Historic Houses

On this cold gray afternoon, I thought I'd share a fiction writer's view of historic houses. In The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith (best known for his #1 Ladies Detective Agency series), his heroine, Isabel Dalhousie visits Barnhill, where George Orwell wrote 1984. They tour the house,

"They peered into the small room above the kitchen, with its typewriter set neatly on the table and beyond the clear glass of the window, the day, now sparkling under a sky that had miraculously cleared."

Isabel mused, as others moved on,

"She thought about the seeing of what others had seen; this was the view that Orwell had while he wrote that dark novel, with its all seeing eye, Big Brother... She remembered being in Freud's house in Vienna and looking out of the window in his consulting room, seeing the small mirror hanging on the shutter the only item remaining in the stripped bare room, and thinking he had looked at that, the great doctor himself; he had looked out onto that particular stretch of sky, that courtyard. And then she remembered seeing James VI's cradle in the bedroom at Traquair and the thoughts that it triggered; and the bed at Falkland Palace in which James V had died, turning his face to the wall, bemoaning what he saw as the imminent end of a Scottish dynasty... And finally, as she tore herself away from the view, and the room, the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing--a human nest really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting."



For some reason, reading this passage made me think of paintings of interiors--and sure enough, the Victoria and Albert Museum had several in their collections database online. There was a bit of a discussion early today on a list serve about whether people would come to a museum if their collections were shown on their website. On this topic, I'm a firm believer in sharing everything. I've been to the V & A Museum, and I wouldn't hesitate to go again. If I went again and saw these three images, I'd be thrilled, and think of them as old friends; if they weren't on exhibit, I'd still be pleased that I found a representation of them to quench my idle interest today.

And as for the fictional Isabel's visit? Just a reminder that we can hardly imagine what our visitors might be imagining.



Top to bottom:
The Kitchen at Elmswell Hall, York, Watercolor by Mary Ellen Best, 1834
The Stray Shuttlecock, Oil on canvas by Frank Dillon, 1878
Interior of the Parsonage, Horningsham, Wiltshire, Oil on millboard by John Sergeant, 1840
All from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Road to Ukraine

The road to Ukraine--it's finally starting to become real for me. From January-April, 2009 I'll be a Fulbright Scholar, teaching museum studies and working with museums in Ukraine. It's an amazing opportunity and I'm very much looking forward to meeting and working with students and colleagues there. My work will focus primarily on issues exhibits and interpretation.

One request for my blog readers. Resources for books and other teaching materials are extremely scarce in Ukraine. I'll be shipping all kinds of materials to help establish a useful library for the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, my host institution. If you have samples of items such as exhibition designs, gallery guides, school programs, educational kits or other materials and want to share, please contact me.



My other observation is about how, for me, this has become, already, a piece of personal meaning-making. I applied for the Fulbright because of the chance to work with museums and Ukraine was a country I only knew a slight bit about. However, as I think about it, I realize that I've come across Ukraine--and Ukrainian Americans-- in a number of different projects. Years ago, a project on ethnic resorts in the Catskills helped me learn about vibrant Ukrainian resorts and communities in the Catskills. The picture above--that's not from Ukraine, but of the beautiful wood church that's St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in Jewett. Many communities here in the Northeast have Ukrainian communities--most recently I've had the chance to learn about that community in Sayre, PA as part of a project for the Sayre Historical Society. A part of the Dutch and American exhibit project Passing on the Comfort that I've worked on this year for the Mennonite Central Committee and the International Menno Simon Center is about Ukrainian Mennonites. And, as I've told friends and colleagues about the Fulbright, I'm amazed at how many say, "oh, my family came from Ukraine!" So I'm beginning to stitch together my own picture of Ukraine, and can't wait for the opportunity to really immerse myself in this vibrant, complicated culture.

I'll plan to blog regularly in this space about my time there--so check back. If you're reading this and wondering if I'm available for projects next year...yes! Whether I'm in Kyiv or upstate New York, I can still be in touch and will be back by the end of April.



From top to bottom: Ukraine Road, Jewett, NY
St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Church, Jewett, NY
Members of Sayre's Ukrainian community on a picnic, circa 1910.

The Beautiful Game

I'm not a huge sports fan, but a recent New York Times article about a new soccer museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil caught my attention. According to the article, it's a shrine with all the jerseys, balls and paraphernalia you might imagine, but it's also a museum that uses sport to explain a country; how "the national pastime has come to represent and inspire the multi-racial, samba-loving soul of the people" and how Brazil transformed an English schoolboy sport into "the beautiful game" of passing and dribbling that is Brazilian soccer today.

I was particularly struck by how the governor of Sao Paulo, Jose Serra, described his dream for the museum, "I imagined a museum fundamentally made up of ideas, memories and not so much of relics. I thought of something that would express the memory of our soccer, the great performances as well as our sufferings."

So I'll probably never see a World Cup game in person nor can I tell you about any of Pele's 1,282 goals, but, based on Jose Serra's dream, I'd love to see this museum of ideas and memories.
Above: Pele doing a bicycle kick

Do Cookies Make Ideas Better?

Lately I've been spending time facilitating strategic planning with a number of small organizations. I'm just wrapping up my process with the Historical Society of Woodstock and on my beautiful drives down and back through the Catskills I reflected on what made this project such a pleasure. Woodstock is a unique place--where else does local history include knowing where Bob Dylan composed? It combines a long Catskill agricultural and industrial history with a twentieth century history that intertwines the local community, visual and performing artists, and popular culture. But it is not, as the town spends a good deal of time explaining, the place where the Festival took place.

The society was founded in the 1930s--and when I first met with the board last December, they had just come out of a very difficult time. The society had been run as a closed organization for decades and as a result, had no meaning for Woodstock's residents or visitors. On relatively short notice, they had had to move the entire collection to another building so improvements could be made on their own structure (owned by the town). It was a small board and I sensed some anxiety about the process moving forward.

Over the past months, that small group has really developed. At last week's meeting, announced one board member, "now we're a team!" They brought several important qualities to the planning process that, from my perspective, helped create an energetic and meaningful plan.

1. Openness and Creativity
They were open to all sorts of things: to advice from me, to what community focus groups had to say, to advice from other consultants and to new ideas from everywhere. It was a group of creative thinkers who felt free to share ideas with each other.

2. Not too Big, Not too Small
Many organizations dream big--but lack the resources to complete those dreams (see recent press about the Mark Twain House and the Mount for just two examples). The Historical Society of Woodstock's new plan is both ambitious, and I think, achievable, by a targeted use of volunteer and other resources.

3. Make it Fun!
I didn't go to any meeting where they didn't seem happy to see each other; to report back good buzz about the historical society in the community, a new object acquired, and to share a meal, or at the very least, home-baked ginger cookies and lemonade. That feeling of a welcoming place is beginning to spread to the community.

4. Listen to the Community
We held two community conversations about the future of the organization. One was parents and the other was long-time (ie twenty years or more) community members. Poets, musicians, highway workers, farmers, retirees and more. It's clear that a passion for this particular place and the values it represents motivates both new and long-time residents. History plays an integral role in that, as one focus group participant said, "Even the kid from Minnesota playing guitar on the green; he comes for the history of the place." All agreed that the mountains made the place special, they create, as one person remarked, “one big hug.”

The historical society's new plan focuses around the idea of conversations--in part, because, in listening to those focus groups, that's something that matters deeply to this community and that the historical society can do well for many different audiences.

Sometimes focus groups feel tacked on, not substantially a part of a planning process. Here, our sessions about vision, mission and goals really were strongly influenced by those lively community conversations, with lemonade and cookies, on sunny summer evenings in those beautiful mountains.