Visiting The Museum of Things

Do museums need objects?  Do we have too many objects?  How do you contextualize objects? What should we be collecting? or not collecting?  These are the kinds of questions that many of us wrestle with on an ongoing basis so it was an unexpected pleasure in April to visit the Museum of Things (Museum der Dinge) in Berlin that is unabashedly about things, in particular, the consumer culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.

My great colleague Katrin Hieke and I experienced some pure delight in exploring objects and puzzling over how the open storage was arranged.  Sometimes by decade, sometimes by color, sometimes by origin.  The crowded shelves actually encouraged us to look deeper, to dig into cases that attracted us.  And as always, with museum visits, what you bring with you matters:  Katrin grew up in East Germany (DDR) so her added context about some objects was great--and she appreciated the way objects from both the DDR and West Germany were sometimes displayed together.

One section of the exhibition was about branding, but then there were also those anonymous objects that we think of as no-brands:  rubber bands, paper clips and the like, encouraging us to think about why some things need branding and others do not.

The museum had some lovely, simple interactives.  First, their calendar of upcoming events was not a display on a screen or a bulletin board, but on these shelves, making the calendar an object in itself. In another location, you could adopt an object and help support its care (you can also do this on the website). The interactives valued pencil and a sense of hand, something too rarely valued in contemporary culture.

But the interactives (and the exhibitions as a whole) didn't shy away from encouraging us to think more deeply about all those things in our lives.  "How should we live?" asked a question on a magnet board.

Wouldn't it be great to take an object away with you from a museum?  At the Museum of Things, a vending machine outside the door gives you a tiny package with a small object, a bit of verse, and a sweet.  What could be better?  Even though it's clear that this museum is very carefully curated and designed, as befits a design-oriented museum, it provided a kind of joy for me that's all-too-rare my museum visits these days--the joy of discovery, surprise, and connection.

Mythbusters: Pilgrim Edition

Virtually every American knows a Pilgrim myth or two.  It's the kind of thing many of us learn at every Thanksgiving dinner and with every hand-made paper turkey on a school classroom window. I'll have to admit, that when I visited the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, MA, I expected more of the same.  The museum opened in 1824 and describes itself as "America's museum of Pilgrim possessions."  But, I was walking by, and decided to visit--and was incredibly surprised at the smart, thoughtful exhibit that deconstructed--that busted those myths--about Pilgrims.

A few examples:   the opening label talks about the Pilgrim story, but doesn't quite give the full hint that some myths are about to be busted.  The mythbusting took two prevalent forms.  First, deconstructing what we believe (and the stories that museums have often told) about objects.  For instance, the spinning wheel above, and label below, which says, "in fact, no spinning wheels recorded in the Colony until the late 1630s."  (no sheep, either).

And here's another one, about a sword. When was the last time you read a label that said, "This is not possible."

The exhibit included reproduction clothing, showing how our ideas about Pilgrims were reflected in the clothes worn and depicted, in films, paintings, and even in museums.  Below, a label from one interpretive era, and clothing from another.

With some objects and images, the labels cleverly paired the mythmaking (Longfellow, you have much to answer for) with quotations from historic documents.

The romance of laughter and tremulous voices, compared with death and eleven children.  This painting of Thanksgiving gets these contrasting labels.

Note the inclusion of the contemporary voice of Linda Coombs, a member of the Wampanoag nation, on the label, contrasting directly with Sarah Josepha Hale's 19th century voice.

It's the rare museum that takes on busting up its own history.  Consider your own history museum. What stories could benefit from some revision?  Can you do some rethinking that lets your audience into the messy nature of history?  How about a new take on those cows in your community?

Listen Up! What's the Sound of Your Museum? Your Mission?

This week's guest post is by Dave Lewis, one of my 2016 mentees.  This post came about through one of our monthly conversations and also reminded me of a conversation I had while traveling this winter in Italy.  The sound of Italy to me:  the noise of multiple coffee saucers make on a counter, followed by the clink of the spoons that always follows.  What's the sound of places you love?

What is the sound of your museum? Your mission statement? Your community? How is the auditory represented in your collections and your exhibits?

As someone who works in a very sound-focused museum, I’m admittedly a bit biased on these questions. I have the privilege of working at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum  a museum that takes sound seriously. We are built around a 1927 recording session that happened in the town of Bristol, VA/TN (we straddle the state line) that helped introduce figures like the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers to the listening public and set the stage for what would later be the country music industry. We have audio experiences throughout the museum - in films, in ambient audio to accompany our exhibits, in a sing-along booth, in our in-house radio station WBCM RadioBristol, and in more solitary, headphone-based audio experiences. We also have a good deal of legacy audio and quite a few vintage playback machines in our collections.

So, I’m a bit biased. I love audio: I love preserving it and finding interesting ways to use it in our exhibits.

Sound can be evocative, though I think most of us know this, intuitively. I’m sure you have a song that reminds you of a first love (that’s the Indigo Girls 1,200 Curfews live album for me), or some other significant event in your life. And we are, at some level, wired to have these kinds of responses to sound. Sound helped humans track prey, run from predators, and locate each other through years of evolutionary change - hearing was of vital importance. We still process many of our aural stimuli pre-cognitively, that is, without any conscious thought. This kind of pre-attentive processing is what we experience when we bite into a delicious dessert, for example, or see a particularly arresting painting for the first time. Sound can easily do things photographs, descriptive panels, and informational text can’t always do: it can make us, if only for a moment, give in to experience, feeling, and emotion rather than reason and logic.

So, how can we begin to document and collect sound - as well as use it - in ways that are in keeping with our varied missions (as well as our varied budgets, staffing sizes, etc.)? I offer a few suggestions here, but I (and Linda!) would like to hear yours, too.

First, consider how any sound you collect or use - just like any other kinds of objects you collect - does work for your museum’s core mission. For some museums that connection might be tenuous - perhaps audio that inspired or reflects the artistic style of a certain time or place. But for others, particularly local history museums, I think there is a more pressing need for strategic collecting.

What does your main street sound like now? What did it sound like ten years ago? What about an afternoon at a favorite local hangout? Or an afternoon at Kmart in 1988? Even if you can access something (like the lovely Kmart recordings) on the Internet now, particularly sites like YouTube, that content is fleeting. If an organization goes under or a video is pulled, it’s gone - poof! - often with no warning. This is work we can’t rely on others to do for us, though working with other community organizations like libraries, universities, folklife organizations, and music clubs, could make this work more possible.

What kinds of sounds does your community make that speak to its fabric and that aren’t being systematically captured and stored? Is someone attentively archiving recordings of your community band, community choir, or resident chamber ensemble? For that matter, are you, as an institution, recording events that you produce? If not, and if you aren’t sure how to start, take a look at this guide put out by the Vermont Folklife Center. It can help get you and your organization started on purchasing a user-friendly, budget-friendly audio recording setup. Certainly, though, most of us don’t have time to walk around town with an audio recorder. But we can arrange a crowd sourcing event like a History Harvest or oral history sessions to capture some of that audio.

Second, what audio do you already have, and what kind of shape is it in? Only the largest, most robust museums need even a part-time A/V archivist, but there are sensible steps any collection manager can take to prolong the life of most any audio format, and to make a passable digital copy. Much of the tape- and disc-based audio that we have is undergoing pretty catastrophic degradation due to internal chemical instability and isn’t easily reversible. There are solutions for almost all price points, but some of them may involve a triage-type approach, digitizing the most useful first, and doing the rest as you’re able. The Association for Recorded Sound Collections has published a [guide to audio preservation designed especially for folks with little to no audio experience. And there are grants, like this one from CLIR to support digitization projects.

There are a myriad of issues that your organization needs to think about, of course - budget, staff time, and your ability to reasonably preserve all of your objects (especially digital ones!). But collecting, preserving, and using audio can make visiting our museums — and using our collections — a more engaging, accessible, and multi-sensory experience.

Images courtesy of the Birthplace of Country Music, David J, and Daniele Napolitano.

Who's Your Hero? Where's the Power?

This past week, in Kyiv, Ukraine, I had the opportunity to walk through two quite incredible exhibits at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, with deputy director Yuliya Vaganova.  I'll combine the two into this one post but both deserve deep attention on their own.

Heroes:  An Inventory is a project that began several years ago, supported by the Goethe Institute of Germany, with the curatorial staff at the museum working with German curator Michael Fehr.  The project began in the simplest of ways:  the staff took an inventory, in every department, of every piece of art that was classified as "hero."  More than 650 works had some identification as “hero”, “saint”, “martyr”, or “heroic deeds."  180 of those works were selected for the exhibition.   Although this project was begun before the Maidan protests began; the revolution, annexation of Crimea and the war in the East, have made heroes a topic of significant conversation again.  The exhibition's thoughtful text labels (hooray, in English as well!) encourage that conversation.  In part, the introductory label says,

For us, therefore, this exhibition is much more than a self-reflection; it is an experiment which results will have a significant impact on the reorganization of the permanent collection and also might push the community to reflection.

The exhibit begins with a gigantic, non-removable marble statue of Lenin, hidden behind a wall for the decades since independence.  Organized in a number of different categories, from heroes of labor to a room full of Stalin and Lenin (displayed as in a storehouse, in the top picture); to heroes of war; traditional Ukrainian heroes like Cossack Mamai; cultural heroes (the smallest group represented in the collection, Yuliya told me);  religious heroes or saints; of course, poet and writing Taras Shevchenko.   Each gallery included an interpretive text panel as well as an enlarged quote on the topic. The exhibition ends in a three-part way.  The first is the most recent portrait of a hero in the collection:  a Chernobyl liquidator.  Then, a room that's used for programs and conversations--diving deeper into both scholarly and emotional aspects of heroism, and finally, a small wall featuring individual stories of personal heroes (and not surprisingly, moms and dads are important.)

Yuliya shared several important points about the exhibition development process that I think hold lessons for us all.  First, that this was really a collaborative process, working across all the disciplines and collections of the museum, from ancient art to today.  Second, that the collaboration with Michael Fehr was, as she said, the first international project that was not a colonial one, but really a partnership.    Third, in comparison to the way most people visit museums in Ukraine, these were galleries of conversation.  Everyone was talking to their family or friends as they went through the exhibit.   And lastly, that the director of museum education said that it was the first exhibition that the museum had done that really didn't need an excursion with an expert to understand.  That visitors, all visitor, could make their own meaning from the creative, thoughtful text, object selection and installation.

The second exhibition, Spetsfond, curated by Yuliya Lytvynets is a fascinating look at our own profession, within the context of the Soviet Union.  To quote the museum,

In the National Art Museum of Ukraine (then the State Ukrainian Museum) Special secret storage was formed in 1937-1939. It contained works from Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv, Poltava and from special storages of Ukrainian art exhibition created by so called enemies of the people. They were formalists, nationalists, those who, according to party ideologists, "distorted reality" and threatened the existence of the "new society". Most of the names and artworks were forgotten for a long time in the history of Ukrainian art. Thus, the works of Oleksandra Ekster, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Davyd Burliuk, Viktor Palmov, Oleksa Hryshchenko, Onufrii Biziukov, Neonila Hrytsenko, Semen Yoffe, and lots of others were transferred to the Special storage of the NAMU.

This special storage was open only to the director and the KGB.  The works were removed from their frames and rolled away.  The exhibition includes not only the works (some of which are head-shakingly normal) but also the records.  Because after all, we are recordkeepers.   A collections book noted the works that were to be stored away; it sometimes noted the fate of their creators ("artist arrested").  Also in the exhibit are some of the paperwork about the "trials" of the artists and the "reasons" for the works censorship.   Interestingly, at one point, a passionate and courageous staff hit upon a solution of classifying the works with a prefix of 0, denoting that the works had no significant artistic merit--which then meant that nobody bothered to look at them to decide if they should be destroyed.  And so they survived.

During my time in Ukraine these last weeks, I had many conversations with my colleagues about the new de-communisation laws passed by the Parliament. The laws are so vague as to be unclear about the impact on museums but they do ban Nazi and Communist symbols and, as I understand, define new heroes for Ukraine's history. As I walked through both exhibits I was incredibly moved and heartened by a museum who, though literally on the frontline of the Revolution last year, continues to build new ways of thinking about the past. History museums could--and should--take a lesson from this art museum's work.

Fundamentally, I realized that these exhibits are both about power.  On the one hand, they both share the horrible power seized and exercised by the Soviet state; a legacy that continues to shape this entire region.  But on the other hand, I see other, more hopeful uses of power here as well:

• the power of collaboration
• the power of storytelling
• the power of visitors, making their own choices and having their own conversations
• the power of documentation
• the power of objects
• the power of museum staff
• and most importantly,  the power of museums to be centers of civic engagement.  

We only need to decide to take the power in our own hands.

How to Fix that "General Backlog" ?

This week I spent a bit of time in the collections storage of a local museum.  It doesn't matter which one, because I know I can find the same issues expressed in this discouraging sign almost anywhere; and particularly in local history museums here in the United States.  But then I realized how little was known about these collections, about how many items have wiggled their way into history collections because they are "old,"  or "maybe old" or "someone here might have used it" or just because, one day, someone left it at the front desk.

The whole experience was a great reminder that we all should be paying attention to and participating in the Active Collections project, an important effort from my smart and passionate colleagues Rainey Tisdale and Trevor Jones.

Here's an extensive excerpt from the project's manifesto:

Millions of artifacts in museum collections across the country are not actively supporting the institutions that steward them. Museums of all types are experiencing this problem, but it is particularly entrenched in history museums. Most history museums possess thousands of poorly maintained, inadequately cataloged, and underutilized artifacts. Instead of being active assets, these lazy artifacts drain vital resources. Multiple studies have assessed the problem of collections preservation, and each has proposed providing museums more money to process and preserve artifacts. But there’s little point in preserving collections if they don’t actively support the mission. We believe collections must either advance the mission or they must go.

Collections are expensive. The time and money required to catalog and store objects ties up valuable resources that could be used elsewhere. Fortunately, museum professionals are recognizing that significant portions of their collections aren’t pulling their weight, and attitudes are changing. But in the absence of a coherent philosophy or way forward, changing opinions have not yet led to changes in practice. Therefore the problem continues to get worse with each passing year. In addition, professional standards, funding models, and museum training programs still primarily support the idea that all collections are equally important, and that owning collections is as important as effectively using them. We believe a new model for thinking about collections is needed. 

Collections are important to history museums. Artifacts are a deeply powerful way to connect with what it means to be human and to understand the past, present and future. In his compelling book A History of the World in 100 Objects Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, argues that “telling history through things is what museums are for.” Museums are uniquely positioned to use things to tell meaningful stories—but to do so they need to collect the right artifacts and make good use of them. We believe that artifacts can be powerful tools—touchstones filled with meaning and connection—but only when used effectively. 

If museums existed simply to preserve things, the best way to save them would be to put the entire collection in an enormous freezer and never take anything out. But museums don’t just preserve things; they also use them to inspire, enlighten, and connect. Every day museums balance the twin needs of preservation and access. Every time a piece is used by a researcher or is exhibited, the decision has been made to shorten its lifespan. We weigh these decisions against the rarity of the piece, its condition, and how important it is to the institution. How is it that we distinguish degrees of significance when we deal with individual objects and yet we are paralyzed into inaction when we look at an entire collection? Major conservation surveys and statewide risk assessments assume that all collections are equally valuable and are worthy of the same standard of care. We believe some objects support the mission better than others—not based on monetary value or rarity, but based on the stories they tell and the ideas they illuminate. The ones that provide the most public value should get the largest share of our time and resources.

They have a wish list and are asking for your crazy ideas.  Check out the site, share it with your colleagues and your board of directors; start a conversation on Facebook; and consider that, if we could begin to think of our collections in this way, that sign above, which only makes our hearts and minds feel like the below, could go away--and we could make our museums passionate, meaningful places at the center of our communities.   Many thanks to Rainey and Trevor for bringing this forward--and now, all of you, let's get this conversation really started!

When is Your Audience Ready for the Tough Stuff?

When is your audience or community ready to discuss difficult, hard topics?  At the Museums and Politics conference in St. Petersburg, a number of presenters I heard talked about topics such as the German interpretation of concentration camps, the ways Belgian museums are re-interpreting the legacy of colonialism in Africa; and American museum presentation of prisons and Native American identity. Absent though, was almost any discussion of the effects of Stalin and the Soviet past except for in one presentation by a Russian colleague who stated that the Russian people "were not ready" to address that very difficult legacy.  When asked by an audience member how Russian museums knew that, she cited audience surveys.  It is a challenging past; it is a recent past; and it is a past with a clear connection to the present and future.  

But I did find time, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, to visit three museums that are beginning that discussion; that are not afraid of opening up tough topics for conversations.  They are undertaking incredibly important work, particularly given that one such human rights museum, the Gulag Museum at Perm 36 has been closed for what seem to be political reasons.

The State Museum of Political History of Russia in St. Petersburg begins with a historical perspective, looked back at the abolishment of serfdom, the Tsar's abdication, and the ascension of Lenin, followed by Stalin. There's no question that great men loom large in this presentation, as they once did in statues found all over the Soviet Union.  I greatly appreciated the incredible objects (for instance the film canister in which Solzhynitzin's writings were smuggled out)  and well-written labels in English. Notebooks in each room provided full English documentation of everything you were seeing.  Sometimes when I visit museums in this part of the world, I feel the stories were purposely crafted to be about not a single ordinary person, but rather just this great collective.   The museum looked at not just the difficult past, but also a past where people felt united in a single purpose, so I suspect there's some nostalgia for many visitors.

One small label made me understand that collective force a bit more. In the section on the end of the Great Patriotic War and the Victory Parade in Red Square, filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko noticed that the dead barely received a mention, "It was if thirty or even forty million had vanished into the thin air...the people in the square did not kneel nor gasped for their sufferings or their spilt blood."  

There was an interesting emphasis on providing the tools for visitors to deconstruct socialist meanings.  Several large Socialist Realist paintings were hung in the center courtyard and extensive labels, "Let's Examine the Painting Together" shared both the meanings of the paintings; what symbols are embedded in those views of happy workers; and what the reality of farming actually was.   I wanted more opportunities for visitor voices and feedback, but the museum does stand at a place where the narrative of the Soviet past becomes more complex and nuanced.

In Moscow, the Museum of the House on the Embankment is just a tiny two rooms in a huge apartment complex, the place known as the House on the Embankment, built by Stalin to house top level Soviet elite in the 1930s and 1940s.  But many of those elite paid the same price as other Soviet citizens.  As Stalin turned on the people close to him, many of those who lived here, those who were "original revolutionaries," who were writers, high government officials, scientists, and even the architect of the building himself, were purged by Stalin, taken away, and most often killed.  The museum contains room like settings of original objects in first floor apartment that was once a caretaker's, I believe.  The space is evocative, but it was a group of notebooks on the table that drew our attention.  We pulled out one that said Women; and in it were simple photocopies and biographies of women who lived in this house.  Page after page of incredibly talented women, some who lived on to their '90s;  but far too many of whom had no death date, as they had been taken away, and no one ever knew the truth of what happened.  It's a place filled with great irony as these were people who believed passionately, deeply in what they were doing; but then it came home to them.  In a museum-sense, was was really interesting here was that this was no computer interactive, no fancy database.  It was a notebook, a table and chairs that we could it in.  That alone kept the two of us there for over an hour.  True stories, of real people, always matter.

And finally, the Gulag State History Museum in Moscow.  You enter, somewhat grimly, through a re-created camp corridor--but then, in a bit of surprise, you're not greeted in any of the exhibition halls or at the front desk by staff who try their best to ignore you, but rather, as you enter a gallery you're welcomed, and invited to share any questions you may have.   The permanent exhibit includes, once again, powerful individual objects and individual stories, that together create a sense, even if it's really beyond our own understanding,  of what the terror of being sent off to the camps must have been like.   But very interestingly, they also delved deeper into not just the camps, but other repressions.  A large temporary exhibit looked at the repression of Buddhism.  My favorite element in that was a propaganda film, where on one head set you could listen to what an ethnographer might say about what was seen; and on the other, what the propaganda would have been.   A set of incredibly beautiful portraits of Ingush elders told yet another unknown story to me, about their forced deportation, just as the Crimean Tatars were deported.

Again, it's the interactive of conversation that matters most. While I viewed the permanent exhibit, my friend Irina who lives in Moscow had a long chat with the guard in the room, about how she came to see the museum, about how she began to volunteer, and just the barest hint of her own personal story.  Irina vowed to return, to hear more.

I was moved by all three of these museums, and I wondered each time about the reluctance of museums in Russia to engage in such dialogue.  Such questioning is not particularly welcomed at this moment in Russia--but that does not mean it's not happening, in museums and in people's own minds.  So I'll end with two comments from the final day of the conference in St. Petersburg.  A Serbian participant said,

“Us Slavic people have problems facing our past, but we have to face it, address it in our museums. The ideologically shaped past hurts a lot, but I take with me to Serbia, that we should have memory places and we should face the hard facts. Museum play a big role in that, and I commend Germany for its work in that.”

And a Russian conference-goer passionately said, “The museum is a place for communication and to treat national trauma. And we must do that,” while one other participant said, “Making a difference needs courage! To see that we all share the same values gives us the strength to be courageous.”

I'll long remember these courageous museums and hope deeply that other Russian museums--that all history museums everywhere-- begin to join them helping community members in a deeper understanding of the past.  The longer you wait, the harder it becomes.

"Their Lives are Full of Art" Visiting the Museum of Innocence

This past spring, Marieke van Damme and I separately had the chance to visit the Museum of Innocence, in Istanbul, winner of this year’s European Museum of the Year award. We had a great conversation about it, and she’s been good enough to share her thoughts here on this unusual museum experience, created by Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk. Marieke is is a museum professional based in Boston. Her recent project, Joyful Museums, explores museum workplace culture. She invites you to weigh in on what your workplace is like here. Results of the survey will be posted this fall.

I fell in love with Orhan Pamuk’s grand writing style when I picked up Snow at the Harvard Book Store in 2008, a couple of years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  While planning for a trip to Turkey earlier this year [2014], I crammed as much Pamuk in as I could, simultaneously reading Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence, and The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk’s catalog of the museum he created in Istanbul. The books did not disappoint--I had a feel for the city before I arrived and, once there, felt I knew its secrets just a little bit more than my traveling companions.

I had the pleasure of visiting Turkey with the University of Michigan’s Knight Wallace Fellowship, where my husband was a 2014 fellow. Together we visited politicians, toured the Bosphorous, bought an incredible number of scarves, and ate gorgeous lamb dishes with candied pumpkin desserts. While visiting the MoI was number one on my must-see sites, I unfortunately didn’t visit until my last full day in Turkey. After 16 days of non-stop activities in four areas of the country, I was exhausted and much preferred the idea of sitting by the Golden Horn drinking Turkish coffee. Luckily I had made an appointment to meet with Esra Aysun, the Director (who has since moved on)  that afternoon so off we went in search of the museum.

It isn’t terrible easy to find. The streets in the neighbourhood of Beyoğlu are steep, winding, and often without clear street signage. As you get closer, the municipal wayfinding and other curious tourists lead you to the site. Inside, we donned the audio tour and set to work listening to Pamuk describe the exhibition.

The book came first, but Pamuk dreamt up both the story and the physical museum simultaneously. In the novel, the main character collects personal objects reminding him of his life with his muse and creates a museum devoted to their experiences. In real life, Pamuk collected objects of old Istanbul, renovated a historic house, and installed three floors worth of curated cases filled with these objects. There’s a lot to take in physically and mentally.

I had very high expectations. I am a fan of Pamuk’s work, I began my museum career in collections so I value objects and their stories, and I’m fascinated by Turkish culture. Also, earlier in the trip I recommended the museum to two colleagues who came back utterly moved by the experience; one of them cried at the beauty of the displays. I thought: This is going to rock my world.

It didn’t. Here’s why.

• The space is stunningly beautiful, a cabinet of curiosities for the modern era. But to me it felt too clean and too organized. It could have been a shop display instead of a museum exhibition.
• I made the crucial mistake of reading the exhibition catalog before I visited the museum instead of afterwards. The audio tour repeats much of the same information in the book and I found myself frustratingly skipping ahead.
• I was exhausted and there was no good place to sit. A bench looking out at the displays would have been very welcomed! Of course, looking at the small and elegant space, I couldn’t identify a great place to put one.
• Even though I loved the book, I knew the story wasn’t real, and the objects didn’t have power over me. I loved looking at these relics of mid-century Istanbul, but I felt as if I were in a high-end antique shop instead of a museum.

One reason the Museum is so beautiful is because it is simple. It tells one story, not several, and not for varying audiences as most institutions must do. It speaks in one voice and gives only one message. Another reason the Museum succeeds is because it is not burdened by what other museums do. There were no school groups, no excessive signage/wayfinding, no labels, no gallery cards, no security guard watching you sternly. While this is refreshing and makes for an elegant presentation, the lack of regard for the visitor is clear. I visited the museum at the end of a long day of sightseeing ( i.e. scarf-buying) and I was exhausted. Yet there was only one place to sit and it was away from the exhibits. The restrooms were down a narrow set of stairs clearly not up to code. The audio tour, while useful in providing interpretation, was long and distracting. (Am I the only person who has trouble listening thoughtfully and looking intently at the same time? You wear the thing around your neck and it knocks the glass whenever you lean over to inspect a case. It’s a hassle!)

Esra, the Museum’s Director, told me they do consider themselves a museum and have such a designation from the Ministry of Culture. While she acknowledges they are more an art installation than a “museum,” they do collect and interpret objects and consider themselves as a city museum for the average Turkish person, representing the years 1950-1980. I would argue that because they interpret objects through a lens of fiction, the MoI is more art installation than museum. Also, museums, as defined in an American context, hold objects in the public trust, and the MoI was conceived, created, and financed by an individual, making it a fully private institution. Another issue to consider is sustainability; Esra admitted they don’t know how long the museum will stay open, but as long as people read the book, the museum will stay relevant.

The museum just opened in 2012. I find it to be a true millennial museum-- it was created from the imagination of one person, it speaks to the average citizen, and it is just a touch narcissistic.

What I love about Pamuk is his deep connection to the city. I’ve found that many of my favorite authors also use place meaningfully; I’m thinking particularly of John Irving and Salman Rushdie. Why couldn’t there be a museum of The Hotel New Hampshire? Or Zadie Smith’s and Helen Fielding’s London? How different is “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” theme park in Orlando, FL? (I saw the Harry Potter “exhibit” at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and I suspended all disbelief that those “artifacts” weren’t real.) There’s also now a Game of Thrones “Exhibition” traveling the world. The Museum of Innocence (the novel and museum) work because the power of place overpowers the need for a traditional museum experience. It’s also inspired university students in Istanbul to think more about how the city and objects intersect (check out An Innocent City:  Modest Musings on Everyday Istanbul).

Pamuk’s work inspired me, in part, because, as the Director Esra Aysun said,   “Museum visitors are not scared of the objects.” They become “part of the experience” because it is a museum for them. The objects are not intimidating, the whole experience is not intimidating. “People can take pride in their own lives, as characters. They can know that their lives are full of art.” What a simple, but beautiful, idea.

Postscript: Pamuk's ideas for museums are more fully articulated in his Modest Manifesto for Museums; well worth a read. His manifesto is strong in several areas, particularly in stressing the need to interpret history through stories, and to tell the stories of all people, not just the rich and powerful.

Break the Rules: Hands-On Tours that Really Do

In our book, Creativity in Museum Practice, Rainey and I highlight an AAM session from several years ago that asked participants to make a list of all the museum rules and then to think about how they could creatively be broken.   What's the biggest museum rule?  The one we tell school children and probably every adult would mention if asked?  Don't touch.

Last week at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, I got a chance to break that big rule, not just with grudging permission, but with enthusiastic encouragement from staff.  The Rosenbach is best known for its incredible manuscript and rare book collection--everything from the manuscript of Joyce's Ulysses to a list of enslaved people written by Thomas Jefferson;  to the entire collection of Maurice Sendak's work to poet Marianne Moore's living room. So you imagine a hushed, white-glove kind of place, where archivists and curators jealously guard access to their precious materials.  Wrong!

The Rosenbach's hands-on tours are not tours with reproductions.  They are small group (less than five people) hands-on tours of the real thing--and the real thing is everything from some of the earliest printings of Shakespeare to Marianne Moore's letters.   The cost is $5 in addition to museum admission and you can sign up in advance or join the tour on the spur of the moment if there's room.
Last Friday, along with other tour participants, I carefully washed my hands, and then Farrar Fitzgerald, The Sunstein Family Assistant Director of Education, led us upstairs, into the Rosenbach brothers' library on the top floor.  It felt secret in a way, and as Farrar unlocked a library cabinet to take out a box, it felt even more special.   Our tour was about the sea, and so we embarked on a journey, both practical and metaphorical.

Over the course of the next hour, we looked--and yes, touched!--a handwritten manuscript by Joseph Conrad, a first edition of Moby Dick;  a fine art edition of Joyce's Ulysses with illustrations by Matisse;  and a lovingly hand-printed edition of the Wreck of the Hesperus.   We held the books and manuscripts in our hands, feeling the weight of the paper, the press of the hand-set type, even smelling that old-book smell.  We each read a bit aloud,  and I remember closing my eyes and listening to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, imagining the scene.  Farrar introduced each item, linking it to the sea, and drawing our attention to details.  She carefully handled each object, but didn't hesitate to say, "go ahead, you can pick it up!"

Upon reflection, I was struck not only by the power of objects and the power of words,  but the power of the experience itself, of bonding with a small group of strangers as we embarked upon our own voyage of discovery. 

The best thing for you, museum readers?  It's that every single history museum or historical society, no matter what your size, could do exactly this same program on the same budget--pretty much zero dollars.  I've used literally hundreds of history archives, large and small, well organized and not, and although Joseph Conrad's manuscripts don't exist in every one,  incredible stories do.  So, next Monday morning, go first thing to your archives and consider what stories you can tell, what voyages you can take your community on.