Whodunnit? The Tale of the Missing Credit Panel

Recently I found myself in a conversation about credit panels for exhibitions: who's on, who's not, and why.  I posted a request for samples on Twitter and Facebook and thought I'd share a bit of what I learned from all of you (thank you everyone!)

Basically I found that credit panels fall into two groups.  First, there's the more the merrier:  the museums that take the opportunity to acknowledge as many people as possible. For instance here, from the Museum Centre Vapriikki in Tampere, Finland, via Katrin Hieke in Germany:

And from the Oakland Museum, via Suzanne Fischer, egalitarianly without job titles.

From Dean Krimmel and the Jewish Museum of Maryland:  Funders, administrators, staff and even students.

And from the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, a high expression of the form, letting the public know that exhibition development is a team effort in every way.  As the label says, "it's a complicated creative process" and that that process is made of real live people, working together.  So much more compelling than just names. I also enjoy the fact that the sponsors are credited in the informal "Hi!" from the director.

Annemarie de Wildt of the Amsterdam Museum in the Netherlands shared on Facebook that:

"We discussed this issue recently in a discussion about the future of the museum with a theatre director. In the theatre/film it's of course very different: naming everyone although the difference in importance shows in the size of the letters."   

But there were those of you whose organizations shared credit for sponsors only.  Colleagues responded to my Facebook query saying:

"We don't include staff but we do include our Advisory Panels that are made up of community members and scholars."

"I don't think we have a real pattern or logic to it. I think the consultants is because it's assumed that otherwise no one would know they helped. Internal, it's just part of our day job. But [at our museum] there's been no deliberate conversation about it. We had some fairly long conversations about who should go on the newest one (it was a community-sourced project with a TON of donors & participants) but the question of internal staff never came up."

"It has been discussed. The question comes up periodically and I am certain it will come up again. We seem to fall on the "no need to print a thank you for doing your job. I don't see how you can thank exhibit staff without acknowledging development staff who raised the funds, education staff who carry out programming for the duration of the exhibit, marketing staff who make sure we're covered in the press, etc. We publicly acknowledge exhibit staff at opening event where donors and sponsors are present. We reserve panels for sponsors and donors."

Where do I fall?  I'm all for credit for everyone.  Exhibits, even small ones, are complicated animals, requiring the skills and talents of so many people, from wall-painters to label-writers to the person who saves you by working late one night to reprint something.  Public credit is cheap.  Why should we be stingy about it?  Couldn't we take our inspiration from the Car Talk guys and their credits?  A sense of humor never hurt anyone.

Interventions

Today's guest post is by Caren Ponty, a former student of mine in the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies Program.  She brings a wealth of experience from her career in community development, a perspective that inform her reflections on several efforts, on both sides of the Atlantic, to re-contextualize museum collections.

With the opening of the new Smithsonian African-American Museum on the Washington Mall last month and the AAM’s focus at the 2017 annual convention on diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion, I have been thinking more about what this means to museums, its audiences and its collections.  Having worked on community equity issues as part of my career in community development, the one thing I think I know is that even the definition of diversity can be a tricky subject. The term can be applied to any number of areas that one considers outside the mainstream, whether it be race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and more. No one seems to have a clear-cut characterization; it depends upon context, but it is based on representation.

This past summer while on a Johns Hopkins University graduate seminar in museum studies, I had two encounters with museum exhibitions which focused on seeking to redress the exclusion of blacks in collections in Great Britain. The first was at the National Portrait Gallery in London where the special exhibit Black Chronicles was a discrete intervention among multiple galleries throughout the museums. (For those unfamiliar with the term, art ‘intervention’ applies to art designed specifically to interact with an existing structure or situation, be it another artwork, the audience, an institution or in the public domain). The intention was to focus attention to the overlooked, underrepresented black community (which in Great Britain includes Asians) whose portraits would be few in a museum dedicated to paintings of the elite British.  While the dispersed special exhibition seemed somewhat confusing, the photographs, particularly those hung in the first gallery on a stark black painted background. The portraits, from the 1850s through 1947s, showed unimaginable, stunningly-displayed images of private lives never seen. While snaking our way around to see the exhibit, I knew that it had made the impression intended when I spotted one of the exhibit portraits staring at me while at dinner at the Museum’s restaurant. I realized that prior to experiencing the intervention, I would have had no idea what the photograph was doing there and it may have seemed out of character. But aimed with this knowledge of interspersing the voices of blacks throughout the museum, it seemed to blend into the room in a way where it might seem naturally suited.

This same technique is being used at The Old Manse in Concord MA in a project entitled Art and the Landscape. (Note from Linda: Caren has been working with me on an unrelated interpretation project at this site). One element of Art and the Landscape, created by artist Sam Durant, added artifacts related to the African presence in Concord to the interior of this historic house. The goal, similar to the project at the National Portrait Gallery in London, is to make the struggles, history, and culture of Africans in Concord more visible within the historic narrative and to integrate the knowledge that enslaved people lived here and were part of the Reverend Emerson’s household at the time of the American Revolution.  Visitors who have seen these interspersed objects or participated in some of the prototyping have walked away commenting that prior to seeing the exhibit, they never thought much about this issue. This is particularly interesting given that this is a community best known for fighting for their right to be represented in government. As few people visit for the tour that focuses exclusively on this aspect of history, one can see the value of the interventionist approach to reach more visitors and provide them to think more about this part of our national heritage.

The second approach I saw to engage diversity was Raphael Albert’s Miss Black and Beautiful at Autograph ABP’s exhibits at their own galleries in Shoreditch, London.  Curator Renée Mussai (who had also curated Black Chronicles mentioned above) has a remarkable and relatable display of black beauty pageants from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, including some from London, and spoke to us about the unanticipated interest from black women--close to 850 people showed up for the opening. But even more brilliantly, running simultaneously in their upstairs gallery was an exhibit entitled Unsterile Clinic, whose goal is to raise awareness of the widespread practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). As described on their website, Aida Silvestri’s sculptural photo-works are shown with text poems based on interviews conducted with participants whose personal testimonies provide harrowing insight into their experiences.  This juxtaposition of social beauty and social justice was bone chilling.

Making visitors aware of an uncomfortable topic while sharing images of pride and more acceptable subjects brings me back to our new American museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Here, the events of our American heritage, which includes our African-American past that is part of all of us, are served by a museum that makes us proud by elevating the narrative of who we are in a broader and all-encompassing manner.

Images:

Sarah Davies (formerly Forbes Bonetta) and James Pinson Labulo Davies
by Camille Silvy, 1862
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Brochure, The Meeting House, Art in the Landscape
Aida Silvestri, Type II B: Distance. From Unsterile Clinic, 2016

How Do You Commemorate?

Almost every history and community museum I know does some sort of commemorative exhibit. We commemorate our town's founding, a big deal in our place (Shakespeare for instance, or Lincoln), wars, battles, landmark court decisions, and the like. In the United States, a large number of historical societies had their impetus in the 1976 Bicentennial, with the idea that a suitable commemoration was the founding of a place where we could, in an ongoing way, recognize the events of our past.

It's really tough to make these kinds of exhibits exciting. Rarely is there new knowledge to be shared, even more rarely new artifacts, and too often they are a sort of timeline or greatest hits. But early this month, I got to see an exhibition that made me think about commemoration in a new way. It was at one of my new favorite museums, the Little Museum in Dublin. This year is the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish patriots rose up against British Rule. There's lots going on in Dublin and around the country this year, including a new comprehensive exhibit at the GPO, the center of the fighting, and a series of events this weekend, Easter weekend.

But the Little Museum choose a path that fits exactly with its slightly irreverent personality. The main exhibit in their first floor galleries is Fergal McCarthy's cartoon history of the 1916 uprising. In 60 giant black and white pieces of paper--cartoons--he makes the history come alive, despite--or perhaps because of--the lowest tech methods possible. Cartoons--for kids only you might think. When we were there, a senior citizen group was also visiting, and they were actively engaged in looking, talking, pondering, laughing (yes, even laughing) at the panels. McCarthy succinctly provides a lesson for all of us who develop exhibits, saying on the museum's website, "By streamlining the narrative and adding visual humour, I have attempted to demystify the Rising by relieving it of some of the excess baggage it has naturally acquired over the past century."

That humor also extends to the gallery guides. Who wouldn't want to pick up a simple activity guide labeled "Easey-Peasy.". Not for you? More complicated ones available including "Totally impossible."

Today's lesson? A sense of humor is a wonderful thing, and all too often absent from what we do. Thanks Fergal McCarthy for the lesson. Lesson #2. Think outside your frame and be not afraid of doing something new.Thanks, Little Museum for that one.

 

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