Brave Museums Part 3: The Legacy Museum

As I get back to regular blogging, I want to begin each one, when I can, calling out museums that are brave in challenging times.  Today, check out this New York Times article featuring a number of sites and museums dedicated to telling the full story of American life, including the story of African Americans and the legacies of enslavement.  In the article, Ashley Rogers, director of Whitney Plantation, reminds readers, “a wound doesn’t get better if you ignore it. It just festers.”

This week, thousands of museum folks are gathering for the American Alliance of Museums annual conference in Los Angeles where I'm sure so many issues about history, funding, and more will be discussed.  I miss Twitter for conference sessions and hope someone will find Threads or some other way to share for those of us not there.  Please share other brave museums you learn about!

But, on to another brave museum.  Some museums become brave, like the Valentine that I wrote about last time (and as an aside, some start as brave and become less so). But others are born brave--their very founding is a call for us to remember and to be brave about facing both past and future.  A few weeks ago I spent a day at the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.  Created by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law office. The goals and inspiration of the Legacy Project are described on their website: "Seeing firsthand how excessive punishment, racial discrimination, and inequality are deeply rooted in America’s history of racial injustice inspired us to create the Legacy Sites. By offering these unique spaces for people to gather, learn, and reflect on our history and its legacy, we hope to foster a new era of truth and justice in America."

No pictures are allowed in the museum and I didn't take notes, partly because of the nonstop conversations Dina Bailey and I were having along the way.  As a result, I have no pictures of label texts, so this post is more reflective of the experience overall.  As you enter, you encounter a very large video of waves, crashing forward, which served to me as both a representation of the journey of the middle passage and of the journey the exhibition would take us through.  The museum has almost no objects and in the early history,  stays away, for the most part, from the images that are so familiar.  Instead, there were hand-drawn videos (with the hands shown at work) sharing parts of the story and as well, concepts and historical facts that may be unfamiliar to many.  We didn't take time to watch the installations in the small theater spaces, but I can imagine they are equally powerful.

The label text is unsparing--when is the last time you saw the phrase "racial terrorism,"  to describe our history?  The amount of graphics with words:  runaway slave ads, legal notices, newspaper headlines, all in black and white, feels a bit overwhelming.  As we read the labels though, it struck us that this is very much an exhibit developed by folks with legal minds.  They assemble the evidence--so much evidence--and then make an impassioned argument.  The exhibit demands our attention to the evidence.

Photo:  EJI

There's also a subtle shift in perspective.  Earlier in the exhibition,  you walk on the outside of cells where you can hear re-created audio of enslaved African Americans--but you're on the outside, listening in, still at some remove.  But at the end of the exhibition, visitors can sit and listen, face-to-face with death row inmates, making sure that visitors understand that this is not history, that this is not past, and that the legacy of enslavement and racism continues forward.

Photo:  EJI

But then,  at the end of the exhibition, we entered a space that I found so beautiful and moving.  It's a very large gallery, that is floor-to-ceiling portrait images, faces only of African Americans of achievement in every field.  The space is copper/gold colored and is the place where the importance of Black imagination, passion and knowledge are made gloriously clear.  We sat in this space for quite a while, talking, but also watching people as they walked through, stopping at images they recognized or sitting like us, for a moment to take it all in.  

From there, we went to what's commonly known as the Lynching Memorial (also, by the way, the admission cost for all three legacy sites was $5 and the tickets are good forever if you don't make it to all three in a day).   There's been a great deal written about this memorial (for instance, here, here and here) and I hope all of you who can will make your way to Montgomery.  As we approached the memorial, there's a large, pristine green lawn between us and the memorial itself.  As we wound our way up the path, the large iron shapes, each delineating a county and its lynchings, come closer and closer.  And then, all of a sudden, we found ourselves looking at counties and wondering.  Wondering about the people named, wondering about all of the unknowns, wondering about why the lynchings happened when they did--sometimes a county had quite a few in a year, and then none.  We walked among these pillars, slowly making our way down the ramp until these are hanging over us, as lynching victims would have been.  You could feel the deep pressure and pain.

I particularly appreciated the way this national memorial focused on the local.  By creating this county-by-county memorial, it makes it hyper-local.  Visitors, including us, think about counties we know, or have been to.  But it also, after the memorial, let's us know that we can make change.  All of the county pillars have duplicates, lined up on the ground for counties to take home once some sort of reconciliation process has taken place.  There are still lots of them left--but then, down a bit, are versions of familiar shaped historic markers for those counties who have actually done the work, a clear message that there is much work still to be done.

"Hopelessness is the enemy of Justice."    
~ Bryan Stevenson

(thanks Paul Orselli of Exhibit Tricks for pointing me to this interview and quote that I found 

when I was writing this post)

Clarity and Memory in Berlin

January 27 was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz. It also happened to be the day that I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin. The memorial itself, with its hundred of grey stelae, stretching over a large space is certainly memorable (and has been controversial) but the exhibition itself in the information center underneath the memorial was a moving demonstration of the ways in which clarity and a conscious hand on what we present and how we present it can make an experience memorable. The exhibit has no objects--and it's not very big--just two of the what I'm sure were many constraints successfully addressed by the exhibit team.

You enter the space and begin by a hallway timeline, just images and text, about the Nazis efforts to exterminate the Jews and others. I didn't linger here, as it was crowded, but was interested in how many people were taking time to read the text. But you turn the corner and you see the image at the top of the post, large, at the end of a room. Just six people, representing the 6 million. You understand immediately that this is not a story just about numbers, but about people. And that focus on individual people is the thread that carries through.



Next, a space with large back-lit panels on the floor. Each one had a reproduction of a fragment of a letter written from a camp; along with English and German transcriptions. I was traveling with college students and one said afterward, "I felt obligated to read every single one." When I asked her to explain, she described it as more a responsibility--that she owed it to each of those people to read the text, honor and acknowledge them.



Those individual people all had families. The next space had six stories, of six families, from all across Europe and what happened to them, told just in photos and text. A different student said he connected more directly with this room; really understanding the idea that whole families, from all across Europe were lost forever. Again, the curatorial skill made concepts real and concrete.

As I entered the next gallery, I found darkness just a single name projected on all four walls, grey benches to sit on, and audio, first in German and then English. Again, it was about individuals. Each name was a person murdered by the Nazis and again made each person real, made you feel you were meeting a person.





A final room talked about the camps themselves. A map located them all over Europe and again, panels provided specific information. The panels created small booths, where individuals could sit down and listen to the voices of survivors about the camps. Throughout the exhibit there always felt a kind of intimacy, in a way an antidote to the bureacracy that carried out the murders.

I spend a great deal of time thinking about interactives or about how to create dialogue in museum settings, or how to make objects compelling. This museum, so clear in its focus and intent, reminded me that although we have an ever-greater number of tools in our interpretive toolboxes, the clear, thoughtful minds and eyes of exhibition developers and designers may be the most important.



As I came up out of the museum on this anniversary, I saw an older couple walk up to one of the stones and gently lay two bouquets of white flowers down and then spend time walking among the dark grey stones, under a dark grey sky and my eyes welled up. Remember.

Where Nothing Happens: Could You Embrace It?

Could your museum promote itself with the slogan "Where nothing happens" ?  How about if you work at a historic house?  Last month I had the chance to visit an organization that proudly promotes itself that way--you can even buy the T-shirt.  It provided a compelling example of why--and perhaps how--we need to think deeply about our organizational missions and about whether the future matters more than the past.

It was a misty, rainy, day before Christmas driving down Highway 1 in Big Sur, California when we saw a big, hand-lettered sign saying,  "Henry Miller Memorial Library.  Free coffee and wifi."  Why not stop?  We parked, made our way up through the dripping trees,  were welcomed by a young woman browsing the Internet and a cat.   Inside the building,  the one-time home of Miller's close friend Emil White (at right, with Miller, above)  there were books (all kinds of books, not just Miller's work)  for sale,  busts of Miller, random letters,  typewriters, and photographs. 

It was a warm, cozy respite on a rainy day--but it made me want to find out more about this place that could have been a museum, or a historic house, but turned itself to something else, something more vital.  Miller himself wasn't interested in memorials, saying "Memorials defeated the purpose of a man’s life. Only by living your own life to the full can you honor the memory of someone.” 

The Library has an archival collection, well-preserved (and they have summer internships available) but the archives, the preservation, is only one tool in their arsenal of creating a memorial that's not really a memorial.

 

I was intrigued enough to buy the 2012 publication, Where Nothing Happens:  The Best of the Henry Miller Memorial Library where I learned a bit more about the place, including Henry Miller's life in Highly Digestible Bullet Form and his life in Highly Digestible Paragraph Form.  Different contributors talk vividly about the way that the library serves as the focus for the cultural life that's directly connected to the incredible Big Sur landscape continues to flourish.   As Christopher Lorenc writes, the library "doesn't traffic in cliches about some bygone cultural era.  It provides lifeblood for real, living, cutting-edge creative work right now."

Every historic house or museum is a memorial in some way or another,  founded and continued by the desire to commemorate something or someone.  But in far too many, we just look backward.  Not every historic house can attract the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Young or Laurie Andersen to play benefit concerts.  But we can all look to the spirit of the place or people we commemorate for clues on how we might look forward ourselves.  Were those homeowners of an early time risk-takers in business or industry?  Why don't we encourage new innovations?   Were they writers or artists or social reformers?  Why not,  like the Matilda Joslyn Gage House in upstate New York,  take on today's tough conversations about reproductive rights?  Were those early house dwellers just ordinary, you say?  (really no one ever says that about their historic house inhabitants, even if they were).  Why not embrace telling the stories of all sorts of everyday people with all the courage, determination, failure and success that implies?

If we want our museums and historic sites to be the lifeblood of our communities,  we need to (paraphrasing Miller himself) live our organizational lives to the fullest.  Now there's a New Year's resolution.

Memorials, Museums, and Each of Us

At the AAM conference this year I was privileged to be a member of a panel in a session, Interpreting Human Tragedy:  In Memoriam,  which sprang from last fall's issue of Exhibitionist on the same topic for which we had all written. Stacey Mann of Night Kitchen Interactive took the lead in organizing our session.  I joined Stacey,   Danny M. Cohen, Ph. D. of Northwestern University, School of Education and Social Policy; Ian Kerrigan, Assistant Director of Exhibition Development at the National September 11 Memorial Museum and Wendy Aibel-Weiss, Director of Exhibits and Education, Tribute WTC Visitors Center.

We really wanted this session to be a conversation,  so Stacey encouraged us to take a leap of faith and not do any sort of formal papers or presentations.  In several conference calls, we brainstormed questions that were interesting to us, and we hoped interesting to an audience.  Stacey began with a brief framing of the issues-which included an invitation to the audience to ask questions at any time--and turned to us,  squished together on the tiny stage, and began asking questions.    

It was so gratifying to have people come up to the microphone and ask such thoughtful questions, and to feel that our own thinking out loud, pondering responses, perhaps provides a better model for our work than the reading of papers.  So here, a recap of key ideas/questions and comments,  as they came forth in the session.  It's a long post,  but I hope worth reading.   Please continue the conversation by sharing your comments below and many, many thanks to Stacey, Ian,  Danny,  Wendy, and all of you who participated (and shared via your tweets.)

We talked about how memorials can tell stories...but importantly,  as Ian mentioned, that these museums take memories combined with,  as he put it,  "agreed-upon facts."  But those agreed-upon facts often feel a burden, as it is becomes a way of codifying history.  The challenge in the 9/11 museum, opening later this year, is to share, to audiences, the event that changed the world as we know it.  And with a changing world, how to design for future audiences and events.  But Danny reminded us,  that "ownership" of events often leads to definitions that may exclude other groups and other narratives.

Place really matters...the fact that an event, whatever it is, happened here.  So Holocaust museums in the United States or elsewhere outside Europe, or in my own experience, the Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv vs. actually visiting Chernobyl,  are entirely different experiences and mean entirely different things to visitors.  Place is powerful.

That discussion of place led to a consideration of these places of tragedy as sacred spaces--and the struggle many have with cell phone pictures,  teenagers giggling and the like.  Danny, whose deep experience in Holocaust education brought a broad perspective to our conversation, mentioned two important responses to what some seem as inappropriate behavior. One, that many survivors comment that they're okay with the noisy groups of young people--that those young people are alive, representing the future denied so many;  that it can be seen as almost a joyful affirmation/antidote to the tragedy.  Second,  he reminded us that these are often traumatizing sites or exhibits and what seem to be inappropriate responses are really coping mechanisms.

And then the questions really began from the audience.   One asked about the inclusion of images of dead bodies in an exhibit on the Armenian genocide.  Should the images be shown in a way that you have to make a choice to see, as at the Holocaust Museum in DC?  Are there other approaches?   The purpose of these images may be only to shock or provoke, and as a learning scientist,  Danny feels strongly that provocation is harmful to a real learning process.  The goal, in a thoughtful, reflective museum, should be to move a visitor from a purely emotional response to an intellectual, reflective, analytical response.  Mere shock never does that.

A staff member from a military museum asked about issues of including the enemy,  particularly in exhibitions about recent US wars--and how to depict the enemy.  Danny asked how often, for instance,  exhibitions about the Holocaust show Nazis in any way but in uniform.  He reminded us that these were people, with families, with emotions--that by showing them only in uniform, we may wiggle out of the consideration of our own human responsibility. 

A question about interpreting the site of a Native American massacre brought conversation--and many shared ideas from the audience-- about  the responsibility of the victors, whoever they may be, in interpreting history--a museum's responsibility of balance to create an exhibition that really provides, through the active involvement of communities affected,  multiple perspectives.  From a 19th century event in the American West to African revolutions...for an exhibit about social media and African revolutions,  the question, "can we trust social media to properly document revolution?"   From someone on our panel (ah, my note-taking fails me),  the idea that we have to trust that our visitors are capable of the same question--and of thinking about the answers.  Perhaps those questions can be asked of the exhibit's visitors.

And a question for us about what the take-away message of memorials and memorial museums could or should be.  As a group, we tried to puzzle out an answer.  The first phase of a project might be memorialization, often driven by what the victims feel is appropriate.  The second might be education--just that our audiences gain basic knowledge and facts.  But the third stage is how we inspire action,  how to ensure that we, as individuals, as I somewhat inelegantly phrased it,  make a decision about whether we are Oskar Schindler or wimps. 

I'd been procrastinating about writing this post, worried about doing justice to the thoughtful panelists and audience members, but today I was reminded how important this work can be when I read this NY Times article about the extremely ad hoc, personal,  dangerous, underground--and inspiring-- efforts underway by Syrian citizens to provide food, shelter, medical care and other support to Syrian communities under attack by their own government.  Said one university student involved in the work, “All our lives we were raised to be afraid. But you get to a point where you realize you are strong because you can speak and do.”    

And of course, as museums, we have powerful voices to raise. We can also be strong because we can speak and do.

Image:  Memorial gate, where people from all over the world have left momentos to honor the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist hijacking of Flight 93. Shanksville, Pennsylvania by Carol Highsmith,  Library of Congress collection