A Meditation on the Absence of Curators in a Museum Exhibition Project

By Timothy J. Chester.

Abstract:

Michigan—Land of Riches: Re-Examining the Old Grand Rapids Public Museum was a month-long temporary installation that took over the disused halls of a defunct regional natural history museum facility and proved that even the museum’s trash can be recycled for the benefit of community. A project to repurpose the old artifacts and dioramas as art involved student artists and art faculty from seven Michigan colleges, universities, and art institutions. Although the museum staff assisted with all object handling and the curatorial staff ensured that the stewardship of the collections was not compromised, the museum’s curators were absent in issues of content and interpretation. By the standards of most visitors, the participating artists, and the museum’s staff, the event was a wild success.

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• Timothy J. Chester (timothychester@comcast.net) is a consultant for museums and historical societies. He is Chair of the Michigan Humanities Council and Director Emeritus of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, where he was employed for 20 years. He is a member of the Museum Group.

DOI: 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2011.00081.x

© 2011 The California Academy of Sciences

by David Carr

Fresh encounters with Maori treasures first seen by the author at the Metropolitan Museum in 1984 revealed the concentrated power of these objects and the importance of their presence among the beliefs and continuities of their makers’ culture. A masterwork viewed in a museum may evoke a strong and sometimes inarticulate response. We might say the inability to articulate reflects a larger dimension—an aspect of the infinite—residing in the object. Museum objects return us to the human culture and knowledge we carry with us; they stimulate reflective impulses essential to the shared threads of democracy. They allow us to locate ourselves and each other, and our shared horizons.

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• David Carr (carr@ils.unc.edu) is a member of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Photographs on these pages were taken in New Zealand by the author and are used with his permission.

by KEN YELLIS

Our relationships with our audiences have proved parlous. But if history is destined to be contested, where should museums be in that contest and how do we get there?

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum has turned out to be a path not taken; Enola Gay was a cautionary tale. But we should have these fights in museums, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged, because of how museums teach us, opening hidden windows on cloaked realities.

Museums can start by becoming clearer about what they think they are doing when they make an exhibition. Exhibitions can have a profound effect on visitors at many levels but it doesn’t happen very often. Is that because visitors seek another kind of experience from what we typically offer?