Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

Although Spain has a long tradition of maritime, naval, and fishing museums, in the last 20 years there has been a boom in museums of this type along the Spanish coast. Paradoxically, this museum boom has coincided with a profound fishing crisis. In order to face the social and economic consequences, Fisheries Local Action Groups (FLAGs) have been established by the EU to support the territorial development of fishing areas, financing projects of various kinds, including sociocultural activities that promote fishery diversification, stimulate fishing tourism, and enhance the value of the rich tangible and intangible heritage linked to fishing. A mixed methods approach has been adopted to characterize fishing and maritime museums that have received European funds and have been supported by FLAGs, and to explore the relationship between the fishing sector and the management of museums. Results confirm the active role played by the FLAGs and the fisheries funds in the creation and consolidation of fisheries museums. However, despite the community-led local development approach, the fisheries sector still feels alienated from the management of these museums. The benefits, especially the intangible ones, that these museums can bring to fishing communities may be limited by the low level of involvement of the fishing sector.

Visitor studies are an important source of knowledge within museum practice: They inform what we believe about our audiences, what kinds of interpretation we develop, and how we conceptualize success. As visitor studies professionals, we see firsthand that the ways we gather data have implications for how we and our colleagues view visitors and how visitors perceive our institutions. Meanwhile, we also see opportunities for visitor studies within museums' broader aspirations to become more visitor-centered, as defined by meaningful two-way engagement with visitors. Using real-world project examples, this paper explores possibilities for moving toward a more visitor-centered approach to data collection, in which practitioners can more clearly privilege meaning, transparency, and care. As starting points, we suggest that active attention to four considerations should inform more visitor-centered visitor studies: comfort (i.e., the well-being of people); context (i.e., the circumstances of museum experiences and study implementation); flexibility (i.e., responsiveness to dynamics that imply a need for change); and value (i.e., supporting relations of mutual benefit).

The history of slavery has often been located on the same continuum as that of incarceration. This article explores the development of an exhibition representing the legacies of slavery in Australia, analysing Australian and international exhibitions alongside theories of museology, historiography and memory. It begins by considering the growth of slavery memory since the latter twentieth century, and Australia's own slavery heritage. The second half of the article focuses on curatorial directions and decisions taken in the exhibition, which our research team is currently developing in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum as part of an Australian Research Council project. Much of the project's research to date has been biographical, investigating the lives of individual slavers and colonists to explore colonial and racial frameworks still underpinning contemporary Australia. For the exhibition, we are investigating ways of expanding the scope to represent the lives and experiences of enslaved individuals. We are also exploring the challenges of retracing past lives, the potential limits of empathy, and the politics of ownership when telling stories about the past. This includes considering community participation, the biases and silences of the archives, and the use of art in representing the past.

This article focuses on the role of food interpretation in prison museums and penal heritage sites, which has been underexplored in recent critical analyses of penal tourism and heritage. The authors argue that food is a fundamental part of the lived experience of confinement and detention and lends itself to multiple forms of interpretation and programming activities. Following an overview of existing literature on food insecurity and the different research methods available in recounting stories about food and food insecurity, the article is divided into three main sections. These explore the connections between the built heritage of prisons and the wider landscape, personal and political experiences of hunger, and the potential of art and creativity in negotiating food insecurity. The article concludes with reflections on how food narratives can be further used by prison museums to engage with contemporary issues of social justice, sustainability, decoloniality, and abolition.

In 2022, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened the temporary exhibition Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak's Designs for Ballet and Opera. Predicting most visitors would know Sendak as the creator of children's books such as Where the Wild Things Are, the Gardner team decided to consider families with children as potential visitors. Though the Gardner regularly offers family guides and children's programming, this would be the first time the Museum would explicitly welcome children in an exhibition. The result was a unique exhibition experience that visitors of a variety of ages could enjoy together. This article describes the process the team used to develop and design the exhibition, told from the perspectives of the fine arts curator and children's museum designer who worked together to make it happen.

This paper examines how museums can address and raise awareness of histories of incarceration through a case study—the Bad Bridget exhibition, which opened at the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in April 2022. Originating as an academic research project (2015–2019) led by Dr Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Dr Elaine Farrell (Queen's University Belfast), it tells the stories of women who left Ireland for North America between 1838 and 1918 and ended up in trouble with the authorities for one reason or another. A unique mix of sights, sounds, and smells, further enhanced by first-person narration, is used within the exhibition to encourage visitors to emotionally engage with the experiences of these women. For much of the nineteenth century, Irish-born migrants were the biggest group in American prisons, and there were disproportionate numbers of Irish girls and women in the justice system, court, and prison (Farrell & McCormick, ‘Bad Bridgets’: The criminal and deviant Irish women convicted in America. Irish Times, 2019). Bad Bridget has provided us with a platform to reveal this previously unexplored aspect of the Irish migration story at the museum, contrary to the “American Dream.”

When are equity conversations more than “just talk?” This article draws on qualitative data from two interconnected NSF-funded studies about racial equity in museums to explore the relationship between organizational reflection and organizational change. In one study, researchers interviewed staff from 29 museums that hosted the traveling exhibition RACE: Are We So Different? In the other, staff from of the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) used action research to challenge their own racial equity norms and policies during and after the permanent installation of RACE. Our results reveal a sharp contrast between reflection that is strategically undertaken to produce organizational change and reflection that emerges opportunistically in response to a traveling exhibition. Yet they also show how, in rare cases, museums were able to exploit the opportunities presented by a traveling exhibition to develop and sustain equity-oriented reflection over time.

In this article we consider suitcases: ubiquitous objects in museum exhibitions used to signify incarceration as well as involuntary or forced migration. Building on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the “attic of memory:” As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz. We consider suitcases firstly as aspects of the extended self, as described in Russell Belk's work, and subsequently as symbolic object figuring imprisonment and mobility in museum exhibitions. We present three different such instances: a suitcase full of personal belongings presented to a museum, a set of concrete facsimile suitcases symbolizing forced migration, and a display of suitcases representing individual stories of confinement and migration. Although some of the life stories in the latter exhibition are presented with happy endings, by and large the museum displays featuring suitcases tell of forced movement and forced immobility. This tension animates our analysis, as we explore the double signification of suitcases as markers of mobility, but also of immobility and imprisonment, as well as the intrusive gaze of the state or other voyeur (including the museum visitor). A suitcase is, thus, not just an extension of the self but represents the lost body, for which the museum becomes the final, very public resting place. It becomes and remains an important memory device, even as its very ubiquity threatens to banalize its meaning into a one-dimensional shortcut.

A large and increasing number of children in the United States are systematically rendered invisible due to the effects of parental incarceration, forced to navigate a correctional system that does not often take their particular needs into account. This trauma can put children at risk of long-term developmental consequences that can be lasting across generations. Two children's museums, among others, are developing unique partnerships to mitigate this negative impact. The Children's Museum of Manhattan has an ongoing partnership with the NYC Department of Correction to reunite incarcerated parents at Rikers Island with their children for an afternoon at the Museum. Hands On Children's Museum in Olympia, Washington, is partnering with the Washington Department of Corrections to redesign the children's area of visiting rooms in three correctional facilities. Anecdotal evidence of strengthened parent–child bonds and improved behavior of parents during incarceration show that early indications of both efforts are positive.

The article reflects on the place and the narratives in which collections of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora are inscribed in the context of ethnographic museums in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Presenting a brief sociohistorical analysis of two collections, one in the Civil Police Museum and the other in the Édison Carneiro Folklore Museum, it demonstrates how different regimes of knowledge are used to “imprison” objects of faith as museum objects in the eyes of the police or in those of ethnographers. “Incarcerated” in museums, these collections have been kept by state institutions that frame them either as testimonies of offenses to the public order, or as objects of folklore, religious artifacts disconnected from terreiros. Finally, recurring to a theoretical framework of nonduality to provoke museum's stable categories, the article considers the current transformative role of museums in the “liberation” of a diasporic heritage, by proposing dialogue and collaboration as important elements in the liminal work of musealization. Ultimately, what is at stake in the case of Afro-Brazilian sacred materials kept in museums is the ability of objects disassociated from their ritual context to transmit the sacred in the museum environment.