Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

Museums and science centers are embracing collaborative design practices to invite diverse expertises into the design process. Co-construction of museum exhibits and experiences can help museums better engage and affirm local communities as well as facilitate disciplinary and educational research connected to museum experiences. To support more collaborative design processes, many museums are creating new frameworks capable of supporting authentic co-construction across wells of expertise, both within a museum infrastructure and with external partners. In this perspective, we share insights that have emerged through the development of such a framework at the Lawrence Hall of Science. We position this design framework as a collection of boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989, 387) that can facilitate collaboration, and discuss the affordances of boundary objects for nurturing inclusive participation, knowledge-sharing, and shared ownership.

Lodovico Brunetti (1813–1899), professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Padua and founder of the Museum of Pathological Anatomy, believed that anatomical preparations were essential for the practice and teaching of pathological anatomy. At his arrival in Padua in 1855, there were around 300 made by other professors of medicine, including some by Giovanni Battista Morgagni, preserved either in liquid or dry. These conservation methods did not satisfy Brunetti, as they drastically altered the shape of the anatomical pieces (reduced by mummification and dilated in liquid); thus, he decided to create a new method called “tannization,” for the use of tannic acid. Brunetti's new method was based on dissection and injection techniques, and it had the substantial advantage of maintaining unchanged the shape and texture of the anatomical specimens, even microscopically, as well as being not so expensive. Another important advantage consisted in the fact that the different stages of the preparation could be put into practice even at different times and at a considerable distance from each other. His specimens seemed to be mummified, but they maintained a remarkable elasticity and softness, as well as almost completely unaltered proportions. Today, the Morgagni Museum of the University of Padua still preserves several tannized preparations attributable to Brunetti and his successors. The current study aims to show the educational value of this method showing the results of Brunetti's tannization nowadays.

This paper examines social media activity by UK museums during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a general perception that as museums closed their doors for extended periods, their digital presence increased to maintain connections with their audiences. However, much of the research conducted in this area is based on small-scale studies and examples of best practice from large, well-resourced museums. By contrast, this study utilizes a comprehensive database of over 3300 active UK museums to understand the use of Facebook and Twitter across the sector. Specifically, the paper examines the frequency with which museums posted to these digital platforms as they attempted to engage with their audiences. Our findings indicate that there was no substantial increase in social media use and activity across the UK museum sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research has implications for museologists studying the impact of the pandemic on museums' digital activity, for museum social media professionals, and policymakers responsible for museum digital transformation strategies.

We have been learning about the learning of children and youth, teachers, and visitors over the course of 7 years as we developed and deepened a research agenda in education in our natural history museum. In 2016 in this journal, we detailed how we began this effort and the development and initial steps of an educational research agenda. Focusing on our work since then, our team of educational researchers describes how our research has revealed the considerable impact of out-of-school learning with youth, educators, and visitors and how we incorporate a focus upon equity across all areas of inquiry. We share main findings emerging from our research, early roadblocks and current challenges, and lessons about engaging in research on learning in a cultural institution with implications for both large and small settings.

Tangible and intangible elements of culture are the primary sustenance of heritage tourism. They include traditional dance, folklore, songs, arts and craft, indigenous technologies, festivals, rituals, and rites. All these are cultural products designed to embody different activities. They constitute some of the major attractions of present-day cultural museums. Although these objects are imbued with functional roles through which they interact with society, yet within the confines of cultural museums, they are seemingly lifeless; needing the curator to narrate their relevance. Their functional role in the community seems lost as no opportunity is given or created to display their cultural relevance to amuse curious museum visitors. This raises some questions, is the museum a mausoleum of cultural products? How can mere narration of lifeless objects satisfy visitors' curiosity and taste for a new experience? To answer these salient questions, this paper employed desktop research design using two case studies, the Osun Osogbo sacred grove in Osun state and the palace of the Oba of Benin Nigeria, to explore the significance of cultural museums in promoting heritage tourism through the functional role of its collections. The study found that living heritage negates their original community role upon entry into the modern museum. The paper concludes that the significance of cultural museum collections can be revived by decolonizing the Eurocentric paradigm and indigenizing curatorial practices of western-modeled museums in Nigeria.

Frederic Webster, chief preparator at the Carnegie Museum (CM) from 1897 to 1907, is credited by some for “rescuing” Lion Attacking a Dromedary (LAD) from destruction by the American Museum of Natural History. Webster's work on LAD was not his only involvement with the preparation and display of controversial bones, however. Webster mounted the hide and bones of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson's war horse, Little Sorrel and displayed the skeleton at CM. In 1949, Little Sorrel's skeleton were returned to Virginia, where it was eventually cremated and interred under a statue of Jackson in a public ceremony in 1997. This article compares the return and reburial of the bones of a Confederate horse to the continued display of the remains of a person of unknown origin in LAD to highlight the very differing treatment of these human and equine individuals. By considering the return of Little Sorrel's remains to be a repatriation, I argue that the horse was transformed from a museum specimen into a monument, leveling him as a symbol of the Lost Cause and further cementing the status of the individual contained within LAD as a specimen. Through a displayed proximity to animals, Jackson (and his horse) become more human, while the person whose remains remain on display in LAD is treated as less than human.

This contribution explores the relationship between performance and art museum practice, through a creative practice-led approach, as part of a collaboration with MUVE, Fondazione dei Musei Civici in Venice. The focus here is on the exploration of performance opportunities embedded in the museography of the case study institutions, encompassing both artistic and curatorial considerations. Through a reflection on current challenges faced by such institutions and through speculative implementation of creative practice ideas, the argument here is that, as museums have re-opened their doors to the public in the aftermath of COVID-19, their performance activation may be crucial in reclaiming their role as physical contexts for cultural dialogue. Performance provides a useful lens to explore and re-imagine the experience of visitors, emphasizing their subjective positionality and their inter-relational connections with each other, with the collection and with the museographic configuration of the space.

Lions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about representations of racialized bodies (real and synthetic) in the history of museum display. Looking to the history of racialized bodies on display, I outline how taxidermied animals and racialized mannequins oscillate to reinforce continual colonial projects of the present. I show my reader how the construction of a ‘specimen’ is used in the dehumanizing processes that shapes who and what is human: a recognizable being that is (borrowing from Judith Butler) grievable upon death. Since the discovery of real human remains inside the racialized mannequin, the group is now redisplayed at the Carnegie Museum alongside educational insights that seek to ethically interrupt the colonial violence that the display narrates. In order to push this discussion further, I seek direction from decolonial artists and scholars on the best approaches to take in response to postmortem human rights abuses (past and present) and to show the ways that art can be both a destructive and reparative exchange.

The diorama “Lions Attacking a Dromedary” is notorious, not just as a remarkable 19th century example of taxidermy, but also its controversial representation of human culture and animals, its questionable accuracy and the murky ethics of the materials sourced for its construction. This study examines whether the diorama is a reasonable representation of the Barbary lion in North Africa. We review the history of lions in North Africa and their interaction with humans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The ecology and biology of North African lions, supported by scientific knowledge of the species, enables assessment of the value of diorama depiction, whether it is realistic and informative, or an artistic interpretation, or mere fiction. Furthermore, if the depiction is fictional, whether the representation is entirely unrepresentative, or at worst a stereotypic fabrication based on Western colonial perspectives of the 1800s. The paper does not explore cultural aspects, although refers to the experiences of people in local communities as well as colonial visitors through 150 documented accounts of lions in the region (modern day Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) between 1830 and 1960. The analysis explores whether real experiences are reflected in the depiction presented in the diorama and identifies that some aspects of the exhibit can be considered authentic, while others appear to emphasize drama rather than lived reality. Recommendations are offered for well-informed future presentation of “Lions Attacking a Dromedary.”