Active Collections

Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, Trevor Jones, Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, Trevor Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781629585222
• eBook ISBN: 9781351383516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

In recent years, many museums have implemented sweeping changes in how they engage audiences. However, changes to the field's approaches to collections stewardship have come much more slowly. Active Collections critically examines existing approaches to museum collections and explores practical, yet radical, ways that museums can better manage their collections to actively advance their missions.

Approaching the question of modern museum collection stewardship from a position of "tough love," the authors argue that the museum field risks being constrained by rigid ways of thinking about objects. Examining the field's relationship to objects, artifacts, and specimens, the volume explores the question of stewardship through the dissection of a broad range of issues, including questions of "quality over quantity," emotional attachment, dispassionate cataloging, and cognitive biases in curatorship. The essays look to insights from fields as diverse as forest management, library science, and the psychology of compulsive hoarding, to inform and innovate collection practices.

Essay contributions come from both experienced museum professionals and scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology, education, and history. The result is a critical exploration that makes the book essential reading for museum professionals, as well as those in training.

p.11

SECTION I

Conceptual Frameworks

FIGURE 0.1A Image by Ray Rieck (www.rayrieck.com)

p.13

1

TEN PRINCIPLES FOR AN ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-ORIENTALIST, ACTIVIST APPROACH TO COLLECTIONS

Masum Momaya

“Don’t linger. Move along. There are lots of people behind us waiting to see this thing,” my sister-in-law pleaded as she prodded my 12-year-old niece past the highly secured display case housing the Hope Diamond. My family had braved a long set of flights from India to Washington, DC to visit me at the Smithsonian while I was working there as a curator. A few days later, on a sticky summer Saturday, we faced the massive quasi-queue in the Gems Hall of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), taking our turn to “oooh” and “aaah” at one of the Institution’s most visited and revered objects. Amongst the visitors to the jewel were many Indians and Indian Americans, who viewed the object with a sense of pride at its magnificence and stature within the Smithsonian’s vast holdings.

With origins dating back to the 1600s in the Kollur mine in Golconda, India, the Hope Diamond was donated to the Smithsonian by Harry Winston Incorporated in 1958 (Smithsonian Encyclopedia 2003). Lore has it that French merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier obtained an uncut, larger version of the stone and sold it to King Louis XIV of France. It made its way through the hands of other royalty, jewelers, thieves and collectors before finding its way to the Smithsonian (Smithsonian Encyclopedia 2003). The object’s label describes a tiny bit of this provenance, but the context of how European empires generally acquired jewels from “the Orient” is entirely missing, on the object label and in the gallery as a whole.

Discussion of the diamond focuses primarily on its rare properties, its value as a scientific specimen, a supposed curse that it brings to those who own or wear it or the James Bond-esque tale of international intrigue that follows how it changed hands over centuries. Yet these conversations and the gem’s positioning as a treasure in Smithsonian collections obscure the dubious and dishonest way in which many of today’s museum treasures were acquired.¹ It is still unknown as to whether the Hope Diamond itself was bought or stolen. As with many objects acquired under the guise of exploration, transactional records, especially at the first point of exchange, are sparse, with documents simply delineating that the diamond was “obtained.” Moreover, when this type of provenance information is murky, it’s simply just left out of information that the museum shares with the public, rendering the theft of many objects invisible.

p.14

As a Smithsonian curator responsible for Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation (2014–2015), an exhibition about the history of Indian immigration in the United States, I often received questions about the Hope Diamond, including, “Is your exhibit in the gallery where the Hope Diamond is at?” and, “Why isn’t the Hope Diamond in your exhibit?” Beyond Bollywood and the Hope Diamond were displayed in the same building in different galleries but were worlds apart conceptually. Still, visitors conflated the precious jewel from India with the history of Indian immigration and Indian Americans as if everything Indian was one massive entity, in the same way that some Americans and American media often refer to Africa as a monolithic entity devoid of a myriad of countries, cultures and peoples.

Amidst the widespread conflation, my niece posed a question that few, if any, other visitors were asking. Upon seeing the Hope Diamond, she asked loudly, “If it’s from India like the label says, then why is it here? Shouldn’t they give it back? It doesn’t belong here. Is it stolen, mama?” “Shhhh!” my sister-in-law interceded. “Don’t make a scene.” Delightfully innocent and irreverent, my niece’s brazen clarity stood in contrast to silence about provenance and contemporary methods of display and labeling that pervades many items within museum collections from “exotic” lands.

Unaware of the colonial legacies of museums as institutions, my niece’s question came from curiosity about rightful ownership. Do museums have the right to collect whatever stuff they want wherever they encounter it? If so, under what circumstances? Should this “stuff” be labeled to reflect its provenance, murky, sordid or glamorous as it is? Or should it be given back to its place of origin, as my niece, as well as so many communities have asserted? Or, alternately, what if members of the community of origin want the object to remain in the museum because of the legitimacy and significance that museums confer on objects? And what if the community members know that a museum will care for an object better than any individual or other institution could? Given all of these questions, do we need a new way of collecting—and giving back—things in the twenty-first century? And if so, how could all the related practices of text and label writing, exhibit design, marketing, fundraising and public programming support a more conscientious collections strategy?

In the year and a half that Beyond Bollywood showed at NMNH, I walked hundreds of family members, friends and tourists through the galleries. Most of them accepted the Smithsonian’s interpretations at face value. Amongst those of Indian origin, many were moved by the significance of their story being told in the world’s largest, and arguably most well known, museum complex. Yet my niece’s question about repatriation led me to wonder whether visitors take for granted institutional ownership and entitlement of objects with histories steeped in colonialism and racism.

p.15

These assumptions resonate all the way back to the first museums, which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “cabinets of curiosities” for visitor amusement. Some of these curiosities, such as rhinoceros horns, elk antlers, shark teeth and human skin from unburied corpses, were thought to have medicinal healing powers (Alexander and Alexander 2008, 54). Later, these institutions became cabinets of natural history for systematic scientific study and display—to exhaustively catalog and understand the natural world and eventually the human place within it (Merriman 2008, 12).

This exhaustive cataloging was not only a scientific project, but also a cultural and political one. Burgeoning collections in museums demonstrated and cemented the European belief that knowledge can be embedded in organized material, and that material display creates knowledge and proper social relationships (Pearce 1995, 139). Displays evolved from shelves and cases of objects laid out in a rational order to dioramas which clustered and contextualized items, rendering impressions of “other” peoples of the world as both exotic and primitive.

As part of imperialism and colonialism, explorers and big game hunters traveled far and wide to amass tools, body ornaments, garments, housewares, animal skins and gems, eventually donating or selling them to museums. Many of Europe’s largest museums acquired their collections in this way. For example, Captain James Cook and other explorers contributed specimens to the now vast anthropological and ethnographic collections of the British Museum (Alexander and Alexander 2008, 59). Large collections drawn from faraway lands conferred stature on institutions and empires. In this way, collecting from far and wide was a “fundamental element of the grand narrative explaining European supremacy” (Merriman 2008, 12).

In cementing these narratives through material displays, museums didn’t just legitimize colonization; through the very act of collecting itself, they became agents of colonization. Museums’ efforts helped define political boundaries as well as influence the social imagination of the museum-going public. This wasn’t just true of European museums; museums in the Americas and Australia were guilty of these same practices with Native/indigenous peoples and people of color. Historically, museums worldwide have treated collections relating to people with disabilities in similar ways, substantiating notions of the “abnormal” through gawkish material displays (Sandell et al. 2005, 16). For example, objects such as a straightjacket used to restrain a person with a psychosocial disability, displayed without contextual information about the medicalization of disability or the pathological, racialized and gendered institutionalization of people with disabilities, reinforces the stereotype of “crazy” and leaves systemic oppression and pathologization unquestioned.

In the twenty-first century, museum collection practices have been called into question by communities that have long found themselves and their cultures pillaged, exoticized, stereotyped and maligned by museums. As Alexander and Alexander point out, “travel, communication, and growing empowerment of the world’s peoples have meant that the authority once proclaimed in natural history and anthropological museums has become at best dated and to some offensive” (2008, 74). What implications does the racist and orientalist history of museums and collections have for re-envisioning collections practices in the twenty-first century? How can we as museum professionals do our work in more conscientious ways? Acknowledging this history, I would like to propose ten principles for an anti-racist, anti-orientalist, activist approach to collections.

p.16

BOX 1.1 Ten Principles for an Anti-Racist, Anti-Orientalist, Activist Approach to Collections

1. Openly acknowledge legacies of colonialism, racism, oppression, distortion and theft.

2. Establish opportunities for community engagement, co-construction of meaning and destabilizing the notion of authority as residing in one party.

3. Aim for achieving “dissensus,” or as many divergent perspectives as possible around a given object or collection rather than a consensus of singular narrative.

4. Accept that some communities view display of their histories in museums (problematic as they may be) as markers of arrival and legitimization.

5. Put repatriation and de-accessioning “on the table” as a part of collections policy, and loaning objects to community-based museums and local historical societies.

6. Prioritize collecting, and helping to preserve, objects endangered in humanitarian crises, natural disasters, violent conflict and war.

7. Reject definitions of value based on the grand narrative of European supremacy.

8. Consider how digital tools and social media shift the balance of power and voice and make these collections accessible.

9. Continuously question whether something must be collected and whether collected objects need to be saved versus repatriated, de-accessioned or disposed.

10. Situate collecting in the larger context of activist views/approaches to all of museum practice, including curating, visitor engagement, education, marketing and communications, fundraising, and management.

First, this new approach should openly acknowledge legacies of colonialism, racism, oppression, distortion and theft that are part of the founding of museums worldwide. Current museum professionals are not at fault for the perspectives and actions of their predecessors, but they can definitely be more conscientious about their practices going forward. For example, advertising grand and rare collections and marketing them as “Treasures of Imperial XX” or “Treasures of Ancient YY” without specifying the histories through which such objects were procured glorifies and legitimizes violent colonial history.

p.17

If we are going to keep such artifacts in our collections and display them in exhibitions, we should: (1) Be transparent, forthcoming and respectful around how they were acquired, including in our panel text, object labeling and marketing; (2) Initiate conversations with museums and communities in their place of origin and/or their diasporic communities in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe about sharing artifacts and possibly repatriating them (see Conaty 2015); (3) Use revenues generated from such exhibitions to help build spaces, institutions and professional capacity to show, share and possibly repatriate these objects and works in their place of origin. The point is not to do away with these collections and exhibitions entirely but to engage with them critically as opportunities for more reflective and conscientious museum practice.

Second, an activist approach to collections should go hand in hand with community engagement, co-construction of meaning and destabilization of the notion of authority as residing in one party and needing to be deposited on everyone else. This parallels social science theories about knowledge being co-constructed as well as the tenets of coalition building in political organizing.² Today, curators and collections managers trained in social movement, critical and postcolonial theory are mindful of identity politics and the politics of representation. They strive to give voice to subjects and enable participatory decision making in interpretations. As Lynch and Alberti argue, “[s]hared authority is more effective at creating and guiding culture than institutional control” (2010, 15).

For instance, museums can issue open and public calls for submissions and convene collective conversations about what should be collected and why. Once objects are acquired museums can craft and save documentation and object records with multiple voices, beyond that of the lender and collector, when collecting and cataloging new collections. The Queens Museum in New York and Oakland Museum in California are known for their exemplary practice in this area, with the former employing community organizers as staff.

Third, an activist view of collections should aim f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Active Collections
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lists of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Jim Vaughn
• Introduction
• A Manifesto for Active History Museum Collections
• SECTION I Conceptual Frameworks
• SECTION II New Ideas and Tools for Change
• Index