Museums are places to forget. An essay, illustrated with poems and images, on the ways that museums are used to forget things that society would prefer not to remember, and the ways in which museum forget things they should remember. On Medium. https://medium.com/@lubar/museums-are-places-to-forget-ba76a92c5701
I’m thrilled to announce that my new book is almost out! You can pre-order it on Amazon! Find it at an independent bookseller at IndieBound! Read all about it at the Harvard University Press site! Available in July! Great blurbs! My deep thanks to Lonnie Bunch and Richard Kurin for their kind words: “In this volume, Steven Lubar, among the most thoughtful scholars and professionals in the field, turns “museum” into a verb, taking us behind the scenes to show how collecting, exhibiting, and…
A four part series on Medium, “Cataloging History,” on the history and practice of museum catalogs, focusing on the publications of the 1853 New York Crystal Palace fair: Part 1: A brief history of American museum catalogs to 1860 Part 2: The New York Crystal Palace Catalogs Part 3: Catalog as Book, File, and Database And coming soon! Part 4, on what we can learn from analyzing the catalog as database. Why Medium for these? I’m experimenting with heavily illustrated essays, and…
Yesterday was the first day of the new semester, and the first day of “Introduction to Public Humanities.” I’ve taught this course most years since I established the public humanities program twelve years ago. It’s the theory half of the introductory courses, paired with “Methods in Public Humanities.” It’s usually taught in the fall. But I was on leave, and so this year the public humanities students got methods first, and then theory. It’s an interesting philosophical question: which comes first, the method…
Every year, the Providence Preservation Society sponsors a symposium on key issues in historic preservation. This year’s symposium, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 historic preservation act, asked: Why Preserve? From the introduction: The 2016 Providence Symposium, Why Preserve?, will bring together experts from across the nation as well as local stakeholders to examine why historic preservation matters to Providence and all communities. To be held at the iconic but threatened Industrial Trust Building, the Symposium will launch a…
I’ve finished my “Lessons from the Lost Museum” book manuscript and I’m starting to think about a new project. I’ve gotten in the habit of writing and may as well keep at it! The new project is about making and technical skill. Not sure how to frame it, or what the end product might be. I’ll teach a class on this in the fall to think it through. I know that part of it will be actually making things. Here’s a first attempt…
As I research my book on museums I tweet some of my sources. Gathering them here for your museum-history pleasure.
Head over to the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities blog for a post Sarah Dylla and I wrote about our course last semester, AMST1510, Museum Collecting and Collections. And head over to the John Hay Library where you can see the course exhibition, Thousands of Little Colored Windows: Brown University’s Stamp Collections. A few pictures of the exhibit…
[my talk to the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, RISD, March 2015] The call for papers placed this conference in the context of RISD’s recent interest and success in “transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries to encourage more holistic, multi-faceted approaches to art and design practice.” In my talk I’d like to focus on disciplinary boundaries in how museums use artifacts, and offer some suggestions on how we might transcend some of those traditional boundaries for a more holistic, multi-faceted museum. The disciplines whose boundaries I’d…
The Jacobs Family Gallery at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. From Wikimedia Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kobo.jpg It’s done! For the past year or so I’ve been working with staff and other Collections Committee members at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on a new collections development plan. It’s been an interesting experience. Collections development plans are a fairly new thing for museums. They are part of a general transition in how museums think of collections. Stephen Weil’s famous 1999 essay sums it up: “From…
