exhibitions – Public Humanities & More

Exhibition How-to Videos

October 25, 2020 Steven Lubar Comments 0 Comment

Remote teaching this fall meant figuring how to reduce in-class lectures, and so I recorded some of the talks I would normally give in class. And once recorded – why not share them? What you’ll find here are short talks about how to do exhibits. They are aimed at students interested in museum work, especially curatorial and education work. They are syncretic and idiosyncratic. That is, they provide a summary of different ways of approaching exhibit development, and also my…

New essay: Exhibiting Absence

December 6, 2018 Steven Lubar Comments 0 Comment

I’ve posted to Medium a new essay, on the challenges (and possibilities!) of exhibiting things museums don’t actually have. Sometimes, an exhibition developer wants to call attention to the absence of an object from the collection. (Fred Wilson famously did this in “Mining the Museum,” and museums have called attention to NAGPRA-returned objects, or to stolen objects.) Sometimes, you want to recreate, or even create, objects that have been lost, or those that never existed. Take a look.

Design Objects in Museums

March 13, 2016 Steven Lubar Comments 0 Comment

[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…

Building a skiascope

June 14, 2015 Steven Lubar Comments 0 Comment

“The theoretic value of the skiascope is incontestable.” —Benjamin Ives Gilman In his Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (1918 ), Gilman gives detailed instructions for making a skiascope, a device that will allow museum to see paintings and sculptures more clearly, by blocking glare, and other distractions. The instructions are long and complicated. Here’s a quick pictorial guide: First, cut out the top and bottom Make the wires, and attach them. Make two…

Exhibit and exhibit labels workshop

March 31, 2015 Steven Lubar Comments 1 comment

I talked to the “Methods in Public Humanities” class today about exhibitions. A very quick overview, and didn’t even get to the how-to-write-good-labels part of the talk. Here are my presentations, on exhibits generally, and on exhibit labels, slightly cleaned up but without much in the way of notes.

Teaching exhibitions

January 25, 2012 Steven Lubar Comments 0 Comment

Here’s the syllabus for my exhibitions course:

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