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Tag: museum history

Design Objects in Museums

Design Objects in Museums

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[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…

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Building a skiascope

Building a skiascope

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                “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…

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“The Curator Rules”

“The Curator Rules”

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These are the slides and my notes from my talk at Marymount University, the Bissel Lecture in the Humanities, presented April 10 as part of the Virginia Humanities Conference. My thanks to Tonya Howe for the invitation, to Marymount for their hospitality, and to the audience for its good questions. NOTE: The next entry in this blog is a corrected and expanded version of this talk.

Writing about the past, thinking about the future: National Museum of American History

Writing about the past, thinking about the future: National Museum of American History

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My article on the history and philosophy of collecting at the National Museum of American History has been published in the Federal History Journal. The issue is freely available, here, and my essay is here. It’s a good issue: I especially recommend the article by Margo Anderson, “Public Management of Big Data: Historical Lessons from the 1940s.” My essay was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the NMAH. I used to work there, and a former colleague asked me to write something. The director was…

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History museums, learning from history

History museums, learning from history

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Can museums use museum history to think about the future? Can their past successes and failures guide them? How might they find possibility and potential in the past when they need to change? I suggest that one way to do this is to look to the long history of museums. Museums have been many things. They have found many ways that museums have balanced the often-conflicting needs of audience, collections, patrons, and educational goals. Looking to this history can help…

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