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Category: Museums

Difficult and Different Histories

Difficult and Different Histories

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[Here’s the short talk I gave at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society workshop on Theories, Practices, and Pedagogies of Telling Difficult Histories in Museum Exhibits. A wonderful group! ] There have been a few surveys that are useful for understanding what visitors think about museums as places for difficult histories. The best known is The Presence of the Past, a survey by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen in 1998. They found that most people believed that…

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Exhibition How-to Videos

Exhibition How-to Videos

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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…

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Little Compton Landscape Stories

Little Compton Landscape Stories

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Last year (summer 2019) the Little Compton Historical Society took on the topic of landscapes. (Each year the organization focuses on a different topic.) We edited a book on Little Compton landscapes. (Available here.) We did an exhibition that showed off maps, landscape paintings, and some of the tools that shaped our landscape history. Students in the public humanities program at Brown contributed several virtual extensions of the exhibit. One group used StoryMaps to tell focused stories of the landscape,…

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New essay: Exhibiting Absence

New essay: Exhibiting Absence

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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. 

Leave the Durham memorial on the ground

Leave the Durham memorial on the ground

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[originally published on Medium]  Aug 15, 2017 Leave the Durham memorial on the ground I’ve been teaching about memorials for over a decade. My goal has always been to help students understand the historical nuance of memorials: what they meant when they were constructed, the political processes that shaped them, the ways that their meanings changed over time. But I must admit: the video of the Durham confederate memorial being toppled gave me a visceral thrill. The confident way Takiyah Thompson climbed…

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Announcing a new timeline of museum history

Announcing a new timeline of museum history

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I’m pleased to announce a new timeline of museum history. The timeline starts in the 17th century, with the 1628  Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest and Ole Worm’s 1655 Museum Wormianum, and comes up to the present day (Decolonize this Museum! and the Museums Change Lives campaign). It includes  175 entries about exhibits, collections, museum philosophy, and more. The timeline is a complement to my new book, Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present, and is organized in…

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Museums are places to forget

Museums are places to forget

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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

New book!

New book!

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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…

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Catalog History: The New York Crystal Palace

Catalog History: The New York Crystal Palace

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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…

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