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Category: Museums

Call for Papers: Lost Museums Colloquium

Call for Papers: Lost Museums Colloquium

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In conjunction with the year-long exhibition project examining Brown University’s lost Jenks Museum, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and the John Carter Brown Library invite paper proposals for a colloquium on lost artifacts, collections and museums. (Other formats—conceptual, poetic, and artistic—are also invited.)  The colloquium will be held at Brown University May 7 and 8, 2015. Museums, perhaps more than any other institutions, think in the very long term:…

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Jenks Society for Lost Museums

Jenks Society for Lost Museums

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I’ve been blogging over at the Jenks Society for Lost Museums. You can see my thoughts on curatorial poetry and  “Report on the food of the robin” and on taxidermy workshops, as well as reflections on the legacy of Prof. Jenks. And also many other reflections and considerations by fellow fellows of the Jenks Society. And a Medium post, now that the installation is complete. 

50 Years of Collecting at the National Museum of American History

50 Years of Collecting at the National Museum of American History

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Here’s the talk I wrote for the National Council on Public History conference at the end of March. It’s a piece of a longer work in progress on the history of the museum’s collections. This talk focuses on the the philosophical and bureaucratic contexts of the collecting at the museum. A second part, perhaps this summer, will look in detail at the changing nature of the objects collected. The big questions: What did they collect, why, and how can we evaluate…

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“An olla podrida of queer things pining away its sweetness in the desert air of the Brooklyn Navy Yard”

“An olla podrida of queer things pining away its sweetness in the desert air of the Brooklyn Navy Yard”

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        By popular demand, the full text of the article about the Brooklyn Naval Lyceum that appeared in the New York Times in 1852. It’s a very odd article. More about it, and the Naval Lyceum, in my article, brand new in Museum History Journal.

One Room (The after post)

One Room (The after post)

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Well, I enjoyed it. The audience was mostly RISD Museum staff – not much of a surprise, given the topic. Interesting to them, less so to the general museum-visiting public. My two hours was mostly conversation. I had imagined actually doing serious work on my visualizing project. Instead, it was more like showing colleagues a really neat new tool I was playing with that might be useful to them. That’s one of my favorite things, and I think that the…

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One Room (The before post)

One Room (The before post)

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I’m about to start my gig at Office Hours, the RISD Museum program “where invited artists, designers, performers, and other community members creatively curate, teach, and experiment through a variety of participatory events.” That’s the official description. In the publicity, it’s “artists, designers, experts, and brainiacs.” I’m not sure what category I’m in: I guess safest to say “other community members.” I was flattered to be asked, of course, especially since a former student was running the program. But what…

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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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LeGrand Lockwood, Early Adopter

LeGrand Lockwood, Early Adopter

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Back in April I gave a talk at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum in Norwalk, Connecticut. They’ve done a very nice exhibition about the technology of the day, focusing on some of the remarkable technologies Lockwood put into his 1864 home. My talk focused on what Lockwood and others of his generation thought about the future of technology. Lockwood was an early adopter and investor. Others were more cautious. Some rejected it, others saw utopian potential. The gimmick for the talk…

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Creative Providence: Past, Present and Future. An NEH Grant Proposal.

Creative Providence: Past, Present and Future. An NEH Grant Proposal.

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We’re  submitting a planning grant to the NEH for a new program that will link Providence’s creative past with its creative future. Here’s a summary: The Brown Center for Public Humanities seeks $34,100 to cover the costs of planning and testing a series of pop-up installations and events that tie Providence’s past as a locus of invention and entrepreneurship to its future as a “Creative Capital” of art- and science-based innovation. The project brings museums and humanists together with artists,…

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Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 1

Should you get a Ph.D to work in a history museum? – Part 1

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Should you get an MA or Ph.D to work in a history museum? I talk to many students interested in museum work. They ask about what training they should get for this. My story is pretty straight now. For better or worse, an MA seems to be necessary to get ahead in the museum world. Whether it’s an MA in museum studies, a related field like public history or public humanities or curatorial studies, or a straight MA in history…

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