The following is an edited excerpt from a longer exhibition review I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I thought it fit well with some of the recent themes of the blog, so I'm posting it here. It reflects on the question, how can history museums balance the telling of an easily understandable satisfying narrative with being true to the reality of ambiguous, unpleasant history?
American Stories fills just one wide
room, so a visitor can scan over the entire display from anywhere within
it. The exhibit is intimate. The deep purple walls and the soft lighting serve
both to protect the light-sensitive artifacts and to encourage the visitor to
draw up close to the display cases. Soft
music, folk songs, plays in the background.
When entering the exhibit starting on the right, the objects are
arranged roughly chronologically, divided into five defining eras in American
history. Both the chronological
organization and the disproportionately high percentage of its hundred or so
objects that are new scientific inventions, suggest a national story of
improvement, of development. Within each
chronological era, the organization of objects into their display cases, and
the supporting materials, particularly the collection of varied American faces
pictured on the walls, tell the exhibition’s most important national narrative:
pride in diversity.
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| Antislavery Potholder, from American Stories: 1801-1870, Expansion and Reform |
Each display case is
organized to cover a single theme. For
example, in the “Expansion and Reform Era: 1801-1870”, a case dealing with the
theme of slavery contains three objects: a stoneware jar made by slave David
Drake in 1862, an anonymous embroidered potholder with abolitionist embroidery
from an unknown date, and a 1833 slave ship manifest from Alexandria,
Virginia. These three items are well
chosen to bring three very different voices into dialog on the topic of
slavery. The manifest is the object
closest to what a visitor might expect to see in a history of American slavery,
and the two other objects add nuance to the narrative: the potholder by
highlighting the important role of women in the abolitionist movement, and the
stoneware jar by giving the viewer an unexpected glimpse of a slave who was
also a potter, whose name and whose art, against all odds, has come down to us through
history. The whole case strikes a
balance: like a table on three legs, the story of slavery in America rests
equally on the three different objects, and the three different standpoints
they represent. The slavery case is emblematic
of the overall structure of the exhibition, which highlights diversity and
equilibrium in most of the other cases. Two
other examples: in the America before the Revolutionary War case, Plymouth
Rock, that quintessential icon of Euro-American founding mythology, looks
across at a string of Wampum beads, evidence that a Native American culture and
economy existed before the arrival of the Pilgrims. In the sports case, the baseball signed by
Babe Ruth is balanced by the inclusion of a ball used in 1930 by Sam Streeter,
star pitcher of the Negro leagues. Taken
together, these balanced cases seem to say: America is all these perspectives,
black, white, man, woman, Indian, European, living together.
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| Baseball signed by Babe Ruth, from American Stories: 1900-1945 Emergence of Modern America |
A national
narrative emphasizing diversity is undoubtedly better than one presenting a
narrow white-male perspective. Unfortunately,
by setting objects in such harmoniously balanced proportions, the exhibit
minimizes any sense of conflict. Slavery
should be one of the most horrible, discomforting topics to encounter in a
museum, yet the balanced happy ending to the story –that the slave gets equal
space in the exhibit case, equal treatment with the slave owner, mitigates the
sense of discomfort the theme should evoke.
This is not to suggest that the slave should not get a great deal of
space in an exhibit that deals with slavery, just that the perfect balance of
the exhibition should be shaken up in some way if the exhibit is to communicate
any sense of struggle. The explanatory
labels and the words on the introductory banners throughout the exhibit do not
shake up the balance; they reiterate the messages of the objects, editing out conflict
under a picture of unity. The banner
introducing the first section of the exhibit, “Forming a New Nation: 1776-1801”
proclaims, “America’s diverse populations –native peoples, Europeans and
Africans– interacted to create a
hybrid new world” (emphasis added). The
term “interacted” is so vague and diplomatic that it seems grossly insufficient
to describe the devastating conflict, hardship and oppression that dominated
the “interactions” between “native peoples, Europeans and Africans”. A second example: the text explaining the
sample of Plutonium-239 reads mostly as a celebratory recounting of successful
government sponsorship of scientific advancement. Only in a far smaller font, in a corner of
the label, is there any mention that this “scientific advancement” was in fact
part of the creation of two atomic bombs that the US dropped on Japan, killing
millions and bringing up dark questions about morality which remain unanswered
to this day. The shortcomings evident in
these two examples of text from the exhibit highlight a real challenge. Museum texts, especially in the NMAH, geared
toward family fun rather than high academic inquiry, are most effective at conveying
a message to the visitor when they are short. So how can the native peoples,
Europeans, and Africans do anything more than “interact”, a single, efficient
word that technically covers the whole slew of complex of ways they came
together? And how can a curator hope to do justice to the moral complexity of
dropping the atom bomb when whole books still cannot fully cover the issue
–better perhaps to hardly open up that story at all. It is evident that there is a friction between the goal of
creating an inviting space for families to visit, and the goal of addressing the reality of conflict.
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