Heritage, Commerce, and Museal Display: Toward a …dev.omeka.org/sbrennan/SearchTestO2/SearchTestO2/files/original/32...Museums and Exhibitions Heritage, Commerce, and Museal Display:

Museums and Exhibitions

Heritage, Commerce, andMuseal Display: Toward a

New Typology of HistoricalExhibition in the United States

Tammy S. Gordon

Abstract: Recent social and economic trends in the United States, most importantlythe increased marketability of local heritage and the national dialogue on identity, havecontrib uted to the proliferation of historical exhibits in the United States, often in non-museum spaces like retail and service settings. Scholarship on historical exhibition, how-ever, has largely focused on exhibits in large, professionalized museums. Dividing exhibittypes into categories of academic, corporate, community, entrepreneurial, and vernacu-lar, this article explores the diverse ways in which the exhibition medium emerges fromdifferent settings, social conditions, and epistemologies.

Key words: Museum exhibitions, history exhibits, small museums, heritage, retail andservice.

In one of only a handful of stores left in a nearly abandoned out-let mall just north of Lansing, Michigan, an evocative display in an antiquesmall commanded attention. Among the many booths of antiques and col-lectibles for sale—booths stocked by different antiques dealers who took turnsrunning the till and looking after the store—one shelf in a center aisle casecontained about twenty nineteenth-century tintypes, each with its own post-

27

The Public Historian, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 27–50 (August 2008). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.

© 2008 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.

Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through theUniversity of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site:

www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10/1525/tph.2008.30.3.27.

it note. As expected, each note functioned as a price tag, referenced thedealer’s code, and told what it was: “tintype.” Unexpectedly, each note alsocontained an interpretation of the subject matter and served as an interpre-tive label. Some were in a distinctive voice, reminiscent of nineteenth-centuryparlor culture, a gossipy, novel-of-manners type of voice:

“She’s way too old for ringlets . . . ”

“Almost a smile on this young aristocrat’s face . . . ”

“‘Plain as the day is long’”1

The display demonstrated an interpretive sensibility, an effort not just to dis-play a themed collection, but to assert meaning in historical context. Whilethis particular effort was also one of marketing—it added to the value by evok-ing the setting in which the objects were presumed to have circulated—it wasalso a teaching moment, a moment in which to engage its viewer in thoughtabout the past. This antiques dealer taught the shopper that ill manners couldbe born of the culture of manners.

This display and countless others created in thrift stores, bars, restaurants,churches, and gift shops demonstrate that historical exhibition is as much asocial practice as a professional one. Traditionally, scholars writing on histor-ical exhibition have focused on highly professionalized exhibits in large, pub-licly funded museums.2 This has left the majority of historical exhibits—andtheir techniques, functions, and social roles—unstudied. Scholarly neglect ofexhibits in small museums, nontraditional museums, and in nonmuseum set-tings compromises the field, and leads to conclusions about exhibition prac-tice that do not reflect the majority of visitor interactions with historical ex-hibits. Ultimately, this neglect has a negative effect on all museums. Visitorsseek out a variety of exhibits, not just the highly professionalized, nationallyvisible ones. The literature of tourism studies has broadened public under-standing of historical exhibition, illuminating both the ways in which museumbehavior operates in the larger culture and the socio-economic trends thathave made local heritage marketable.3 Museums have become ubiquitous.Towns too small for grocery stores have historical museums. As Americanscontinue to theme their spaces on both large and small scales,4 it seems that

28 THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

1. Liberty Antiques Mall, Dewitt, Michigan. July 9, 2004.2. Kenneth Ames, Barbara Franco, and L. Thomas Frye, Developing Interpretive History

Exhibits (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1997); Steven C. Dubin, Displays of Power: Contro-versy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (New York: New York Univer-sity Press, 1999); Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

3. Bella Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability (Maiden-head, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2003), Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: His-tory, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade andthe Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Urry, The TouristGaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990).

4. Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, andThemed Environments (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).

every third restaurant meal is accompanied by the material evidence of thepast. While the global economy homogenizes cultural difference, local com-munities assert their uniqueness through the exhibition medium. The socialand economic trends described in this scholarship on tourism point to a needto rework our ideas to come to terms with the full range of historical exhibi-tion practices in the United States, not just the highly professionalized ones.Because of the increase in the past’s marketability and the attendant rise inhistorical exhibitions in nonmuseum settings, analysis restricted to the pub-licly funded, large museum model no longer will do as the primary source forscholarship in museum studies.

In the 1990s, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen conducted a ground-breaking study of Americans’ relationships to the past. They described a so-ciety of people who sought meaning from history and who applied this mean-ing to the choices they made in their lives.5 What was radical about this workwas that these scholars sought to illuminate not whether Americans were“right” or “wrong” according to academic standards of scholarship, but howtheir pasts were constructed by different and diverse epistemologies. This isthe approach that we’ve largely missed in studying exhibition practice in theUnited States: how exhibits emerge from diverse sources of knowledge, howpeople construct them for a range of purposes, and how they bring their ex-

HERITAGE, COMMERCE, AND MUSEAL DISPLAY 29

5. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History inAmerican Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

“A city girl in all her finery.” Tintypes display in the Liberty Antiques Mall, Dewitt, Michigan,2004. (Photo by the author)

periences, insights, and talents to bear on the development process.6 This ap-proach will give us more insight into this compelling medium and help us un-derstand the social, economic, political, and cultural forces that inform theirproduction and use. The goal of this essay is to initiate a basic typology forhistorical exhibition in its various and diverse forms. First, I survey the schol-arship and socio-economic trends that have made a revision of historical ex-hibition typology necessary. Next, I identify the range of historical exhibitionpractices and provide a typology with which to explore the issues inherent indiverse exhibition practices. Finally, I provide a discussion of case studies thatdemonstrate the combinations of historical exhibition variables and their im-plications for the field of museum studies.

Survey of Scholarship

Scholarship in public history, museum studies, and tourism studies hasaddressed the exhibition medium and its development according to profes-sional objectives and community needs. Recent economic and social trends—in particular the increased marketability of historic knowledge and symbols—require a re-analysis of the issues inherent in historical display.

Public history scholarship provides some background on the exhibition asa cultural product developed collaboratively among professionals, academics,and communities. As an academic field, public history developed in distinc-tion to “academic history,” or history produced for an academic readership.Public history scholars have criticized “traditional” history for its elitism, butin terms of producing scholarship on exhibition, their focus has largely beenon professionalized—even elite—museums. The field’s founders took inspi-ration from an academic job crisis and from the experiences of formally trainedhistorians working in government, archives, museums, and libraries. 7 In re-


6. Amy Levin first identified the importance of studying diverse exhibits in a 1997 article.She looks at home tours, local industry museums, collections of individuals, and museums of“non-canonical art forms.” She asserts that “they deserve study because they occupy a particu-lar niche in our evolving social grammar, one that reflects not only cultural change, but also re-actionary forces and attempts at subversion.” Amy Levin, “The Family Camping Hall of Fameand Other Wonders: Local Museums and Local Histories,” Studies in Popular Culture, 19, no. 3(April 1997): 77–90.

7. Denise D. Meringolo provided insight on the development of the field in its academic andprofessional forms. In “Capturing the Public Imagination: The Social and Professional Place ofPublic History,” she writes that academicians provided definition to the field, which resulted in“a taxonomy of professionalism that locates public history beneath and perhaps to the right ofuniversity-driven historical scholarship.” She calls for more scholarship on the nonacademic rootsof the field. American Studies International 42, nos. 2 & 3 (June-October 2004). See also Marla R.Miller, “Playing to Strength: Teaching Public History at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Amer-ican Studies International 42, nos. 2 & 3 (June-October 2004): 174–212; Deborah Welch, “Teach-ing Public History: Strategies for Undergraduate Program Development,” The Public Historian,25, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 71–82; Constance B. Schulz, “An Academic Balancing Act: Public His-tory Education Today,” The Public Historian, 21, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 143–154.

counting the developmental years of public history as an academic field, pro-fessor and one of the founders of The Public Historian G. Wesley Johnsonnoted that while public history seemed to require a good measure of expla-nation to an academic audience, the public fully understood the relevance oftrained historians engaged in work outside academe. He wrote that the phe-nomenon “suggested . . . that indeed public history was a concept whose timehad come, and the public at large was one step ahead of the historians in ac-cepting it. They knew they needed help.”8 Other scholars have supported hisobservation, and some—notably Michael Frisch in A Shared Authority: Essayson the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History—have theorized theconcept.9 While public history provides significant understanding of relation -ships between history curators (usually in larger professionalized museums)and the public, it has not provided a framework for understanding diverse ex-hibition practices. Public history scholars are academicians training studentsfor professional settings, and the focus on professionalized museums emergesfrom this, but to understand museum exhibition fully, we need to broaden thescope of study.

Museum studies scholars—particularly those using anthropological or so-ciological methods—provide additional insight into the relationships be-tween exhibition creators and exhibition users. Visitor studies in particular haveparalleled public history’s interest in the role of the public in the develop-ment of museum function and programming. Unlike public historians, mu-seum studies scholars examine exhibits on subject matter beyond history.Using methods from education and sociology, scholars in visitor studies havebeen a major force transforming the museum’s role from a top-down, au-thoritative institution to one that includes multiple voices and recognizes thenecessity and value of community input. Museum professionals have produceda number of guidelines that help those in the field include and engage visi-tors and communities. Professionals in history museums have built on meth-ods developed for science museums and science centers and have begun tointegrate community groups into their development process.10 Scholarship on


8. G. Wesley Johnson, The Public Historian, 21, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 175.9. Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public

History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).10. The best work on the changes in the exhibition development process in history museums

remains Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits, Kenneth Ames, BarbaraFranco, and L. Thomas Frye, eds. (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 1992). Randolph Starnprovides a comprehensive overview of recent literature in museum studies in “A Historian’s BriefGuide to New Museum Studies,” American Historical Review, 110, no. 1 (February 2005): 68–98. For practice manuals, see Judy Diamond, Practical Evaluation Guide: Tools for Museums andOther Informal Educational Settings (Lanham: Alta Mira Press, 1999); Kathleen McLean, Plan-ning for People in Museum Exhibitions (Washington, DC: Association of Science-Technology Cen-ters, 1993); Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996). Leinhardt and Knudson studied visitor conversations in museums to demon-strate the diversity of interaction among visitors and exhibit elements. Listening In on MuseumConversations (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 2004).

the relationships between museums and their publics, however, employsprimarily a large museum model.11

Some anthropologists studying museums have departed from the practiceof privileging the large, professionalized museum. Christina Kreps used NickStanley’s concept of “indigenous curation” to break down the assumption thatcontemporary professionalized museum methods—those based on interna-tional knowledge derived from scientific and academic traditions—are notalways helpful in making museums responsive to community needs.12 Shestudied museums from Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States toassert the diversity of valid museum practices. The dichotomy, however, be-tween “professionalized” and “indigenous” is problematic. A more usefulframework for studying exhibition must recognize that all curation is respon-sive to the needs of a defined community, whether local or global, formallyeducated or not. This means studying exhibitions according to their episte-mologies, looking at each exhibit’s source of knowledge and purpose for de-livering it. Such an approach problematizes the uneven relationships betweencurator and visitor, between the museum and the public.

Tourism studies provide the broadest understanding of exhibition practicesand yield a much more globally focused understanding of the practice of ex-hibition. Tony Bennett made the historical connection between museums andother public leisure activities like amusement resorts, midways, and depart-ment stores. He traced the history of the museum as an institution that “pro-vided a mechanism for the transformation of the crowd into an ordered and,ideally, self-regulating public,” an effect shared by other places of organizedleisure and consumption. This “exhibitionary complex” allowed for a re- evaluation of material culture and heritage, resulting in public (professional)administration of heritage and scientific resources.13 Bella Dicks provided adescription of “contemporary visitability,” the phenomenon in which publicspace has museal function. Contemporary public spaces are planned for max-imum viewing pleasure, scripted with signs both textual and visual that tra-ditionally had been the markers of meaning for museum exhibitions sincethe formation of the public museum. These scripts are aimed at attractingtourist dollars. Dicks provides new understanding of heritage: “heritage isproduced within the cultural economy of visitability, in which the object is toattract as many visitors as practicable to the intended site, and to communi-


11. One significant exception is Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven Lavine,eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington and London: Smith-sonian Institution Press, 1992). In this volume, John Kuo Wei Tchen’s “Creating a Dialogic Mu-seum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment,” pp. 285–326, and Nancy Fuller’s “TheMuseum as a Vehicle for Community Empowerment: The Ak Chin Indian Ecomuseum Project,”pp. 327–366, are case studies of two smaller history museums that employed experimental devel -opment processes.

12. Christina Kreps, Liberating Culture: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation,and Heritage Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2003). See also Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Mu-seums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000).

13. Bennett, 99, 73.

cate with them in meaningful terms.”14 Dicks’ formulation brought earlierwork on tourism and ethnographic display together with historical display toassert the interconnectedness among globalization, heritage, and consum -erism. The argument points to a need for a revised typology of historical ex-hibition, one that recognizes the proliferation and diversity of historical dis-play and the integration of museum visitor behavior into the public spaces ofeveryday life. Indeed, Dicks’ emphasis on “public” as a type of space ratherthan on “the public” as a group of people helps to explain historical exhibi-tion in more diverse forms, particularly exhibitions made by nonprofession-als in nonmuseum settings. The exchanges between curator and visitor inthese spaces complicate the unequal power relationships traditionally inform -ing the curator/visitor relationship. The very fluidity of these categories in thesmaller museum and the nonmuseum setting requires a more nuanced defi-nition of historical exhibition, one that accommodates a diversity of exhibi-tion variables and considers the medium in its relationships to epistemology,community, and commerce.

Historical Exhibition Practice: Features and Variables

In order to move beyond discussions of whether or not history exhibitshave lived up to the standards of academic rigor, we need to understand themaccording to their own variables: institutional framework and gallery tech-niques. The institutional framework of the exhibition includes the exhibit’sphysical setting, its knowledge sources, its purpose, staff training, and fund-ing. These inform another set of variables more closely related to the gallerysetting: exhibition design and resources, collections care, and visitor expec-tations. These variables exist in combinations that describe most types ofhistorical exhibition: academic, corporate, community, entrepreneurial, andvernacular. Of course, individual exhibitions are more complicated than thecategories set up here, and many have characteristics of two or more cate-gories. Museums or other settings may host more than one type. However,without a solid vocabulary of museal display types, scholars make assump-tions about the practice of exhibition based on only one type: that of the large,publicly funded, professionalized museum.

This typology is meant to suggest terms that add more precision to schol-arly dialogue on historical exhibition. While the above types describe combina -tions of the features of the medium in its diverse forms, some characteristicsdo not seem to be tied specifically to one of the above combinations. Whatcan only be termed “motivation” is the liveliest and least predictable indica-tor of type in the proposed framework. Exhibits can be motivated by memo-rialization, nostalgia, claims for sovereignty, desire for redress, pride, or even


14. Dicks, 134.


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fear of eternal damnation, but diverse motivations appear across the frame-work. Memorialization, by way of example, motivates individual exhibits of alltypes. The Smithsonian’s World War II: Sharing Memories, informed heavilyby scholarship and constructed with highly professionalized objectives, usedmemorialization as an interpretive technique.15 Memorialization also in-formed the arrangement of photographs of World War II fighter planes andpilots on display at Captain Bob’s BBQ and Seafood Restaurant in Hertford,North Carolina, a setting for a decidedly vernacular exhibition. The types sug-gested above are distinct combinations of variables, not distinct expressionsof particular motivations. These types may also work together, which is thecase at the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, home to the Foxwoods ResortCasino and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Recentscholarship describes a complex, scripted environment, one in which com-munity, corporate, vernacular, and academic exhibition could be said to oper -ate together.16 Such examples demonstrate the need for an expanded vocab-ulary of historical exhibition to help sort out the complexities of the mediumin its contemporary forms.

Historical Exhibition Practices in the United States

Historical exhibition exists in stunning diversity in the United States. Thepurpose of this typology is not to impose a rigid structure for ordering thisdiversity but to emphasize that exhibition variables come together in combi -nations that emerge from cultural, social, political, and economic conditionsof their communities, defined broadly to include visitors. Academic, cor por -ate, community, entrepreneurial, and vernacular are terms that refer to idealtypes to assist in promoting scholarly dialogue on a wider range of historicalexhibitions.

Academic Exhibition

This exhibition type, formed on principles of academic and market re-search, receives the most public scrutiny and scholarly attention. Audience isbroadly conceived and carefully studied through rounds of front-end, form-ative, and summative evaluation. Whereas exhibits may be funded with soft


15. See Steven Lubar, “Exhibiting Memories,” in Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representa -tion at the Smithsonian, eds. Amy Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler (Washington and London:Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997): 15–27.

16. For two useful and intriguing works on identity and representation focus on public com-munication authored by Native Americans, see Mary Lawlor, Public Native America: Tribal Self-Representation in Museums, Powwows, and Casinos (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: RutgersUniversity Press, 2006) and John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, Casino and Museum: RepresentingMashantucket Pequot Identity (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2007).

money, the institution’s funding is comparatively stable (if this can be said ofany public historical museum in the United States) and comes in large partfrom government or corporate donors. Located in large urban areas, muse-ums with exhibits of this type bring together diverse viewpoints and serve di-verse user groups. The visitor gaze is highly managed within the gallery, usingcommercial design styles and materials and high-end technology. The col-lections have equal—or even less—visual weight than constructed elements.

Many of the exhibits studied in the classic work on exhibit developmentIdeas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits are academic ex-hibits: From Victory to Freedom: Afro-American Life in the Fifties, The Wayto Independence: Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840–1920, and FitFor America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society, 1830–1940. Schol-ars have also documented the narratives, development processes, and contro -versies associated with academic exhibitions, often criticizing them for notbeing critical enough of subject matter, such as Wallace’s discussion of EllisIsland exhibits, Dubin’s work on The West as America and the now infamousEnola Gay interpretive plan, or Handler and Gable’s ethnographic study ofColonial Williamsburg.17

Academic exhibits use academic research methods and conventions tomediate among diverse viewpoints. Such is the case with The Dead Sea Scrolls,a 2003 exhibition at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the largest museumin west Michigan. The Dead Sea Scrolls featured twelve fragments from theDead Sea Scrolls on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority and had broadparticipation from both Christians and scholars. Public programming was am-bitious, including a public lecture series featuring an impressive list of schol-ars, an academic conference, performances, “Learning Lunches,” and familyworkshops. One of the main themes of the exhibit was to desensationalize ru-mors that either Jews or Christians manipulated the processing of the scrollsto stabilize the validity of each religion. Exhibit text emphasized the commonorigins of the world’s three monotheistic religions: “The Dead Sea Scrolls pro-vide a window into an incredible time in history—the time when Judaism aswe know it today was formed; the time when Christianity was born; and thetime when the seeds of Islam were sown.” Curator Ellen Middlebrook Her-ron wrote that “perhaps the true legacy of the Dead Sea Scrolls is their powerto bring people together.”18 Such an approach is typical of academic exhibi-tion: scholarship on the past to solve contemporary problems.


17. Ames, Franco, and Frye, Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits;Mike Wallace, “Boat People: Immigrant History at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island,” inMickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-sity Press, 1996), 55–73. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum:Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).

18. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Catalog of the Exhibition of Scrolls and Artifacts from the Collec-tions of the Israel Antiquities Authority (Grand Rapids, MI: Public Museum of Grand Rapids,2003). http://www.grmuseum.org/exhibits/dead_sea_scrolls/images/navigation/exhibition.shtml(accessed January 20, 2006).

Academic exhibits often reflect the newest ideas in the museum studiesfield. Teen Chicago at the Chicago Historical Society Museum is a case studyin best professional practices, and employed a technique often used by highlyprofessionalized museums to share authority: multiple perspectives. This exhibit, however, went beyond diversity in interpretation and began devel-opment with a Teen Council composed of fifteen teens from across the cityand suburbs. The CHS employed these teens, trained them in museum prac-tice and oral history methods, and provided research guidance. The Councilwas integrated into every facet of exhibition development, resulting in a highlyengaging exhibition. It employed multimedia presentations, digital and me-chanical interactives, object-based interpretation, and a two-dimensional design motif that bordered on graphic saturation. Members of the Teen Coun-cil and CHS professionals reported that the exhibition development expe -rience of Teen Chicago was transformative. The American Association of Mu-seums gave its approval through an award in the Excellence in ExhibitionCompetition.19

While experimental in some ways, academic exhibits will regularly stresstraditional historical subjects like the affairs of nation-states and change overtime. The core exhibits at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe are a casein point. As part of the Museum of New Mexico system, the museum’s mis-sion is to educate visitors about the long and varied history of New Mexico,its triculturalism, and its role in international affairs. The building itself re-flects this theme. Built in 1609–10 by the Spanish, the Palace of the Gover-nors was the seat of government through Spanish, Mexican, and Americancontrol. The core exhibits highlight state history with a governmental theme:an 1845 Mexican governor’s office, Governor Bradford Prince’s 1893 re-ception room, a portrait gallery, and cases on “The Spanish Frontier,” “The Anglo Frontier,” and period cases highlighting different phases of New Mex-ico as contested terrain. Timelines play a prominent visual and thematic rolein exhibition.20

Academic exhibits are more likely to employ theoretical label text. With-out Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America at the Wright Museum ofAfrican American History in Detroit provides an example of this phenome-


19. Claire Elderkin, “Coming of Age,” Museum News (July/August 2005); Daniel Oliver, “Fromthe Winners: ‘Teen Chicago’,” Museum News (September/October 2005.) The developmentmodel used by the Chicago Historical Society reflects some of what Christina Kreps discusses as“indigenous curation,” or the practice of preserving local traditions in the process of exhibitiondevelopment. CHS’s collaboration with teen researchers and curators is innovative in Westernprofessional practice, but certainly not new. It is somewhat similar to the Museum Balanga’s (In-donesia) integration of religious specialists in their exhibition development for The Art of Tradi-tional Carving of Central Kalimantan. Basirs, the carvers and keepers of religious knowledge as-sociated with the carvings, made major curatorial choices and were assisted by the museum’scurators, an inversion of traditional roles in the ethnographic museum. Local knowledge was fun-damental to interpretation. See Christina Kreps, Liberating Culture: Cross Cultural Perspectiveson Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation (New York and London: Routledge, 2003),29–34.

20. Palace of the Governors, April 13, 2006.

non. This exhibit displayed photographs of people lynched in the U.S. betweenthe latter half of the nineteenth century and 1981, KKK dress and jewelry, aquilt, a camera, recorded oral histories of lynchings, and numerous two-di-mensional artifacts. Conceptually sophisticated and self-aware, this exhibitasked visitors to pay close attention, as explained in the introductory text tothe first section Lynching: A Somber Phenomenon: “As you go through theexhibition, take time to read the labels. In a sense, they are the obituaries forthe victims of a society that ignored the persecution of thousands of its citi-zens.”21 Section text was written in academic-style prose. This section label,on metaphorical lynching, reflected the theoretical focus of many academicexhibits:

Lynching as Metaphor

African Americans have for centuries been conscious of their image as an ethnicgroup. A negative collective image—popularized in stereotypes and circulatedin mass media caricatures—reflected and reinforced society’s misunderstand-ing, non-appreciation, intolerance and even hatred of blacks. Such xeno phobiaexpressed by whites, and learned by other ethnic groups socialized into the“American way,” served as a pretext for acts now characterized as “hate crimes,”especially lynching. In fact, it is indeed possible to speak of stereotypes, cari-catures, and character assassinations as forms of metaphorical lynching. Devoidof physical carnage, the intergenerational psychosocial damage that may beinflicted on members of an entire ethnic group via metaphorical lynching is,nevertheless, a method of control to “keep them in their place.”22

These examples demonstrate that academic exhibits differ from other musealdisplays in curatorial desire to mediate knowledge, the exhibit’s role in en-couraging dialogue on national issues, and reliance on academic researchmethods and suggestive language.

Corporate Exhibition

Although the corporate exhibition shares some methods with academicexhibition, its purpose is decidedly more connected to marketing a particu-lar product or company. These exhibits explain the large company’s success.Using professional development and materials, the corporate exhibit employshistory as indirect advertising. Victor Danilov defined the corporate museumas “a corporate facility with tangible objects and /or exhibits, displayed in amuseum-like setting, that communicates the history, operations, and/or inter -ests of a company to employees, guests, customers, and/or the public.”23 Danilov


21. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, Charles H. Wright Museum ofAfrican American History, Detroit, Michigan, August 25, 2004.

22. Without Sanctuary. August 25, 2004.23. Victor Danilov, A Planning Guide for Corporate Museums, Galleries, and Visitor Centers

(New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 4.

summarized the purposes of corporate museums, citing some in common withother types of museums, like being a repository of artifacts or serving thepublic. Corporate museums differ from others, however, in that they seek to“influence public opinion about the company and/or controversial issues” andto “serve as a showcase for the company’s collections and/or products.”24 TheHistory Factory, a company that develops and fabricates corporate historicalexhibits, summed up the purpose of corporate exhibition: “A corporate mu-seum or historical installation is the ultimate showcase of your organization’shistory and an amazing brand-building tool.”25

Scholarship on corporate exhibits emphasizes relationships to funding andmarketing, with emphasis on the role of the large corporation in exhibitiondevelopment. Danilov’s work documents corporate museums and serves as aresource for companies planning corporate exhibits.26 Mark Rectanus providesa more critical approach focusing not on corporate museums per se but oncorporate sponsorship of public museum exhibits, asserting that corporationshave been using museums “as a public relations instrument” in the UnitedStates starting in the 1950s.27 Except for the isolated exhibit review, there isvirtually no scholarship on corporate exhibition techniques and how thesemight differ from those used by other types of museums.28

Exhibits in the Levi Strauss & Company Museum or the Wells Fargo His-tory Museum are corporate exhibits that rely heavily on high-end constructedelements for visual impact. The quintessential corporate exhibits, however,are at the World of Coca Cola in Atlanta, Georgia. Ted Friedman describedthe interpretive approach:

Looming over all of the exhibitions at the World of Coca-Cola is the questionof control: who owns Coca-Cola? Again and again the World of Coca Cola im-presses upon visitors that it is a “consumer’s eye view,” a cultural history of Coca-Cola. But it is a strange kind of cultural history, told not from the bottom up,but from the top-down. It tells its story exclusively through materials gener-ated by the Coca-Cola Corporation. . . . And so while the World of Coca-Colaoften claims that Coke belongs to everybody, it is engaged in a continual ef-fort to circumscribe the way Coca-Cola is defined to include only corporate- originated communication.29


24. Danilov, A Planning Guide, 5.25. The History Factory. http://www.historyfactory.com/index.aspx?sectionid=23 (accessed

April 25, 2007).26. In addition to the planning guide cited above, Danilov authored Corporate Museums,

Galleries, and Visitor Centers: A Directory, which includes descriptions of 329 corporate muse-ums in 16 countries.

27. Mark Rectanus, Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

28. Neil Harris, “The World of Coca Cola,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (June1995): 154–58.

29. Ted Friedman, “The World of The World of Coca-Cola,” Communication Research 19,no. 5 (October 1992).

Although World of Coca-Cola curators made some effort to connect coke tobroader themes in U.S. and world history, their goal was primarily to tell thestory of market dominance and consumer loyalty: “the coke story is told ab-solutely without tension or conflict—except insofar as rivals and pretendersare concerned.”30 Visitors could choose multimedia presentations, view a ki-netic sculpture on bottling, visit a 1930s soda counter re-creation, or touchoff a coke fountain by offering it a glass of ice. World of Coca-Cola presenteda dazzling selection of exhibition and theme park technologies.31

The corporate exhibit presents scholars with interesting possibilities for vis-itor studies, given the complicated dynamics of marketing to a society over-saturated in advertising. Indeed, Margot Wallace’s work on “museum brand-ing” reflects a recent effort by museums to employ image managementtechniques previously associated with for-profits. This direction in museumstudies has potential for revealing how visitors conceive of themselves as con-sumers of educational experience and how this conception affects learning.32

Community Exhibition

The community exhibit is similar to the academic exhibit, but it usually dif-fers in size, funding, and—most importantly—curatorial role vis-à-vis thecommunity. The latter is the most striking feature of the community exhibi-tion: it is produced by a person who has close personal or ancestral ties to thetopic being presented. They interpret the particular history because they ortheir parents/grandparents/ancestors lived it. These exhibits rely on blends oflocal and academic authority, professional and nonprofessional staff. Fund-ing is primarily from small governmental entities like municipality, town,


30. Harris, 157.31. This discussion of The World of Coca Cola is based on visits to the museum in the mid-

1990s. In May of 2007, the museum opened new and revised exhibits. The museum Web site de-scribes the changes as such: “Our new and expanded World has something for everyone!

Thrilling 4–D TheaterWorld’s largest collection of Coke memorabiliaFully functioning bottling line that produces commemorative 8–ounce bottles of Coca-Cola®Tasting experience with over 70 different products to samplePop Culture Gallery featuring works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell,and Steve PenleyWorld-famous Coca-Cola® Polar BearAnd so much more!

It’s the only place where you can explore the complete story—past, present, and future—of the world’s best-known brand!” http://www.woccatlanta.com/ (Accessed May 22, 2007).

32. Margot A. Wallace, Museum Branding: How to Create and Maintain Image, Loyalty, andSupport (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006). See also Jennifer Deutsch, Just Who Do Your Cus-tomers Think You Are?: A Guide to Branding Your Organization (Lansing: Michigan MuseumsAssociation, 2002).

county, or tribe. From a standpoint of display style, the objects have more vi-sual impact than the constructed elements, and the implied visitor is conceivedof as one of two types: local or outsider. Visitors’ motivations are to get “localheritage” rather than broad understandings of historic themes. The type def-inition emerges from Nick Stanley’s concept of “indigenous curation,” whichrefers to curation practices by those who are both curator and subject. Thatis, the people creating the exhibit are its subject or are otherwise connectedto from the history they are telling. They are also usually very tied to place.The most useful scholarship on this type is the recent collection Defining Mem-ory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s ChangingCommunities, which used a theoretical framework from education to hy-pothesize about how people learn in local history settings, even if practicesin these museums are sometimes far from dominant professional exhibitionpractices.33

A good example of community exhibition was the Munising Woodenwareexhibit at the Alger County (Michigan) Historical Society Heritage Center. Thisfacility featured a changing exhibit gallery, a fur trader’s cabin re-creation, agift shop offering artwork from local artists, an archives, and a meeting roomwith exhibits on the area’s historic and contemporary industries. The Munis-ing Woodenware exhibit was among these. Munising Woodenware was a com-pany operating in Munising from 1912 to 1955, creating a wide variety of hand-crafted wooden products from bowls and platters to tent stakes. Recently,Munising Woodenware became “collectible,” making the exhibit diffi cult to cre-ate. While other exhibits of local industry at the museum employed the pre-scribed professional authoritative voice, the Woodenware section broke throughthe guise of objectivity to make direct appeals to the visitor, as in this label:“Unfortunately, there are many examples of Munising Woodenware which arenot part of this exhibit. If you own a piece we don’t have, we hope that you’llconsider donating or bequeathing it to the museum for public display andpreservation.” Other interpretation featured the act of collection: “MunisingWoodenware has become a popular collectible around North Amer ica. It isnot unusual to find it on ‘E-Bay.’ Especially prized are pieces in their originalpackaging or those with Munising brand burned into them.” What followed,and was given equal typographical weight on the label, was a list of people whocontributed their pieces to the collection rather than selling them on a lucra-tive national market. Interpretation of World War II tent stakes also gave equaltypographical weight to the fact that the donor bought them on e-Bay.34 In-terpretation that gives such prominence to the act of acquisition conceives ofthe visitor as a possible partner in the fight between the people who (in somecases literally) made this history and those who treat it as a market investment.


33. Amy Levin, ed., Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History inAmerica’s Changing Communities (Lanham: Alta Mira Press, 2007). See also Ron Chew, “In Praiseof the Small Museum,” Museum News (March/April 2002): 37–41.

34. Woodenware. Alger County Heritage Center. August 10, 2004.

It reflected the tension between social classes as well as between the rural, lo-cal creation of history and the national economy’s appropriation of it. The ex-hibition practice of giving equal weight to the local control of history makesthe exhibit an act of community assertion as much as an act of public education.

Vernacular Exhibitions

Vernacular exhibitions are those that are integrated into nonmuseum set-tings like bars, restaurants, or barber shops.35 Museal display and other ac-tivities mingle seamlessly. Users can discuss artifacts while eating, drinking,getting a haircut, or shopping. Using historic artifacts in a museum presenta-tion, these exhibits represent the interests of owners or users. Visitors reportliking vernacular exhibition because it makes them feel they are part of a tra-dition. Interviews conducted with patrons at Murphy’s Bleachers—a museumbar next to Wrigley Field dedicated to Cubs history—show that visitors likethe museum presentation because it operated on emotion, emphasizing theirown participation in a continuing tradition. It helped legitimate their con-nection to a fan community.36

Scholarship on vernacular exhibitions is scarce indeed. Twenty years agoin their study of museum bars in the upper Midwest, Kurt Dewhurst and Mar-sha MacDowell identified the possibility of learning from museum bars:

As a gathering place, the museum bar provides an opportunity for the objectsassembled there to be invested with new meanings as well as convey a con-nectedness to past traditions. Usually developed through community partic-ipation, rather than the efforts of a single curatorial vision, the collection ofobjects and related folklore can provide a rich index of community life. . . .Understanding the cultural life of a museum bar therefore begins with field-work within the closed circle of museum bar patrons. Then can the objectsbe properly considered as part of the expressive local culture that deservesconservation.37

Other scholars have emphasized the community function of vernacular ex-hibition. In their discussion of “reliquary theming” in bars and restaurants,Beardsworth and Bryman state that artifacts move the emphasis from con-sumption of food or drink to the experience of being in a meaningful space:

With [reliquary theming], emphasis is placed upon the creation of an enter-taining and appealing setting through the display of precious artifacts of known


35. These settings are described by Oldenburg as the “third place,” the one between workand home that provides opportunity for significant community cohesion. Ray Oldenburg, TheGreat Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts atthe Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1989, 1997, 1999.)

36. Visitor interviews at Murphy’s Bleachers, Chicago, Illinois, June 27–28, 2006.37. Kurt Dewhurst and Marsha MacDowell, “Museum for the People: Museum Bars,” Ma-

terial Culture 18, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 37–49.

provenance. These artifacts are in fact ‘relics’ and their provenance links themdirectly to revered or heroic figures or to highly salient events or processes inthe public domain. The presence of sacred relics introduces a sense of pil-grimage to the experience; the logic of the diner’s attendance is as much to payhomage to the objects as to consume the food on offer.38

Documentation of vernacular exhibition appears in travel guides, authoredwith visitors in mind, not scholars. These guides document a stunning diver-sity of topic.39

Exhibits in nonmuseum settings make objects highly accessible. In fact,collections care is usually secondary to access. One restaurant museum pro-vided a provocative case study of collections access. Billie and John Pappas,the owners of B&J’s American Café in downtown LaPorte, Indiana, have re-created a restaurant from the middle decade of the last century, as their menucover relates:


38. Alan Beardsworth and Alan E. Bryman, “Late Modernity and the Dynamics of Quasifi-cation,” The Sociological Review, 47, no. 2 (1999): 240.

39. The following document a variety of exhibitions, including vernacular exhibits: ChristineDes Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest (Black Earth, WI: Trails Books, 2002); JoyceJurnovoy and David Jenness, America on Display: A Guide to Unusual Museums and Collectionsin the United States and Canada (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1987); Saul Rubin, Off-beat Museums: The Collections and Curators of America’s Most Unusual Museums (Santa Mon-ica: Santa Monica Press, 1997), and Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith, and Doug Kirby, The New Road-side America: The Modern Traveler’s Guide to the Wild and Wonderful World of America’s TouristAttractions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

Photo collection in the banquet room at B&J’s American Café, LaPorte, Indiana, July 8, 2005.(Photo by the author)

As you sit in our restaurant today, the past surrounds you. We are pleased tohave restored the restaurant back to its décor of the 1940s. Many of the itemsare original to the building including counters and stools, the buffets tin ceil-ing, porcelain floors. . . . We have restored it as it was when the Pappas and Philonfamilies owned it . . . from the 1920s to the early 1960s. The building has beenin the Pappas family for over 8 decades.40

While the menu took the visitor-patron through the architectural features ofthe restaurant, the primary impact of the rooms was in the photography onthe walls and in boxes on shelves in the banquet room. The restaurant wasbelow a former photography studio, and the Pappas family became the in-heritors of not only photographic equipment (which they display in theirrestaurant) but about fifty years of photo documentation of the LaPorte area’speople and activities. The framed photographs on display were loosely groupedaccording to type of photo (weddings, siblings, high school teachers, nature),and the banquet room was equipped with metal shelves holding boxes of pho-tographs. The Pappas family encouraged visitors to peruse the photos. Theyhave even provided people with copies of family photos that had been lost infire or other disasters. In effect the mid-century restaurant restoration func-tioned as a highly accessible archives.

Like the tintypes example that opened this essay, some exhibitions evoke thepast as a marketing tool to sell historic artifacts. This type of display has dualorigins in merchandising and museums. Interpretive labels employ informa-tion about the past to raise the value of the product. Antique shops, second-hand stores, and flea markets offer this type of display. The interpretation pre-sented is usually fairly superficial, based as it is on common perceptions (ormisperceptions) of the past.

One noticeable trend in vernacular exhibitions is parody: they make funof the conventions of the exhibition medium. The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club,a bar in Atlanta, displayed yachting and boating artifacts to play on the bar’sreputation as a hangout for working-class bikers and not upper-class yachts-men. The sheer impossibility of yachting in Atlanta parodied the traditionalplace focus of historical exhibitions. Employees and patrons contributed tothe collections regularly and asserted proudly, “Our walls do talk.”41

Vernacular exhibitions cross boundaries between education and business.Large not-for-profit educational institutions carefully distinguish between ed-ucational and business functions, most notably that businesses attached to mu-seums “pay the bills” so that education can occur.42 The logic of vernacular


40. Menu, B&J’s American Café, July 8, 2005.41. Conversations with patrons at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club, Atlanta, Georgia, April 13,

2006.42. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at

Colonial Williamsburg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997): 37–39. See also MarkRectanus, Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists and Corporate Sponsorship (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2002).

exhibitions is neither governed nor troubled by this dichotomy. Display of his-toric material is part of doing business, part of creating an atmosphere thatevokes emotional connections and responses, a common practice for bothsmall enterprises and large corporations. Like entrepreneurial exhibits, ver-nacular exhibits rely heavily on face-to-face conversations between curatorsand visitors but also among visitors. Unlike entrepreneurial or community ex-hibits, vernacular exhibitions rely heavily on the visitor’s status as consumerof goods and services other than exhibition. Vernacular exhibition curators de-pend on their displays to express their personal views to customers, creatingan intimacy that supports the business by encouraging the visitor to make per-sonal connections with it. In this way, “intimate history” told in public is in-extricably linked with the processes of production and consumption.

Entrepreneurial Exhibition

The entrepreneurial exhibition has close ties to small business and seeksto perpetuate a craft tradition. It may be located in the same building as asmall business, but the gallery and the objects themselves are set apart fromthe business activity (unlike vernacular exhibitions, which occur in the samespace as retail or service activities). The exhibit is usually funded by the smallbusiness, and topically, these exhibits reflect the interests and collections ofthe business owners and are characterized by the features of small businesses:intimate spaces and face-to-face conversation with owners. Scholars have yetto significantly address the entrepreneurial exhibition.

Jim Anderson created the Old Mill House Printing Museum in 1995. Asa printer himself, he knows about the possibilities and limits of print com-munication. The digital age was his inspiration for creating the printing mu-seum. He observed the changes in the trade he had been in since he was ateenager and took on the role of saving and explaining the old methods of print-ing. His collections included inked blocks, iron hand letterpresses, and platenletterpresses, all operational. His desire to bring his printing business fromTampa and create the museum in Old Homosassa was inspired in part by thepresence of the sugar mill ruins in this small Florida town. Descended fromcane workers, Mr. Anderson identifies strongly with Florida’s African Amer-ican past.43 He blended these interests in his museum and can move smoothlyfrom talking about printing press technology to identity. He begins each tourwith a word from an antique dictionary; he chooses this word based on hisvisitors’ interests, which he discusses before the tour. Each tour stresses hu-man ability to communicate, which he sees as the ultimate message of the ar-tifacts. Such attention to individual visitors is a characteristic of the small busi-ness, service-focused environment, and visitors respond positively. The


43. Jim Anderson, interview by author, video recording, Homosassa, Florida, June 10, 2006.

dominant theme that emerged from interviews with visitors at the PrintingMuseum was, in the words of one patron, that “Jim breathes life into theseartifacts”;44 the significance of the visit was to learn about history and makepersonal connections with a person who knows about it.

Entrepreneurial exhibits blend trade history with personal history. The Mid-dlefield Cheese Factory Museum exhibits blend the history of cheesemakingwith the history of the cheesemaker. Their exhibits focus on the business andfamily history of the factory, and explain the process of cheese production,the founding of the Middlefield Cheese Factory, and the personal historiesof Ann and Hans Rothenbuhlers, the company’s founders. The display in-cludes antique cheese making equipment, art depicting cheese makers, HansRothenbuhler’s 1947 Swiss master cheesemaker’s diploma, a factory model,a Rothenbuhler Bible, and a model of the Rothenbuhler home; some displayswere professionally produced, while others were more decidedly home-made. The main theme is that the Rothenbuhlers combined Christian faith,hard work, and skill to create a successful business. The sign entrance to themuseum/cheese shop evokes the importance of both cheese and religion: “Itis written Man Cannot Live By Bread Alone Luke 4:4.”45

Entrepreneurial exhibits sometimes grow from initial efforts in vernacu-


44. Visitor Interview B3, Old Mill House Printing Museum, June 9, 2006.45. Middlefield Cheese Museum, Middlefield, Ohio, June 17, 2005.

Printing press at the entrance of the Old Mill House Printing Museum, Old Homosassa, Florida.(Photo by the author)

lar exhibition. Such is the case for the American Sanitary Plumbing Museumin Worcester, Massachusetts. Charles Manoog, owner of a plumbing supplycompany, retired from the business and began work on a museum to tell thehistory of plumbing in the United States. Using his business contacts withplumbers to build a collection, he created historical displays for the store.Later, Manoog’s son created a stand-alone museum, which he now directs andcurates with his wife, B.J. Manoog. Artifacts include a spigot dated to 1652,prison toilets, and historic dishwashers and showers. The exhibits also includehistoric tools of the trade. Trade schools use the museum to educate studentson the history of plumbing and artisanal heritage.46

Entrepreneurial exhibitions demonstrate the importance of first-person ac-counts and face-to-face interactions in museums as well as the possibilities fordesigning small-space galleries and more intimate settings for larger museums.

Conclusion: Future Directions for Visitor Studies

Community, vernacular, and entrepreneurial exhibitions have significantpotential for demonstrating why and how visitors learn history in informal set-tings. While the corporate exhibit relies on glitz and hyperproduction, andsome academic exhibits also employ this style, visitors continue to attend—and take significant meaning from—the less polished exhibition types. Thelack of analysis of history exhibits in smaller museums and in nonmuseum set-tings means that we are missing crucial insights into the role of private his-tory in the shaping of democracy and the ways in which communities pro-mote their sovereignty. In small community museums, truck stops, restaurants,bars, barber shops, plumbing supply houses, schools, and churches, peoplecreate displays to tell the neglected histories that matter to them. Much ofthis history is personal: family history, community history, the history of one’strade, or the history of something considered less than genteel. It is often his-tory based on feelings, beliefs, and memory. These exhibits’ intimate spacesand hybrid epistemologies break down the traditional hierarchies between cu-rators and visitors. Because of this, the small, often nonprofessionalized his-tory exhibit is the medium through which individuals connect their “privatehistories” to those of other individuals. These spaces lend themselves well tocross-group interaction, one of the most important characteristics of a civilsociety. Distrustful of overproduced messages from the media or other largeinstitutions in American life, the creators and users of these displays see theseexhibitions as ways of bringing individuals together around ideas about thepast. They provide spaces in which strangers meet to talk about the past and


46. Rubin, 150–53; John McVey, “The American Sanitary Plumbing Museum: Unusual Ex-hibit Features the Fixtures at the Business End of the Pipe,” The Lay of the Land: The Centerfor Land Use Interpretation Newsletter (Spring 1997), http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/ lotl / lotlv10/sanitary.html (accessed April 30, 2007).

its applicability to present society. Such conversations are the foundation ofdemocratic action and have the potential to change social practices and evenpolicy. These exhibits demonstrate that more is at stake than a fun visit to aroadside attraction; they are sites of cross-class, cross-ethnic, cross-cultureconversations that can ultimately lead to social and economic changes.

In the past forty years, professional work in historical exhibition has madeenormous strides in promoting public dialogue through not just the end prod-uct but the process of exhibition development. Users have been included inprofessional exhibition development in significant and meaningful ways, pos-itively transforming the field. Although the importance of these innovationscannot be overstated, other trends in development may be hindering this ef-fort to make history relevant for contemporary visitors. Recent federal regu-lations that emphasize quantifiable educational outcomes, as well as much ofthe prescriptive literature, have emphasized exhibit development as an act ofmarketing, a tool for producing the commodity “learning.”47 In getting largefederal grants, exhibit developers must constantly, through rounds of forma-tive, remedial, and summative evaluation, prove that visitors are “getting” theirmessage. Much of this evaluation is highly useful, but it has created a climatein which visitors may be lacking what they like best about history exhibits: in-timacy with the past. Exhibits in small museums and in nonmuseum settingsare intimate not only because the artifacts are highly accessible, but becausethey are less mediated by institutional (academic) authority and more medi-ated by face-to-face interactions with people whose identities are heavily in-vested in the historical topic at hand.

To fully understand the role of historical exhibition in the United States,we need to explore the medium in its diverse forms, particularly the ways inwhich visitors make meaning from them. This work is especially importantfor community, entrepreneurial, and vernacular exhibits, which have been neg-lected by scholars but not by visitors. Museum educators have been studyingthe ways in which visitors learn in large museums since the late nineteenthcentury. In the twentieth, increasing visitor demands, higher professional stan-dards, and accountability pressures beginning with the Elementary and Sec-ondary Education Act of 1965 combined to make the academic form of ex-hibition more distinct from others.48 The growth of heritage tourism, pairedwith lively public discussion on the meaning of identity in America, has con-tributed to an increase in historical exhibitions in settings outside the largeprofessionalized museums. Historical, sociological, and ethnographic meth-ods have a great deal of potential for comparative work on learning in dif-


47. Andrew Pekarik recently wrote of the problem of outcome-based evaluation in the con-text of interactives development. See “Engineering Answers,” Curator: The Museum Journal, 47,no. 2 (2004): 145–148.

48. George Hein presents a useful summary overview in chapters 3 and 4 of Learning inthe Museum (New York: Routledge, 1998). For a discussion of early visitor studies, see KennethHudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Hu-manities Press, 1975).

ferent museum settings. Visitors are aware of the real distinctions among exhibition types, but unlike scholars, they pay attention to the smaller, lessprofessionalized exhibits. They report learning from—or being inspired by—all types.49 One couple, seasoned visitors who had been to the major muse-ums of the United States and Europe, visited Da Yoopers Tourist Trap andMuseum, a highly irreverent local history and culture museum and gift androck shop in Ishpeming, Michigan. They reported that it was a relief to thinkabout history and culture without having to display the genteel appreciationthey thought the “great museums” expected of them. Da Yoopers Museumlet them get over their “museumed out” fatigue and helped to open their mindsto new ways of looking at artifacts.50 It is time scholars catch up with museumvisitors like these.

Tammy S. Gordon is assistant professor of history at the University of North CarolinaWilmington, where she teaches exhibition, public history, and U.S. history. She is cur-rently working on a research project using museum visitor evaluation techniques with visitors at history exhibits in nonmuseum settings. She received her Ph.D. in AmericanStudies from Michigan State University in 1998 and worked as assistant curator of ex-hibits at the Michigan State University Museum for five years.

The author wishes to thank Maria Quinlan-Leiby, Susan Stein-Roggenbuck, Juan Alvarez,and Will Moore for their helpful insights on this article and Kris Morrissey, Julie Avery,and C. Kurt Dewhurst for pointing the way toward this topic and methodology.


49. This assertion is based on summative evaluation interviews with visitors in diverse exhi-bition settings conducted in 2006. This research forms the basis for a manuscript (currently underpublisher review) on small museums and exhibits in nonmuseum settings.

50. Visitor Interview A6, Da Yoopers Tourist Trap and Museum, May 24, 2006.

Documents

Heritage, Commerce, and Museal Display: Toward a …dev.omeka.org/sbrennan/SearchTestO2/SearchTestO2/files/original/32...Museums and Exhibitions Heritage, Commerce, and Museal Display: