Dreamed up by Ruth Abram in the late 1980s, the heyday of the new social history boom, the Tenement Museum was conceived as an activist organization. The idea was to raise up the voices of the people who built America, the people whose names never graced buildings or appeared in history texts, and to engage visitors in thinking about ways to create an equitable, egalitarian society. The Tenement Museum has often been seen as a model for promoting dialogue in a museum setting. Current events have made this work even important, even as it has become more difficult. As a result of my experiences at the Tenement Museum, I am interested in exploring the ways in which museum professionals and historians can reimagine public engagement in the museum context, specifically with regard to the difficult balancing act between opening public discourse on contentious issues and actually entering partisan political life. Additionally, I would like to think about how museums can build on the successful, though limited, model of the Tenement Museum’s discussion programs to speak to and with a broader, more diverse audience.

One of the major problems with civic discourse in the museum that concerns me the most is practical: as a non-profit organization, the Tenement Museum cannot advocate for a particular political position, nor would we want to. Immigration has always been a contentious political issue in the United States (and, indeed, the world), but I think that the sudden prominence of these questions in contemporary political debates took Museum leadership somewhat by surprise, and has led to an interesting tug of war between the wishes of the Board of Trustees and what the Museum staff is actually able to do. The Museum’s strategic plan asks the Museum to become a leader in the national conversation about immigration, citizenship, and national identity, and specifically sets a goal of informing the press and the policy community on these issues, as well as the general public. But what sorts of civic action are appropriate for a museum? The Tenement Museum has perfected a kind of consciousness-raising, in which visitors are presented with new materials and asked to rethink their positions, but how might the Museum use its stories to create dialogue and present historical facts outside of the museum walls? Who are we “allowed” to engage and under what circumstances?

Aside from the regular school and tour programs that strive to create dialogue on a more limited scale, the Tenement Museum runs a special program devoted to historically-informed small group dialogue. The Museum has had this discussion program in place since 2004, when it was called “Kitchen Conversations.” It was created as a way to counter the romanticized notions of the immigrant past that visitors often arrived with, and to allow visitors to relate their own experiences to the history that they hear in more length and depth than is possible during the tour. The evolution of the program is particularly interesting, especially since it was initially designed specifically to upend the hierarchy of educator and visitor and to exist outside the rarified “museum” space. The tour and discussion portions were led by different people, and the space for the conversation was deliberately designed to look as much like a home kitchen and as little like a museum as possible. In this incarnation, it was a spectacular failure. Many visitors never even considered staying once the tour was complete, and many others came to the kitchen area only to take snacks and leave.

The program picked up steam once the two parts were integrated, with a single educator leading both the tour and discussion. The current version, “Tour and Discussion,” runs once a day. The program begins in a classroom with a short introduction and a “getting to know you” discussion, in which visitors share their names, where they are from, and a bit about their own immigrant backgrounds. The group then takes the typical public tour with an educated facilitator as their guide, and then returns to the classroom, where tea and cookies have been set out, for a discussion. The facilitators are effective at keeping the conversation lively and productive, and all the sessions I have observed have engaged, interested participants. There is no question that the participants dig deeper into the themes introduced on the tour during the conversation, and, on their way out of the room, many visitors stop to thank the facilitator for helping them think in new ways. The program makes a measurable difference for many of the visitors who participate, but it’s still just one tour, in the middle of the day, with a $25 barrier to entry. How might it be possible to extend this method to reach wider, more diverse audiences, especially when the Museum’s real cost per participant is easily double that? How can the museum create a space for dialogue that is welcoming to any visitor but informed by good historical knowledge?

Additionally, how much of this model is transferable to other museums and other topics? What makes it possible for the Tenement Museum to even partially achieve its overtly activist mission is its lack of glass cases and traditional exhibits. Immersive exhibits help to create a liminal experience, and when combined with an historical narrative built on personal life stories and told quite literally in someone’s bedroom, visitors react with empathy, as if they have been invited into a deeply intimate space. The Tenement Museum’s constructivist educational philosophy argues that the museum can exist as both a place of authority and a place of questioning at the same moment, and most effectively squares the two identities by deemphasizing the authority of the museum on the public tours. By coupling descriptions of the process of historical interpretation with the presentation of primary source documents, educators invite visitors to act as their own historians, and argue that their own authority rests on familiarity with the sources, rather than specific credentials. Is this a practical – or even desirable – model for more “traditional” museums to follow?

~ Rachel Feinmark, Lower East Side Tenement Museum

 

 

Discussion

3 comments
  1. First of all, hats off to the Tenement Museum for its good work. I have long been inspired by you! The question of how to provide the more successful, but more labor intensive, version of the programming more broadly while also controlling cost is very important. What are the barriers to entry? What would a cost effective program look like? In what ways can spaces (let alone complex physical spaces such as the Tenement Museum) be openly inviting to all? I was just at a meeting for a planning group that I’m part of re-imagining Navy Pier in Chicago. The site is visited by 8-9 million people each year, making it one of the top ten destinations in the world in between the Louvre and Disney Anaheim. But right now, there’s a lot of wondering what to do with these visitors. One of the site’s big goals is to engage a lot of young people. But how do you make young people, particularly young people of color, feel safe in an indoor/outdoor space where the authority figures may well be the police? How do you welcome young people without making them feel under surveillance? These questions play into the question of bringing in more and different audiences to the conversations at the Tenement Museum as well. I hope we can learn together more ways of welcoming and including. I think this is a key to many of our concerns about civic discourse in museums.

  2. Lyra Monteiro says:

    Whether or not it is practical, I desperately wish more museums would follow the example of the Tenement Museum. As I regularly tell my students, the LESTM was revolutionary when it was founded in the early 1990s, and, disgracefully, still is. I used to be a volunteer educator at the museum, and have sat in on the Tour and Discussion program, and agree that it’s really exceptional in terms of the conversations it allows.

  3. Jennifer Scott says:

    Rachel, thanks for your statement, and glad you are a part of the working group! When I was with Weeksville, we benefited form our camaraderie with the Tenement Museum and from the museum’s various examples of engagement – completely aligned with the immersive exhibits model. With Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, we continue to be “partners from a distance” through the International Coalition of the Sites of Conscience network, which supports dialogue programs on socially impacting topics, such as immigration. Looking forward to discussing these topics more!

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