Inspired in part by our attendance at the first International Conference on the Inclusive Museum, in Leiden in 2008, journalist Andrew Losowsky and I developed The Museum On Site, a collaboration that creates museum-style projects that are embedded in community and place. Rather than beginning with a fixed collection of objects, or developing work marked off from the everyday lives of visitors both spatially and temporally, the galleries, so to speak, for The Museum On Site’s projects are places where people already gather for other reasons, such as public buses, festivals, shopping malls, etc. The themes and subject matter of our projects grow out of the characteristics of a given place—including the history of that area, the stories of the people who use it, the objects and buildings that define and surround it, and so forth. By applying techniques from museums, theater, journalism, advertising, and academic research to everyday environments, our vision is to help people understand their worlds through site-specific, free public experiences that share ideas and information in accessible and stimulating ways.

Our first project was the installation A Thousand Ships in Providence, Rhode Island, which we co-created with the artist Barnaby Evans, in collaboration with a dozen local non-profit organizations, including as the Rhode Island Black Storytellers and the Rhode Island Historical Society, and sponsored in part by grants from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and from Brown University. The name of the event referred to the approximately one thousand slave ship voyages that left from Rhode Island in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—accounting for about 60% of the entire United States-based transatlantic slave trade. This exceptionally large involvement in the slave trade from the smallest colony and later state, had been all but forgotten by Rhode Islanders, as had its role in growing, making, and transporting basic food and supplies to the Caribbean, whose slave system was built around the exclusive cultivation of sugar. However, between 2003 and 2006, an investigation by Brown University into the involvement of its founders in slavery and the slave trade made national news, and raised awareness about this history locally. We knew, though, that it was one thing to read or hear about the thousands upon thousands of human beings sold into slavery by Rhode Islanders, and about the state’s complicity in and financial gain from slavery right up to the Civil War, but we were interested in finding a way to help people connect to this difficult past on a visceral and emotional level; and also to offer them a communal moment of reflection and remembrance.

A Thousand Ships was presented as a part of a public festival called WaterFire, which takes place about a dozen times every summer in Providence, and consists of 100 braziers that are placed in the rivers downtown, lit at sunset, and kept burning until after midnight. This creates a moving, ritual atmosphere, complete with performers, street food, and tens of thousands of people who come to the event, both from the local area, and around the country. At the event’s heart lay the same river from which slave voyages were launched more than two centuries earlier; buildings that witnessed the loading and unloading of goods destined for the Caribbean; the former customs house and coffee houses where the business of the trade was negotiated, and many other sites with direct relationships to this history.

On the night of October 4, 2008, approximately 30,000 people came to WaterFire, and most of them did not know that it was going to be different from any other night—we intentionally did not advertise the event broadly, since we wanted to catch people more or less unaware. As a result, these visitors were not in the “mood” for learning or braced solemn commemoration, as they might have been had they known the theme of the evening.

As sunset neared, volunteers dressed in black with red sashes around their waists, went throughout the crowd that was gathered to watch the fires being lit, handing out small bottles of water. The label on the bottles stated that there were 1,000 water bottles being handed out, each of which represented one slave ship voyage from Rhode Island. The label also invited them to join us in pouring the water as a libation, on the signal. As the braziers were lit, figures dressed in black with red sashes around their waists appeared on boats in the middle of the basin, and at points all around the water’s edge, holding large silver bowls. Among them were invited members of the state’s religious and political community, academics who had worked on Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report, as well as descendants of both slaves and slavetraders. Then, the sound of Paul Robeson singing “Amazing Grace”—a song written by a reformed British slaveship captain—came over the loudspeakers, and the people holding the large bowls began to pour. When they saw this signal, the crowd came down to the waterfront to pour out their own bottles of water—commemorating a history that some of them learned of less than half an hour before.

In the two hours following the libation were a number of additional participatory rituals and performances (for details, see the book about the event at www.themuseumonline.com/book).

The success of A Thousand Ships, which reached tens of thousands of people, moving far beyond a typical museum-going audience, was due to its engagement with a story that was deeply linked to the past and present of a specific place. While we believe that amazing things can and do happen in museums, we also believe that working in everyday spaces offer very different opportunities, in terms of both the breadth of audience, and the level of engagement of that audience. When done well, such projects have the potential to bring moments of unexpected delight into people’s daily routines, which can then be associated with emotionally linked information to change their perspectives more effectively than traditional didactic methods.

~ Lyra Monteiro, Rutgers University-Newark

Discussion

4 comments
  1. Lyra, It’s amazing how directly your experience with Museum on Site seems to speak to Joan’s questions about legacy collections. It also brings up the question of how installations (programs?) such as _A Thousand Ships_ differ from other public programs. What makes _A Thousand Ships_ a museum experience? There’s no question that it was a moving and informative program that reached tremendous number of people. I can’t wait to hear what more you and Andrew are up to now. I’m so looking forward to reconnecting in Baltimore!

  2. Christine Arato says:

    Lyra, I am amazed by the creativity and vigor of the Museum on Site, and can’t wait to hear more about what you’ve learned about the impact of critical and creative interventions in everyday environments. How has the kind of unexpected delight and engagement associated with a specific and familiar place created the kinds of “transitional space” and transformative experience that can lead to equity change? Sounds like you’re really on to something!

  3. Jennifer Scott says:

    Lyra, I was incredibly excited reading your Museum On Site “A Thousand Ships” intervention! We definitely intersect in thinking about site-specific and responsive museum work. Although historic house museums are fixed (even protected) places, they lend nicely to accenting local and community histories, and are place-based by definition. Unfortunately, I don’t think that many local or historic house museums necessarily take full advantage of this strength, but there are now many more efforts in animating these spaces with much more active ‘exhibiting’ and dynamic public engagement. I’d love to share more with you about what we are working on, and I think we should think about possible collaborations!

    1. Lyra Monteiro says:

      I’d love to talk about collaborations, Jennifer! And I agree with you about house museums as site-specific–I actually just took my grad students in a “Community Engagement and Site-Specific Storytelling” course to the Tenement Museum, for this reason. I love what they do with neighborhood tours, too. Let’s be in touch!

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