jack pittenger, ObjectIDEA
Proposal Type
Panel
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
Related Topics
- Consulting
- Museums/Exhibits
- Public Engagement
Abstract
In order to stay relevant to their communities, agile cultural institutions must be ready to adapt and change their tactics to connect and repair ties with any number of groups. An institution can lose the trust of its partners for a number of reasons, but also foster new connections via programming and advocacy to permanently connect with previously untapped communities. By being attentive to the needs of the communities that they serve and keeping an eye towards building the future instead of just repairing the present, cultural institutions can ensure sustainability. Our panel seeks to examine the successes and failures of community building, maintenance, and repair by consultants and cultural institutions alike.
Description
Jack Pittenger works as a museum consultant and performs work that includes exhibition and master planning, including at The House of the Seven Gables. Made famous as the inspiration and setting for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of the same name, the Gables was later acquired by a philanthropist who turned it into a tourist attraction to fund her efforts to help acclimate immigrants to the Salem area. The Gables maintained its commitment to this community over the ensuing century, but lost touch with many of its donors and community liaisons when these efforts were recently scaled back. Our firm was tasked with creating a new interpretive plan that would increase relevancy for visitors, ensuring the sustainability of the institution.
While the Gables never stopped supporting the immigrant community, the reiteration of this long-standing commitment proved to be a cornerstone of interpretive planning. The rebuilding of trust with local stakeholders is an example of how consultants can help an institution perform repair work with their community by offering fresh ideas and perspectives.
Hannah Schmidl works at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, NJ as the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Two instances of “repair work” through the library could be highlighted under the conference theme. The first example concerns the screening of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS series “The Vietnam War” and associated public programming. The content of the series itself helps to repair the public’s understanding of the era and all parties involved. The attendees (veterans, family members of vets, and others) at programs planned by the library evidenced this repair by sharing how much they’d learned through the series and discussions.
The second instance is a series of library programs which were part of the larger Princeton & Slavery project which examines the university’s and town’s historical ties to slavery. The library played an important role in promoting the project’s findings and helping people understand and reckon with a previously hidden history of slavery. Both projects are examples of purposefully working to repair understandings of contentious historical topics.
We are seeking additional panelists and feedback to add to the conversation about how repair work, specifically with a variety of communities, is approached and carried out at various institutions.We welcome others from various backgrounds and institutions to share their ideas.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Jack Pittenger, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be submitted by July 1, 2018. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
I work as a public historian at Princeton University. Some of my projects incorporate research from the Princeton & Slavery Project, though they also span other histories. I’d be happy to participate and/or talk with Hannah about some of the ways that the university is addressing a variety of things that “happened here”.
You might delve a little more into the types of repair you’re proposing to cover here – it strikes me that they are quite different, from overcoming the legacies of racial violence to relationship-building and re-building to attempts to broaden awareness of Vietnam War history (and this last one is less self-evidently an act of “repair,” perhaps). Thinking through the different faces of “repair work” in these cases might be one useful way to approach the panel. Another that occurs to me (especially in light of Abby Klionsky’s comment above) is to think about the particular advantages and challenges of different types of institutions (university, public library, settlement house) for undertaking various kinds of acts of repair. That’s a bit more “meta,” but might help frame the panel in a useful way.
I’m a grad student at the University of South Carolina working at South Carolina State Parks on exhibit development, and one of my largest projects is interpreting the park system’s history of segregation and integration, which certainly requires engaging the community. In 2015 State Parks began revising their own institutional history to include the role of civil rights activists, leading to new interpretation of this history at various parks. This interpretation includes new waysides at several parks as well as digital interpretation through ArcGIS Story Maps. Through working on this project, my colleagues at State Parks and I have noticed a general institutional enthusiasm because we’re finally addressing this difficult history. We’ve also noticed that it’s a slow process to cultivate institutional connections and trust with community groups due to the State Parks’ own history of racial discrimination, but we see acknowledging this history as the first step of repair work. I’d be happy to participate or offer insight from a park system perspective.