Carrie Villar
John & Neville Bryan Associate Director of Museum Collections National Trust for Historic Preservation
Facilitator, “Making Radical Repairs” NCPH Working Group 2019
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has twenty-one historic sites located across the country where we own historic museum collections. These sites range from Drayton Hall, an 18th century plantation home to the Farnsworth House, a modernist icon. For most of these sites, a large portion of the collection came along with the house at the time it transferred to the National Trust. For some sites, like the Woodrow Wilson House or Chesterwood, the summer home & studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French, the objects that transferred were carefully curated by family members interested in memorializing their famous relatives. At other sites, the houses came to us nearly empty and we had to recreate the collections based on a period of interpretation.
One thing that all these sites have in common is the real need to stay relevant and tell the fuller story of American history. We no longer can, or want to, focus on just one era or one wealthy or famous owner. As we try to tell this fuller story, we find that the collections often don’t represent these stories and new interpretations. While a few sites have been able to add new objects to the collection, this has been limited by object availability and financial resources.
While there are certainly ways to interpret these new stories that do not rely on objects, object-based storytelling can be a powerful and effective interpretive tool. I recently had the opportunity to direct a project funded by the National Trust’s African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, an initiative dedicated to telling the full American story and ensuring that the places that tell those stories are preserved for the future. For this project, I invited African- American writers, curators and artists to explore the collections at our sites and create pieces that reflected their experiences. As I had site visits with each individual or group, it quickly became obvious that rather than focusing on an object in the collection, most of these projects would involve reflecting on the lack of representation they felt at the sites. Although intellectually I recognized that our collections lacked full representation of the people who lived and worked at our sites, observing the emotional, tangible reaction of the participants as they struggled to connect with the collection and the site really hit home. The lack of representation in the collection has real human impacts on our visitors and the audiences we may be unwittingly alienating. More than one participant told me that they would have never stepped foot in the historic site if they had not been invited to be part of the project.
With that experience in mind, as well as my observations of how our sites are telling the fuller story, but often by not using the collection, I realized that we could be facing a threat to the relevancy of objects, object-based interpretation at historic sites and museums and the allocation of resources to support collections care. I proposed this working group as a way we can take a first step in the discussion of how the public history field, especially the curators and collections staff, needs to improve the relevancy of our historic collections to ensure that they contribute to our broader interpretation work and remain a resource for our sites and their audiences.
The list of questions that I asked the group to consider are some of the key questions that I have been grappling with as I work with the National Trust collections to help our sites tell a fuller story.
• How can public history organizations benefit by improving representation within collections?
• How do we determine what should be preserved? Deaccessioned? Acquired? Loaned?
• With limited resources in our organizations, what can get allocated to this work? What might need to be let go to do this?
• How can we communicate the need for these changes to stakeholders?
• What groups should we be including in the conversation that we aren’t doing so now?
• Draft a preliminary vision statement for American’s history collections.
There is not a one size fits all answer to any of these questions, nor is my list of questions exhaustive. In fact, I hope this working group surfaces even more! It all may depend on the particulars of each historic site or museum. Although historians love nuance and context, I would like this working group to begin to clarify the issues facing the public history field in this area, identify field-wide needs and begin to create frameworks to help advance the conversation around America’s history collections.