Meghan Gelardi Holmes Curator, Gibson House Museum (Boston, MA)
NCPH Working Group Case Statement
for Making Radical Repairs: How to Tell an Inclusive Story when your Collections are Stuck in the Past
As the curator of a small historic house museum, I am confronted daily with the challenges of telling new and inclusive stories while relying on the objects of a dominant culture to illustrate those stories. The Gibson House Museum in Boston, MA reflects a 1930s vision of upper-crust Boston, as seen through the eyes of one wealthy white man. The majority of the objects in the Museum were collected and arranged by a handful of individuals, originally displayed to burnish the reputation of the Museum’s founder and his family. And therefore, even under the best of interpretive circumstances, they tell a particular story. That lens is exclusive, rather than inclusive.
Of course, this is an issue of content. While we do interpret the story of the working class women (and a few men) who lived and worked in the house, for example, our collections do not support that story. If the stories museums tell are mostly defined by their collections, ours are quite limiting. This is also an issue of resources. Our shoestring budget is tapped out caring for the objects already in our collection; our collections policy is therefore very stringent about adding new items to the collection. Moreover, the objects that garner the most resources, in terms of both money and staff time, tend to be the flashier ones—the 18th century tall case clock, the family’s small art collection, the piano—and that leaves very little time to consider the interpretation of the laundry room.
Museums and other cultural organizations clearly benefit from collections that are more representative; not only does this make for richer, more nuanced historical interpretation, but it connects institutions to a broader public, allowing more individuals to connect their own story to the history on display. In my experience, most of the stakeholders—the board, the staff, donors, visitors—agree that this is a crucial part of the mission of a modern-day museum. And yet, in practice it is incredibly hard to move resources away from the objects that support the historically dominant cultural narrative.
Right now, our low-budget solution is to consider creative ways to re-frame our material culture, i.e. how can we turn an object’s significance on its head. Can a collection of Chinese export vases tell just as much about the person who purchased them as the person who cleaned them? If we have no obvious objects to talk about a particular individual’s LGBT identification, can the physical spaces of the building help tell that story? This allows us to reframe the object’s perceived meaning to include individuals and groups whose stories are often less represented in the material record (or, at least, collected and interpreted less), including the working class, women, people of color, members of the queer community, and non-western cultures. And, this encourages visitors to re-examine their first impressions and read objects with a closer, more critical eye.
In addition to creative thinking around the interpretation and use of collections, public history organizations really need to shake up the internal barriers to change in collections stewardship. For one, it seems necessary to re-consider museum standards around deaccession, which could offer organizations ways to be more nimble with their collecting missions (and let go of some of the intense research and documentation that is the only path to deaccession currently). Could we, for example, have a level of deaccession that offers up an object to a fellow cultural institution, effectively retaining the public trust component of object stewardship while providing a less onerous way of giving up an object that is difficult or expensive to care for? A ‘Buy Nothing’ group for collecting institutions? A database, regionally specific maybe, could help us determine whether our Imari dinner service is, using the terminology of endangered species and buildings, “Critically Endangered” or just “Threatened.” By placing objects within a larger regional context, stewardship decisions become easier to make.
For several years, I worked at an art museum in southwestern Virginia that purposefully had no permanent collection; instead, it opened its substantial gallery space to guest curators and community groups for traveling shows on a variety of topics, but especially those rooted in the artistic context of the region. History museums are a different beast, of course, but this suggests to me a potential model: there are interesting possibilities to consider around the idea of shared collections and whether a consortium of museums might pool their resources to collectively care for groups of objects. Could our loose network of Boston historic house museums, for example, collaborate to furnish and interpret our currently empty servant bedroom? Or, alternatively, could we consider pooling our resources to keep in pristine condition ten of our most significant 19th century upholstered chairs, instead of fifty? By sharing the burden of maintaining certain categories of objects (particularly those that require expensive maintenance and restoration), museums could free up resources to pursue different projects and collecting aims, such as restoring the Gibson House coal shed, for example, or reconstituting Charlie Gibson’s collection of photographs of semi-nude boxers.
A museum’s collection policy needs to do the hard work of delineating the crucial link between a creative, relevant, and inclusive mission statement and a collection, current and future, that is representative. This, too, could be a place to be creative and nimble, rather than restrictive and staid. At the root of this discussion is the question of whether museums should reconsider how we define an object’s value. Rarity, craftsmanship, interpretive potential, market value…all of these factors influence object valuation. Maybe, however, we need to make community representation a larger factor in questions about valuation, both as a consideration for collecting new objects and as a consideration for care spent on current collection items.