Steven Lubar
January 2019
Case Statement for NCPH Working Group “Making Radical Repairs: How to Tell an Inclusive Story when your Collections are Stuck in the Past.”
Touring a collections area storeroom or database looking for objects with which to create an exhibition can be an emotional experience. On the one hand, joy: Look at that amazing object! Who could have guessed we’d have such a thing! Thank you, curator of the past, for thinking to collect it. Or, dejection: Why didn’t you, curator of the past, collect what we really need to tell the stories we need to tell? Why is the storeroom filled with objects that we’ll never use? Of course, it’s likely that the next generation of curators will think the same thing. Some twenty years ago, historian Neil Harris wrote that “repudiation of the immediate museum past as dusty, remote, lifeless, and unimaginative became an expressive ritual for each generation of museum professionals since the late nineteenth century.”(1) Still true!
Connecting curatorial past and present in a more friendly and useful way seems a good goal for our working group, and I’d like to suggest three tracks to moving beyond cursing our predecessors. One is to deal with what they bequeathed us, considering anew what’s in our storerooms, and making some hard decisions about deaccessioning. The second is to think hard about current collecting, learning from the past to try to consider what future curators might want and need. And third (the approach I’ll focus on here), we need to make both historical collections and ongoing collecting, and the connections between them, visible to the public. We might do that with new thinking about open, visible, storage that combines past and present collecting. Conceiving of collections as a form of communications between past and present might help us think through what quality means when applied to the work of collecting. I’ll consider how this might apply to two museums where I’m a member of the collections committee.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum was founded as The Old Dartmouth Historical Society in 1903. It has all of the usual local history collections, from costume to furniture to portraits. It grew to focus on local whaling history, which seemed romantic to the children and grandchildren of whaling captains who built the institution. In 2001it acquired the extensive international whaling collections of the Kendall Institute. Its Collections Development Plan (CDP) notes that “the Museum possesses the world’s most comprehensive collection of art, artifacts and archives of whaling history as well as the most comprehensive collection of art, artifacts and archives representing the social and cultural history of New Bedford and the surrounding area.” Today, it has some 500,000 archival items, 200,000 photographs, and 35,000 artifacts.
But is “comprehensive” really the right word? Does it have what it needs to (in the words of its mission statement) “educate and interest all the public in the historic interaction worldwide of humans with whales; in the history of Old Dartmouth and adjacent communities; and in regional maritime activity.” The CDP – written three years ago, and an excellent first step toward dealing with collections issues – suggested that the collections were unbalanced, and suggested new attention to areas that seem more important today, including whale natural history and whale science, not whaling; art, especially contemporary art that addresses local history and whaling; fishing, the most important contemporary industry in the city today; and the history of the increasingly diverse communities that make up New Bedford today. And it has made good progress toward building new collections, in some areas. A new exhibit on the science of whales, for example, has provided the impetus to bring in significant collections relating to that subject (including thousands of recordings of whale sounds!). It’s done less well on collecting in the social and cultural history of a broader range of communities. And it’s been shy about deaccessioning objects that have no local or whaling connection, and not really considered deaccessioning in areas that are appropriate, but simply too extensive. That means lack of storage space can provide a reason not to collect in new areas.
The Little Compton Historical Society has a different set of challenges. Though the LCHS has gained significant recognition in the past few years for important research, publications, and exhibitions on issues of slavery, its collections, driven by a mission statement that calls for “Collecting, conserving and interpreting historical documents and objects linked to the houses, farms, and families of Little Compton,” are very traditional: “over 10,000 items features fine and decorative arts, furniture, artifacts, documents and photographs related to the town of Little Compton.” Like the NBWM, it’s a mostly 19th century collection. Its historic house includes furnishings from the 1600s to the 1850s. The outbuildings contain agricultural items, tools, carriages, and sleighs, up to about 1930. It’s easy to imagine a Collections Development Plan for the LCHS that would encourage more recent collecting, but also easy to imagine that the collections will change very slowly.
Given the momentum of existing collections, our challenge is to put them to better use. One way to do that is to make them more visible in a new kind of open storage. Open storage makes collections immediately useful: no longer just an expense for the museum, or of interest only to scholars and hobbyists, open storage makes existing collections part of the museum’s public face, an attraction. It can offer museum visitors both an insight into the behind-the-scenes of the museum, a place where decisions shape collections, as well as a place where curiosity, rather than narrative, drives engagement. And it might provide a place for contemporary collecting that shows off the connections of past and present. Recent artifacts, on display with similar or related historical artifacts, might make a connection to the present. An open-ended question to visitors about what’s missing might make open storage a way to bring in new, relevant, collections. Communities might see themselves, or be motivated to build collections so that they might see themselves.
For the Whaling Museum, open storage might start with letting visitors see into existing storage areas. A next step would be to juxtapose traditional collections with new collecting, to tell a story of change and increasing interest in contemporary concerns. Storage displays that range from harpoons used to kill whales to the scientific instruments used to understand and protect them tells a dramatic story without words. So too would a storage area that ran from oil portraits of Yankee ship captains to framed photos of Guatemalan immigrants.
For the Little Compton Historical Society, open storage would look different. Much of the collection is already on display. The historic house shows off furniture and household items. The old barn that stores agricultural machinery and carriages is already, in a sense, open storage. Is there a way to tell not one story – of daily life, or decorative arts, or the agricultural history of the town – but two stories, with these collections? Might we add to the display in the historic house rooms artifacts not appropriate to that house, but to others, to show the range of lifestyles, the choices that were made, the changes over time, coming closer to the present? In the barn, might we encourage visitors to fill in the missing gaps that provide context to the carriages and plows and well pumps? Or to think about the modern equivalents, as a way to build more modern collections?
I don’t have the answers, but I believe that a new kind of open storage – open-ended, active, one that raises questions and highlights and calls for new collections – might be an answer for organizations like the Whaling Museum and the LCHS. The Active Collections Manifesto has drawn attention mostly for its argument for deaccessioning. But it also argues that we “Make the Good Stuff Sing.” My hope is that we might have it sing in harmony, old and new, past and future, singing a new song.
1 Neil Harris, “The Divided House of the American Art Museum,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (1999): 37.