Making Radical Repairs: How to Tell an Inclusive Story when your Collections are Stuck in the Past
William F. Stoutamire, PhD
G.W. Frank Museum, University of Nebraska at Kearney
My interest in this discussion stems from several years of effort expanding the collections – and, by extension, the story – of the G.W. Frank Museum of History and Culture, a historic house museum located on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Like many of the roughly 15,000 historic house museums in the United States today, the Frank Museum had long been stuck in an outdated model of collecting and interpretation, which privileged the voices and material culture of one wealthy family in our community’s past. As the story of George and Phoebe Frank grew more distant and disconnected from the present realities and needs of our community, the museum increasingly struggled to attract and retain visitors and financial support. When I was hired as the first full-time professional director in 2014, it was evident that the history this institution told needed to be overhauled from the ground up. But how could we do that when almost everything collected over the past forty years was selectively chosen to focus on one, exclusive story?
I would like to propose two potential paths forward, both of which we have embraced in our efforts to reinvent the Frank Museum. First: When made necessary by certain realities – the total lack of material remains, physical demolition, and/or poor historical records – we should embrace the absence of collections as part of our story. The absence of physical evidence can be an important interpretive tool for engaging visitors in discussions about power, privilege, and the inherent biases that infuse the origins of many history museums. Second: Whenever possible, museums should engage in active collecting, up to and including deaccessioning objects that do not support the story (and we all have those) in order to create space for the addition of new collections that enable us to share a more inclusive history. This process must be handled delicately, in collaboration with key stakeholders, and museum staff must be able to clearly articulate how the deaccessioning of non-contributing collections and the investment of museum staff in active collecting practices will enable the institution to engage broader and more diverse publics in conversations about the past.
At the Frank Museum, we have chosen to embrace the former approach for much of our interpretation of the life of domestic servants and factory workers during the community’s industrial boom in the late 1800s, the period in which George and Phoebe Frank lived in the home. Written records on these individuals are scarce; we only know the names of three domestic servants. And because of the biases of previous collecting policies, which favored the personal possessions of George and Phoebe Frank (or, failing that, the material culture of the upper class in the Gilded Age), less than a dozen objects in the museum’s collections have tangible connections to these individuals. This issue is further exacerbated by the physical state of the building, as the servant bedrooms and original kitchen were the first spaces to be gutted by a later tenant. No documentation or physical traces exist to indicate their original appearance.
Rather than ignore these spaces or bemoan the inability of our collections to contribute to the interpretation of servant life, we use these challenges as opportunities to engage visitors in a discussion about the stories we choose to preserve in our historic places. Just as the physical appearance of a servant bedroom can tell us much about domestic life and inequality in the Gilded Age, so too can the absence of physical evidence – both in the built environment and in our collections – help to inform conversations about how many museums, especially historic house museums, have often worked to perpetuate these biases. In recent months, we have taken this a step further, as the museum tackles the interpretation of factory labor in industries owned by the Frank family; factories and tenement housing units that, much like the spaces reserved for domestic servants in the family’s private home, were demolished and discarded after the laborers and their descendants fled the community in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. A series of historical biking tours led by museum staff and historians at the University of Nebraska at Kearney visits these sites of industrial life, using photographs, narrative, and guided discussions to engage participants in conversations about both the community’s history and the biases of our preservation efforts.
Active collecting also serves a vital role in our efforts to repair the Frank Museum’s collections, most notably in support of a recent exhibition that sought to challenge the community’s perceptions of the museum as a Gilded Age shrine. After the economic collapse of 1893, which bankrupted the Frank family, the home became a private sanitarium and, for six decades, served as the Nebraska State Hospital for Tuberculosis. The hospital, which employed many local residents, treated thousands of indigent Nebraskans suffering from tuberculosis. The memory of that institution is still very much so alive in the community and its story allows for deeper conversations about contemporary issues of race, class, and access to affordable healthcare. However, the house’s “period of significance” and a persistent romanticism surrounding life in the Victorian era had led previous curators to almost completely ignore collecting stories, photographs, and objects from this era. In collaboration with several key stakeholders, including a Board member whose father served as hospital superintendent, we launched a campaign through museum programming, a documentary film, social media, and local newspapers, television, and radio stations to actively recruit the donation of objects and the collection of oral histories related to the history of the hospital. The resultant collections formed the core of our exhibit, The White Plague Comes to Kearney, which is located in several rooms that have been intentionally restored to their now well-documented hospital-era appearance.
In order to ensure that the museum would have space to house and care for this growing collection, we also had to engage in a period of active deaccessioning. Too often, museums are reticent to deaccession objects that fail to support the institution or its mission, expending valuable staff time on processing paperwork and filling limited storage spaces with irrelevant or redundant objects; objects that will rarely see the light of day. Taking inspiration from Active Collections (edited by Elizabeth Wood, Rainey Tisdale, and Trevor Jones), museum staff spent several months working in collaboration with the museum’s Collections Committee to determine which artifacts were vital to the museum’s interpretive efforts and finding suitable places to donate those that were deemed eligible for deaccession. When done carefully and sensitively, deaccessioning can help museums strengthen their collections and encourage future growth.
Without diminishing our ability to interpret the life of the home’s original residents, this careful deaccessioning combined with active collecting and the interpretation of absence has allowed the museum to begin the process of telling a more inclusive story, one that is more relevant and responsive to the needs and interests of our surrounding community.