Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and
showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction
between personal and collective identities, between memory and history.
The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and
historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators,
and scholars.
Representing a variety of fields--history, anthropology, art history,
and museum scholarship--the contributors discuss museums across
disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural
history museums or local history museums from national galleries. The
essays range widely over time (from the Renaissance to the second half
of the twentieth century), and place (China, Japan, the United States,
and Germany), in exhibitions explored (photography, Native American
history, and "Jurassic technology"), and institution (the Chinese
Imperial Collection, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and modern art
museums).
Memory operates thematically among the essays in diverse and provocative
ways. The papers are organized according to three suggestive themes:
experimental ways of theorizing and designing contemporary museums with
an explicit interest in history and memory; discussions of personal
encounters with historical exhibits; and the professional risks at stake
for collectors and curators who shape the institutional presentation of
history and memory.
The contributors are Susan A. Crane, Wolfgang Ernst, Michael Fehr, Paula
Findlen, Tamara Hamlish, Alexis Joachimides, Suzanne Marchand, Julia A.
Thomas, and Diana Drake Wilson.
