Beyond the Blockbuster: Good Exhibitions in Small Packages

Many American and European art museums are now featuring small, highly-focused shows in their exhibition programs. In 1990, the Indianapolis Museum of Art organized an exhibition that reunited, for the first time in a century, the four landscape paintings created by neo-impressionist Georges Seurat during the last summer of his life. Using Seurat at Gravelines: The Last Landscapes as an example, this article addresses the advantages — for museums and their visitors — of the small temporary exhibition.     

Diversity and the Museum of London

Increasingly, some — but not all — urban history museums are facing the challenges of reaching out to and serving growingly diversified populations. Described here is the Museum of London's The Peopling of London, which recognizes the history and contributions of immigrant communities and their descendants. Planning for the exhibition required an about face from the museum's traditional in-house method of exhibition development — involving members of minority communities. Both the planning process and the resulting exhibition serve as a model for consideration and possibly emulation as urban history museums look at the growing diversification of the populations they serve.     

Time to Listen

This article is a reflection on two aspects of the exhibition development process that are important but elusive. One is a habit of listening, and the other is the importance of allowing time for listening—to advisers, visitors, and other members of the exhibition team. The team that developed the touring exhibition Invention at Play used visitor research throughout the process of exhibition development to explore the links between the work of inventors and familiar human activities such as exploration, imagination, and play. The exhibition won an award of excellence at the AAM convention in Portland, Oregon in 2003. It was used as a case study on integrating accessibility into exhibition planning and design at an international conference, ADA Coordinators and Accessibility Managers in the Cultural Arts, sponsored by the Kennedy Center in 2002.     

Connecting a Museum with Its Community

Abstract The exhibition, Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor, at the Levine Museum of the New South, in Charlotte, North Carolina, is more than a story about a changing community—it’s a platform for an experience that engages its local audience.     

Mesopotamian Megacity Re‐imagined in Berlin

The curators of the exhibition Uruk: 5000 Years of the Megacity claim that Uruk is the earliest known city in the world, the birthplace of writing, bureaucracy, monumental art, and architecture. Their reconstruction of this ancient metropolis in present‐day Berlin suggests to visitors that modernity and Mesopotamia are perhaps not worlds apart after all. The sumptuous new exhibition—organized by the Vorderasiatisches Museum/Staatliche Museum Berlin, the Reiss‐Engelhorn Museum Mannheim, and the Curt Engelhorn Foundation in collaboration with the German Archeological Institute and the German Oriental Society (DOG)—commemorates the centennial of the first German excavations at the site of Warka in southern Iraq.     

Communication and Persuasion in a Didactic Exhibition: The Power of Maps Study

This article describes a study of The Power of Maps, an exhibition presented in 1992 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York City. The study compared the result of surveys administered to visitors at the Cooper-Hewitt as they entered and exited the exhibition with a control group of surveys administered to visitors at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, who had not seen The Power of Maps exhibition. It was found that visitors who were surveyed as they entered the exhibition were closer in agreement with the message of the exhibition than the control group. It was also found that visitors surveyed upon exiting The Power of Maps exhibition were in closer agreement with the message of the exhibition than with visitors who were surveyed as they entered the exhibition. The study demonstrates that it is possible to document a change in visitors' conceptions about a topic as a result of hearing about or visiting an exhibition and reliably determine the degree to which exhibitions can influence visitors.     

How Popular Music is Exhibited by Museums in Portugal at the Beginning of the Twenty‐First Century: A Case Study

Popular music is deeply embedded in the dynamics of the contemporary world by means of its capacity to engender modes of privacy and publicness, to communicate emotion, and to enable us to create connections—and so to work within communities. Museums have traditionally addressed art‐music through the exhibition of musical instruments. But now that the exhibition of popular music has presented new challenges and opportunities worldwide for museum professionals, examining popular music discourses in museums is of the utmost importance in order for it to be meaningfully celebrated as instances of heritage. This paper expands on the representation of Popular Music in museums in Portugal at the beginning of the twenty‐first century by discussing a case study: the exhibition No Tempo do Gira‐Discos: Um Percurso Pela Produção Fonográfica Portuguesa at Museu Nacional da Música, Lisbon, Portugal, in 2007. Two methods of analysis are deployed: interviews with the curators, which revealed insights on their understanding of popular music, and analysis of the exhibition through discourse analysis, specifically through the lens of the analytical concepts genre and register. Although the curators had themselves previously developed insightful and innovative concepts with regard to popular music, discourse analysis reveals how, in this instance, the museum practices were primarily inherited from past traditions, and so failed to convey the meanings previously envisioned by the curators. In order for genuine public engagement with museum exhibitions about music, a collaboration is required between the music studies and museum studies professionals. Only through such a collaboration can it be ensured that those contemporary dynamics are present and meaningful.     

On the Road with Rock and Soul

This article reports on a study conducted for an exhibition team at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH). As part of the planning process for a major exhibition, we studied visitors at a small preview exhibition, The Social Roots of Rock and Soul. Personal interviews, including a tape-recorded portion in front of the Rock and Soul display about the images and the themes, were conducted at four venues of the Smithsonian's 150th Anniversary traveling exhibition, America's Smithsonian (Los Angeles, Kansas City, St. Paul, and Houston). The most significant finding from visitor responses is strong regional differences. The study also showed that visitors responded to the images and storyline differently, depending on whether the material was presented through video or panels.     

Visitors' Role in an Exhibition Debate: Science in American Life

In the year after the exhibition Science in American Life opened at the National Museum of American History objections were raised by the exhibition's chief sponsor, the American Chemical Society, and by the American Physical Society. These critics argued that the exhibition gave the public a negative view of science. The Institutional Studies Office was asked to conduct a study to determine whether or not the exhibition was affecting visitors' views of science, and, if so, in what direction. Using an entrance/exit survey design, the study determined conclusively that the visiting public entered the exhibition with a very positive view of science and technology and that their views were reinforced and confirmed by the experience of Science in American Life, rather than changed in either a positive or negative direction.     

Revolution Collected and Curated Russian Revolution: Hope,Tragedy, Myths at the British Library

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the theory of exhibition presentation as a genre, the specific issues of curatorial styles, and the distinct features of exhibitions in libraries. Based on my personal reflections on taking part in curating the Russin Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths exhibition at the British Library, the article discusses the tension between the nature of collections held in libraries and their transformation when turned into an exhibition display, as well as the tension between the purpose of collecting for libraries and collecting for displays. It also presents the author’s experience of the challenges and solutions that exhibitions in libraries normally face. As the number of exhibition projects in all kinds of libraries is growing, the library communities are looking toward a better understanding of how libraries’ special and general collections can function in an exhibition environment and how information professionals can contribute to curatorial practices. Sharing experience about library exhibitions in the wider framework of art and museum curation will help to recognize exhibition curating as a requisite part of librarianship, which might change our perception of libraries and their relations with users now and in the future.     

Recognizing the Relationships between Interactivity,Story, and Message: Lessons Learned from the Summative Evaluation of the Human Plus Exhibition

Interactivity, message, and story are critical, interrelated components of most educational exhibition designs. In this article, we introduce an Interactivity Design Framework for guiding exhibition designers’ intentional inclusion of interactivity, story, and message in exhibition components. This framework emerges from selected findings from summative evaluation of the Human Plus exhibition, which took place at the New York Hall of Science in late 2013. The exhibition was designed to generate interest in engineering among pre‐adolescent girls. Recognizing the target group's interest in human relationships and narrative, the exhibition was designed to be engaging and interactive, driven by compelling narratives of how engineering had enhanced the lives of people with disabilities. Exhibits interwove interactivity and story to convey messages related to both engineering itself and how engineering can meet the needs of people with disabilities. Because of this dual focus, the exhibition evaluation revealed important findings about how, and under what conditions, story and interactivity function to convey message: they can work together or compete.     

Displaying Dinosaurs at The Natural History Museum,London

Dinosaur reconstructions have been exhibited in public for over a hundred years. During that time, scientific and public understanding of these extinct animals has changed considerably. Changes in perception have influenced and been influenced by the three-dimensional reconstructions mounted in museums and galleries, and these in turn have been influenced by the availability and use of mounting materials and techniques. The dinosaur exhibition in The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London contains examples of original, altered, and new dinosaur reconstructions that are described here—two, Gallimimus and Massospondylus, in detail. The final form of any reconstructed dinosaur is often influenced by factors beyond the control of the conservation, preparation, and mounting workers involved.     

Activating exUrbanScreens: Applying Curatorial Design toward Affective Experience in Civic Media Spectacles

As the character of aesthetic experience becomes more complex and multi‐faceted, exhibitions become interfaces that actively mediate between physical and invisible realities. Challenging more conventional forms of exhibition‐making, this situation becomes exaggerated when producing affective exhibition experiences in non‐conventional event‐structures and site‐specific contexts. This article explores how digital mediation and spatial practice can be productively integrated into new program architectures, specifically the type of civic media spectacles associated with the cultural phenomenon of the White Night or Nuit Blanche. The co‐authors engage with the social and cultural dynamics of such “performance spectacles” through the twin perspectives of curator and exhibition designer, which informed the realization of exUrbanScreens, an image‐based arts and new media festival that operated as a multi‐site, distributed nocturnal event. Practice‐based insights give perspective on audience participation in this type of exhibition event and the social dynamics of civic engagement in this particular form of program architecture.     

In Byzantium1

During Spring 1997 we experimented with a research method combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to documenting visitor experiences in The Glory of Byzantium, a special exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to using standard demographic and behavior surveys, a small team of researchers and volunteers gathered information, compared experiences, and summarized their observations of people in the exhibition. Each team member conducted about a dozen structured conversations with visitors as they left the exhibition. Subsequently the team met as an informal focus group to describe their experiences. We found that many museum users arrived with relevant experiences and high expectations for this somewhat specialized exhibition; we also found users whose approach to the exhibition was less well‐informed, but whose enthusiasm and trust for the museum experience moved them to attend with satisfaction. We believe that such team approaches to research might well be used as a regular part of museum work as we search for answers to the many elusive questions about museum use.     

Understanding Visitor Comments: The Case of Flight Time Barbie

Many museums use comment cards, visitor books, and bulletin boards to capture the reactions of visitors. Whether they are collected, counted, skimmed, read, or simply filed, the utility of these documents is rarely questioned. This paper suggests some pros and cons of comment systems and presents an analysis of the comments on an exhibition, Flight Time Barbie, at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. The responses to this exhibition included judgments about the subject matter of the exhibition, opinions about its presentation, and remarks regarding its appropriateness to the museum. The paper concludes by suggesting a practical approach to the analysis of visitor comments.     

A Case Study of “Planetary Landscapes: Sculpting the Solar System”

This article presents a case study of the design, development and evaluation of a science museum exhibition called Planetary Landscapes: Sculpting the Solar System. The exhibition was created by Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California, in collaboration with the artist Ned Kahn. (A slightly smaller version has been traveling to science museums around the country, and has been sent to the Middle East and Asia.) This exhibition affords a chance to explore the work of a gifted artist as he seeks to merge art and science and create beautiful inquiry‐based exhibits. The story also relates how a museum design team and an evaluation team sought to support the exhibition design in ways that would augment and not interfere with the expertise of the artist.     

Paying Attention: The Duration and Allocation of Visitors' Time in Museum Exhibitions

The amount of time visitors spend and the number of stops they make in exhibitions are systematic measures that can be indicators of learning. Previous authors have made assumptions about the amount of attention visitors pay to exhibitions based on observations of behavior at single exhibits or other small data samples. This study offers a large database from a comparative investigation of the duration and allocation of visitors' time in 108 exhibitions, and it establishes numerical indexes that reflect patterns of visitor use of the exhibition. These indexes—sweep rate (SRI) and percentage of diligent visitors (%DV)—can be used to compare one exhibition to another, or to compare the same exhibition under two (or more) different circumstances. Patterns of visitor behavior found in many of the study sites included: (1) visitors typically spend less than 20 minutes in exhibitions, regardless of the topic or size; (2) the majority of visitors are not “diligent visitors”—those who stop at more than half of the available elements; (3) on average, visitors use exhibitions at a rate of 200 to 400 square feet per minute; and (4) visitors typically spend less time per unit area in larger exhibitions and diorama halls than in smaller or nondiorama exhibitions. The two indexes (SRI and %DV) may be useful measures for diagnosing and improving the effectiveness of exhibitions, and further study could help identify characteristics of “thoroughly-used” (i.e., successful) exhibitions.