Temple to Forum

    We begin collecting early, often as children. Showing off our collections and looking at others is fun and interesting. As a fourth grader my daughter earned a Girl Scout Collections badge with her Beanie Babies. To earn the badge each girl selected the items to exhibit and decided how best to display them. As well as teaching them some curating and exhibition skills, the girls learned about themselves each other.  Collections and the way they are exhibited is a statement about the person, and for that matter, an institution. The Girl Scout badge is just one recognition of the importance of collections in our lives. 

My daughter Julie shows her Beanie Baby collection to her fellow Girl Scouts.

    In the Introduction to their book Exhibiting Cultures, Karp and Lavine refer to the work of Duncan Cameron which considered two differing functions of museums. The traditional role has been one of a temple, while the contemporary few is the museum as a forum. 

 The concept of the museum began in the Third Century B. C., not so much as a place for collecting things, as a way to collect knowledge. With quite an impressive faculty, including Archimedes and Euclid, the evolution of museums had begun. A considerable period followed where objects were collected, but not for educational purposes. Motivation was either hoarding or collecting curiosities. Not until the Renaissance of the 14th to the 16th century did the purpose of the museum become enlightenment. That was when the word “museum” or “place sacred to the Muses” came into use in Florence to describe the Medici collection. 

     Although the first museums may have housed important art and artifacts, they were certainly not available to the public. Not until the end of the 17th century were museums  open to the public with the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum one of the first. By the middle of the 18th century the British Museum opened to a restricted audience. Even with its long history, the Louve was not a truly public museum until after the French Revolution.

    Traditions in the U.S. were not the same. The earliest museums were accessible to the "public", although “public” certainly did not include everyone. It was not until the Civil Rights crusades that museums became open to people of color. Case in point, the stellar exhibit of Africa and Oceania Treasures at Tugaloo College in Jackson, MS would probably not exist if black students had had access to the local museums. Genevieve McMillan saw that as a problem and gifted the college with part of her collections.

     Although the education and public service mission of museums has existed, at least in U. S. museums, since the earliest days of the republic, the drive to be more relevant to society quickened mid twentieth century. Museums had to adapt to changes in technology and society. There was competition for people's leisure time with the advent of TV. Funding issues are always a challenge. Images could be reproduced easily, people became more mobile, and now, with Google Street View, many museums can be viewed anytime, anywhere. Museums have responded with efforts to reach a larger and more diverse audience, with objects, ideas, forums and contributions to social welfare.

     So it is with pleasure to find that important institutions around the world belong to the International Coalition of Site of Conscience, a “global network of historic sites, museums, and memory initiatives connecting past struggles to today’s movements for human rights and social justice”. Almost 200 institutions are grouped into the eight regions of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, North America and Russia. Locally the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site is a member. So are two of the sites included in this study: The International Folk Art Museum and The New Mexico History Museum, both in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

     The mission of the coalition states: "We are sites, individuals, and initiatives activating the power of places of memory to engage the public in connecting past and present in order to envision and shape a more just and humane future." Founded in 1999 with 12 model sites the coalition has grown to almost 200 sites today. Each Region participates in a project appropriate for their part of the world. The project for North America is “Immigration and Civil Right”. Serendipitously the International Folk Art Museum was showcasing an exhibit “Between Two Worlds: Folk Artists Reflect on the Immigrant Experience” at the time of our visit.

     Another evolution in the role of today’s museum is audience participation, an expectation that an institution will educate in an engaging way. Author and Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History Nina Simon is a leading proponent of audience participation. Happily we found he ideas put into practice in these selected museums.

The museum exhibits in this study have very little to do with temples and very much to do with forums.