Three years ago, I wrote about immersive memorials - the idea of places where objects and points of memory are dispersed through spaces, rather than being localized in one place. The example I used were Stolpersteine, the brass “stumbling block” cobblestones that mark the former residences of Holocaust victims throughout Europe. When I first wrote…
What happens when museums create space for others to talk about controversial issues?
I don’t know if this exhibit title was intended to make me laugh, but I did and I love it for that.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium does some of the most elegant and evocative labels I’ve ever seen. Here are some of the ones that captured my imagination recently.
What happens when visitors explore life in the ocean during Arctic winter using flashlights in a pitch black room?
I’m so pleased to share that my recent piece, “Telling Stories with Invisible Objects,” was republished by Riksutställningar, The Swedish Exhibition Agency - and in Swedish, too! Att organisera berättelser kring föremål verkar vettigt i utställningsform. Men i en podcast eller ett öde landskap? SPANA:s gästskribent Katie Bowell skriver om konsten att bygga berättelser kring det som…
It’s no secret that I don’t like traditional dioramas. But apparently I do like it when it looks like traditional dioramas have exploded and scattered animals throughout the exhibit. I like it a lot. Last week I visited the National Museum of Scotland. And it was a lovely, if somewhat predictable, experience until I got…
A few weeks ago, my students and I were talking about what pieces of current pop culture we thought would have sticking power. What references, songs, movies, and taglines from today will people still be using thirty years from now? Will our future be full of YOLOs, hashtags, twerking, and fetch? Just kidding. Fetch is never going…
While working on a new evaluation project with the Freiburg Museum Natur und Mensch, I’ve come across an interesting example of how un-prompted visitor-contributed content can work. In the temporary exhibit “Letzte Ölung Nigerdelta,” one room invites visitors to sit and watch a projected series of photographs exploring the social, economical, and environmental affects of the oil industry…
Because no matter how big you make the first one, you’ll probably need four more. For a more gorgeous use of arrows, see how Double Portrait at the Philadelphia Museum of Art did it right. Now that’s how you add more arrows.
Museums Askew 