I’m thrilled to report progress of the museum studies students + staff experiment underway here at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (CMP) and Pitt’s Department of History of Art and Architecture (HAA) since my previous two field reports (co-creating a dynamic museum profession and curation and education). Following our exploration of the Carnegie Science Center, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) as practical and theoretical introduction to museum studies, we have moved to the final type of museum in our inquiry of the current museum field: the natural history museum and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH).
As one of the largest natural history museums in the United States, CMNH conducts field studies and collections-based scientific research of its 22 million specimens to advance the public’s and scientific community’s understanding of our world in the past and present so that we can better understand our relationships with and impact on the natural world for the future. For CMNH, we began by delving into the processes of collecting and storing collections in the Section of Anthropology with Deb Harding (Collections Manager, Section of Anthropology) and Amy Covell (Curatorial Assistant, Section of Anthropology). While looking at a Cherokee object, we were introduced to the object’s history and to best practices for collections care and storage. We also discussed ethics for museums with an introduction to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
We then began thinking about how such collections are enlivened for visitors to the museum’s galleries by preparing for the second open-staff forum, which would deal with the relationships between education and engagement. Mandi Lyon (Program Development Coordinator of the Climate & Urban Systems Partnership) advised our thinking in this session, which quickly evolved into a broad inquiry on the nature of engagement. We asked if engagement was necessary for education, or whether it was more closely related to entertainment in its myriad forms. In response, students broke into groups to outline topics for the upcoming March forum.
To prepare us before the forum we looked to how CMNH links visitor experiences with research of its scientists in the galleries with Becca Shreckengast (Director of Exhibit Experience). We learned about how CMNH is hoping to quicken the traditional exhibit model in natural history museums – like large renovations that change infrequently such as the Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt – with small-scale and frequently rotating prototype exhibits that would ask for and incorporate visitor feedback. Unless participating in a scheduled educational program, exhibits are museums’ primary ambassadors to visitors. To think deeply about the kinds of messages these ambassadors communicate through exhibit design, we analyzed the Walton Hall and found meaning in details such as lighting, color, architectural space, and the amount and organization of objects and text. All this led up to a HAA museum studies guest talk with Thomas Gaehtgens (Director, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles) who emphasized the importance of publics in museum work and scholarly inquiry.
Building on the topic of publics in relation to museum work, the second open-staff forum dealt with the interrelations of education and engagement. This forum was held on March 28 in the Earth Theater, where students designed an interactive program that was well-suited to the intimate space. Each group wrote topics and questions on large post-it notes and hung them around the theater. Staff were asked to circulate through the different groups and engage in small-group conversation before bringing all attendees together for a large discussion. The theater was alive with spirited deliberation in which three dozen staff members from CMNH, CMOA, and HAA debated student questions like: how can working with community partners create new opportunities for education and engagement? To which one staff member simply and eloquently replied, “We learn from them,” remarking on multi-processual modes of learning in and outside of the museum. Another group took on the topic of entertainment as related to engagement and yielded an energetic student + staff dialogue in which Eric Dorfman (Director, CMNH) remarked on the importance of the emotive experience in ensuring learning in museums goes far beyond a specific moment to life practice.
After we all reconvened, main themes emerged in the open discussion: emotional value is essential to incite impact and problem-solving, and the idea of play may be a more accurate word than entertainment in a learning museum context as it allows for action, doing, and process. Entertainment is a packaged and static noun, whereas play is open-ended and invites risk and discovery. Staff commented on the importance of collaboration (especially with new and diverse partners) in a variety of roles, from leading projects to acting as “back-up singers.” In this sense, we must be willing to give up control in order to truly collaborate, and to invite partners to take ownership and exercise personal and communal agency. Throughout the discussion, it was emphasized that museums are educational institutions with a unique opportunity to encourage life-long learning of people of all ages and backgrounds through experiential interaction with physical objects.
In crafting questions for this forum, students were keen to push the dialogue to ask staff about their thoughts and hopes for the future. In part, this was self-serving, as our in-class training would next tackle the future of the museum field at large and its specific cases in the Carnegie Museums. I also see it as a way students began taking ownership of their partnership with museum staff, and imagining themselves as active agents in creating the future of museums. My fourth and final field report will relay our future-forward lessons with staff and projects students design to continue the CMP initiative to be a leading force into the future… until then…
This post is co-published with the Innovation Studio at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.