Curator

Whether museums want it to be or not, their audiences are composed of diverse social categories that must be embraced and represented.

In July 2019, Curator: The Museum Journal published a special issue called Sonic. As part of that issue, we explored our archives and uncovered seven papers where sound experience in museums was a central subject of scholarly study. These papers were made open access from July 1st, 2019 – December 31st, 2019.

I saw the first major survey of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s work at an exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C., at the end of 2016. The talk of the exhibition was Woman in E (2016), featuring a succession of live performers rotating through a perpetual strumming of that single note on an electric guitar.

As a museum educator who has spent two decades thinking about object-based education, I found the shift to children’s museums challenging. Where are the objects? Why is this a museum? What allows us to claim special educational status for these charming play spaces? To find answers, I turned to the literature. This virtual issue contains findings of my search: nine articles, selected from the Curator archives, on the topic of children’s museums.

Beverly Sheppard, Marsha Semmel, and Carol Bossert David Wildon Carr (1945–2016) was recognized in the international cultural community as a scholar and instigator whose critical thinking challenged museum practitioners to reflect on the purpose and responsibility of their work. In his recent papers and lectures, he argued that those discussing museum experiences are late to enter into a dialogue already in progress—a dialogue which carefully considers the whole person in a community, and wherein thinking with a museum is an enterprise embedded in the learner’s experience.

Warwick Anderson In the early 1920s, young Louis Sullivan, collecting Polynesian skulls for the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and the American Museum of Natural History, faced stiff competition for the valuable items from Ales Hrdlicka, a rival physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. “Hrdlicka gets everything that isn’t nailed down,” Sullivan lamented. “He surely is a hog of collectors.”[i] Collecting was what museum men did, often voraciously. Acquiring some more Polynesian skulls a few years later in the South Seas, Harry L. Shapiro, also from the American Museum of Natural History, referred ambivalently to his “collector’s cupidity.” In the Tuamotus, when he heard of a skull recently reburied in a cemetery, the physical anthropologist “reacted to that as simply and decisively as the hind leg of a frog to an electric spark.” Somewhat regretfully, he “abstracted” the skull at night and hid it in his laundry till he could get it to New York.[ii] As a career museum man, Shapiro had taken to heart the precept of his mentor, Franz Boas: …