Full Description
Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process, and Practice offers a new model for understanding exhibition design in museums as a human and material process. It presents diverse case studies from around the world, from the nineteenth century to the recent past.
It moves beyond the power of the finished exhibition over both objects and visitors to highlight historic exhibition making as an ongoing task of adaptation, experimentation, and interaction that involves intellectual, creative, and technical choices. Attentive to hierarchies of ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and ableism that have informed exhibition design and its histories, the volume highlights the labour involved in making museum exhibitions. It presents design as filled with personal and professional demands on the body, senses, and emotions. Contributions from historians, anthropologists, and exhibition makers focus on histories of identity, collaboration, and hierarchy 'behind the scenes' of the museum. They argue for an emphasis on the everyday objects of museum design and the importance of a diverse range of actors within and beyond the museum, from carpenters and label writers to volunteers and local communities.
Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum offers scholars, students, and professionals working across the museum and design sectors insight into how past methods still influence museums today. Through a postcolonial and decolonial lens, it reveals the lineage of current processes and supports a more informed contemporary practice.
Contents
Part 1: Exhibition Makers: 1. Exhibition Work: Exploring Labour in the Federal Community Art Center Project; 2. Putting Joseph Towles' Name in the Credit Line: Institutional Racism at the American Museum of Natural History; 3. 'Miss Hall and her Busy, Energetic Design Group': The Emergence of Professional In-House Design at the British Museum; 4. An Immersive Journey - Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia & Alaska (1986-92); 5. A Latin American Model of Professional Training in Exhibition Design: Alliances, Outcomes and Challenges; Part 2: Beyond the Museum: 6. Fashioning the Beaton Portraits: 1928-1968 Exhibition; 7. Collaboration and Exhibition Making at Cartwright Hall: Strategies of Permanence; 8. The Re-Crafting of Design: Towards an Ethnographic Perspective in Chinese Exhibition Design; Part 3: The Material Culture of Display: 9. The Afterlives of Labels: Materiality and Labour in the Science and Technology Exhibition Label Archive of National Museums Scotland; 10. Ethnonational Identity and Mannequins in History Museums in Korea and Japan; 11. Exhibition Design and the Construction of Race, Gender and Class in the First Ladies Hall of the United States National Museum; 12. 'Above All Matter of Facts': Material Knowledge, Exhibition Culture and the Making of Economics; Part 4: Exhibition Afterlives: 13. 'Gesamtwirkung': Researching Wilhelm von Bode's Design for the Exhibition of Old Master Paintings (1883) as a Model for Future Museum Practice; 14. Visual Interventions: Exhibition Graphic Design as Critical Practice; 15. The Living Area at the Sainsbury Centre: Looking Back to Look Forward; Index.
