First Person Museum. First Person Arts. Seth C. Bruggeman, Julia Foulkes, and Tom Sugrue, historical consultants; Katthleen McLean and Elizabeth Tinker, museum consultants; Dana Dorman, museum coordinator. Painted Bride Art Center (Philadelphia, Pa.), November 5-December 18, 2010.
The First Person Museum touts itself as “a museum of the people.” Exhibiting sixteen “ordinary” objects—from a wedding ring and a tie-dyed t-shirt, to a fishing license and a passport—alongside “the personal and societal stories that give them their worth,” the First Person Museum seeks to uncover “the worth of our homes, our things, and our stories,” as one of the large exhibit texts declares. Judging by the publicity material and the captions contextualizing the exhibit itself, museum coordinators want visitors to recognize that our stuff and the memories it engenders do not simply reveal our values, but society’s values as well.
This attempt to link individual objects and their stories to broader concerns within the body politic seems like a gallant endeavor, and certainly one akin to “doing history,” which I would define as “the situating of a particular circumstance from the past within a social, cultural, political, and/or economic context through careful and responsible scholarly inquiry.” But the First Person Museum is not strictly a history museum, a fact made patently obvious by a quick glance at its five exhibit goals:
- Visitors will recognize that they endow objects with value.
- Visitors will understand that the person and his/her story is the focus.
- Visitors will be able to articulate an emotional response to the stories in the exhibit.
- Visitors will understand that the meaning of an object is influenced by time, place and experience.
- Visitors will think about their own stuff differently.
None of the exhibit goals expressly identifies the acquisition of historical knowledge as a hoped-for result of museum patronage; none of the goals explicitly anticipate the exhibit leading visitors to a better understanding of the social and cultural influences that give “meaning” to our “stuff.” How, then, does history figure into the First Person Museum?
