NYC Museums over Spring Break

Spending the week of spring break in New York City was great for visiting Museums and thinking about what some of the best endowed and most creative are doing on the cutting edge of museum practice. This is the first of a couple of posts about the museums that I saw.

The Tenement Museum is a great example of new museum style. The museum has taken an old tenement house on the lower east side of Manhattan at 97 Orchard Place to tell the story of immigration to the United States. The tenements started to be built in the 1860s when the demand for low cost, high density housing went up.  The neighborhood was first called “Little Germany” when the tenements were new and housed more bourgeois Germans coming as political refugees with some wealth to invest. They created the third largest German settlement in the world in NYC. When they began moving out Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe came, followed in the twentieth century by Italians. There is no “museum” as we would think of the term with displays but a number of tours of up to fifteen people that take you into parts of the restored tenement apartments or stores and into the neighborhood on walking tours. Not all of the building is restored so you still see the ruins of how the building looked when they bought it to being the restoration.   

http://www.tenement.org/

Here are some things I found useful and exciting about the museum:

1.      The educators were knowledgeable and committed. The two tours we had were led by people who had been there 5 years and 20 years. The young woman who did the neighborhood tour with us had an undergraduate liberal arts degree and said she works part time as an educator and part time in curation. The staff is given a lot of continuing education by experts and develops their own knowledge base. She said that this is a place one could build a career, not just as temporary stop. You increasingly get more responsibility as you prove yourself in the organization.

2.      The museum had a clear social activism stance toward their work. The guide who took us through the apartments said, ‘we at the museum are concerned that immigrants coming into NYC today may not have the same chance to begin their stay in America in this neighborhood because the price of land and housing is going up so dramatically.’ They are working not only for historic preservation in the neighborhood but in advocacy for the current immigrants who live there – currently mostly Chinese, Asian and Latino. New tours are looking at the issues of current immigrant communities and both tours said that American is enriched and depends on this constant infusion of new ideas and fresh inspiration – that we would be the poorer without immigrants. One guide said that getting a job here is competitive and that a degree in public history would help but is not required. One thing they look for in hiring is a variety of different experiences and perspectives that the staff bring to the museum – a commitment to social activism being high on that list.

3.      Each of the guides worked to connect the past with the present. On the neighborhood tour we heard stories about the great depression and how people survived, the informal economy of the pushcart business (outlawed by the mayor in the 1930s), the Jewish socialist newspaper (Forward, in Yiddish) that was founded in this neighborhood by intellectuals who worked in the cigar factories. This was the largest garment industry in the US at the time and produced something like 75% of men’s readymade clothing.  The tenements were finally closed when government regulations made it impossible to keep them open.  So of course there were connections to sweatshops, public policy, social activism etc. People in the tour were encouraged to make these connections and the tours were dialogic. They did not engage in nostalgia about an idealized past but rather using the past to think about the present.

4.      Each of the tours was built around a single theme. The neighborhood tour started out by the guide saying, ‘I am going to show you how immigrants adapted to American life in this neighborhood and how America was adapted to and changed by the immigrants.’ The tour of the tenement apartments began with, ‘I am going to show you through the stories of two families why American needs immigrants and how it is built by and made stronger by a constant flow of new people.’

5.      The tours were structured around personal stories of individuals and families.  In the tenement building we did a tour called “Hard Times” that highlighted the perseverance and ingenuity of immigrants facing adversity. We were in two reconstructed apartments of an early German Jewish family and a later Italian Catholic family. We learned the names of the people who lived there, heard their stories, were shown documents and photos of their lives and heard about their currently living descendants who helped put together the stories. So the tenements became places with named people who had connections to real people who are alive today – one who died in the 9/11 disaster.  Each guide carried around laminated copies of documents.

The National Museum of the American Indian with collections in Washington DC and NYC is also very well done and demonstrates some of the best practices in museum exhibits. The museum is based on a private collection of George Heye beginning at the end of the 19^th century. The museum is down near Wall Street and the financial district so an interesting walk too. It is housed in the old custom's building  which is quite grand on its own.

http://nmai.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/newyork/

Here are some of the things that I noticed at this museum:

1.      The story behind the collection of the artifacts was included in the exhibit. Rather than presenting the objects out of context they exhibits told how Heye got a hold of them. In one case he bought the Northwest Coast objects for a very low price because the potlatch was outlawed by the federal government and the goods confiscated when they held an illegal potlatch. The government then sold the goods at an auction. By doing this one connects what was collected with a very particular time frame and historical context of the collector rather than seeing them as timeless pieces.

2.      The Great Lakes exhibit mixed contemporary native artists and traditional artifacts. A special temporary exhibit in the museum was organized each room around a theme in which older artifacts were displayed together with recent Native artist renderings of the same theme. For example on of the themes was the spirit world – the sky thunderbirds and the water panthers. One could see the same symbolic world playing out in contemporary paintings as well as buckskin pouches. 

3.      Where possible the creators/owners of the objects were named and their stories told.  Amidst all of the displays there were always a few objects highlighted by telling the personal story of the people behind them, often with photos or oral history. Like the tenement museum this made lives of real people much more apparent.  In addition many of the objects had explanations of their use and meaning by named native people. This helped us to appreciate the objects beyond their function and see them in a larger symbolic world and cultural context.

4.      The exhibit featured the ways that native and anglo culture interacted. This allowed them to tell the stories of oppression of Native cultures but also to show the new hybrid forms that emerged from trade goods and the tourist trade.  The exhibit avoided the depiction of a reified and idealized native culture that did not change over time, but rather showed the dynamic ways that people adapted in spite of domination and destruction.

5.      A limited number of objects were on display in fairly sparse arrangements. Each exhibit case featured a focal point in a story or object so that your attention was not so scattered. There were clear explanations of  the context of each region and set of objects. Each section included interactive video screens and video clips of interviews that explained the artifacts. By displaying fewer objects you could concentrate more on each one and the overall effect was beautiful.