History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 130-149

Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10700

AN OPEN INVITATION?: ADDING LINKS TO THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF

HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS
Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Edited
by Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski. Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage; Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011. Pp. 336.
ABSTRACT

Gradual changes in the way historians select, interpret, and represent aspects of the past
are related to equally or perhaps more gradual changes in museum practice. Edited collections on this subject reflect the state of both disciplines and offer an opportunity to
evaluate trends, assess progress, and forecast the future. The collection examined in this
review essay focuses on the idea of sharing historical authority: How far have we come?
What methods have been used? What is the value of collaborative effort? Have technological developments, including digital media and the participatory Web, really enabled
more inclusive participation? The analysis of the collection includes specific attention to
the text itself as an exhibitionary object and emphasizes the effects of its unusual design
elements, deictic signals, and heterogeneous genresparticularly the case studies and
thought pieces that form a significant part of the collection. Other focal points include:
the interrogative mood of the text and its call for active reading; explicit historical, social,
and disciplinary contexts; and precursor texts that have addressed similar subject matter.
Keywords: artist, authority, dialogue, exhibition, oral history, public history, public curation, Web 2.0

On more than one occasion in this uniquely conceived and intricately designed
anthology we are reminded of the artist, collector, and museum-maker Charles
Willson Peale (17411827) whose figure hovers anonymously in allusions to
pulling back the curtain. In Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a
User-Generated World those gestures reveal the wider range of practices and
innovations employed almost 200 years later in the discovery, representation, and
exhibition of history. Peale and his iconic self-portrait The Artist in His Museum (1822) are seldom directly named but they do fully emerge when contributor
Melissa Rachleff uses the curtain image in her thought piece on Artists and
Questioning Historical Authority and makes explicit reference to the man and
his monumental work. The visual metaphor is an apt introduction to Rachleffs
intention, to reveal the intellectual issues that govern challenging interpretive
projects particularly those that unite historians, artists, and audiences in a vital
collaborative space of inquiry and exhibition design (Rachleff, 210211). Peale
is named again when Laura Koloski, in a case study of artist interventions at the
American Philosophical Society Museum in Philadelphia, acknowledges his role

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as founder of the first APS museum in 1794. Peales self-representation in the

1822 portrait, which had been commissioned by the museum trustees, emphasizes
his authority over the space, the specimens, and the visitorsall of which he has
carefully arranged in the galleryeven though his proprietary collection had by
this time become a public institution. He is in effect hanging on to his authority
and, as Roger B. Stein notes in a comprehensive, now foundational analysis of
the paintings formal and cultural contexts, Peale has given us a tightly controlled
and highly manipulated yet valuable rendering of the web of relations between
the artist and his world.1
Peales firm hand on a curtain that grants or withholds access is the very gesture of ownership and control we find challenged in the projects discussed here.
In this putatively user-generated world, transparency is valued, the status of the
museum professional, the historian, the visitor, and the collection is shifting, and
stakeholders are assuming new positions and taking on new roles, including the
role of agent-provocateur, the person or thing that incites some action or reaction; a provoking cause. . . .2 The artist is no longer in his museum but in a museum, a physical or virtual place where visitors questions, answers, and objections
might exert significant influence on exhibitions and the making of meaning. In a
dialogue concerning visitor involvement in interactive, Web-based projects like
PhilaPlace, produced by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, for example,
Matthew Fisher explains that technology lowers the barrier for entry into the
process of historical detective work and that there is a profound potential to
pull back the curtain on this process (Fisher and Adair, 55). Similarly, in a case
study of Open House: If These Walls Could Talk at the Minnesota History Center,
Benjamin Filene emphasizes that most of the exhibit elements are not protected
behind glass, sending a message that not only do ordinary people make history;
they can be historians. The assortment of sources pulls back the curtain on the
history-making process and reveals its contingency, its inherent incompleteness,
the art of the craft (Filene, 150, 152).
The guiding purpose of the book, summarized by the editors in a general
introduction, is to explore how public history practice is wrestling with issues of
shifting authority in several realms: the Web, community-based programming,
oral history, and contemporary art (Adair et al., 11). The specific frame and
background are indicated in a foreword by Paula Marincola, Executive Director
of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, in which she explains that the Centers
grants reward artists and arts and culture organizations that engage a broad
range of audiences with meaningful cultural experiences and support an overall
vision that sees culture as critical to a vibrant civic ecology. . . . The volumes
main title announces that audience/visitor participation will be a primary focus,
and Marincolas opening remarks underscore the fact that contributing to a more
civil society is a broader goal of this pragmatic, consequence-oriented text. As
1. Roger B. Stein. Charles Willson Peales Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum.
Reprinted in Reading American Art, ed. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), 40.
2. OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/
view/Entry/3864?redirectedFrom=agent+provocateur (accessed April 28, 2013).

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she notes, the Pew Center functions as a hub or thought leader for discourse
around issues critical to practice, and an ongoing analysis of their grant-funded
activities can extend that temporal and geographical reach. The book draws specifically but not exclusively on the results of the Heritage Philadelphia Program
and efforts to encourage area practitioners . . . to make compelling the connection of the present to the past and the pertinence of history to contemporary life
(Marincola, 7-8). This past/present/future-oriented conception of its subject is
encountered throughout Letting Go? in a multiperspectival approach to the epistemology of historical representations. Throughout the collection, however, we
find references to the always incomplete, open-ended, indeterminate, subjective,
contingenta reminder of the nature, limits, and validity of these efforts.
The inclusion of multiple perspectives, professions, disciplines, and subject
positions is an essential element and is appropriate to the books goals. The
institutional affiliations and professional backgrounds of the editors reflect a
concentration on United States history, and the fact that the Heritage Philadelphia
Program was an initiating impulse for the project suggests that a degree of regionalism is to be expected. The editors include: Bill Adair, Director of the Heritage
Philadelphia Program; Benjamin Filene, Associate Professor, and Director of
Public History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Laura Koloski,
Senior Program Specialist, Heritage Philadelphia. Beyond these current positions
and affiliations, each editor brings substantial and varied professional expertise
to the project. This is also true of the individual contributors, who have a wide
range of academic and museum-specific experience.
It would go against the grain of the text to attempt a neat taxonomy of these
contributors, whose multiple identities and interdisciplinary leanings are a key
aspect of their credentials. (A complete list of authors and titles appears at the
end of this essay.) Many can be included in the broad category of museum professionals (curators, designers, directors, educators, exhibit developers, program
managers, and public historians) and have served in more than one category.
Several hold positions in academia; some are artists; some are public citizens
who have been drawn to the medium of the exhibition or other forms of personal expression without formal training. Given the diversity of minds, methods,
realms of experience, and, as I will also go on to discuss, modes of textual and
visual presentation, the book does not fit neatly into the category of a scholarly/
academic collection of essays. This does not seem to be what the editors were
aiming for, however. The volumes heterogeneity is one of its most original and
apt contributions to how we approach, analyze, problematize, prescribe, and, in
general, think through our practice.
The main title (Letting Go?) suggests a holdor holding patternwhile the
subtitle (Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World) specifies the
stakes and the state of transition or transformation that might unsettle that status
quo. Not surprisingly, the details and dimensions of these conditions are nuanced
and complex, and the contributors identify a range of postures, preferences, and
relationship dynamics that may be involved in resisting and/or bringing about
change. The examination of hard and soft oppositional terms suggests the gaps
that must be bridged between, for example: the expert-driven versus populist

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exhibition (Steve Zeitlin); the raw oral history document versus the cooked
scholarly/specialized presentation (Michael Frisch, 128ff.); and the constructivist
versus transmission-based learning model (Kathleen McLean; Deborah Schwartz
and Bill Adair). The identification of tensions or significant distinctions between
systems of value and method suggests obstacles to be surmounted, including the
inclination to value specialized expertise more than collective energy (Filene,
179), or the preference for an informative versus evocative approach to history (Mary Teeling, 321).
The use of more fluid/third terms, however, points the way to shared terrain: dialectic inclines toward exchange across difference (John Kuo Wei
Tchen and Liz evenko, 83-84), and dialogue can discover the common
ground occupied by experience and expertise (Frisch, 128). Moreover, in
the argument for a research-based practice we hear that a shift and not a dramatic readjustment may be required: in spite of the volumes main title, public
curation is not an abdication of curatorial, educational, or design responsibility.
Rather, it entails a different type of responsibility requiring an equal or perhaps
an even greater level of expertise and knowledge (Tom Satwicz and Kris Morrissey, 196).
I. PERFORMING THE EXHIBITIONARY IMPULSE3

In the process of presenting case studies and other analytical approaches to historical representation, Letting Go? performs the very activity it seeks to study and
thus warrants examination as an object. The exhibitionary impulse that unifies
the subject matter also appears in key elements of form and content. Marincola
notes in her foreword that the volume is itself imaginatively orchestrated and
user-friendly (Marincola, 8), but this may be an understatement. The performative/exhibitionary dimension is evident in the identification of the texts in terms
of genre, including the labeling this entails, and extends to: unusual page designs;
multiple font sizes, colors, and styles; color-coding; high-quality and highly
relevant full-color illustrations; and comprehensive captions. A notable example
of the artfulness of the text appears in a process analysis/case study by Billy
Yalowitz. This anatomy of a community-based performance initiative is amplified by the inclusion of dramatic visual material by Pete Stathis, some of which
dominates the margins and results in a vibrant frame and additional context for
3. In her Introduction to Part 1 of the co-edited volume Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global
Transformations, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains that the term the exhibitionary complex
is a way of signaling a nervous preoccupation with exhibition as a practice. She also credits Tony
Bennetts formative essay of that title (Tony Bennett, The Exhibitionary Complex, New Formations
4 [Spring 1988], 73-102) and his refinement of the concept in his own contribution to Museum Frictions. In substituting impulse for complex I want to signal the evidence of related preoccupations
in Letting Go? and acknowledge a debt to these theorists, particularly to Bennetts understanding of
civic self-fashioning through the use of public/exhibition venues as it has evolved over time. It is
also crucial to remain aware, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, that public museums are by their
nature governmental (35). See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Exhibitionary Complexes (35-45) and Tony
Bennett, Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture (46-69) in Museum Frictions: Public
Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et al., with Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, and Ciraj Rassool (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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the verbal text. Certain design elements may prove helpful as readers navigate the
variety of content; other elements may be distracting. The contributions made by
genre-tagging, fonts, formats, and color-coding are debatable, but a passive reading of the book is almost impossible, and perhaps that is the point.
The editorial matter consists of a foreword, general introduction, and five section introductions, all standard for a volume of this kind. The provocative decision to classify/label the rest of the content according to genre, however, is more
common to literary anthologies. These labels remind readers that form is not only
part of but often determinant of content, and instances of genre slippage indicate
the limits of those classifications. The genres include: five thought pieces, at
least one of which is a thought experiment that ponders the potential results of
its hypothesis; eight case studies, which vary in length and depth of analysis,
so that some might be viewed as illustrative exempla rather than comprehensive
studies of process and product; three conversations, one of which is also identified as a collaborative reflection; one hybrid case study/conversation; one
art piece introduced by a fine prefatory dance around the issue of provenance;
and one extremely useful (and unclassified) analysis of the question of evaluation. Some texts include scholarly apparatus (notes and reference lists); some do
not. This book, perhaps more than most anthologies, calls for decision-making:
How many ways are there of engaging with the collection? What routes are
announced? What routes might active readers devise on their own?
An obvious option would be to follow the lead of the editor-curators and move
through the five clearly organized topical sections, which have been marked out
and reinforced with color-coded header bars at the top of every page. This will
lead to encounters with: 1) Virtually Breaking Down: Authority and the Web;
2) Throwing Open the Doors: Communities as Curators; 3) Hearing Voices:
Sharing Authority through Oral History; 4) The Question of Evaluation: Understanding the Visitors Response; and 5) Constructing Perspectives: Artists and
Historical Authority. However, given the unusual variety of narrative platforms,
a reader might decide to follow the genre indications and, while doing so, consider
those mixed signals sent by the hybrids. As deictic signals they function as a form
of visual and verbal pointing. They provide contextualizing information and they
remind us that form is itself a context that can affect reception. Another option
would be to follow the interrogative mood of the text by reading the series of questionsprinted in a different font colorthat conclude each section introduction.
This might be a highly individualized and perhaps idiosyncratic approach, yet the
physical page, with changes in font color and hypostatic representations of each
question, seems to encourage special notice. An active reader/visitor, inclined to
look for recurring patterns, themes, and moods of address, may find it useful to
collect these explicit questions as well as those posed by the contributors.
II. READING THROUGH THE GENRE: THE CASE STUDY

Readers searching for practical examples may want to start with the case studies
and their analyses of process and product. These texts arguably respond to the
main title by 1) answering yes to the proposal to let go and then 2) report-

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ing on and analyzing the consequences of that decision. The texts vary in length,
degree of critical analysis, and attention to scholarly apparatus. One thing that
many have in common is their candor.
Steve Zeitlins Where Are the Best Stories? Where Is My Story?Participation and Curation in the Media Age is the sole example of this genre in Part 1
(on Authority and the Web). This is an issue-oriented, curators account of
City of Memory, a Web-based project located at www.cityofmemory.org.4 Zeitlin
describes the development of this participatory, dynamic story map of New
York City and its use of extensive documentation from the archives of City
Lore.5 As the public face of those archives, the project was a way to bridge the
populist tell your own story and the expert-driven preserve the finest stories
approaches to technology and storytelling. The result, he explains, is an openended cultural work (Zeitlin, 35, 43).
The first of two case studies in Part 2 (on Communities as Curators) appears
under the general title Moving Pictures: Minnesotas Most Rewarding Film
Competition. It includes contributions from the Greatest Generation project
manager Randal Dietrich and two of the participants, Tom Drube and Matt
Ehling. Dietrich notes that the increased availability of and access to equipment
(hardware and software) made this annual film festival at the Minnesota Historical Society viable. Drube describes the extensive research he conducted as one of
the normal folksmeaning not a professional historianresulting in Remembering Grandma Lucy, a film that seeks to retrieve one womans experience as
a patient at the Ah-Gwah-Ching Sanitarium for Consumptives in the 1920s and
1930s. Drube notes that through this process he became more conscious of the
role of the museum and his own role in documenting the past for the benefit of
the future. In From Book to Film: The Artifacts of Wartime History, Ehling,
another nonprofessional historian, explains that he saw the film festival/contest
as a way to craft a public tribute to his grandfather and make a visceral connection to a historical moment (Ehling, 109, 111). The second example in Part
2, Community as Curator: A Case Study at the Brooklyn Historical Society,
is a hybrid case study/conversation between Deborah Schwartz, President of
the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), and Bill Adair, one of the volumes
co-editors. Although driven by leading questions, this dialogue about the BHS
Public Perspectives Exhibition Series is a candid process analysis of the open
call to Brooklyn residents who had ideas about how to tell history (Schwartz,
113), and a demonstration that sharing curatorial authority online is one thing,
whereas doing it in real space is another (Adair, 119).
Part 3 (on Sharing Authority through Oral History) contains three case
studies, two of which are authored by co-editor Filene. Make Yourself at
HomeWelcoming Voices in Open House: If These Walls Could Talk offers an
excellent issue-oriented process analysis of another Minnesota Historical Society
project (also see Dietrich, Drube and Ehling), in this case a presentation of multiple stories about one ordinary house in the city of St. Paul. Filene recounts
4. Accessed December 4, 2013.
5. Zeitlin is Founding Director of City Lore, a nonprofit organization engaged in educational
programming and cultural activism.

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the details of collecting materials, including written documents and an array of

voices, and he addresses decisions about the placement and content of curatorial
information/labels. In Listening Intently: Can StoryCorps Teach Museums How
to Win the Hearts of New Audiences? Filene takes on a subject that has had a
significant amount of attention.6 He describes the powerful and yet elegantly
simple act of having a conversation in a soundproof booth and, in the process, demonstrating that ordinary people shape history from the bottom up.
Taken together, he explains, these recordings constitute a collective portrait of
America that perhaps resembles Web-based crowd-sourcing (Filene, 175-179).
This is much more than an archival enterprise, he notes, But is it history?
(Filene, 181). The case of StoryCorps becomes a locus for broader debates about
local historyis it too parochial?and about credentialswhere do experts
belong? (Filene, 182, 189). Part 3 also contains a comprehensive case study
by Billy Yalowitz (Associate Professor and Best Unclassifiable Theater Artist of 1997) with valuable visual contributions from artist Pete Stathis. The
Black Bottom: Making Community-Based Performance in West Philadelphia
is a process analysis, placed in full historical context, of a multipart, multimedia
project. This provides an inside look at what happens when community voices
are given the opportunity to tell their stories, challenge official histories, and
address legacies of inequity in the present (Yalowitz, 157). Part 4, devoted to
Understanding the Visitors Response, contains no case studies. As an interlude
in the presentation and interrogation of innovative practice, this singular piece is
well-placed and underscores the need for more consistent, proactive attention to
the theories and methods that can support that goal.
Three case studies in Part 5 (on Artists and Historical Authority) offer usefully different views of the contributions and enlightening disturbances that result
when a creative artist engages with the collections and physical space of the
museum, or historic house, and its firmly instituted conventions and expectations.
In The Fever Dream of the Amateur Historian: Ben Katchors The Rosenbach
Company: A Tragicomedy, Rachleff provides a theorized and historicized process analysis. With Walter Benjamin in the background7 she brings the collecting drive of the founders, the Rosenbach brothers, into perspective, explains the
motivations and actions of the artist/writer Ben Katchor, and attends to some
institutional ambivalence about artist interventions as exhibited by members of
the staff of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. She also considers how constituencies react to the uncovering and representation of buried (for
some, unwanted or unwarranted) histories and hidden transcripts (Rachleff,
248). Site-specific installations are the subject of co-editor Koloskis case study
Embracing the Unexpected: Artists in Residence at the American Philosophical
Society Museum, in which she approaches the complex dynamics of the artist/
visitor/staff relationship through the work of artists Brett Keyser and Winifried
Lutz. Koloski asserts the potential of combined expertise, which allows visitors
6. Filene notes, for example, Nancy Abelmann, Susan Davis, Cara Finnegan, and Peggy Miller.
What Is StoryCorps, Anyway? Oral History Review 36, no. 2 (SummerFall 2009), 255-260.
7. See Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 59-67.

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to gain new ways of understanding the historical content and themes and allows
staff to gain new perspectives on the material; but such results are not guaranteed (Koloski, 266, 268). They require, from all parties, flexibility, patience, and
acceptance of new methods and unfamiliar results. The concluding text, Mary
Teelings A London Travelogue: Visiting Dennis Severs House, is a compelling self-reflexive argument for the value of contrivance and artistry in a place
where many layers of history coexist and where, hopefully, the visitor becomes
the newest participant (Koloski, 310, 307). Overall, the case studies are a major
strength of Letting Go? and support its experiential concentration.
III. TRACKING THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD

The books technique of insistent questioning, set in motion by the main title,
featured in the design elements, and prominent in the case studies noted above,
seems to encourage a level of responsive reading and active engagement consistent with the methods and goals of the innovations and initiatives it considers.
In his critical thought piece, Frisch observes that the books fascinating and
provocative title raises some very large questions, draws on some very broad
assumptions, and frames a very expansive field of inquiry (126). The explicitly labeled conversations are also essentially question-driven and model the
same spirit of inquiry. We are reminded in a thought piece by Kathleen McLean,
however, that a conversation requires an exchange of some sort, a reciprocity
that creates new knowledge and insights. This is where the notion of conversationthe most essential of human interactionscan help museums create more
meaningful relationships with their visitors (McLean, 70). The editors have created a structure for such reciprocity by raising many questions and concerns in
their general introduction. They ask, for example: do changes in the culture fundamentally challenge museums traditional relationships to their constituencies?
They voice widely held concerns: how much will be washed away and what
will the terrain look like afterwards? They challenge their own assumptions: are
museums actually being asked to let go of their position as historical authorities? Is letting go an inexact formulation? Is sharing an appropriate term,
or might the relationship be better characterized as dialogic or collaborative?
One resounding, if evasive, answer is offered at the outset: What the museum
lets go of is not expertise but the assumption that the museum has the last word
on historical interpretation (Adair et al., 11-13).
The inquiry-based framework is reinforced in a standard editors introduction
at the beginning of each section that contains brief opening statements, claims,
and theses, and then raises key questions that situate and foreshadow the texts that
follow. The contributors then raise further questions, some explicit, some subtle,
depending on the genre and approach to the audience. An art piece entitled
Sanford and Sun by the artists collective Otabenga Jones and Associates, for
example, is represented as a television script and glossed by prefatory contextualizations from the books editors and the artists. This unproduced performance
piece, waiting to be performed by the reader, interrogates indirectly by speaking unreliably to the audience in many voices, including the voices that describe

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and raise doubts about its provenance and the circumstances of its creation. This
reader was reminded of another highly performative material discoverya
certain affair of fine red cloth stored in an unofficial archivethat lays claim
to historical authenticity in the Custom-House chapter of Hawthornes The
Scarlet Letter. With the understanding that last words are not the province of
the museum or of this anthology, the following overview of the editors questions
and a sample of the responses and amplifications of the contributors suggest some
of the hopes, fears, and insights that arise in the interrogative process.
The introduction to Part 1, Virtually Breaking Down: Authority and the
Web, places in question: the significance and sustainability of Web 2.0 (the
participatory web); the ability of everyone to be a storyteller, historical interpreter, or curator or docent of their own history; the status of real
objects and real experts in a new virtual world; and the possibility that the
real and virtual worlds could learn from each other and be in dynamic dialogue (Adair et al., 17). Nina Simons thought piece on Participatory Design
and the Future of Museums then proposes a thought experiment. She asks us to
imagine the Web as a history museum. Vast open collections storage facilities,
filled to the brim. . . . What, she wonders, would the museums ten-year institutional vision and/or master plan look like? Simon asserts that it might introduce
more structure, carefully vet and eventually suspend new collections, and
create greater coherence through gallery organization, and that the democratic
principles . . . would be lost. It would eventually become a curated space, one
that is governed by the institution not the users (Simon, 18-19). She contrasts
this scenario with the real Web, which, as it has developed from 20012011,
has stayed true to the inclusive ethos and open protocols of the first generation. Although this statement on the Webs inclusiveness is itself open to debate
and does not take on issues of unequal access to such resources, it does lead to
a very realistic question: Why would a cultural institution want to invite visitors to participate? (Simon, 19, 21). This new model, she responds, could help
in dealing with a lack of effectiveness on the part of the institution and a lack
of engagement on the part of individuals and groups, who may see the museum
as irrelevant, static, exclusionary, and uninterested in the creative contributions
of its visitors. Her prescription, that museum professionals need to think like
Web 2.0 developers (Simon, 22), is strengthened by specific suggestions, for
example, that a community co-creation process could be built into exhibition
planning, and she offers some specific examples. More generally, she suggests
that sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook might provide practical models
worth adapting to museum applications.
In another thought piece, Matthew MacArthur considers the effects of the
digital age on the traditional museum mandate to collect, preserve, and exhibit
physical objects. Now that physical and digital collections have coexisted for
a number of years, he writes, its possible to ask: What have emerged as the
peculiar strengths of each format? (MacArthur, 56). He offers examples of
success but readily admits that digital projects need to be examined in another
context: Research shows that a relatively small number of people make use
of the ability to create their own galleries . . . (MacArthur, 60). This may be

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a compelling caution for educators who create assignments involving digital

resources but perhaps need to engage in more self-questioning about their inflated
estimates of interest and value. Whatever the answers, we may need to present
more rigorous arguments for that value judgment. Research also indicates that
museum visitors still gravitate toward the basic elements that [George Brown]
Goode was advocating more than a hundred years ago: a variety of compelling
objects supported by well-written labels (MacArthur, 62). In addition to the
question of the visitors desire for curatorial authority, the question of the power
of digital environments as sites of exposure arises: can they provide the aura
needed to make deep connections to the past? (MacArthur, 63). Readers may be
left with a healthy degree of doubt, balanced by some confidence that museums
can be better at what they do best if they carefully and creatively incorporate the
potential of new technologies.
In Part 2, Throwing Open the Doors: Communities as Curators, the editors develop the focus on curatorial qualifications. They raise questions about
how we define and assign value to expertise, the degree of content authority
that can or should be shared in community-shaped programming, the visitors
expectations regarding the exhibition of their own cultural productions, the
role of the museum educator, how museums will measure success, and what
excellence and quality [will] look like within this new paradigm (Adair et al.,
69). In a thought piece, McLean raises additional questions that take visitorgenerated inquiry very seriously and bring the journey to that goal into sharp
focus. She asks, for example: How can museum programs and exhibits better
support visitor-generated inquiry?; What skills do visitors need to engage more
deeply? and How can visitor questions inform museum practice? (McLean,
76). Acknowledging that a noviceexpert tension exists within the ranks
of museum professionals, she presents a candid assessment: some museums
have challenged outdated hierarchical models of practice but they are in the
minority; while curators frame the issues and develop the ideas, the designers
and educators are still usually not considered knowledge-creators, and such
practices leave little room for the voices of visitors and community members
(McLean, 71-72). She offers examples of counter-movements and insists that
museums need to stretch beyond existing channels of communication and find
ways to include visitors more interactively, even in the articulation of core questions. Besides conducting focus groups to ask what they think about our ideas, we
should be figuring out how we can bring them to the table as questions are posed
and ideas developed. Museum experts, she explains, need to learn how to listen
and respond, share the inquiry process, and change perspectives as new ideas
emerge (McLean, 76-77). The critical importance of timing begins to emerge as
a recurring theme throughout this volume, and it raises the question: When does
and when should visitor participation begin?
The questions raised by John Kuo Wei (Jack) Tchen and Liz evenko in
The Dialogic Museum Revisited: A Collaborative Reflection, are informed
by years of museum-related practice and a view toward the future. The dialogic
museum quoted in the title refers to an essay by Tchen that appeared in the col-

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lection Museums and Communities (1992),8 which I will go on to discuss as a precursor/context for Letting Go? Tchen now reminds us that Chinese American history was a subaltern history best understood by those who lived the experience
and came from it (Tchen, 82). The exclusion of that history from mainstream
exhibitions gave rise to what became the Museum of Chinese in America and to
broader questions about what was/is not collected and what is not exhibited.
This leads to the related extra-museum question: What dialogues are not going
on? (Tchen, 81). evenko, founding director of the International Coalition of
Historic Site Museums of Conscience, identifies three different ideas, or layers,
of a dialogic museum: one that promotes public discussion of a truth that
has been forgotten or deliberately suppressed; dialogue between academic
historians and people with lived experience; opening the museum as a space
for using new truths about the past as the starting point for discussion about their
unresolved legacies, and what we should do about them. She admits, however,
that there has been resistance to the idea of opening dialogue from or about different perspectives because for some constituents it smacked of moral relativism. One solution may be found in an idea of dialogue that affirms the forensic
truths of the past, while opening debate on the implications of those truths for the
present and future (evenko, 84-85, 87). Tchen argues that we need to confront
foundational questions of history and also trust. How can we trust whats being
written by a historian? What are the sources? Are the sources based in archives
that are truly resonant with the lives of people who are victimized by some of
these laws or on the other side of power? (Tchen, 89). A twenty-first-century
consideration of the epistemology of our historical representations would seem to
require these questions and would benefit from a variety of answers.
In Part 3, Hearing Voices: Sharing Authority through Oral History, the
editors raise questions about expertisein the selection, interpretation, transcription, and transmission of materialsand about the need for professional mediation. The validity and efficacy of the first-person account is also a key point of
inquiry. Hard questions for professionals include: To what extent has the promise of oral history been realized?; Do first-person testimonials really challenge
expert authority, or do professionals fundamentally control how recollections are
gathered and deployed?; and What are the potentials and pitfalls in bringing
participants voices center stage in museum interpretation? (Adair et al., 125).
In Frischs thought piece, From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen,
and Back, he questions the usefulness of calling this realm a user-generated
world and of letting go as an answer to concerns about authority (Frisch, 126127). He suggests that letting go will entail less reliance on searching a digital
resource and greater appreciation of the creative exploration of those resources
(Frisch, 132). He also reminds us that authority in the context of oral history is by
nature sharedthis is not something we can choose to do; rather, it is inherent
in the dialogic nature of an interview, and in how audiences receive and respond
to exhibitions and public history interchanges in general (Frisch, 127).
8. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen
Kreamer, and Steven Levine (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).

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Frischs A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and
Public History (1990),9 like Tchens Creating a Dialogic Museum, is a core text
for professional discourse and practice; like many formative studies, it has been
adopted, adapted, and to some extent misread, making it necessary for Frisch to
underscore the a priori condition of sharing. His sense of oral and public history emphasizes the need for a shared authority in the unity of vernacular
understandings on the one hand, and professional scholarship on the other.
He acknowledges the value of genuine dialogue between them, experience and
expertise being words with a common root and an instructive resonance. . . .
He also addresses what he terms the Deep Dark Secret, the fact that relatively
few researchers actually attend to recorded oral histories, and the Unexamined Assumption that historians must accept the limitations of their reliance
upon written transcription. He finds in digital content-management a way to
bridge the gap between raw materialthe relatively unmediated oral history collectionand the cookedthe result of professional processing, and
advocates a post-documentary sensibility, a stance directed less toward the
either/or of collection stewardship and fixed outputs, and more toward the active
in-betweena more creative, more open-ended, less linear, and hence a more
sharable space (Frisch, 128-130).
In Part 4, The Question of Evaluation: Understanding the Visitors Response,
the editors pose important questions about learning outcomes, the degree to which
visitors actually value the opinions of other visitors and alternate perspectives
like those of contemporary artists. They look beyond the hypothetical individual
to ask: Do communities actually feel more attachment and commitment to institutions that experiment with these practices? (Adair et al., 195). In Public Curation: From Trend to Research-Based Practice (the only text in this section) Satwicz and Morrissey address the importance of assessment and, more generally,
the efficacy of museum-based learning. Those of us who teach in the humanities,
however, know that assessment instruments and practices employed in the hard
and social sciences do not translate directly to, for example, the disciplines of history, literary studies, or philosophy. Moreover, as these authors clearly indicate
in their title, there is a distance to be traveled in any discipline between a trend
and a research-based practice. Their candid assessment of the lack of and need
for assessment includes a comparative research framework of learning goals
(or strands) related to informal environments (rather than classrooms or laboratories). They show how those goals might be (re)mapped across the disciplines
of science and history. The strands they identify for history include, for example:
learning to Reflect on history as a way of knowing and learning about oneself,
ones relationship to the world . . . , and ones connections to worlds that came
before (Satwicz and Morrissey, 200). This leads to valuable questions about the
capabilities and barriers encountered in public curation initiatives: increased
interest and the desire to inquire more deeply, conceptual understanding of the
material and of history as a dynamic and interpreted process, and incentives
for visitors to recognize in themselves the identity of historian (Satwicz and
9. Michael H. Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public
History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

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Morrissey, 201). They also provide a comprehensive definition of Public curation, used here as an umbrella term to encompass Participatory design, userdriven content, and the . . . range of ways public (or non-professional) audiences
are increasingly and collaboratively involved in shaping museum products (e.g.
exhibitions, websites, archives, programs, media), processes (e.g. design, evaluation, research, public discourse), and experiences (Satwicz and Morrissey, 196).
Again, with the kind of candor that characterizes many of the contributions to
this volume, they observe that museums can hold on to their responsibilities
(not their power) through the adoption of research-based practice, characterized
by identifying and challenging assumptions and engaging in iterative cycles of
innovation and research. These assumptions include the belief that public curation is more democratic and inclusive and that participatory design is both more
engaging for the visitor and more beneficial for the visitor and the institution
(Satwicz and Morrissey, 197-198). Once again the reader is challenged to (re)
consider the principles and goals that underlie innovative approaches to historical
representation.
In Part 5, Constructing Perspectives: Artists and Historical Authority, the
editors raise questions of trust in the artist as historiographer, of responsibility
on the part of museums who might be giving up too much, of risk when an artist
exposes difficult or controversial information about the founders, the organization, or the ways in which stories are being told (or not told)?; and of longevity:
can collaborating with artists change organizations or the practice of public
history more broadly? (Adair et al., 207). This section includes an art piece
by Otabenga Jones and Associateswhich reactivates a site of popular culture,
populates it with some unexpected characters, and creates an uncanny exchange
with radical thoughtand a thought piece by Melissa Rachleff, which I will
take up in a consideration of contexts.
One of those contexts is the subject of Mining the Museum Revisited: A
Conversation, in which Fred Wilson, Paula Marincola, and Marjorie Schwarzer
look back at Wilsons exhibition/installation at the Maryland Historical Society
in Baltimore (19921993), remember its historical and ethical contexts, and
reinforce its ongoing importance for the future in terms of inclusion, accuracy,
and creative and provocative exhibitions. This is a revealing question-driven
discussion that will be of special interest to those who regard the exhibit (and
the catalogue edited by curator Lisa Corrin) as a key moment in historiography
and in museology.10 The figure of Wilson as an adversarial rebel turns out to be
inaccurate, given his stated respect for curators and, in general, for both junior
and senior members of the museum staff. He also acknowledges his own as well
as the museums subjectivityI look for truth thats minewhich is not to
say that he lacks respect for the factual (Wilson, 232, 233). Although I have
emphasized the presence of the interrogative mood in the book, this rhetorical
stance is rarely a demand for answerswhich would be inconsistent with the
value assigned to openness and the admission of the contingent nature of facts
and representations. Instead, questioning takes place in a spirit of inquiry.
10. See Mining the Museum: An Installation, ed. Fred Wilson and Lisa G. Corrin (Baltimore: The
Contemporary; New York: The New Press, 1994).

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IV. REGARDING CONTEXTS

The editors and contributors identify a number of relevant political, social, cultural, and disciplinary contexts for their work. These include the legacy of the
New Social History of the 1960s and a focus on telling history from the bottom
up, the anti-authoritarian bent that became a legacy of the culture wars of the
1990s, and the increasing pressure on cultural institutions to attend to ethnic
diversity and economic crises (Adair et al., 11). More specifically, Yalowitz
identifies the effect on ordinary lives of the obliteration of the Black Bottom, an
African American neighborhood destroyed by the Philadelphia Redevelopment
Authority and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 60s (Yalowitz,
157-158). Frisch finds an immediate cause (for his eventually influential work)
in a panel on collaborative community projects at the Oral History Associations
2000 biennial meeting, as well as a subsequent forum, Sharing Authority: Oral
History and the Collaborative Process, in The Oral History Review (2003). In
their analysis of the current status of researched-based practice, Satwicz and Morrissey note the importance of current theory in the learning sciences, particularly
the neurological aspects (and the work of molecular biologist John Medina),
and the social aspects, including the role of social media and the work of Lev
Vygotsky on cooperative communication (Satwicz, 202). The development of
Web 2.0 as a participatory model is, of course, a key context, as are precursor
developments in technology. Zeitlin places the emergence of Web 2.0 within a
larger historical frame. He credits the early twentieth-century invention and dissemination of recording devices and phonographs, developments in radio and
television, and the establishment of initiatives like the American Folklife Center,
that celebrated the stories of ordinary people, as steps that preceded Web 2.0
as democratizing force[s] in American culture (Zeitlin, 37).
In terms of texts, we find specific mention, for example, of Frischs A Shared
Authority, Tchens Creating a Dialogic Museum, Hilde Heins Public Art:
Thinking Museums Differently (2006), George Brown Goodes The Museum of
the Future (1901), and Steven Conns Do Museums Still Need Objects? (2010).
The emphasis on empirical, practical, and experiential accounts in Letting Go?
does not allow much space for the articulation or application of theory. We find
acknowledgment, but not extensive discussion, of the influence of Paulo Freire
and his pedagogical method of student empowerment (Fisher, 48), of Margaret
Lindauers language of hope and the concept of transformative experiences
(Fisher, 49), of Mikhail Bakhtins concept of chronotopes in understanding
the significance of a past time/place from the vantage of the present moment
(Tchen, 82-83), and of the foundational work of Paul Chan Pang Siu (The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation, 1988) and Eric Yamamoto (Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America, 1999)
(Tchen, 83, 93-94).

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Melissa Rachleff offers the volumes only sustained analysis of the influence
of theory on actual practice. She emphasizes the importance of Fredric Jamesons Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, including his
identification of the pastiche and the replacement of the master narrative by
numerous narratives that refer to numerous realities (Rachleff, 215). She
outlines how the critical practices of cultural theory and multicultural identity
converged and how, because these practices relied upon historical research,
the contemporary art community began to look at history more seriously and
the history museum came into view as a distinct ideological space. In contrast,
she finds a resistance to cultural theory in the subfield of public history and
programs in material culture, which hewed closely to traditional notions of
interpretive historic inquiry, preferring the empirical to the epistemological
(Rachleff 216-217). In regard to artist-based performance projects, she considers
their relationship to Relational Aesthetics, a form of art in which the realization
of the work is dependent upon public exchange (Rachleff, 222).
In terms of formative exhibitions as a context, Fred Wilsons Mining the
Museum (19921993) is acknowledged by the editors, regarded retrospectively
in a conversation with its artist/curator as noted above, and further analyzed by
Rachleff, who notes that Wilsons installation demonstrated that a museums
exhibition practices are entangled in its ideological framework (Rachleff,
219). She also observes, however, that the history community has not seemed
to recognize and further explore this kind of project (Rachleff, 223). Also noted
by the editors are two Smithsonian exhibitions, The West as America (1991)
and the Enola Gay exhibition/controversy (19941995), which initially became
subjects of a fierce backlash against revisionist historical interpretations and
then inspired new trends in the representation of a once closely protected national
history (Adair et al., 11).
As a textual event in the continuum of studies that interrogate the practice of
historical representation, Letting Go? joins a substantial list of major collections
published over the last three decades. It is beyond the scope of this review essay
to engage in a detailed comparative analysis of their content. However, given
their focus, sense of context, and statements of purpose, several of these precursors arguably stand as an important context for this collection.11 With the appearance of History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (1989),12
11. A comprehensive comparative analysis of these and other critical volumes devoted to public
history and museum representations would be both useful and revealing, perhaps as a dissertation
topic in the discipline of historynot least because it would attempt a history of such anthologies
as well as a history of relevant exhibition projectsand/or as a non-genre-specific interdisciplinary
museum-studies analysis. In addition to the texts specifically discussed here, other volumes of collected essays that warrant considerationand this is a very partial (selective and subjective) list
would include in reverse chronological order: Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics
and Society, ed. Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown, and Amy Sodaro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Americas Museums. Ddalus 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999). Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian, ed. Amy
Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler (Washington, DC; London: Smithsonian Institution, 1997); and
Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain, ed. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (London:
Leicester University Press, 1997).
12. History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy
Rosenzweig (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

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historical representations in museums became a vital subject for analysis within

and beyond the multidisciplinary field of museum studies. These compilations
continue to extend their reach, and as we see in Letting Go? they now encompass
more activities sited in spaces outside public and private institutional walls.
Prior to the publication of History Museums in the United States, Roy Rosenzweig collaborated with Susan Porter Benson and Stephen Brier as editors of
Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (1986), which inaugurated
the series Critical Perspectives on the Past.13 In the Preface they acknowledge
the new generation of historians who were intellectually and politically shaped
by the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and
they identify a new kind of history that explores long-neglected subjects
and critically re-examines the centers of power and authority around the world
. . . beyond the confines of academe.14 In the Introduction they place their collection within a growing body of literature about public history and make the
critical point that their volume addresses broader and more analytical questions
than much of the professional writing in this vein, including the place as well as
the efficacy of historical consciousness in American life. . . .15 They then warn
that, despite the successes, . . . the prospects for a more inclusive vision of history
are growing dimmer in the 1980s due in part to a conservative political power
base and cuts in funding sources like the National Endowment for the Humanities. They also complain that most peoples history projects have operated from
the top down. Experts or professionals prepared a productwhether film, play,
exhibit, or pamphletfor a largely passive audience.16 This complaint resonates
twenty-five years later in Letting Go? where we find that it is still necessary to
work against a current of top down history, a tendency to rely heavily on professional expertise, and a persistence of exclusionary norms.
As noted above, History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment
marked out a crucial area of inquiry and remains a core text for museum studies.
Leon and Rosenzweig note in their Introduction that the book seeks to fill a gap
in the absence of critical scrutiny of museum-based historical presentations.17
They observe that recent historical scholarship has and has not been translated
into museum presentations in spite of developments in the so-called new social
history, and they warn that even an approach to history from the bottom up
can result in the same sort of celebratory history found in traditional greatman accounts.18 In Letting Go? complaints about the resistance to theory still
resonate, and we find repeated calls for more pointed applications of theory to
museum practice. We also hear a call for greater application of the findings of
learning research (albeit originating in the sciences) and for application of
those findings to public history curation and programming.
13. Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier,
and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
14. Ibid., xi.
15. Ibid., xvi.
16. Ibid., xxii-xxiii.
17. Leon and Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States, xii.
18. Ibid., xvii-xviii.

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In the early 1990s, two volumes appeared and arguably set a standard for
conference and/or project-related anthologies. The conferences, held in 1988 and
1990, were convened jointly by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Smithsonian
Institution. The first led to the publication of Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics
and Politics of Museum Display (1991).19 Editors Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine
make a number of points in their introduction that now stand as foundational
assumptions for ongoing research, analysis, and professional practiceeven if
they are not always reflected in the exhibitions we subject to critical scrutiny.
They note, for example, that: Decisions about how cultures are presented reflect
deeper judgments of power and authority . . .; that exhibition designers are still
struggling to invent new ways to accommodate alternate perspectives; and that
we need experiments in exhibition design that try to present multiple perspectives or admit the highly contingent nature of the interpretations offered.20
The second conference led to the publication of Museums and Communities:
The Politics of Public Culture (1992), edited by Karp, Lavine, and Christine
Mullen Kreamer. As Karp explains in the general introduction, a main focal point
here is the position of museums as institutions and agents of civil society and
as places for defining who people are and how they should act and as places for
challenging those definitions.21 This is not to suggest, of course, that museums
offer equal access or equal time to all individuals or communities. Karp emphasizes that the institutions of civil society can either support or resist definitions
imposed by the more coercive organs of the state and that, in the case of museums: the collections and activities are intimately tied to ideas about art, science,
taste and heritage. Hence they are bound up with assertions about what is central
or peripheral, valued or useless, known or to be discovered, essential to identity
or marginal.22 Clearly these assertions about the margins and the center have
survived into the present, as do attempts to override their truth claims. Letting
Go? offers evidence that a combination of democratizing technologies, historical
consciousness, and ethical imperatives has enabled those efforts to become more
widespread and more prominent.
Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits also appeared in
1992.23 Kenneth L. Ames explains in Peering into the Process: An Introduction
that this collection of essays can be traced back to the Common Agenda for History Museums, a project that began in 1987 with the support of the American
Association for State and Local History. The overall purpose was to produce
better history exhibitions and, in furthering that goal, to produce an exhibition
reader that focused on analyses of the elusive creative process. The contributors were given a long list of questions to consider and many are revisited two
decades later in Letting Go? The issues they address include: the positions and
roles of key decision makers, consultants, specialists, and designers, and the
19. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven
D. Lavine (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
20. Ibid., 2, 4, 7.
21. Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities, 4.
22. Ibid., 5, 7.
23. Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits, ed. Kenneth L. Ames, Barbara
Franco, and L. Thomas Frye (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1992).

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degree of collaboration involved.24 In Finding Common Threads: An Afterword, Ames identifies the volumes recurring topics, many of which resonate
in Letting Go? They include: the value of flexibility, openness, and evolution
throughout a projects development; the need to evoke in people specific patterns of feelings about an event, a movement, a legacy of the past; the importance of asking, Whose voice, whose view, will dominate the exhibition?; and
the need to build evaluation into the process.25 The case study/process analysis
model explicitly employed in Ideas and Images reappears in a less consistent and
less systematic form in Letting Go?26
The third collection in the Smithsonian series appeared more than a decade
after Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities and is relatively contemporaneous with Letting Go? Published in 2006, Museum Frictions: Public
Cultures/Global Transformations27 had its roots in the Rockefeller Foundation
humanities programming that began in 2002. In their Preface, Ivan Karp and
Corinne Kratz, two of the co-editors, reflect on the earlier conferences and
resulting volumes: We wondered what issues would have characterized the
conferences had they been held ten years later, in the new millennium, and what
themes. . . . Their decision was to focus on a critical concept of globalization,
to move beyond the United States, and to include a greater range and weighting of international cases.28 In their foreword, co-editors Lynn Szwaja and
Tmas Ybarra-Frausto also note the issue-oriented global focus on race, gender,
and ethnicity, developing countries, and transnational or diasporic issues and
identities.29 Museum Frictions goes on to include analyses of the representation
of slavery and, more expansively, of African American history, while enlarging
its reach to issues and praxis in locations as far apart as Australia, Cambodia, and
Peru. Szwaja and Ybarra-Frausto point out that in recent years the Rockefeller
Foundation has sought to address, interrogate, and theorize notions of cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) and to encourage community cultural development projects that use oral history and dialogic exhibitions to probe
histories of repression and conflict and to safeguard memory.30 Although Letting
Go? addresses primarily US initiatives, they are informed by the discourse on
universal human rights. Most if not all twenty-first-century approaches to how we
address issues of exclusion, silencing, inequality, and displacement, for example,
will be inflected with realities and concerns that extend beyond borders, as is
evident in evenkos discussion of the International Coalition of Historic Site
Museums of Conscience.31
24. Ibid., 1-4.
25. Ibid., 323.
26. See, for example, Clement Alexander Price, Been So Long: A Critique of the Process That
Shaped From Victory to Freedom: Afro-American Life in the Fifties, in Ames, Franco, and Frye,
eds., Ideas and Images, 9-30, and Lonnie Bunch, Fueled By Passion: The Valentine Museum and Its
Richmond History Project, in ibid., 283-311.
27. Karp et al., eds., Museum Frictions.
28. Ibid., xvi-xix.
29. Ibid., xi.
30. Ibid., xii-xiii.
31. For an analysis of the global common ground shared by aspects of our national history see, for
example, Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia, ed. Carla Hesse and Robert
Post (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

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V. CONCLUSION: RECONSIDERING THE FIGURE OF THE CURTAIN

Taking into account recent developments in public history, oral history, the
participatory Web, and innovative museum practiceincluding artists interventions, forms of collaboration, and efforts to increase visitor engagementit
would be inaccurate to suggest that Peales hold on the gallery curtain has the
same metonymic power it had even fifty years ago. But how inaccurate would
it be? Few if any institutions, founders, or staff members could overtly insist on
the degree of ownership and control of national, regional, local, or natural history we find depicted in Peales self-portrait. We now have a habit of questioning
motives, expertise, interpretations, and the synecdochic value of our selections:
how much, for example, can a single slice of history reveal about the whole?
(Filene, 139). We are slowly expanding our definition of the archive to include
content that has been actively excluded or suppressed, or simply ignored. We are
becoming more attentive to the complexities of memory, testimony, and other
personal and collective claims to truth. There is persuasive empirical evidence in
Letting Go? that we have reason to be optimistic about the future of sharing,
but, like all states of mind, our conclusions and forecasts are inevitably subjective, contingent, and open to revision.
Bettina M. Carbonell
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
APPENDIX

This list of the contents of Letting Go? does not include editorial matter; genre designations are included in square brackets if they do not appear in the title.
Nina Simon, Participatory Design and the Future of Museums [thought piece]
Steve Zeitlin, Where Are the Best Stories? Where Is My Story?Participation and Curation in the Media Age [case study]
Matthew Fisher and Bill Adair, Online Dialogue and Cultural Practice: A Conversation
Matthew MacArthur, Get Real! The Role of Objects in the Digital Age [thought piece]
Kathleen McLean, Whose Questions, Whose Conversations? [thought piece]
John Kuo Wei Tchen and Liz evenko, The Dialogic Museum Revisited: A Collaborative Reflection [conversation]
Randal Dietrich, Moving Pictures: Minnesotas Most Rewarding Film Competition:
Introduction by Dietrich; Tom Drube, Remembering Grandma Lucy; Matt Ehling,
From Book to FilmThe Artifacts of Wartime History [case study]
Deborah Schwartz and Bill Adair, Community as Curator: A Case Study at the Brooklyn
Historical Society [case study/conversation]
Michael Frisch, From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back [thought
piece]
Benjamin Filene, Make Yourself at HomeWelcoming Voices in Open House: If These
Walls Could Talk [case study]

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Billy Yalowitz and Pete Stathis, The Black Bottom: Making Community-Based Performance in West Philadelphia [case study]
Benjamin Filene, Listening Intently: Can StoryCorps Teach Museums How to Win the
Hearts of New Audiences? [case study]
Tom Satwicz and Kris Morrissey, Public Curation: From Trend to Research-Based Practice [unclassified and the only text in The Question of Evaluation section]
Melissa Rachleff, Peering behind the Curtain: Artists and Questioning Historical Authority [thought piece]
Fred Wilson, Paula Marincola, and Marjorie Schwarzer, Mining the Museum Revisited:
A Conversation
Melissa Rachleff, The Fever Dream of the Amateur Historian: Ben Katchors The
Rosenbach Company: A Tragicomedy [case study]
Laura Koloski, Embracing the Unexpected: Artists in Residence at the American Philosophical Society Museum [case study]
Otabenga Jones and Associates, Sanford and Sun [art piece]
Mary Teeling, A London Travelogue: Visiting Dennis Severs House [case study]