Practical Questions to Inform Planning a New, Hermeneutics-Inspired Museum Exhibit

I use eight questions when planning a new museum exhibit to maximize its potential to serve as a hermeneutically-informed interpretive space where both the visitors and the museum can expect to have a transformative conversation from which each will emerge with, and be able to articulate an expanded, more nuanced or even different understanding? These questions were developed from my professional experience as the executive director, for nearly seven years, of the Bolduc House Museum in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. More recently, I submitted these practice-based ideas and commitments to academic literature in museology and cultural theory during my doctoral studies and research at the University of Leicester. 

1)      What is the purpose of the exhibit and of each artifact or other resource to be included in the exhibit? Make sure to state this without using educational terms. Do not say that the visitor will learn, discover or understand something. Instead, pose an essential question or set of questions. For example, when I was creating the exhibit “The African Experience in Colonial Ste. Genevieve”, my essential question was how could the contributions of Africans in that colonial community be honored today. My goal was to disrupt the silence of the current community, which is 98% white, about how much we owe to the enslaved Africans that made up more than 40% of the colonial community.

2)      What does the museum bring to the conversation? Usually this will be artifacts in the collection and documents and images in the archives. It will be important to revisit provenance to evaluate how it may perpetuate any persistent stereotypes or social injustices. This does not invalidate the usefulness of the item. It raises the potential that there may be other ways to understand what has been documented that are even invisible to the museum. For example, I along with every white museum professional familiar with the Ste. Genevieve community and history that I asked, did not even recognize that there is a possibility that the platform extending from the porch of the Janis House, built in 1792, could have been used as a platform from which enslaved Africans were bought and sold. It is the very first thing that a visitor who taught African Studies at the college level assumed and asked about. Even though I can, to date, find no documents to validate her assumption, my inability to recognize what she feels is plainly encoded in the architecture prevented me from acknowledging that it could produce pain for people whose ancestors may have suffered the indignity of slavery, especially when its significance was ignored.

3)      What facts are clearly objective? In the example above, there are certain facts that are indisputable. We know who obtained the grant for the land on which the Janis House was built. We know when it was built. We know the kind of wood in the hand-hewn vertical logs. We can prove that it served as the first Masonic lodge west of the Mississippi River. We know who lived in the house. We know that it was erected by the labor of a team of enslaved Africans. We know who the slave owners were and we can find the names of some of the Africans who may have been on the construction crew. These facts can be displayed to inform the conversation in the interpretive space of the exhibit.

4)      What aspect of this issue, event, encounter or artifact is best handled at this museum? For example, in the exhibit I created to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes, I focused on its historical aspects and minimized the attention given to science.

5)      Who else could have a legitimate different perspective? This could come in the form of an oral tradition, a family or other document, archaeology, an eye-witness or additional artifacts, images, songs, dances or pieces of art.

6)      Are there alternative ways to understand an event, decision or artifact? If there are, then it is important to be careful to disclose them. For example, in researching the earthquake exhibit, I discovered that the Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh and a Cherokee Chief both prophesied the first major tremor. Tecumseh’s prediction was accurate to the day it happened. In addition, there were eye-witness accounts of the earthquake from women, men, Christians, Africans, children and government officials.

7)      How will the museum invite and honor the contributions of perspectives and culturally specific knowledge that are as yet invisible to the museum? It is important to realize that just because someone does know something that the museum does not know, there is no entitlement by which the museum should expect to be entrusted with their knowledge. The sharing of information proceeds from trust which is developed incrementally as mutual respect and honor are given. Trust and honor does not demand disclosure. Instead, it permits and values privacy, withholding, giving and it respects any restrictions imposed by sacred spaces and holy things.

8)      How is the museum’s historical or cultural exhibit relevant today? In the earthquake exhibit I was able to include images of geological formations that are still visible such as the emergence of Reel Foot Lake in Tennessee. The exhibit was located in a historic house built for and lived in by Rene LeMeilleur who had been born and raised on a sugar plantation in St. Domingue, today’s Haiti, which had just experienced its major quake. I had friends who were working on earthquake relief efforts in Haiti who permitted me to include in the exhibit photographs of the work there. In addition, I included a challenge to use a smartphone app to discover where on earth earthquakes were happening.

By Lesley Barker, 2017