Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present
Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors.

Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service.

Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.

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Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present
Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors.

Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service.

Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.

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Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

by Steven Lubar
Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

by Steven Lubar

Hardcover(New Edition)

$35.00 
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Overview

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors.

Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service.

Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674971042
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 08/07/2017
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 704,246
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Steven Lubar, a former museum curator and director, is Professor of American Studies at Brown University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Explore 1

Part I Collect 11

1 Why Collect? 13

2 Collectable 24

3 Acquisitions 42

4 In the Field 60

5 Who Collects? 73

Part II Preserve 93

6 Into the Storeroom 95

7 Paperwork 110

8 The Ethics of Objects 128

Part III Display 147

9 Objects, Stories, and Visitors 149

10 Objects on Display 164

11 Organizations and Juxtapositions 176

12 Explanations and Encounters 192

13 Setting the Scene 208

14 Turned Inside Out 227

Part IV Use 239

15 What Use Is a Museum? 241

16 Museums Make Communities 254

17 Learning from Things 269

18 Teaching with Things 285

19 The Promise of Museums 302

Coda: Critique 316

Notes 335

Acknowledgments 385

Illustration Credits 389

Index 391

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