Exploring Dialogic Museum Exhibits

Half a century ago, a museum might have neatly explained its functions in six phrases: collecting, collections management, objects preservation, scholarship, exhibition and interpretation. A recent statement by The Institute for Museum and Library Services shows how museum mission statements have shifted over the years to view all functions within the newly important lens of public service: The cornerstone of many museum mission statements is educating the public. This is done through exhibits and programs about the collections that the museum holds. Collections care activities ultimately expand public access by providing more information about objects and allowing objects to be preserved for future interpretation.1 The importance given to topics like diversity, accessibility, outreach, repatriation, and institutional collaboration in the past twenty years speaks to this major shift in purpose from museums as essentially collection-focused to museums as essentially public-service institutions with accountability to their communities. I would argue that we can identify an even more drastic shift underway over the last ten years, as professional dialogue has begun within the museum community on ways of involving the community in more direct collaboration. Curatorial collaboration on exhibits in museums is a relatively new phenomenon of the last five to ten years, and models of this development have been presented in journals and at professional meetings of the museum field. These exhibits do not deny the primacy of the museum’s collections or objects in general in conveying their subject; but they do use community advisors in a more substantial way than museums have traditionally done—no