Chapter Three - From body to soul

Silverman describes several programs through general themes on how museums offer social work to their constituents. During this chapter she focuses on how individuals create meaning impacting their self. Many of the examples she provides are public programs based around the museum collection. During the latter part of the chapter she examines the spiritual and ephemeral capabilities of exhibits. Public programs through the lens of social work offer individuals opportunities to build self-esteem through individualize or collaborative projects. Often, such programs engage the individual in activities which promote introspective analysis on the self. One example Silverman provided was through employing mentally and physically disabled persons in a museum café. Through this employment experience successful individuals were able to generate better self-esteem. Other examples included reflection creation of artistic objects as therapy.

One of the key areas where I have concern is of Silverman’s discussion on museums and work. I am curious on how the professionalization of the field through programs such as the IUPUI museum studies master’s degree may affect this form of social work. Will potential internship and volunteer opportunities for persons benefiting from work experiences be limited due to an influx of individuals with a professional degree in this area? In many ways, it seems that Silverman argues for museums to exist and to support social work ethos through simply existing and being open entities to the public. Museums then serve their communities as a third-place environment which promotes self-reflection and identity creation. Identity can best be created and reflected upon when the individual sees herself in the exhibit. Many groups still do not see their story represented in museums due to broader preventative social norms. While museums may serve to create reflexive environments, they also help maintain social barriers and walls.

Chapter three provided many key examples of successful meaning making experiences that museums can create. Public programming and community outreach are excellent venues for museums to create increased community relevance. Through examining how such programs assist communities I can better serve the community in which I live. This path allows museums to actively solve problems within a community, rather than suggest solutions or ignore them completely.

Ultimately, this chapter leads me to consider questions about representation and its association or dissonance with identity creation. As practitioners are serving our constituent’s desire to learn, but to what extent inside and out of the museum are we approaching their needs for self-reflection? How are we hindering this process? How can we help?

Re-Presenting Disability: Section Two

I found Chapter 7, titled “Disability Reframed,” a useful case study in analyzing the success of using the social model of disability as a theoretical framework for exhibits. While I think it is essential to reframe disability in this way, I am afraid that these representations may get lost among the other, more prevalent representations of people with disabilities as either victims or heroes. When I consider the most common contexts where I see disabled people in the media, it is usually in commercials or advertisements either showing a person with disabilities “heroically” performing some act despite their disability, or in advertisements for charities that paint people with disabilities as pitiful or helpless. It is therefore understandable that many visitors’ comments framed people with disabilities in this way. As mentioned in this chapter, reframing these kinds of stereotypes is also more difficult because a medicalized or individualized understanding of disability is not viewed as harmful, and it is generally understood that no one wishes harm on people with disabilities. In your opinion, are these kinds of stereotypes harder to change than more negative ones?

For the exhibit mentioned in Chapter 7, curators and exhibit developers chose to use comment cards at the end of the exhibits to collect visitors’ reactions and opinions of their experiences. These comments helped museum staff measure if people felt their views had been changed or influenced by the exhibits. Are publicly-viewed comment cards an ideal method of recording visitor reactions? How could they be problematic? For instance, I think visitors are less likely to post negative comments or admit their opinions hadn’t changed if the cards are visible to all visitors. If the comment cards are more private and turned into a staff member at the end of the exhibit, how do you think the visitor responses would change? Are there problems with this approach as well? I also found it intriguing that the museums asked visitors to provide demographic information on the back of the card, as I have never seen that approach. If you were implementing a comment card program, would you ask for such information? If you were a visitor, would you provide it?

Chapter 11, “Revealing Moments” was an open and honest account of the challenges and triumphs of putting on an exhibit about disability and sexuality. I found the controversy surrounding the Museum of Sex’s choice to include information on the medical definitions of the participants’ disabilities to be particularly revelatory. While some disability activists thought the inclusion of this information only served to further “medicalize” perceptions of disability, many participants approved of the museum’s choice. If you brought the exhibit to your museum, would you include that information?

Elizabeth Mariko Murray and Sarah Helaine Jacobs, the authors of this chapter, mentioned how the Museum of Sex is in a unique position as a for-profit, private museum; there is a degree of freedom that other museums receiving public funds do not have, yet there is a constant struggle to make enough money to stay open. In fact, they are the only authors I have read in this book who openly admit that they must always consider the money-making potential of their exhibitions. Is having the freedom to take on more controversial issues and exhibits worth worrying about losing your job or keeping the lights on? Given that many government-supported museums are struggling as well, does it even matter?

Re-Presenting Disability: Section One

There is a lot of material for discussion in the first section of Re-Presenting Disability, and not enough time or space to devote to all of it. I will touch on just a few of the many topics presented by the case studies in section one.

The works of public art discussed in the first chapter, “Activist Practice” by Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd, are very intriguing, particularly because of the highly charged debates these works stirred up among disabled activists, politicians, artists and viewers. A similar controversy has arisen right here in Indianapolis, but dealing with issues of race. A proposed statue of a freed slave by the artist Fred Wilson to be displayed on Monument Circle has drawn vocal commentary and heated discussions about the appropriateness of such an image in a public space (http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/news/local/marion_county/art-of-slave-draws-vocal-critics). Do you think the decision to display these works in public spaces is generally beneficial, or is the message obscured by the controversy? By displaying art and objects that generate debate and emotions, museums can act as forums for the healthy discussion of painful topics. By placing controversial art in public places, can we open up the discussion to a wider audience, or the entire community?

I found Chapter 4, “See No Evil” by Victoria Phiri, to be particularly interesting. What struck me was how this case study on the struggle for representation in Zambia so closely reflects the same issues disabled individuals deal with in the United States. While Phiri seems to blame Zambian beliefs relating disability to witchcraft or punishment for the lack of representation in museums, are American museums any different? She notes that the only representation of a disabled individual in the Livingstone Museum is a wood statue titled “the diviner,” showing the close association between disability and the supernatural in Zambian cultural beliefs. However, Sandell and Dodd argue that Western representations of disability are often framed the same way; is a painting like The Blind Men of Jericho as damaging and dehumanizing as “the diviner?” Phiri says that the lack of representations of disabled individuals in Zambia’s National Museums is analogous to the cultural practice of literally hiding away severely disabled individuals from society. While our country no longer believes in institutionalizing or secluding the disabled, we share Zambia’s problem of a lack of adequate representation; and if honest and accurate portrayals of disability are absent from museums and the media, are disabled people truly “seen” in our country?

While reading the case studies highlighted in the first section of Re-Presenting Disability, a question has been at the back of my mind: How does the push for rights and representation of the disabled echo similar movements among other marginalized and under-represented communities? Just lumping together individuals and calling them “the disabled” is problematic. The hearing impaired, the visually impaired, the physically disabled, individuals with developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, and mental illnesses are best served with very different and distinct forms of representation and diverse strategies for improved access. Aren’t the same challenges inherent in our attempts to be more inclusive of marginalized racial and ethnic groups? Pan-ethnic “multiculturalism” is not a substitute for understanding the particular needs of individual communities in museums, just like a desire to be inclusive of “the disabled” is not a substitute for truly equal access and representation for the diverse communities of disabled individuals.