<p>This thesis introduces the concept of living exhibitions:continuously evolving museum exhibitions that are cooperativelydeveloped and evaluated by teams of museum professionals andvisitor representatives. The author argues that the livingexhibition design process should draw its inspiration frommultiple resources, including current research on museumlearning, interaction principles and technology. As acase-in-point, the thesis provides a description of how suchresults have inspired the design of The Well of Inventions, apublic installation at the Museum of Science and Technology inStockholm. Furthermore, the thesis describes how an evaluationmethodology from cooperative design was adopted andsuccessfully applied within the museum domain. The ultimate aimof the work is to increase the opportunities for communicationbetween museum professionals and their audiences.</p>

This thesis introduces the concept of living exhibitions:continuously evolving museum exhibitions that are cooperativelydeveloped and evaluated by teams of museum professionals andvisitor representatives. The author argues that the livingexhibition design process should draw its inspiration frommultiple resources, including current research on museumlearning, interaction principles and technology. As acase-in-point, the thesis provides a description of how suchresults have inspired the design of The Well of Inventions, apublic installation at the Museum of Science and Technology inStockholm. Furthermore, the thesis describes how an evaluationmethodology from cooperative design was adopted andsuccessfully applied within the museum domain. The ultimate aimof the work is to increase the opportunities for communicationbetween museum professionals and their audiences. / NR 20140805

This case study explores the collaborative conversation between curators and educators in the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and how these conversations affect didactic texts in the museum galleries. By situating the Blanton Museum in a larger historical framework, the focus of this study maps out the historical perspectives informing the museum during a pivotal integration of collecting areas, including Latin American and American modern and contemporary collections, and explores how the Blanton Museum attempted to facilitate learning and meaning-making for the visitor through didactic wall texts. / text

Uma das principais características das exposições museológicas é o seu potencial de representatividade histórico-cultural, sobretudo quando dirigimos nossa atenção aos museus de história natural dos séculos XIX e XX, período de constituição do museu público, impulsionado pelos discursos nacionalistas, civilizatórios e modernizantes. A análise de projetos expositivos desse contexto possibilita inferir que o novo modelo de museu é resultado da busca do equilíbrio entre os estudos científicos desenvolvidos através das coleções de pesquisa e as formas efetivas de instrução pública. Centenas de museus foram construídos enquanto outros reformaram suas áreas técnicas e administrativas, de forma a atender os novos parâmetros estabelecidos pelos programas museológicos, arquitetonicamente definidos como área restrita de pesquisa e área restrita da exposição pública. As exposições museológicas abertas à visitação ganharam impulso a partir de uma perspectiva objetiva. Os recursos comunicacionais, que nasceram e se desenvolveram nestes museus, reforçam o sentido da educação popular a partir da leitura do discurso expositivo presente nas narrativas polissêmicas estabelecidas nos novos espaços de consagração da ciência. O objeto museológico, o espaço museal e o público das exposições formam a base desse fenômeno moderno de comunicação. A modernidade forjada tanto pela Revolução Industrial quanto pela Revolução Francesa gerou este tipo de organização institucional que, por meio da reunião de objetos extraídos do mundo natural, como referências patrimoniais, registros documentais e testemunhos materiais, assumiu a responsabilidade pela conservação, pesquisa e difusão de uma nova visão sobre a natureza, a partir de critérios científicos. A este processo de seleção, de transferência de elementos naturais para o interior dos museus, para composição de coleções e cenários museais didáticos, foi cunhada a ideia de Musealização da Natureza. Essa proposição deve ser entendida pela abrangência do percurso da nova vida do objeto, enfocando as formas de representação do mundo natural por esta tipologia de museu, apresentando em seus sistemas comunicacionais uma natureza compartimentada, classificada e reconhecida. Com o desenvolvimento e aplicação de diferentes recursos expositivos, sobretudo os dioramas, os museus de história natural passaram a preencher as salas expositivas com uma museotecnia nascida na Europa, que ganhou forte e determinante impulso nos Estados Unidos e se difundiu por todo o mundo, inclusive no Brasil. Com a instalação de cenários de ambientes naturais, didaticamente preparados, consolidou-se no museu público uma nova forma de olhar para o mundo natural: uma forma científica. É justamente no limiar da ciência moderna, que os museus de história natural se proliferam e declaradamente passam a se preocupar com a popularização da ciência. Os processos modernos de produção econômica transformaram definitivamente a relação do homem com o mundo natural. Ao mesmo tempo, estabeleceram novas formas de vivência com a natureza, seja através de parques naturais, jardins ou mesmo pelas exposições museológicas com seus dioramas, aqui considerados como verdadeiras janelas para o mundo natural. / One of the main characteristics of museum exhibitions is its potential historical and cultural representativeness, especially when we focus our attention on the museums of natural history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those were periods of constitution of the public museum that was driven by nationalistic, civilization and modern speeches. The analysis of exhibition projects in that context makes it possible to infer that the new model of museum is the result of the search for balance between scientific studies developed through the research collections and the effective ways of public instruction. Hundreds of museums were built while others reformed their technical and administrative areas in a way they could attend the new parameters established by the museum programs that were defined as restricted area for research and restricted area for public exhibition. Museum exhibitions opened to visiting won strength based on a focused perspective. Communicational resources that had been born and had developed in those museums reinforced the sense of popular education based on the reading of the exhibition speech that were present in the multifaceted narratives established in the new spaces of consecration of science. The museum object, the museum space and the exhibition\"s public form the basis of this modern phenomenon of communication. The modernity forged by the Industrial Revolution as well as the French Revolution generated this kind of organizational institution that - by the means of reuniting objects extracted from the natural world such as heritage references, document data and material testimonies - have assumed the responsibility for the conservation, research and diffusion of a new vision about the nature based on scientific criteria. To that process of selection and transfer of natural elements to the interior of museums to form didactic museum collection and scenarios was coined the idea of Musealization of Nature. This proposition must be understood by the comprehensiveness of the path of the new life of the object focusing the ways of representing the natural world by this typology of museum and presenting in its communicational systems a compartmentalized, classified and recognized nature. With the development and application of different exhibition resources, especially the dioramas, the natural history museums began to fill the exhibition rooms with a museumtechnique born in Europe that gained strong and determining strength in the United States and had spread all over the world including Brazil. With the installation of scenarios of natural environments that were didactically prepared, a new way of looking to the natural world in the public museum were consolidated: the scientific way. It is precisely on the threshold of modern science that the museums of natural history proliferate and reportedly began to worry about the popularization of science. The modern process of economic production definitely transformed the relationship between man and natural world. At the same time thei established new ways of living the nature whether through natural parks or gardens or even through museum exhibitions with its dioramas that we consider in this research as are true windows to the natural world.

Uma das principais características das exposições museológicas é o seu potencial de representatividade histórico-cultural, sobretudo quando dirigimos nossa atenção aos museus de história natural dos séculos XIX e XX, período de constituição do museu público, impulsionado pelos discursos nacionalistas, civilizatórios e modernizantes. A análise de projetos expositivos desse contexto possibilita inferir que o novo modelo de museu é resultado da busca do equilíbrio entre os estudos científicos desenvolvidos através das coleções de pesquisa e as formas efetivas de instrução pública. Centenas de museus foram construídos enquanto outros reformaram suas áreas técnicas e administrativas, de forma a atender os novos parâmetros estabelecidos pelos programas museológicos, arquitetonicamente definidos como área restrita de pesquisa e área restrita da exposição pública. As exposições museológicas abertas à visitação ganharam impulso a partir de uma perspectiva objetiva. Os recursos comunicacionais, que nasceram e se desenvolveram nestes museus, reforçam o sentido da educação popular a partir da leitura do discurso expositivo presente nas narrativas polissêmicas estabelecidas nos novos espaços de consagração da ciência. O objeto museológico, o espaço museal e o público das exposições formam a base desse fenômeno moderno de comunicação. A modernidade forjada tanto pela Revolução Industrial quanto pela Revolução Francesa gerou este tipo de organização institucional que, por meio da reunião de objetos extraídos do mundo natural, como referências patrimoniais, registros documentais e testemunhos materiais, assumiu a responsabilidade pela conservação, pesquisa e difusão de uma nova visão sobre a natureza, a partir de critérios científicos. A este processo de seleção, de transferência de elementos naturais para o interior dos museus, para composição de coleções e cenários museais didáticos, foi cunhada a ideia de Musealização da Natureza. Essa proposição deve ser entendida pela abrangência do percurso da nova vida do objeto, enfocando as formas de representação do mundo natural por esta tipologia de museu, apresentando em seus sistemas comunicacionais uma natureza compartimentada, classificada e reconhecida. Com o desenvolvimento e aplicação de diferentes recursos expositivos, sobretudo os dioramas, os museus de história natural passaram a preencher as salas expositivas com uma museotecnia nascida na Europa, que ganhou forte e determinante impulso nos Estados Unidos e se difundiu por todo o mundo, inclusive no Brasil. Com a instalação de cenários de ambientes naturais, didaticamente preparados, consolidou-se no museu público uma nova forma de olhar para o mundo natural: uma forma científica. É justamente no limiar da ciência moderna, que os museus de história natural se proliferam e declaradamente passam a se preocupar com a popularização da ciência. Os processos modernos de produção econômica transformaram definitivamente a relação do homem com o mundo natural. Ao mesmo tempo, estabeleceram novas formas de vivência com a natureza, seja através de parques naturais, jardins ou mesmo pelas exposições museológicas com seus dioramas, aqui considerados como verdadeiras janelas para o mundo natural. / One of the main characteristics of museum exhibitions is its potential historical and cultural representativeness, especially when we focus our attention on the museums of natural history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those were periods of constitution of the public museum that was driven by nationalistic, civilization and modern speeches. The analysis of exhibition projects in that context makes it possible to infer that the new model of museum is the result of the search for balance between scientific studies developed through the research collections and the effective ways of public instruction. Hundreds of museums were built while others reformed their technical and administrative areas in a way they could attend the new parameters established by the museum programs that were defined as restricted area for research and restricted area for public exhibition. Museum exhibitions opened to visiting won strength based on a focused perspective. Communicational resources that had been born and had developed in those museums reinforced the sense of popular education based on the reading of the exhibition speech that were present in the multifaceted narratives established in the new spaces of consecration of science. The museum object, the museum space and the exhibition\"s public form the basis of this modern phenomenon of communication. The modernity forged by the Industrial Revolution as well as the French Revolution generated this kind of organizational institution that - by the means of reuniting objects extracted from the natural world such as heritage references, document data and material testimonies - have assumed the responsibility for the conservation, research and diffusion of a new vision about the nature based on scientific criteria. To that process of selection and transfer of natural elements to the interior of museums to form didactic museum collection and scenarios was coined the idea of Musealization of Nature. This proposition must be understood by the comprehensiveness of the path of the new life of the object focusing the ways of representing the natural world by this typology of museum and presenting in its communicational systems a compartmentalized, classified and recognized nature. With the development and application of different exhibition resources, especially the dioramas, the natural history museums began to fill the exhibition rooms with a museumtechnique born in Europe that gained strong and determining strength in the United States and had spread all over the world including Brazil. With the installation of scenarios of natural environments that were didactically prepared, a new way of looking to the natural world in the public museum were consolidated: the scientific way. It is precisely on the threshold of modern science that the museums of natural history proliferate and reportedly began to worry about the popularization of science. The modern process of economic production definitely transformed the relationship between man and natural world. At the same time thei established new ways of living the nature whether through natural parks or gardens or even through museum exhibitions with its dioramas that we consider in this research as are true windows to the natural world.

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The focus of this thesis will be the exploration of the narrative constructs around the life and work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). This exploration will occur through the study of selected exhibitions curated on the Lombard artist from the twentieth- through twenty-first centuries. It will demonstrate how museums have played a significant role in the public’s understanding and perception of Caravaggio. In this thesis, I will argue that exhibitions on Caravaggio have supported and reshaped the general understanding and perception of the artist in crucial ways not done to the same effect in more nuanced academic scholarship. I will also argue that public exhibitions have functioned according to a different set of agendas from those addressed to academia. For example, exhibitions are conceived and function on guiding principles such as alignment with museum mission statements, audience draw and accessibility, educational outcomes, and the visitor experience. This thesis will seek to determine to what measure these principles have affected the framing of content and to clarify how in particular the selective use of Caravaggio’s biography has affected interpretation of his works within a museum context for a viewing public. The restored enthusiasm for Caravaggio in the second-half of the twentieth century also focused on his personal life due to the publication and translation by Walter Friedlaender of Lives written by his seventeenth-century biographers—Giorgio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori—as well as the publication of documents and court records, which highlighted episodes of Caravaggio’s criminality, all impinging on our interpretation of his artistic merits. Although these findings support our understanding of Caravaggio as a complex individual, they also contribute to the sensationalization and romanticization of the artist as the quintessentially bohemian figure. Furthermore, doubtful attributions and disputes over execution dates problematize our understanding of the artist’s oeuvre and have at certain points reinforced a ‘Caravaggio narrative’ of the rebellious, indecorous artist. It is my intention to show how museum exhibitions have contributed to and exploited this narrative and to determine more precisely how and to what extent they have shaped it. With this exploration of Caravaggio’s narrative construction by museum exhibitions of the twentieth- to twenty-first centuries, I aim to approach and reconsider this subject, which has been dealt with heavily in scholarship, under a different lens. In the case of Caravaggio—whose persona and works have been posthumously manipulated, admired, and condemned at the hands of biographers and critics—it is necessary to approach this subject with renewed, unbiased, and objective vigor within a new frame of understanding: the museum exhibition frame. I will use a comparative method, studying three key exhibitions over time, to show how museums have presented the artist’s career development. I pay particular attention to the incorporation of biography and to the impact the inclusion of selected aspects of his Lives have had on the public view of his works. The influential format of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists set the structure and codified the model of biographical determinism that would inform Caravaggio’s later biographers in the interpretation of his works; this has persisted through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries with the application of psychoanalytic approaches to Caravaggio. The first of the three exhibitions I have selected is Longhi’s 1951 Milan exhibition, Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi, which restored public consciousness of Caravaggio’s innovative and revolutionary style, reinserting him into the artistic canon. My second example will be The Age of Caravaggio, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. The Met exhibition is novel for its focus on Caravaggio’s relationship with his precursors and contemporaries (the organizing committee deliberately excluded works by Caravaggio’s followers) and for its interpretation of works within their historical context. Finally, I will examine Caravaggio: L’ultimo tempo 1606–1610, held first at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples 2004–2005, then later as Caravaggio: The Final Years, at the National Gallery, London in 2005, which focused on the more enigmatic part of Caravaggio’s late career after his flight from Rome in 1606. The London 2005 exhibition provided new insight into the artist’s stylistic changes in the last years of his life. These three exhibitions will give insight about the perception shifts of the artist that have taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a result of scholarly research spurred by museum exhibitions centered around Caravaggio. / Art History

This study analyzes two successful exhibitions on American slavery in the South: In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia, 1790-1860 by the Valentine Museum and Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South by the Museum of the Confederacy. It puts the exhibitions in the context of the social history movement, and explains the difficulties exhibiting a sensitive topic. It examines the creation of the exhibitions, the controversies because of the subject, both real and potential, and the overwhelmingly positive reaction.

This thesis contributes to the knowledge of museology, anthropology and Native American studies. It is an analysis of the discourse that surrounded The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, an exhibition prepared by the Glenbow in Calgary as the 'flagship' of the Olympic Arts Festival in 1988. After the Lubicon Indians of Northern Alberta called for a boycott of The Spirit Sings, in attempt to draw critical attention to their long outstanding lands claim, a large and heated debate ensued involving several disciplines, particularly anthropology and museology. Much of this debate took place in the print media, therefore a large body of material remains to be reviewed and studied. The intent of this thesis is to illustrate that the issue of museological representation of First Nations was one of the most central themes discussed in the discourse, but to argue that the major players dealt with this issue on only the most concrete level and therefore largely neglected to recognize that the issue of First Nation's representation was not just a concern over museum interpretation but more importantly an issue of the contested authenticity of national and cultural claims. / vi, 335 p. ; 29 cm.

Museums today provide learning-rich experiences and quality informational resources through both physical and virtual environments. This study examined a Holocaust Museum traveling exhibition, Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust that was on display at the Art Center of Battle Creek, Michigan in fall 2005. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to assess the informational value of a Holocaust Museum exhibition in its onsite vs. online format by converging quantitative and qualitative data. Participants in the study included six eighth grade language arts classes who viewed various combinations or scenarios of the onsite and online Life in Shadows. Using student responses to questions in an online exhibition survey, an analysis of variance was performed to determine which scenario visit promotes the greatest content learning. Using student responses to additional questions on the same survey, data were analyzed qualitatively to discover the impact on students of each scenario visit. By means of an emotional empathy test, data were analyzed to determine differences among student response according to scenario visit. A principal finding of the study (supporting Falk and Dierking's contextual model of learning) was that the use of the online exhibition provided a source of prior orientation and functioned as an advanced organizer for students who subsequently viewed the onsite exhibition. Students who viewed the online exhibition received higher topic assessment scores. Students in each scenario visit gave positive exhibition feedback and evidence of emotional empathy. Further longitudinal studies in museum informatics and Holocaust education involving a more diverse population are needed. Of particular importance would be research focusing on using museum exhibitions and Web-based technology in a compelling manner so that students can continue to hear the words of survivors who themselves bear witness and give voice to silenced victims. When perpetuity of access to informational resources is assured, future generations will continue to be connected to the primary documents of history and cultural heritage.