This paper takes a fresh look at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and exhibits that interpret it, and suggests new exhibit strategies to re-interpret this complicated moment in American history. / History

This study explores the use of gardens and agricultural spaces at historic house museums, and the potential these spaces have for supporting positive change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, house museums grappled with a crisis of limited funding and ever shrinking visitor capacity, which continues to affect the success of these spaces today. I argue that garden spaces can provide interpretive revitalization, community relevancy, and increased income for historic house museums that can positively support a house museum. By surveying house museums throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I show that garden spaces provide a tool for house museums to gain stability amidst crisis. / History

Philadelphia is a city that constantly gazes back toward its eighteenth-century past. Many of its historic sites rely on legends from the era of the American founding fathers in order to attract visitors. The Powel House, an historic house museum that was once the home of Philadelphia's last colonial and first post-revolutionary mayor Samuel Powel, fits into this category. Yet for The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, the consortium that manages the Powel House, there is a pressing need for an expanded audience and increased funding, and the story of the Patriot Mayor does not provide enough fuel to achieve these goals. This essay examines some of the Powel House's lesser-known narratives. It suggests that for historic house museums such as the Powel House that are bound to constricted historical eras, an exploration of the house's entire history is a route toward uncovering new strategies for audience engagement. The essay isolates three specific narratives from the early twentieth century, and contemplates how each individual story can be leveraged for Landmarks' broader goals. / History

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the borders in November 1989 and eventual unification in October 1990, Berlin faced the distinct challenge of how to create a modern, unified capital city in the center of Europe while the physical landscape continued to reinforce mental divisions. Changing the physical face of Berlin to capitalize on the city's less-traumatic history while promoting an active tourist economy proved the most visually appealing and marketable approach to meet this goal. This study focuses on the impacts of these efforts two heavily debated sites of heritage tourism in Berlin: The Schloßplatz and the Berlin Wall. By applying methods of American Public History and History of Tourism, this paper answers the following question: How can Berlin sites of heritage tourism support the city's tourist economy, properly interpret the history of division and engage a population that carries its own narratives, experiences, and continued consequences of the Cold War? Examination of these sites demonstrates that the histories produced through sites of Cold War heritage tourism continue to propagate the popular narratives of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but in recent years also demonstrate a notable shift towards engaging a more nuanced understanding of Cold War experience in divided Berlin. In a city only twenty years separated from reunification, Berlin's sites of heritage tourism are increasingly successfully providing their visitors, both supremely local and broadly foreign, with nuanced and critical narratives of Berlins Cold War history. / History

<p> This dissertation provides an analysis of current multilingual practices among art museums in New York City. This study is located within the current theoretical analysis of 1) museums as sites of cultural production and 2) the politics of language, interpretative material, and technology. This study demonstrates how new roles for museums embracing multilingual exhibitions and technology may signal new ways of learning and inclusion.</p><p> The first part is a theoretical-based approach. The second part consists of a mixed-method research design using qualitative and quantitative methods to create three different surveys: of museum staff, of the general public, and finally my observations of museum facilities and human subjects.</p><p> Multilingual exhibitions are complex and require changes at all levels in a museum's organizational structure. Access to museum resources can provide more specific data about language usage. The survey responses from 175 adults provides statistics on multilingual settings and its complexity. The survey responses from 5 museums reveals the difficulty, and benefits, of dealing with this topic. Visual observations at 36 museums indicate that visitors pay attention to interpretative material, while production cost, space, and qualified linguistic staff are concerns for museums. Technology is a breakthrough in multilingual offerings, for it can help democratize a museum's culture to build stronger cultural community connections.</p>

Of central importance to this thesis is the way security measures contradict the process through which museums have been seeking to divest themselves of theoretical hierarchies and value judgments in recent years. A context for investigation is established that considers how a perceptible increase in art theft, complicated by the escalating value of individual objects and the proliferation of museums as represented by a rise in attendance figures has produced a climate of vulnerability for arts collections around the world. In response, museums are installing unprecedented levels of security that are having a significant impact on established viewing conditions and redefining museum space. Further hindering this situation is the disparity between the fields of museology and museum security. These two fields have grown simultaneously, yet independently of one another producing a significant paradox between museum rhetoric and practice. To address the disconnection, this thesis seeks to make museum security relevant to academic discourse by aligning features related to the safeguarding of collections with contemporary museological considerations. Taking the void left behind by a stolen object as a point of departure, this thesis examines the ways in which theft alters the relationship between viewer, object and space in the museum setting. Three major case studies each form a chapter exploring the impact of the theft on established viewing conditions. As the first art theft of the modern era, the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, Paris (1911) creates an historic precedence for this investigation allowing for the examination of how conventions based upon exclusivity were dismantled by the theft, only to be reproduced by a legacy of increasingly prohibitive security measures. The theft of thirteen objects from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (1990) is used to address the implications of theft on a fixed and introspective collection, and in particular upon institutional identity and public memory. The theft of the Scream and Madonna from the Munch Museum, Oslo (2004) and its subsequent security upgrade reveal a negation of institutional transparency and the birth of a new security aesthetic. An analysis of each space is balanced against material gathered from a variety of visual, textual and ephemeral sources to produce a developed understanding of affected space.

No description available.

<p> Museums, and museum professionals, engage in a significant role within society. This dissertation is a qualitative exploratory study of the ways in which museum professionals promote or hinder the social inclusivity of museums through curatorial voice. Through a series of exhibit evaluations and intensive interviews, the researcher investigates the mechanisms used to craft curatorial voice within museums that handle contested subject material. This research seeks to broaden the understanding of curatorial voice, as viewed through the theoretical lenses of gatekeeper theory and co-creation of identity, with the explicit purpose of aiding in the development of professional guidance to help make museums more socially inclusive.</p>

published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

This thesis details a study that I conducted in order to better understand family groups who visit the Blanton Museum of Art. This data is presented using a case study methodology. I interviewed and observed eight families in an attempt to better understand what brought them to the Blanton, and what they wanted to accomplish during their time at the museum. The data collected revealed six themes. Four of these themes were goals the families brought with them to the Blanton Museum of Art. One of the themes pertained to individual motivations for coming to the museum. The final theme related to the participating families use of museum resources other than the art on display. The data was meaningful in that it demonstrated that these families did have specific goals for their time at the Blanton, and the families demonstrated behaviors which served as a means to accomplishing these goals. A goal of this research was to provide me, as an educator, with a more full and rich understanding of family groups that visit museums. / text