abstract: In the 1960s, Minimal Art introduced a radical insistence on the bodily immediacy of the experience. Since then, artists have increasingly focused on the creation of immersive experiences, resulting in spectacular installations that fill museums, galleries, and public spaces. In this thesis, I argue that the artistic shift toward experience-based work stems from an overall revaluation of the experience as a central component of contemporary life in Western societies. Referencing sociological and economic theories, I investigate the evolving role of the art museum in the twenty-first century, as well as the introduction of new technologies that allow for unique sensorial encounters. Finally, I situate this development in both art historical and theoretical context, examining the relationship between critical distance and immersion and challenging the notion that art must become spectacle to compete with the demands of a capitalist culture. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2015

<p>Lincoln County, Arkansas, is a small county in the southeastern sector of Arkansas that lacks a museum dedicated to its history. With Lincoln County lacking the funds to purchase/build a physical space that is on-par with current museum standards, a museum building is an impossibility at this point. Yet, the older generations that are full of knowledge about the history of the county are fading away. To preserve past and future history, a new spin on a museum had to be accomplished. The spin was creating a digital museum. This study goes in-depth on the creation of a digital database and museum for Lincoln County using Omeka.net and WordPress.com according to Dublin Core and museum standards. The websites showcase a broad and general history of Lincoln County that will hopefully become a foundation for the creation of a physical museum.

<p> This dissertation is a case&nbsp;study, written from my perspective as a new museum professional and museum educator. The work explores the museum as an institutional and community space and demonstrates how museum educators may understanding their role and the roles of their peers in a relational way with the aim of increased productivity.</p><p> Using a contemporary university art museum as the setting, I and 14 of my museum colleagues, at least one from each department at the museum,&nbsp;discuss our understandings of: co-creation, collaboration, physical mental and social space individually and as a group. The questions that guide this study are: </p><p> &bull; What do art museum staff members communicate about their understanding of their roles in co-creative and collaborative education programming and museum exhibition design in contexts of relational space in the museum? </p><p> &bull; What indicators of internal dialogue are revealed in this exploration? </p><p> &bull; &nbsp;What do these conversations uncover about staff understanding(s) of the spaces that they work in as relational? </p><p> &bull; What ideas arise regarding possible change for the museum&rsquo;s approach to collaborative and co-creative education programming and museum exhibition design?</p><p> I utilize two methodologies, case study and auto ethnography, to create a relational accounting of my experience and how my understandings and perspective changed during this process.</p><p> I also incorporate a theoretical frame grounded in theories of relational space from Martina L&ouml;w and Henri Lefebvre to guide my research. To highlight my methodological frame, I collected observations and reflections about the one-on-one interviews and two large focus groups I facilitated in my research journal. I captured photographs of my colleagues&rsquo; work spaces to serve as visual aids for the readers regarding my process and interest in space. </p><p> Themes include those guided by the methods that focused on understandings of: co-creation, collaboration, physical space, mental space and social space. Participants also discussed additional properties that shape their understanding of these terms. They include: age, untapped staff talent, the impact of hierarchy in the museums&rsquo; internal structure, staffs' varied understanding of the museum visitor and power in different spaces.</p><p> From my perspective, these findings represent opportunities for new museum professionals and educators to strategically approach their transition from in-classroom learning to the workforce. These findings also present opportunities for museum educators to reimagine the formal and informal learning opportunities museums can offer those interested in a career in the museum sector and museum education.</p><p>

<p> From approximately 1850 to the beginning of World War II, archaeological collaboration between the United States and France was at its peak in terms of the study of human prehistory. This span of time will be referred to as a &ldquo;golden age&rdquo; of exchange, which resulted in thousands of objects being sent from France to be housed in museums and institutions of higher education in the United States. Within these collections, the presence of replicas, casts, and even objects questionably catalogued by the museum as &ldquo;frauds&rdquo; highlight the underlying value of the broader collecting ideologies. Through a statistical analysis of the French prehistoric collections at the National Museum of Natural History that includes replicas, casts, and &ldquo;frauds&rdquo; as well as case studies into specific objects, I hope to explore the patterns of motivations and range of perspectives of the various actors within the process of creating, collecting, and distributing these objects. More in-depth, biographical case studies will also allow for a glimpse into the complex and often ambiguous social lives of certain objects within these collections (Kopytoff 1986). Overall, the presence of replicas, casts, and &ldquo;frauds&rdquo; becomes a lens into which commodity, agency, and value of the prehistoric French collections can be examined and analyzed. </p>

<p> This dissertation explores narratives that emerge from a community-museum collaboration while working with refugees in relation to Trinh T. Minh-ha&rsquo;s (2011) concept of the boundary event. Within this study the boundary event is explored as moments of overlap where identity, experiences, knowledge, and processes are continuously being negotiated; by embracing or leaning into these moments, community-museum programs can develop multivocal narratives&mdash;where no single voice is heard as distinctly clear or separate. These co-created museum narratives stand in contrast to educational and engagement strategies that aim to instill knowledge and elevate community with the museum as the expert. In this dissertation 16 participant voices&ndash; of 15 refugees and one museum educator&ndash; mingle, coalesce, and complicate museum narratives. These narratives are participant-created (data presentation) as well as researcher-constructed (analysis and interpretation). Using the methodological lens of narrative inquiry and decolonization I investigated data collected from over a two-year period (summer 2013-summer 2015) including: content and wall labels collected from two exhibitions, one marks the beginning of the study in 2013 and the second in 2015 concludes the study; gallery activities collected over the course of the two-year study; and educator field notes from the 28 individual sessions. Ultimately, I argue that multivocal narratives, and embracing moments defined as the boundary event, complicate traditional hierarchy and expected stories of refugees and new migrants illustrating how difference can positively disrupt linear, static, and authoritative institutional narratives.</p><p>

Exotic animals are conspicuously absent in economic histories and discussions of material culture in eighteenth-century Britain, even though they were highly sought-after luxury goods. As a response, this cultural history is a step towards a fuller understanding of the broad yet related meanings that a range of exotic animals held in Georgian Britain. A study is structured around four themes of meaning. The significance of exotic animals is explored, in turn, through their function as commodities, as objects of sensory encounter, as political symbols and charismatic material for anatomical investigation. The spaces through which animals moved, the contexts of their display and the meanings different audiences produced are considered throughout. Several species of animal were transfer points for cultural configurations, and a selection receives detailed cultural biographies here. Their histories are utilised to understand practices of collecting and spectatorship, national cultures and natural history. The work of naturalists and anatomists is intertwined with other ways of knowing exotic animals in Georgian Britain. Exhibition and the production of knowledge were interrelated, so ideas produced by some practitioners were absorbed, transmuted and modified into different cultural forms and contexts. The reality of exotic animals as commodities is established through a history of animal merchants in London and, from there, their wider place in eighteenth-century Britain is discerned. The development of animal trade from itinerant bird sellers to high-end menageries tell, once collated, a story revealing a usual but significant part of commercial and exhibitionary culture. By historicising the sensory encounters of spectators, readings of broader cultural anxieties about malodour and the bodily proximity of women and children to animals are possible. The senses were managed and ordered around exotic animals, and it is argued that experiencing them in this period was predicated on specific and fluctuating notions of risk and endangerment. Exotic animals acquired political symbolism, especially in matters of monarchy. Associations were generated and circulated by public representations that foregrounded humour, political satire, sexuality, luxury and fashion. Interwoven within these concerns were serious and not so serious discussion about Enlightenment attitudes and the “Improvement” of Nature. It is argued throughout that new spaces emerged for the spectatorship of exotic animals during the long eighteenth century, and, as such, that these animals should be historicised as eighteenth-century British phenomenon.

Evaluation of museum audiences both in their physical and web-based spaces is a necessary component of museum education. For smaller museums without the personnel or knowledge to create a website and evaluate the on-line audience, using a web-based learning tool may be able to help these museums properly maintain an online site. A web-based Elm Fork Natural Heritage Museum (WBEFNHM) was created during the 2008 fall semester at the University of North Texas. The site included photographs and information from specimens housed within the physical Elm Fork Natural Heritage Museum. The site was available to three non-science majors' biology laboratory courses, and three science majors' biology laboratory courses during the 2009 spring and fall semesters. Student use of the WBEFNHM was tracked and found no significant difference between the amount of time science majors and non-majors spent on the site. This evaluation helps in understanding future use of an online EFNHM.

Commemorative programming for historic anniversaries reveals an interpretive and narrative evolution between public memory and history. The divisiveness of the war and the public’s ambivalence about its meaning allowed for broader interpretive perspectives compared to earlier war commemorations. Research on the evolving narratives considers how public memory informs identity and affects historical interpretations. Recent museum exhibits, historic sites, and films about the Vietnam War bring into focus the changing narrative of the Vietnam War. Case studies for this research are the Washington, D.C. National Archives and Records Administration Remembering Vietnam exhibit, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s plans for an education center, and Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary The Vietnam War. The soldier’s experience narrative still dominates interpretations, but interpretations have expanded to include the Vietnamese and the protest perspective. The passage of time and the conflict’s complexity has opened the way for new perspectives in commemorative programming.

This study is a contribution to the programme of memorializing District Six through the site-specific stories that are shared in research, education, and the co-curated spaces of the District Six Museum. When buildings, streets, street names and place names are erased from a landscape; when cultural, economic, religious, and educational spaces are shut down; then people’s connections to place are disrupted, diverted, reimagined, often lost to future linked generations. These connections, however, continue to live on in people’s memories - individual and collective, sometimes lying dormant waiting to be triggered into wakefulness and visibility. In the case of District Six, these memories have lived on as nostalgia about a recent past with the trauma, often, edited out. Consequently, District Six has frequently been rendered as a stereotype - a friendly, unproblematic, tolerant, kanala place, where grand narrative re-enactments provide a sense of closure for some or evokes a sense of renewed anger about the stories not told and the unfulfilled restitution process. The stories of women factory workers are a case in point, where the closing down of factories and the subsequent loss of livelihoods are remembered in two ways. Firstly, through a lens of nostalgia premised on the idea that the past was a better place when we had jobs and could feed our families. Secondly, this recent past is also remembered with a sense of unresolved anger that people are less important than profit margins and real estate - a mentality that resulted in the export of cheap labour factories overseas and gentrification. This study explores the stories of two women clothing workers from District Six. I mapped out the important clothing factories contained in the stories of the two women I interviewed like, for example, the Ensign Factory that was in a section of District Six now rezoned as part of Woodstock. The site and its surroundings have taken on a new corporate brand but still lives with the spectral traces of the old District Six. I make these and other District Six fragments more visible through the stories of Ruth Rosa Phala-Jeftha and Farahnaaz Gilfelleon, using the District Six Museum’s oral history methodology – one steeped in a critical pedagogy where the storytellers have agency and are invited into a co-curated sense-making and interpretive process. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci / Unrestricted

The study investigates traces and historical origins, socio-economic, political and cultural lives of 'black servants' who worked and lived at the Zwartkoppies Farm and other establishments owned by Sammy Marks through photographs, oral histories and Archives. Furthermore, I interrogate the notion of representation by exploring the house as a colonial object and the site as exclusive and perpetuating divisions in a democratic South Africa. The decision to employ oral histories is so as to give these servants the freedom to represent themselves in a space where their voices have been muted in their presence. The history of labour in Southern Africa serves as my point of departure so as to better frame my research. This study reflects on the effects of colonisation and apartheid characterised by injustices and marginalisation which is to this day still are reflected in the silenced narratives of South Africa's dark history. / Dissertation (MSoSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / University of Pretoria Bursary and DITSONG Museums of South Africa Bursary / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSoSci (Heritage and Museum Studies) / Unrestricted