FRAMING THE CONTEXT OF COLLECTIONS AT THE NMAAHC

Collections Corner | Martin Bierens

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After I have graduated from the MMSt program my goal is to be hired as a collection manager. I assume that I will find myself in two possible situations. First, I find myself at a well-established museum with a larger collection, that is well documented and it will now be my job to continue this excellent care. Or perhaps I am hired by a small institution that is in desperate need of somebody to come in and document their collection which has not been housed or organized efficiently in the past. What I would never imagine is coming to a museum with not a single object, and then being asked to amass a complete collection in little more than a decade.

Lately, I have been reading A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump, a new book by Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian and former director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. During the development of the new NMAAHC, which opened in 2016, Bunch was in charge of the exact task I have described above. Bunch and his small team of curatorial staff and collections managers had to travel the United States to establish a brand new museum collection — from scratch.

Trumpet owned by jazz musician Louis Armstrong, part of the NMAAHC collection. (Source)

I could tell the story of how Bunch went about finding objects to collect, all the interesting people he met on this mission, and the collection’s lasting impact on the Smithsonian. All of these stories are fascinating, but I guarantee that in his book Bunch tells these stories much better than I could. Rather, I would like to ponder the differences between a “new” collection and an “old” collection, and the implications of each.

Museums are constantly trying to innovate and stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and many are doing an excellent job engaging with their communities, but there are still many issues. Perhaps an origin of these contemporary issues is that collections reflect radically different methodologies and values from those today. Could part of the reason that these collections do not serve their communities be due to the age of the collection?

I would like to make it clear that the age of the objects within a collection is not the issue, but rather the context in which the object has been collected which can dictate the stories that museums convey centuries later. Many large institutions such as the ROM, the British Museum, and the Louvre were founded in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. As a result, the objects that were chosen to be included in these museum collections were influenced by this time period.

Some museums, like the Brooklyn Museum pictured here, have opted to promote transparency in the museum's practises with "open collections" visitors can explore as additions to traditional galleries. (Source)

It is not the fault of the objects, but many of these objects reflect the attitudes and beliefs of this time. For example, in ethnographic museums, the collection reflects a history of Western colonial exploitation and the theft of material culture from marginalized colonial populations. Art museums on the other hand may reflect gender, class, and racial prejudices of the past. Think of all the white-male artists hanging in galleries all over the world. Of course, the great tragedy of collecting practices of the past that were based on deeply held prejudices is to think of what we have lost because it was not considered worth preserving at the time.

Ole Worm's "Musei Wormiani Historia" the original colonial collecting practise, the Cabinet of Curiosity (Source)

In a sense, the new collection at the NMAAHC is free from the dubious collecting practices of the past. However, perhaps in one-hundred years, future museum professionals will look back at the material collected today and identify issues that we are now foolishly unable to recognize. This highlights the assumptions, and reminds us that collections are so much more than their objects, the act of collecting itself has long-lasting implications, reaching beyond the objects, and the lowly collection manager themselves.