In light of recent events that have seriously impacted charitable giving and our own needs at the Museum of the Big Bend, I have given thought to why museums are important. We have recently completed Phase One of a campaign to renovate the original historic museum building, and we are now embarked upon Phase Two for exhibits. We did this because we know that museums are important and bring meaning and excitement, especially for children. The problem here is that this region has never had an actual general purpose museum with a mission to serve the broadest community.
I have been blessed to spend my entire working career in the museum business, and I have certainly seen how they can impact people. In the traditional classroom the instructor engages in linear and structured thought. The student learns that Fact A or Date B leads to Conclusion C. Tests are conducted and we find out if the student has formally “learned.”
Museum visitors, regardless of how we design and direct them through an exhibit, engage in unstructured, amorphous and, if we are lucky, even magical thought. The visitor often has a different experience than what we, as museum professionals, are seeking to provide. This is satisfactory and wonderful. This is the great difference between formal (classroom) and informal (museum) learning. It is in this difference that we shall rejoice.
My friend Michael Duty, who followed me as director in Wichita Falls
tells the story of the dinosaur footprint in stone that they placed in
the lobby: “One day I walked out of my office in time to see a group of
second graders making their way through the museum. All had left the
footprint and were heading to the galleries except for one little girl
who looked around to see if anyone was watching and then carefully
placed her hand in the footprint. As she did so she was looking
directly at the picture of the dinosaur and a look of sheer revelation
passed over her face. As far as I am concerned, at that moment she
instantly knew that dinosaurs actually existed. They were not just
pictures in a book, and she could actually touch were one had once
walked.
When I tell this story, I always say that from that day forward her world became larger. That, I think, is one of the services that museums can provide; they make aspects of the world that were heretofore unreachable by a large majority of our audiences real.” We could say that this is a story about a kid and a rock, but who knows how her world changed that day, but surely it did.
When I was the director of the Wichita Falls Museum and Art Center, we had every second and fifth grader come to visit each year, plus any others that wanted. The teachers would bring the class into the lobby, and hush everyone. My greatest joy was coming out of the office and asking, “Why are we whispering?” Museums are not for whispering. Adults whisper in museums, children should not; they should exercise their wonderment and imagination.
As adults, most of us are finely formed, cynical and know that we cannot slay the dragon. Children do not know this, and that is why museums are important. Children have not lost the ability for magical thought, or the ability to make up their own story from the raw materials a museum can provide. Thus, in my mind, museums are really about children. As we are currently configured the Museum of the Big Bend cannot be anything like the institution we should be. Our constituents who are indifferent or who say we are not important do not know what we can and will become.
This past spring we received this letter: “Dear Museum of the Big Bend, thank you for letting us tour your museum. I bet you were scared when a-lot of kids came in your museum. Sam.”
This is a child who still thinks he can slay the dragon, and his wonderment must be nurtured.
Museums do not teach by rote, but rather by imagination. They teach
with objects, not words. Objects have power. They stimulate the
imagination, they define progress, and they identify craftsmanship or
skill beyond the ability of most of us. And unlike ideas, once an
artifact is gone it is gone forever. Interpreted properly a common
object can tell a most uncommon story. As John Hankey, Curator at the
Smithsonian writes, “artifacts are real, but they are only meaningful
when we understand them in terms of all that is lost.”
Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of New
York, has expressed that what this means, “is mankind’s awe-inspiring
ability, time and again, to surpass itself; that no matter how bleak
the times we may live in, we cannot wholly despair of the human
condition.”
We must know the past to understand the present and face the future. Museums teach optimism, values and wonder with a subtlety that far surpasses the classroom. In a museum we can all be children again.
Those who ask you why museums matter, or ask why should they support
something that appears to have small value, are asking the wrong
question and they have no experience with what the Museum of the Big
Bend can be. Rather we ask them to give us the tools we need and step
back and watch us work. Then they might judge our value.
Larry Francell,
Director of the Museum of the Big Bend, has spent over thirty years in
the museum profession, half working for a variety of institutions
including the Dallas Museum of Art, and half as a partner in a museum
and art services company. He prefers porch sitting to work. He can be
reached at francell@overland.net.
