Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

For more than two centuries museums have preserved art, artifacts, and natural specimens, engaged and educated the public, and provided resources for research in areas from art history to zoology. Inside the Lost Museum explains the work of museums--collecting, preserving, displaying, and using collections--by considering their remarkable history. Museums make choices about what's worth saving. Inside the Lost Museum explores those choices, and the processes--from donation to purchase to expedition--thatshape collections. Once collected, museum objects are numbered, cataloged, and conserved, and sometimes deaccessioned--processes that have their own hows and whys. Museums display art and artifact in many ways, from dioramas and period rooms to paintingson white walls and visual storage. Inside the Lost Museums reveals the meanings of those choices, and the ways that they have changed and continue to change, shaped by new technologies and ideologies. It also argues for the the value of museum collections for research, teaching, and community-building. Woven through Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum of Brown University, a nineteenth-century museum of natural history, anthropology and "curiosities" that disappeared a century ago. TheJenks Museum's history, and a recent effort to re-imagine that museum as art, science and history, serves as a framework for understanding museums' long record of usefulness and service. Inside the Lost Museum considers the lessons museum history holds for museums today and tomorrow.--
Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors.Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service.Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.
Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every exhibition. Steven Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples, especially the lost but reimagined Jenks Museum at Brown University.