Museum Exhibitions And Suspense

Museum Exhibitions and Suspense takes insights from screenwriting to revolutionise our understanding of exhibition curating. Despite all genuine efforts to reach broader audiences, museums persistently fear riskingtheir credibility by becoming ‘too popular’. Thus, the enormous potential to learn from other storytelling forms more experienced in the field of entertainment remains essentially unexploited. Museum Exhibitions and Suspense unlocks this creative potential. A comparative in-depth analysis of three classical Hollywood films and three cultural historical exhibitions demonstrates how dramatic suspense techniques can be applied to exhibitions. These techniques must be adapted to the typical epic character of the exhibition medium. By differentiating between mild and wild suspense the book provides a new understanding of the nature of suspense itself. Museum Exhibitions and Suspense addresses academics and students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies and heritage studies interested in how exhibitions function and in how to achieve dramaturgical effects like suspense. It also appeals to scholars and students within film studies who want to gain a deeper understanding of suspense. It provides an important resource for curators and other museum practitioners and scriptwriters who intend to create stories with a wide audience appeal.

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design. Placing a specific emphasis on social responsibility, in its broadest sense, the book emphasises the need for a greater understanding of the impact of museum design in the experiences of visitors, in the manifestation of the vision and values of museums and galleries, and in the shaping of civic spaces for culture in our shared social world. The chapters included in the book propose a number of innovative approaches to museum design and museum-design research. Collectively, contributors plead for more open and creative ways of making museums, and ask that museums recognize design as a resource to be harnessed towards a form of museum-making that is culturally located and makes a significant contribution to our personal, social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Such an approach demands new ways of conceptualizing museum and gallery design, new ways of acknowledging the potential of design, and new, experimental, and research-led approaches to the shaping of cultural institutions internationally. The Future of Museum and Gallery Design should be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies, and heritage studies, as well as architecture and design, who are interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. It should also be of great interest to museum and design practitioners and museum leaders.

Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process, and Practice offers a new model for understanding exhibition design in museums as a human and material process. It presents diverse case studies from around the world, from the nineteenth century to the recent past. It moves beyond the power of the finished exhibition over both objects and visitors to highlight historic exhibition making as an ongoing task of adaptation, experimentation, and interaction that involves intellectual, creative, and technical choices. Attentive to hierarchies of ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and ableism that have informed exhibition design and its histories, the volume highlights the labour involved in making museum exhibitions. It presents design as filled with personal and professional demands on the body, senses, and emotions. Contributions from historians, anthropologists, and exhibition makers focus on histories of identity, collaboration, and hierarchy ‘behind the scenes’ of the museum. They argue for an emphasis on the everyday objects of museum design and the importance of a diverse range of actors within and beyond the museum, from carpenters and label writers to volunteers and local communities. Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum offers scholars, students, and professionals working across the museum and design sectors insight into how past methods still influence museums today. Through a postcolonial and decolonial lens, it reveals the lineage of current processes and supports a more informed contemporary practice.

"Indexes to papers read before the Museums Association, 1890-1909. Comp. by Charles Madeley": v. 9, p. 427-452.

Updated to reflect the latest developments in twenty-first century museum scholarship, the new Second Edition of Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts presents a comprehensive collection of approaches to museums and their relation to history, culture and philosophy. Unique in its deep range of historical sources and by its inclusion of primary texts by museum makers Places current praxis and theory in its broader and deeper historical context with the collection of primary and secondary sources spanning more than 200 years Features the latest developments in museum scholarship concerning issues of inclusion and exclusion, repatriation, indigenous models of collection and display, museums in an age of globalization, visitor studies and interactive technologies Includes a new section on relationships, interactions, and responsibilities Offers an updated bibliography and list of resources devoted to museum studies that makes the volume an authoritative guide on the subject New entries by Victoria E. M. Cain, Neil G.W. Curtis, Catherine Ingraham, Gwyneira Isaac, Robert R. Janes, Sean Kingston, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Sharon J. Macdonald, Saloni Mathur, Gerald McMaster, Sidney Moko Mead, Donald Preziosi, Karen A. Rader, Richard Sandell, Roger I. Simon, Crain Soudien, Paul Tapsell, Stephen E. Weil, Paul Williams, and Andrea Witcomb

“This is a must-read for the nervous novice as well as the world-weary veteran. The book guides you through every aspect of exhibit making, from concept to completion. The say the devil is in the details, but so is the divine. This carefully crafted tome helps you to avoid the pitfalls in the process, so you can have fun creating something inspirational. It perfectly supports the dictum—if you don’t have fun making an exhibit, the visitor won’t have fun using it.” —Jeff Hoke, Senior Exhibit Designer at Monterey Bay Aquarium and Author of The Museum of Lost Wonder Structured around the key phases of the exhibition design process, this guide offers complete coverage of the tools and processes required to develop successful exhibitions. Intended to appeal to the broad range of stakeholders in any exhibition design process, the book offers this critical information in the context of a collaborative process intended to drive innovation for exhibition design. It is indispensable reading for students and professionals in exhibit design, graphic design, environmental design, industrial design, interior design, and architecture.

Lists exhibits in the United States, Europe, and Canada, with highlights, cost, hours, addresses, and other data.

Making exhibitions is a collaborative art, producing is a multi-layered unity of ideas and objects, of invention and manifestation, of content and form. However, there is an antagonistic dimension to it, because content and form are traditionally represented by the entirely different realms of curator and designer. Future successful developments in exhibition-making are dependent on whether this gap of antagonism can be bridged. space.time.narrative calls for a paradigmatic shift of focus. It puts forward a unique approach, breaking down traditional barriers and offering a wide-ranging theoretical context, redefining and expanding the parameters and the dynamics of the exhibition-format in terms of an open, narrative environment, which at its roots displays deep similarities with performance on stage, or installation in urban and rural space. The book breaks new ground by looking at the exhibition as a cultural format firstly within a great sweep of the arts in general, weaving a web of philosophical, museological, linguistic and media-theoretical references, which expands the contextual field of the profession. It then offers unique and important insights from within, in extreme close-up, by bringing together interviews with six of the leading exhibition designers who discuss the dynamics of the medium, its interactive dimensions, the soft parameters of the exhibition, and how to get to grips with the format as a complex narrative space, in which the public takes part. Curator and designer should reposition themselves professionally at the heart of the axis, which divides (or connects) content and form.