When people think of museums, they probably envision the artifacts and objects that fill our galleries. But these are only part of the story. Museums are also the links to other worlds, to past civilizations that have been lost or built over. They are the keepers of irreplaceable works of art and rare natural objects, of bones and photos and ancient artifacts that have been retrieved from sand and silt and ash. They are a window into other worlds and the past, displaying the remains of heroic moments in history or unthinkable monsters.
The word “museum” comes from classical Greek: it literally means the seat of the Muses and was used for philosophical institutions like the Museum at Alexandria, which Ptolemy I Soter founded in 3rd century bce to house his collection of objects from around the globe. It was not until the 17th century that it gained a wider use as a place to collect and display items of historical interest.
As a cultural institution, the museum has always had devoted followers who value it on their own merits. They are patrons, collectors, scholars, or a more amorphous group that includes the general public. These devoted visitors make up the vast majority of museum audiences and provide funding to support their collections and scholarly endeavors.
Historians have long preferred to research their subjects in the library or archive rather than the museum object store but in recent years they have become more engaged with objects as new technology has made digitised collections widely available online. Historians have even started to work in museums, helping to develop gallery spaces and curate exhibitions.
During the late 19th and 20th centuries museums grew rapidly. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired paintings by John Kensett and Edouard Manet, while The Metropolitan Museum of Art became one of the most significant repositories of Classical antiquities with the 1874-76 purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot art. The Museum of Art’s collections diversified further in the 21st century with the acquisitions of sculptures by Auguste Rodin and a slew of modern paintings by artists including Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh.
Museums have also been seen as civic centers, economic engines, refuges and town squares as well as places for democratic discussion, and more recently – as the lead curators of The Cloisters’ re-conceptualisation in the 1990s showed – as laboratories where you can experiment with different approaches to telling history.
In the current social upheaval that is transforming America, many museums are recasting their histories to address issues of inequality and reach a wider range of the population. Some museums are doing this in very innovative ways; Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia are both examples of venues that have very few, or no, artifacts but tell memorable and compelling stories. Other museums are working to be more inclusive by mining their collections for art movements that have historically been underrepresented or ignored.
