Dispatches from the Mid-Atlantic: City of Museums

Since college, I have tried really hard to dislike Philadelphia. It probably had something to do with dating a guy from Pittsburgh, but it mostly boiled down to this: its not big like New York, it’s not the capital like Washington, it’s not as strong-willed as Boston, and I hate all its sports teams. I’ve been known to call it Filth-adelphia from time to time, and curse its middling existence when driving between Washington to New York. It feels like an “unspecial” city. And did I mention that I really hate all the sports teams?

But, here I am living in Philadelphia, and I’m going to tell you a secret. Ready?

I kind of really like it here.

It was a puzzling thing for me – liking a city I’d decided to hate – until I heard a short bit on NPR, featuring Penn professor David Brownlee that made it all click into place.

Philadelphia is the birthplace of the American museum.

In 1789, Charles Wilson Peale (of The Artist in His Museum self-portrait fame) founded The Philadelphia Museum, a collection of odds and ends, paintings and taxidermy specimens he had acquired over the years.

Peale was the first to establish collection loans when he borrowed taxidermy specimens for his museum from a London institution, and was also the first to adopt the Linnaean taxonomy, presenting his specimens as scientific pieces for study and education, rather than for entertainment or shock value as many other curio collections did at the time.

Other Philadelphia museums quickly popped up, and spread the idea that collections could be used to broaden the mind and cultural horizons. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (founded in 1806) is the oldest art school and museum in the United States. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel (founded in 1812) is the oldest science research institution, and the Franklin Institute (1824) was one of the first museums in the western hemisphere to dedicate itself specifically to science education.

For a history major and a museum studies graduate, that’s a lot of BIG museum firsts.

(FYI – The oldest established museum I could find in Boston was the Boston Athanaeum, founded in 1807. Let me know if there’s an older one.)

Maybe Philadelphia feels “unspecial” to me because at so many times it has been special for different reasons. For a little while it was the nation’s capital, then the industrial capital, then arts capital and then a center for scientific and philosophical thought.

And, as Brownlee posits, this fluctuating role in history is also represented in its museums. How, where and why certain institutions were built can represent a city at a certain moment – much the way your high school yearbook photo represents you when you graduated.

I often ask my peers: do museums have a specific personality based on their location? Is a modern art museum in Chicago, for example, fundamentally different from one in San Francisco? Or is a museum a museum a museum, no matter where you go?

Personally, I subscribe to the idea of a personality. I do think museums have a certain feel depending on the city.

Washington gets to have the Nationals – the museums that represent the United States as a whole. Boston gets the Revolutionaries– the places that talk about colonial life and the start of American history and culture. New York has the Hipster-Highbrows – institutions that are as big, as fancy and as eclectic as its population.

But I think Philadelphia has something extra special. It has the Firsts. The places that went through the growing pains and all the changes that make American museums what they are today. And, oddly, for being the City of Museums (as Brownlee put it), Philadelphia institutions don’t feel pretentious.

Sadly, Peale’s Philadelphia Museum failed and the collection was sold, so you can’t go see the first American museum. But Peale’s idea for an educational institution remained, and can be seen in all sorts of museums, both in Philadelphia and around the United States.

What do you think? Do museums have “personalities” based on location? How important is it to be labeled oldest, first or biggest?

To hear Brownlee’s interview on NPR, click here

Dispatches from the Mid-Atlantic: Cinderella Ate My Breakfast

by columnist Madeline Karp,

I did not have the chance to make my mom breakfast in bed this Mother’s Day. I had to go to Philadelphia to be a princess.

The Please Touch Museum hosts an annual Mother’s Day Princess Brunch for Centennial Guild Members (i.e.: platinum level, or those who pay for the highest possible membership package). The morning is complete with omelets and pancakes made to order, flowers for the mothers, and early admission to the museum, so kids can play on the floor relatively undisturbed.

And, oh yeah, you can meet a princess.

Following Storybook Ball, I was drafted for a Tour of Royal Duty – my supervisor claims it’s because I have the necessary “bubbly enthusiasm” early in the morning.

I was cast as Sleeping Beauty, and spent the morning greeting children, asking them if they had “a good sleep with nice dreams” and discussing the importance of eating your breakfast so you can have the energy to play all day. It was a blast, and no small ego boost to have squadrons of little girls follow you around like you’re a rock star.

But when I was all finished Princessing and had slipped out of the tulle dress and back into my blue jeans, I suddenly felt conflicted. Had I done the right thing by agreeing to do this? What kind of role model was I being for these kids?

My university-educated, progressive, egalitarian, feminist side was boiling mad. How could I – a girl who had put so much effort into my education, and who refuses to date men who choose my body over my brain – walk around smiling at kids pretending that none of it matters?

I typically agree with Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter. Orenstein posits that most women have a “princess complex,” where we fear aging into evil hags, will wait around for Prince Charming rather than adventure solo, and feel we need to meet certain societal conventions to be considered beautiful. (I could go on and on, but I’d rather you read more about it here, here or here.)

My inner feminist was freaking out, but my museum professional side took a deep breath.

In school we learn that part of being a good museum professional is to know your audience. What do they like? What do they want? What gets them excited?

Little girls love princesses. (And by the way, their brothers love princesses who freelance as international superspies, Jedi Knights and ninjas.)

If dressing up like a princess is what it takes to get a three-year-old girl to come to the museum, then so be it. It doesn’t mean that said princess has to sell the idea of needing a prince or that you have to be a certain dress size to be beautiful. Quite the contrary. This princess asked kids what their favorite exhibit was, and did they like coming to the museum, what’s the best part about Kindergarten and what books they like to read. She also told them that they were beautiful, especially with pancake syrup all over their faces.

Interestingly, kids are more willing to share their toys (and breakfasts) with princesses, and kids who are normally really shy told me their life stories. Learning through play, for sure. If only they believed all their playmates were royalty.

My hope is that rather than creating girls with a princess complex, I’m helping to create museum advocates. Anything that helps to create a good memory in the museum – be it a Carousel ride or meeting a princess – creates the inroads for that little girl to ask to come back, or to go to another museum next weekend, or to even take out a membership years later when she has kids.

So I came to this conclusion: so long as you’re not violating the museum’s mission or promoting retrograde thinking, and you are working towards building a community in your museum, princess it up. Jump into that tulle dress, smile, sparkle and sell it.

Where do you fall on this issue? Do you think it’s okay to have princesses in the museum? Share your thoughts with me in the comments!

Dispatches from the Mid-Atlantic: Museum Professionals 360°

by columnist Madeline Karp,

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, then you may know that I spent Sunday morning at the Stainton Society’s Annual Brunch, which featured CNN journalist Anderson Cooper as a guest speaker.

The Stainton Society is an Atlantic City-based medical philanthropy group and the annual brunch is their big fundraiser for a local medical center. The who, what, and why of how I got into is event is really neither here nor there, but if you’re friends with me in general, then you may know that I am a huge Anderson Cooper fangirl. That had something to do with it.

I say this with only a little bit of bias: Anderson was awesome.

“There’s a value to bearing witness to what people are going through,” he said. “I think it’s important to see people in remarkable situations and acknowledge it.” No, bearing witness does not change the course of events, he continued. But it does open our eyes to other places and situations, and prevent someone who has passed away from simply dissolving into history, as if he never existed at all.

He went on to play to his audience, talking about how doctors and nurses bear witness to emotional, physical and medical extremes in hospitals – they see deaths and births, cure deadly diseases and deliver heartbreaking diagnoses. He then spoke about seeing war zones, of dealing with loss, of the people he’s met who remain optimistic, even in the direst of situations. On the surface, this all has nothing to do with me, or my profession.

But when it was all over, I had a strange thought: Anderson Cooper is a museum. (Specifically, I think he’s a history museum, but you can tell me if you disagree.)

Anderson Cooper has dedicated his life to bringing others’ stories to the public. They are stories from people you will never meet, stories that you may never hear otherwise. Some of them are terribly sad. Some of them are amazing. Some of them are funny in their own way. He wants to inform people and to tell them the facts – it’s up to us to interpret those facts, form an opinion and make that story mean something.

What is your museum’s mission? Technically, it may be to interpret history or make artistic masterpieces accessible for a nominal fee. But isn’t it really to bear witness to an historical moment? To recognize the human capacity to create amazing works of beauty?

Museums collect things, but the true story is that of the person who owned or used them. Objects tell a story – like Anderson Cooper, it’s the museum’s job to root that story out and share it with the public. With any collected object or exhibit, we have to find the story, ask the tough questions, edit the content, package it for mass consumption and give people something to think about. Please remember this exhibit, museums ask visitors. Please make this story meaningful.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that in their own way, museums bear witness to the human condition and we as museum professionals are the reporters.

So what do you think? Is Anderson Cooper a history museum? Can history museums be Anderson Cooper?

Share you thoughts with me in the comments!

PS- I highly recommend reading Anderson’s book Dispatches from the Edge. In addition to giving insight into the lifestyle of a foreign correspondent, it may have helped inspire this column’s name. (Just a little.)