Museum Archipelago

74. 'Houston, We Have A Restoration' with Sandra Tetley

January 13th, 2020  |  14 mins 13 secs

apollo mission control center

Every time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city: Mission Control. In that room on July 20, 1969, NASA engineers answered radio calls from the surface of the moon. Sitting in front of rows of green consoles, cigarettes in hand, they guided humans safely back to earth, channeling the efforts of the thousands and thousands of people who worked on the program through one room.

But until recently, that room was kind of a mess. After hosting Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions through 1992, the room hosted retirement parties, movie screenings, and the crumbs that came with them.

Spurred by the deadline of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019, the room was carefully restored with a new visitor experience. The restoration project focused on accurately portraying how the area looked at key moments during that mission, right down to the ashtrays and soda cans. In this episode, Sandra Tetley, Historic Preservation Officer at the Johnson Space Center, describes the process of restoring “one of the most significant places on earth.”

73. Sanchita Balachandran Shifts the Framework for Conservation with Untold Stories

December 2nd, 2019  |  14 mins 59 secs

sanchita balachandran

The field of conservation was created to fight change: to prevent objects from becoming dusty, broken, or rusted. But fighting to keep cultural objects preserved creates a certain mindset — a mindset where it’s too easy to imagine objects and cultures in a state of stasis.

Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, founded Untold Stories to change that mindset in the conservation profession. Through events at the annual meetings of the American Institute for Conservation, Untold Stories expands cultural heritage beyond preserving the objects we might find in a museum.

In this episode, Balachandran talks about Untold Story’s 2019 event: Indigenous Futures and Collaborative Conservation, avoiding the savior mentality, and how the profession has changed since she was in school.

72. ‘Speechless: Different by Design’ Reframes Accessibility and Communication in a Museum Context

November 18th, 2019  |  14 mins 42 secs

Museums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and audio guides lead headphone-ed users from one piece to the next, paragraph by paragraph.

But Speechless: Different by Design, a new exhibit at the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, guides visitors as far away as possible from words with six custom art installations.

In this episode, curator Sarah Schleuning and graphic designer Laurie Haycock Makela discuss how their personal experiences lead them to Speechless, and describe the process and considerations of putting it all together.

71. Assessing Curatorial Work for Social Justice With Elena Gonzales

October 28th, 2019  |  15 mins 6 secs

Museums are seen as trustworthy, but what if that trust is misplaced? Chicago-based independent curator Elena Gonzales provides a solid jumping off point for thinking critically about museums in her new book, Exhibitions for Social Justice.

The book is a whirlwind tour of different museums, examining how they approach social justice. It’s also a guide map for anyone interested in a way forward.

In this episode, Gonzales takes us on a tour of some of the main themes of the book, examining the strategies of museum institutions from the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

70. The Gabrovo Museum of Humor Bolsters Its Legacy of Political Satire Post-Communism

September 30th, 2019  |  11 mins 30 secs

bulgaria, museum of humor

To the extent that there was a Communist capital of humor in the last half of the 20th century, it was Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Situated in a valley of the Balkan mountains, the city prides itself on its unique brand of self-effacing humor. In 1972, the Museum House of Humor and Satire opened here, and the city celebrated political humor with people in Soviet block countries and even some invited Western guests.

Today, three decades after the collapse of Communism, the Museum House of Humor and Satire remains one of the region's most important cultural landmarks. The museum has had to reinvent itself to interpret not only a democratic Bulgaria, but a the global, meme-driven, and internet-forged culture most visitors live in.

I went to Gabrovo to visit museum director Margarita Dorovska, who describes how the museum's strengths in its early years—like knowing how to present political humor without arousing the interest of the authorities—inform how the museum thinks of its role in the world today.

69. Soviet Spacecraft in the American Heartland: The Story of the Kansas Cosmosphere

August 26th, 2019  |  11 mins 53 secs

From Apollo Mission Control in Houston, Texas, to the field in southeastern Russia where Yuri Gargarin finished his first orbit, there are many sites on earth that played a role in space exploration. But Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t one of them.

And yet, Hutchinson—a town of 40,000 people—is home to the Cosmosphere, a massive space museum. The Cosmosphere boasts an enormous collection of spacecraft, including the largest collection of Soviet space hardware anywhere outside Russia. How did all of these space artifacts end up in the middle of Kansas?

To find out, I visited Hutchinson to talk to Cosmosphere curator Shannon Whetzel. In this episode, Whetzel describes the story of the Cosmosphere as “being in the right place at the right time,” why the museum’s collection includes “destroyed” artifacts, and how she interprets Soviet hardware for a new generation.

68. The Akomawt Educational Initiative Forges a Snowshoe Path to Indigenize Museums

August 5th, 2019  |  14 mins 42 secs

akomawt educational initiative, endawnis spears, mashantucket pequot museum

Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together.

In this episode, endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw), director of programming and outreach for the Akomawt Educational Initiative, talks about the different between living culture and sterile museum artifacts, how Native narratives are violently presented through a white lens in museums, and the potential for museums to disrupt that for many visitors.

67. Cité de l'Espace Celebrates Apollo Day from the Middle of the Space Race

July 15th, 2019  |  8 mins 8 secs

apollo 11, cité de l'espace

Cité de l'Espace in Toulouse, France is a museum in the middle. It is in the middle of France’s Aerospace Valley and the European Space Industry. But it is also geographically in the middle of the two competing superpowers in the Space Race that ended with Apollo 11.

66. From ‘Extinct Monsters’ to ‘Deep Time’: A History of the Smithsonian Fossil Hall

June 17th, 2019  |  14 mins 35 secs

nmnh, smithsonian

The most-visited room in the most-visited science museum in the world reopened last week after a massive, five year renovation. Deep Time, as the new gallery is colloquially known, is the latest iteration of the Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

65. Sarah Nguyen Helps Fight Digital Decay with Preserve This Podcast

June 3rd, 2019  |  11 mins 8 secs

archiving, sarah nguyen

Everything decays. In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum—still decaying, but at least visible. Today, human heritage is decaying on hard drives.

Sarah Nguyen, a MLIS student at the University of Washington, is the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast, a project and podcast of the same name that proposes solutions to fight against the threats of digital decay for podcasts. Alongside archivists Mary Kidd and Dana Gerber-Margie, and producer Molly Schwartz, Nguyen advocates for Personal Digital Archiving, the idea that for the first time, your data is under your control and you can archive it to inform future history. Personal archiving counters the institutional gatekeepers who determined which data and stories are worth preserving.

In this episode, Nguyen cautions that preserving culture digitally comes with its own set of pitfalls, describes the steps that individuals can do to reduce the role of chance in preserving digital media, and why automatic archiving tools don’t properly contextualize.

64. Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Atlantis Experience Is Part Museum, Part Themed Attraction

May 13th, 2019  |  13 mins 33 secs

The Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience, which opened at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2013 brings visitors “nose to nose” with one of the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters. The team that built it used principles of themed attraction design to introduce visitors to the orbiter and the rest of the exhibits.

Atlantis is introduced linearly and deliberately: visitors see two movies about the shuttle before the actual orbiter is dramatically revealed behind a screen. The orbiter’s grand entrance was designed by PVAG Destinations, whose portfolio includes theme parks and museums. Diane Lochner, a vice president of the company who was part of the architectural design team, says that without that carefully-planned preparation, visitors wouldn’t have the same powerful emotional reaction to the Shuttle.

In this episode, Lochner is joined by Tom Owen, another vice president at PVAG Destinations to talk about the visitor experience considerations of the Shuttle Atlantis Experience, whether attractions engineered to create a specific emotional response in visitors are appropriate for museum contexts, and the broader trend of museums taking cues from theme park design.

63. Sex and Death Are on Display at The Museum of Old and New Art

April 29th, 2019  |  9 mins 57 secs

mona, museum of old and new art, tasmania

The Museum of Old and New Art opened in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in 2011. With a name like that, MONA could include any type of art. But looking at the collection, it’s clear that its creator, millionaire gambler David Walsh, has a fascination with sex and death -- and bets that the rest of us do too.

Walsh himself calls MONA a “subversive adult Disneyland.” The building’s architecture is designed to make you feel lost, and the art is displayed without any labels whatsoever. It’s just you and the art.

In this episode, Hobart-based musician Bianca Blackhall talks about how she’s watched MONA reshape the creative community and art landscape of the island, what makes the museum different from other art museums, and how Hobart is now in “Sauron's Eye of tourism.”