Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

by Steven D. Lubar

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Museums, History, Art, Grad School, Natural History, Read For School

406 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 7, 2017

Reviews

[Laurel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a super readable book about museums and the work of a curator. I don't think it crosses over into being of interest to the general public but anyone with an interest in curatorial work would enjoy and benefit from the history and thought in this book. I'd love for all museum directors and trustees to read it so they better understand the complexities of this work.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inside the Lost Museum is not the book on the Jenks Museum I expected, but it is an enlightening look behind the scenes of curating a museum. It ties in incredibly well with museum management philosophy, showing why things like collections policies need to exist from a curator’s perspective. It also provides a good starting place for conversations on moral acquisitions and museum narratives, which are incredibly important topics in museum education right now. Overall, Inside the Lost Museum is definitely a recommended read for anyone interested in curatorship or museum studies.

[Elizabeth Dunham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lubar's book is one I reviewed for required reading for my Museum Studies students. The chapters on key curatorial questions about museum life sit comfortably on museum studies shelves alongside such works as Stephen Weil’s Making Museums Matter, Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum, and Adrian George’s The Curator’s Handbook. It is of practical interest to those who participate in any organization, large or small, devoted to preserving or displaying art or artifacts or as a gift to a museum director.

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for my museum studies class and it did a really good job of presenting an overview of how museums are created, run and operate within communities.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great way to understand how museums function through the lens of Jenks' museum. Thorough explanation of why every part of a museum is necessary and important.

[Andie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was basically my entire intro to museum studies class in one book, and it was written way better than the stuff I had to read for the class.

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Repetitive, the Coda about deconstructing the museum is better than the book, unfortunately.

[Susan Dietz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful use of the reinvention of closed Jenks Museum to consider themes of collecting, preserving, displaying and using that are the work of museums.

[Wendelle]

a thorough but light-touched introduction to all aspects of curating a museum, such as the criteria for adding an artifact/specimen to a collection, and descriptions of the situation and purpose of a museum's storage collection.