How To Tell Philadelphia’s Stories

Jun. 20, 2019

Back in February, more than 400 concerned citizens came out for a public meeting about the fate of the recently-shuttered Philadelphia History Museum. Things got heated (equally heated as a discussion almost a museum tin become).

"Philadelphia deserves a existent history museum," said John Gallery, sometime caput of the Preservation Brotherhood of Greater Philadelphia. "It's a disgrace."

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"The museum has never lived up to its potential because it's been chronically underfunded," said another attendee. Its closure, he said, "is a disgrace for the city."

What followed was a stew of frustration and defoliation. Members of the City's Office of Arts, Civilisation and the Artistic Economy had expected about 250 people to show up. They got well-nigh double that. People wanted to know: Why can't we take a physical infinite for these objects? What will happen to the drove now? How can nosotros forbid this from happening to other small nonprofits? How did the city permit this happen?

To sit down with Drexel's Remer is to conjure the implications of a museum without walls—1 that'southward too fully attainable online—whose mission is to take history to the people.

A scrap of background: The museum, known to most of us equally the Atwater Kent, had long held the premier concentration of Philly-themed objects from 1682 to the present 24-hour interval, ranging from the delightfully eccentric (a clamper of Veteran's Stadium Astroturf), to the forebodingly grim (the key-shaped weathervane from the top of Moyamensing Prison), to the magnificently evocative (George Washington's mahogany roll-elevation desk from his dwelling house at Sixth and Arch streets).

Merely it had fallen on hard times. Mike DiBernadinis, the City'south so-managing director, told The New York Times final yr that the museum's revenue generation had been shrinking over time; the Urban center had approaching $300,000 to PHM for 2022 and had planned to allot $250,000 this year (if it had remained open). By comparison, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art typically receives about $300,000 annually from the City, but its revenues are significantly higher. Bottom line: Also few people were going to the museum at 7th and Market Streets for information technology to be sustainable.

Merely who says a museum has to exist fabricated of brick and mortar, with a door that locks to continue the metropolis outside? Is this moment of transition for the PHM collection really an opportunity to concur up to inspection merely what a museum is and ought to be? Tin can the closing of PHM stop upwards bringing history to Philadelphians where they live, potentially growing an audience across the typical museum-goer?

To argue about whether the city ought to devote $300,000 or $250,000 to our common preconception of what a museum must be kind of misses the bigger moving-picture show: that brick and mortar museums cry out for disruption.

"Startups are about ideas people believe in so much they desire to take extraordinary risks to make them happen," writes Jasper Visser in The Museum of the Future. "Museums are well-nigh ideas nosotros consider so valuable and important they need to be preserved and presented forever. When we manage to combine these 2 cultures, I guess there's little that tin can stop the states from being successful."

And that, in a nutshell, is what this moment in Philadelphia arts and culture is all most. Other institutions are already holding upwards to inspection just what it means to a museum these days, such as the upstart Philadelphia Gimmicky , a robust program of popular-up exhibitions and performances that is the abstraction of Harry Philbrick, former museum director of the Pennsylvania University of the Fine Arts.

So, too, is the fight over PHM actually virtually our inclination to reimagine the condition quo—or not. "There'due south an quondam management question: 'If we built information technology afresh, would nosotros build it the aforementioned way we did 10 number of years ago?'" says Thaddeus Squire, who founded the arts consulting organization CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia."That needs to be asked vigorously by every managing director and every lath, instead of people asking 'How do we perpetuate something?' That'southward where organizations neglect."

The success of this new stage in PHM's life will depend, in big role, on how well Drexel can curate and promote exhibits that depict a crowd, the way the museum failed to do. Can they make objects from 200 years ago relevant today?

That'southward precisely how Rosalind Remer, Vice Provost and Executive Director of the Drexel University Lenfest Heart for Cultural Partnerships, is approaching the PHM question, full of vision and "why non" questioning. Drexel has heroically stepped upwardly to assume control of the closed museum'due south drove, even if many of those who attended the public meeting at the Constitution Center aren't ready to reimagine what it ways to be a museum in this day and historic period.

To sit down with Remer is to conjure the implications of a museum without walls—one that's also fully attainable online—whose mission is to take history to the people. Imagine, for example, an exhibit framed around Joe Frazier's boxing gloves in the Logan Branch of the Free Library, almost where he resided and had his gym. Perhaps that could be tied to a photo exhibit of the Philly boxers he trained and who've been affected past Smokin' Joe's legacy, a screening of vintage footage of Frazier's most memorable fights, an artist's rendition of a life-size image of Frazier (hello, Instagram selfies). Could that spark a little joy, perchance inspire some reflection, or even exist and so compelling that a person walking by has to drag her friend over to meet information technology, too?

Remer'south plan is to use this historical collection every bit a lending library to organizations like local library branches, historic sites and houses, archival collections, and museums. If a robust lending program gets off the ground, there'southward a potential for more of the collection to be on view at any one fourth dimension than when it was at its brick-and-mortar location, where but 400 objects were typically on display. Already, several of the pieces are on display at museums from hither to Minnesota, including the National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of American Jewish History, and Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.

"We can just blanket the city with great objects and stories, and go well beyond what the Museum was doing," Remer says. "This is a scalable idea that other cities would be paying attending to considering this is not a trouble unique to Philadelphia or to this particular museum. Someone will have to imagine a new model, so that items just don't disappear when museums flounder and there's no one to grab them. If that happens, items are sold or thrown abroad and y'all never become them back together."

Drexel was not the get-go choice for the PHM; a deal with Temple University to safeguard the collection cruel through at the 11th hr. Merely in some ways Drexel is the logical option for stewardship, for which it would receive five years of metropolis funding to process the drove and launch the new lending program. (After v years, Drexel would need to raise its ain funds to maintain the collection.)

"We are a collecting institution," says Remer. "The first thing our founder Anthony Drexel did was requite a chunk of money to the get-go president to leave and purchase fine art, artifacts, decorative arts, so the students would meet these things while attending classes. They would exist surrounded by the beauty and craftsmanship almost how things are made. It's baked into our Deoxyribonucleic acid."

Items in the PHM collection say something most Philadelphia, who we are, what we value. They tell stories near our grittiness, our refinement, our idiosyncrasies, and the best and worst moments of our citizens and communities.

Over the years, Drexel has acquired important archives including the Women'due south Medical College of Pennsylvania'south research collection about women in scientific discipline and medicine, likewise as the 18 one thousand thousand scientific specimens in the  University of Natural Sciences Museum. With PHM, Drexel would acquire a collection considered the city's attic of sorts; as with stuff people put in their attics, some pieces are more germane than others and the chore of managing the collections entails culling it earlier Drexel builds on information technology.

Page Talbott, a individual planning and exhibition development consultant hired to evaluate the drove and recommend which pieces should be sold, explains that what remains will be the richest portions of a rich history. "Any of the objects in this collection that are well-loved are loved considering of those rich stories and none of them would be at any risk," she says.

The success of this new phase in PHM's life will depend, in large office, on how well Drexel tin curate and promote exhibits that draw a oversupply, the way the museum failed to do. Tin they brand objects from 200 years ago relevant today? Can they arts and crafts compelling narratives out of its collection of ephemera of African American life in the city through the years, or its vast array of pictures from the earliest days of photography to the present 24-hour interval? Tin can they turn the moribund collection into a living, breathing story of Philadelphia? Information technology'due south a dazzling creative opportunity that makes this moment an exciting one—and not something to exist feared.

That'due south why the fate of the museum has brought together for brainstorming some of the urban center'south deepest cultural thinkers, whose ideas could offer lessons beyond just PHM. Amid them accept been Squire, documentarian and former mayoral aspirant Sam Katz, and philanthropist (and former Philadelphia History Museum board chair) David Seltzer. They've inspected many ideas, including seeing PHM as a type of virtual museum that would also serve as the foundation for a unique, region-wide heritage/historical festival, or portfolio of programs to celebrate our country's 250th ceremony in 2026, perhaps in partnership with USA250, the nonprofit that is creating programming to celebrate the semiquincentennial. In this way, the museum is as much an idea, a cultural glue, as it is a collection.

Right now, that collection—all 130,000 objects—is stored in a secret, 10,000-square-foot Philadelphia warehouse. Among the items is a modest, gray hat that Abraham Lincoln wore to disguise himself on his 1861 secret train journeying to the Capitol on the way to his inauguration. At about four inches loftier and 12 inches across, information technology looks nothing like his signature black stovepipe. This less impressive hat—held aloft past the tissue paper placed underneath the hat's crown—assisted in foiling an assassination attempt, allowing Lincoln to pass unrecognized through Philadelphia and Baltimore in social club to safely reach D.C. Lincoln held this very chapeau in his own hands. It might accept saved his life. It might have changed the class of history. This hat has a story to tell.

Lincoln's chapeau, like every other item in the PHM collection, says something about Philadelphia, who we are, what we value. They tell stories about our grittiness, our refinement, our idiosyncrasies, and the best and worst moments of our citizens and communities. They add up to telling the states who nosotros are—and perhaps, who we tin can be in the future.

We just don't need a edifice to house them in for yous to run across. What we practice need is the blazon of sui generis thinking Remer and others are bringing to arts and culture bug.

We wouldn't be the first. None other than United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland is toying with the idea of rethinking traditional notions of what a museum is. "We really need to challenge the bricks and mortar motif of the museum itself," Ed Vaizey, Britian'south sometime Government minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has said. "Objects need to come out from behind their Victorian façades and go to where people are more likely to stumble across them. Is it really blasphemy to imagine a few earth-class objects being housed in shopping centres, to entice and excite the many people who still believe that museums are not for them?"

Hell, if stodgy ol' Keen U.k. is thinking along these lines, surely nosotros tin be but as cheeky as Vaizey, who asked, "Who's up for a Whistler in Westfield [Mall]?"

Photo via US History

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/how-to-tell-philadelphias-stories/

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