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14 books match the query 'Museum'

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Casino and Museum

Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity

John J. Bodinger de Uriarte

University of Arizona Press, 2007

The past twenty-five years have seen enormous changes in Native America. One of the most profound expressions of change has been within the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The Nation has overcome significant hurdles to establish itself as a potent cultural and economic force highlighted by the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and Foxwoods, the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere. In Casino and Museum, John J. Bodinger de Uriarte sees these two main commercial structures of the reservation as mutually supporting industries generating both material and symbolic capital.

To some degree, both institutions offer Native representations yet create different strategies for attracting and engaging visitors. While the casino is crucial as an economic generator, the museum has an important role as the space for authentic Mashantucket Pequot images and narratives. The book’s focus is on how the casino and the museum successfully deploy different strategies to take control of the tribe’s identity, image, and cultural agency.

Photographs in the book provide a view of Mashantucket, allowing the reader to study the spaces of the book’s central arguments. They are a key methodology of the project and offer a non-textual opportunity to navigate the sites as well as one finely focused way to work through the representation and formation of the Native American photographic subject—the powerful popular imagining of Native Americans. Casino and Museum presents a unique understanding of the prodigious role that representation plays in the contemporary poetics and politics of Native America. It is essential reading for scholars of Native American studies, museum studies, cultural studies, and photography.

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Conscience and Memory

Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust

Harold Kaplan

University of Chicago Press, 1994

Prompted by the suicides of Jean Amery and Primo Levi, Harold Kaplan sought to ask what the Holocaust can be said to affirm even even in the face of its overwhelming negation of meaning. "I wrote this book," he explains, "to translate the Holocaust out of the moral and intellectual shock which contemplates the alienation of humanity from itself. I wished to understand the 'crime against humanity' as a viable category of the moral reason. And I wished to respond to the written testimony of Holocaust victims and survivors as if the issue of their survival were present to us today."

Kaplan simulates the response to a long visit to the new Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., which, crucially for Kaplan, is sited in direct view of the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments, powerful symbols of humanist democracy. He insists the Holocaust be viewed not only in terms of personal ethics but modern political ethics as well: for Kaplan the affirmative legacy of the Holocaust is its focus on the dangers of nationalism, racism, and all forms of separatist group identities. It challenges the historicism, cults of power, and scientistic politics of modernity. And it challenges the moral passivity and relativism of mass politics in Western and Eastern societies.

The opening of the Holocaust museum has sparked a debate that reflects a larger debate over the Holocaust's "meaning," its translatability for ordinary understanding. Some deny any possible response except that of overwhelming grief and horror. For others, the "lesson" of the Holocaust implies, in the words of Robert Nozick, that "mankind has fallen. . . . Humanity has lost its claim to continue." The moral life and political institutions will remain endlessly tormented by the Holocaust. That, Kaplan tells us, is the ultimate content of its "meaning," and is what makes the discussion of "meaning" much more than a mourner's symposium.

The Museum itself, according to Kaplan, has become an impressive memorial to the principle of humanism, instructing the collective memory of this democracy and that of nations everywhere which aspire to civil existence. Out of its awful darkness the Holocaust throws the light of conscience for those capable of receiving it.

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Contributions from the Museum of Geology

Containing Papers Published between July 10, 1924, and August 3, 1927

Edited by Eugene S. McCartney

University of Michigan Press, 1928

This volume features a collection of papers originally published between July 10, 1924, and August 3, 1927, and edited by Eugene S. McCartney. Most, but not all, of the contributors were members of the faculties or graduates of the University of Michigan who published on their findings while examining fossils and rock formations. Many of the articles discuss findings from the state of Michigan, including “Occurrence of the Collingwood Formation in Michigan.”

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Contributions from the Museum of Paleontology

Containing Papers Published between July 31, 1936, and July 1, 1939

Edited by Eugene S. McCartney

University of Michigan Press, 1939

Containing papers published between July 31, 1936, and July 1, 1939, edited by Eugene S. McCartney and published by the University of Michigan Press in 1939, is a comprehensive compilation of influential paleontological research. Among the notable articles included are E. C. Case's study on a nothosaur from the Triassic of Wyoming, Chester A. Arnold's multi-part observations on fossil plants from the Devonian of Eastern North America, and K. G. Brill's description of Productella waynensis, a new brachiopod from the New Providence Shale of Kentucky. The volume also features detailed examinations such as Chester A. Arnold's work on some fossil species of Mavonia from Oregon, E. C. Case's analysis of a specimen of Stylemys nebrascensis showing the bones of the feet and limbs, and Andrew H. McNair's study on cryptostomatous bryozoa from the Middle Devonian Traverse Group of Michigan. Helen Duncan contributes with her research on trepostomatous bryozoa from the Traverse Group of Michigan, and John A. Wilson describes a new species of dog from the Miocene of Colorado. This collection is an invaluable resource for paleontologists and researchers dedicated to the study of fossil plants and animals, providing detailed descriptions and insights into ancient life forms and their geological contexts.

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Contributions from the Museum of Paleontology

Containing Papers Published between November 10, 1928, and April 9, 1932

Edited by Eugene S. McCartney

University of Michigan Press, 1932

Containing papers published between November 10, 1928, and April 9, 1932, features significant paleontological research. Edited by Eugene S. McCartney and published by the University of Michigan Press in 1932, this volume includes groundbreaking contributions such as E. C. Case's study on indications of a cotylosaur and a new form of fish from the Triassic beds of Texas, Aldred S. Warthin Jr.'s research on fossil fishes from the Triassic of Texas, and the collaborative work of Laurence M. Gould, Aug. F. Foerste, and Russell C. Hussey on the geology of Foxe Land, Baffin Island. Other notable entries include Russell C. Hussey's examination of cystoids from the Trenton Rocks of Michigan, E. C. Case's detailed description of the skeleton of Ostodolepis brevispinatus, and Aug. F. Foerste's studies on the color patterns of fossil cephalopods and brachiopods, as well as additional notes on nephritic erina. E. C. Case also provides insights into the lower jaw of Brachysuchus megalodon, arthrodiran remains from the Devonian of Michigan, limb movement patterns in phytosaurs, and the description of a new species of Buettneria. Chester A. Arnold discusses Calamites newberryi, while Charles F. Deiss offers a description and stratigraphic correlation of the Fenestellidae from the Devonian of Michigan. This volume is an invaluable resource for paleontologists and researchers interested in furthering their understanding of fossil organisms and geological history.

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Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum

Katrin Sieg

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum examines efforts by European museums to investigate colonialism as part of an unprocessed past, confront its presence, and urge repair. A flurry of exhibitions and the overhaul of numerous large museums in the last decade signal that an emergent colonial memory culture is now reaching broader publics. Exhibitions pose the question of what Europeans owe to those they colonized.

Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum shows how museums can help visitors mourn historic violence and identify the contemporary agents, beneficiaries, victims, survivors, and resisters of colonial presence. At the same time, the book treats the museum as part of the racialized power relations that activists, academics, and artists have long protested against. This book asks whether museums have made the dream of activists, academics, and artists to build equitable futures more acceptable and more durable—or whether in packaging that dream for general audiences they curtail it. Confronting colonial violence, this book argues, pushes Europeans to face the histories of racism and urges them to envision antiracism at the global scale.

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Grand Designs

Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture

Lara Kriegel

Duke University Press, 2007

With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart of debates about cultural institutions during the Victorian era. Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the continent and in the colonies. Declaring a crisis of design and workmanship among the British laboring classes, reformers pioneered schools of design, copyright protections, and spectacular displays of industrial and imperial wares, most notably the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their efforts culminated with the establishment of the South Kensington Museum, predecessor to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which stands today as home to the world’s foremost collection of the decorative and applied arts. Kriegel’s identification of the significant links between markets and museums, and between economics and aesthetics, amounts to a rethinking of Victorian cultural formation.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including museum guidebooks, design manuals, illustrated newspapers, pattern books, and government reports, Kriegel brings to life the many Victorians who claimed a stake in aesthetic reform during the middle years of the nineteenth century. The aspiring artists who attended the Government School of Design, the embattled provincial printers who sought a strengthened industrial copyright, the exhibition-going millions who visited the Crystal Palace, the lower-middle-class consumers who learned new principles of taste in metropolitan museums, and the working men of London who critiqued the city’s art and design collections—all are cast by Kriegel as leading cultural actors of their day. Grand Designs shows how these Victorians vied to upend aesthetic hierarchies in an imperial age and, in the process, to refashion London’s public culture.

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Irina Nakhova

Museum on the Edge

Jane A. Sharp

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Throughout her extensive career, Russian conceptual artist Irina Nakhova has frequently pushed the limits of what constitutes art and how we experience the art museum. One of her famous early pieces, for instance, transformed a room in her very own Moscow apartment into an art installation.

Released in conjunction with Nakhova’s first museum retrospective exhibition in the United States, this book includes many full-color illustrations of her work, spanning the entirety of her forty-year career and demonstrating her facility with a variety of media. It also includes essays by a variety of world-renowned curators and art historians, each cataloging Nakhova’s artistic innovations and exploring how she deals with themes of everyday life, memory, viewer engagement, and moral responsibility. It concludes with a new interview with Nakhova herself, giving new insight into her creative process and artistic goals. Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge provides a vivid look at the work of a visionary artist. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.

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Mining in the Museum

Mineral Technology on Display in American History

Eric C. Nystrom

University of Massachusetts Press, 2027

Examining 150 years of mining and mineral technology exhibits at the Smithsonian

Buried deep underground or cut into remote landscapes, mines are often dirty, dark, and dangerous places, located far from the everyday urban spaces that most Americans call home. Yet mining is foundational to the making of the United States, supplying the raw materials that built its infrastructure, powered its industries, and shaped its scientific institutions, even as the work itself has remained physically removed, technically complex, and culturally overlooked. Mining in the Museum reveals how Americans have encountered this vital industry not at the distant mine face, but in museum galleries. Tracing more than 150 years of mining and mineral technology exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Eric C. Nystrom shows how curators transformed ore, instruments, models, and machinery into stories about progress, innovation, and national development, and how those interpretive choices shaped what the nation remembers—and forgets—about mining.

Using mining collections as a lens into institutional change, Nystrom offers a new history of the Smithsonian and its United States National Museum, examining how curators, administrators, and policymakers debated what museums were for, which kinds of knowledge they should produce, and what objects deserved display. He follows the shifting fortunes of mineral and mining exhibits across world’s fairs, scientific surveys, and changing exhibition philosophies, showing how display strategies evolved alongside professional science and public education. As mining’s place in the national imagination changed, so too did its presence in the federal museum, moving from a central scientific and technological showcase to a subject increasingly preserved by regional and local institutions closer to mining communities themselves. Grounded in extensive archival research, Mining in the Museum illuminates the evolving relationship among technology, public history, and the politics of display, demonstrating how museums help define which industries, and which kinds of work, become part of the American story.

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Museum of Words

The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery

James A. W. Heffernan

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures.

In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

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Museum of the Soon to Depart

Andy Young

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024

A poetic exploration of life amid intimate losses.

In Museum of the Soon to Depart, poet Andy Young searches for her place in history as it unfolds around her through revolution, plague, and natural disaster. As curator of her museum, she navigates her own and others’ suffering through intense observation, from the inner mechanisms of grief and illness to the solace of distance provided by photography. The material of the poet’s own life and events on the world stage intertwine, resulting in poems with a staggering range, inhabiting language in ways that ultimately point to its limits.

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Museum of the Weird

Amelia Gray

University of Alabama Press, 2010

WINNER OF FC2’s AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW/RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATE FICTION PRIZE

Step inside a gallery where the strange feels familiar.

A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.

Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

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