Museum Studies Commons^™

Selective Remembrance: Constructing Nostalgia At The Park Chung Hee Presidential Museum, Abigail Shaw

Honors Theses

How and why does Park Chung Hee remain so potent in the minds of South Koreans, decades after his rule? Seungsook Moon (2009) describes the phenomenon as Park Chung Hee Syndrome: a cultural condition in which Park’s image circulates between glorification, demonization, and humanization, producing an unresolved and emotionally charged field of memory. Building on this, researchers have examined how a type of “Park Chung Hee nostalgia” operates through selective remembrance of developmental success, moral discipline, and national unity, ultimately creating a positive memory and longing for semblance of his long-ended rule (Park, 2011; Podoler, 2016; Lee, 2022).

Statues and …

Origins Of Art: Demystifying The Scheuring Icon Collection, Mikayla Klemp

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Assembling A Queer Exhibition: A Phenomenological Case Study Of Exhibition Team Members And Their Interpretation Of Material In An Lgbtq+ Exhibit, Ethan Wojciechowski

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Recently, exhibitions highlighting LGBTQ+ history, art, and culture are becoming increasingly popular. Consequently, museum workers are routinely engaged with material directly attributed to the LGBTQ+ community. This study utilizes a two-pronged qualitative approach of a phenomenological case study to examine how members of exhibition teams interpret queer materials within the exhibit and in the context of their own expressed identities. Data collection involved surveys and interviews, and employed a textual analysis of the survey responses and interview transcripts to identify key themes in the dataset. Consequently, the findings revealed that exhibition team members focused on Intersectionality, Activism, and Geography when …

Culturally And Socially Responsive Teacher Professional Learning At The American Museum Of Natural History, Jessica Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project consists of a series of professional learning sessions to support teachers in their implementation of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-SE) using the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a resource and case study. Through the lens of Historically Responsive Literacy, the series also seeks to reestablish social science as a critical element of natural history for teachers. This series can help teachers see the museum as not only a place to explore life and physical science, but also a place to explore identity, social/emotional development, cultural studies and American History. The project includes resources and directions for …

Of Minutemen And Boomers: Fallout And Doing History In Imagined Space, Marissa Paige Schuling

CGU Theses & Dissertations

On October 23, 2077, the world as known to the average American ends abruptly with the onset of the Great War, transforming the United States into a nuclear wasteland and setting the stage for the Fallout series of role-playing video games by Interplay Entertainment and Bethesda Softworks. Set in a post-apocalyptic future yet steeped in 1950s American ideals, Fallout merges historical fiction with sci-fi fantasy, exploring themes of American exceptionalism, hyper-Capitalism, anti-communism, nuclear anxiety, and militarism through exaggerated symbols of Americana. This thesis posits that Fallout serves as a critique of Cold War America's paradoxical utopianism and paranoia, highlighting the …

Reframing Culture: The Decolonization And Repatriation Process In The Italian Museum System, Leila De Gruy

Honors Theses

In 2022, the collections of the former Museo Coloniale, Colonial Museum, were reopened to the public as a part of the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome. This reopening, viewed by many as an exhumation of fascist dictator Mussolini’s former collection, in the neighborhood he built for the World Fair, reinvigorated the debate surrounding museum decolonization and brought Italy into the spotlight for this topic. This thesis seeks to explore the conversation surrounding the topic of Italian museum decolonization, using the Museo Coloniale’s collection as the primary example of a colonial museum in a post colonial world. Through this, it asks …

Postcolonial Museums And National Identity In Vietnam, Reese W. Hollister

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Following the Vietnam Wars, the nation of Vietnam used museums to construct its identity for both national and international audiences. This paper first investigates the colonial origins of Vietnam's museum landscape, stemming from French ethnographic museums in colonial Indochina. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism then serves as the theoretical framework to understand Vietnamese nation's collective, historical memory of the French and American Wars. This paper concludes that the Vietnamese national identity is based on the shared trauma and socialist solidarity that arise from anti-colonial resistance. Museums both construct and preserve this national identity, …

The Body Articulated: Gender Violence And The Performative Turn In Mexico, Kylee Aragon

Museum Studies Theses

The Body Articulated: Gender Violence and the Performative Turn in Mexico explores the role of performance art in raising awareness for gender-based crimes. My thesis investigates the performative response to gender-based violence in contemporary art in Mexico during the 1970’s and then again in the post-NAFTA era, with the aim of examining the use of the artists body, the voices of women as substitution for the body, and the bodies of others as means of creating a greater awareness to the feminicidal epidemic. Artists like Mónica Mayer and Lorena Wolffer use their body and the voices of woman, as opposed …

How Neurodiversity Centered Museum Education Within Art Museums Can Benefit Children With Adhd And Autism Spectrum Disorders, Maria I. Johnson

Museum Studies Theses

Within the last twenty years, many major museums have made an effort to be seen and operate as pillars of their communities. They have begun shifting their organizational standards to be more inclusive and accessible to marginalized communities. When looking at the educational practices of modern art museums, there is undoubtedly a common standard of educational programs. While this formula has worked for many, there is a community that has voiced the need for a change. The neurodivergent community, which developed within the last two decades, should have access to art museum education in an accessible way. The following thesis …

The Pervert’S Guide To The Museum, Seth Ifor Alt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides a sustained theoretical articulation of core Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts situated within the standing difficulties in the practice and theory of museums. Drawing upon research gathered from site visits, informational interviews, textual analysis, and an extensive engagement with the seminars of Jacques Lacan, I enumerate here a first attempt at what a Lacanian theoretical formation can contribute to museum studies scholarship. Through this research this dissertation shows psychoanalysis to be especially useful for museum studies owing to how the troubles immediately encountered in the everyday material practices of museological work are structurally analogous to the impossibilities experienced on …

Institutionalizing Identity: Examining The Louvre In Revolutionary And Napoleonic France, Emma Balda, Amy Woodson-Boulton

Honors Thesis

With the collapse of the French monarchy in 1789, France sought to solidify their sense of national identity in the wake of revolution. Since the late eighteenth century, museums have long been used to foster nationalism and belonging through the institutionalization of historical narratives-- the opening of the Louvre in 1793, and its transition from a royal palace to a palace of the people, served as a physical metaphor of the complete political transformation that occurred during the French Revolution. Existing literature examines the revolutionary nationalization of the Louvre as it relates to the concept of the modern museum and …

The Museum Of The Infinite Scroll: Assessing The Effectiveness Of Google Arts And Culture As A Virtual Tool For Museum Accessibility, Megan K. Udell

Master's Projects and Capstones

As technology evolves, the concept of the virtual museum continues to come into focus. Google Arts and Culture (formerly the Google Art Project) has been a leading platform in virtual exhibitions and digital collections since 2011. Arts and Culture presents itself as a democratic platform that allows any museum, regardless of size or resources, access to the same new digital technologies. However, its model tends to favor institutions with more staff time to spend on their virtual presence. By analyzing Google Arts and Culture within the context of larger museum trends in virtuality and interviewing museum professionals responsible for their …

Social Media And The Democratization Of American Museums, Valerie Wainwright

Master's Projects and Capstones

The democratization of American museums has been accelerated by societal changes caused by the development of new, multiway channels of communication created by the Internet and social media. Social media is prompting public participa- tion which has led to a paradigm shift in museology towards public engagement. The rise of vernacular creativity, especially among the younger, digitally native generations who are “curating” their identities by replicating, manipulating and sharing culture on- line, challenges the authority of the museum and curator as arbiters of culture. This paradigm shift also broadens the definition of authenticity from the object to the au- thentic …

Amazons, Indian Princesses, And The Artistic Matriarchs Of The Southwest: On Classicization And The Construction Of Native American Femininity In Museums, Kendall Lovely

Museum Studies Theses

This paper explores the Classical influence within the discourses surrounding museum exhibitions that helped to construct colonial representations of gender. I address how Classical receptions and images of Native Americans rendered into Classically influenced discourses have featured in anthropological and later art market structures within museum displays. Constructions of femininity play a significant role here as these representations, especially in the Southwest, serve to gender colonized and Othered subjects with parallels in Classical ideas about foreign others. My analysis is in two parts: I first explore constructions of femininity in museum exhibitions through these insights. I then consider the agency …

Employing Natural History Collections In The Aid Of Conservation: Streamlining An Approach To Model Species Distributions En Masse For The Preservation Of Biodiversity, Alice Fornari

Master's Projects and Capstones

Using species distribution models (SDMs) in Natural History Collections (NHCs) can influence how humans implement conservation changes in flora and fauna communities and ecosystems. Through the use of legacy data (old NHCs and their associated locality/collection information), data correction (background data or pseudo absences added to presence-only data), and the SDM software, Maxent (and its associated geographic information systems or GIS projected models), it has been shown that it is feasible to create a low budget protocol/setup to project the past, present and future of species population changes. This has been done in the past few decades as more collections …

The Destruction Of Unesco World Heritage Sites Aleppo And Palmyra In Syria Due To Civil War: Accessioning And Cataloging The Satellite And Drone Imagery Into A Museum Collection, Colette P. Militello

Master's Projects and Capstones

This Museum Studies capstone will discuss the civil war inside Syria, and the destruction of UNESCO World Heritage Sites Aleppo and Palmyra. This paper will examine the historical importance of these sites, and the drone and satellite imagery data used to confirm the destruction. This paper will argue that for full preservation of these cultural heritage sites that this imagery data should be accessioned into a museum collection with the use of professionally-trained registrars. This paper will explore this idea further by arguing that this imagery data collected by companies and governments should be handed over with full copyright to …

Homeward Bound: The Struggle Senior Dogs Face To Find Their Fur-Ever Homes, An Exhibition Proposal, Natalia Chavez

Master's Projects and Capstones

For this capstone project, I created a proposal for an exhibition centering around animal rights that focuses on the rights of senior dogs in United States animal shelters. Homeward Bound: The Struggle Senior Dogs Face to Find Their Fur-Ever Homes intends to raise awareness of the difficulties senior dogs face in being adopted from animal shelters, while promoting individuals to be active and engaged participants in actions to support the needs of senior shelter dogs.

Senior dogs have the highest probability of euthanasia in shelters.[1] Shelters and rescue organizations provide much needed assistance to senior dogs, supporting their …

Renouncing The Universal Museum’S Imperial Past: A Call To Return The Rosetta Stone Through Collaborative Museology, Anna Volante

Master's Projects and Capstones

In colonial times, Western empires used orientalism to justify and perpetuate colonialism and imperialism over countries that they believed inferior to their own. These imperial powers plundered cultural heritage artifacts from the nations they oppressed and took these objects back to their national museums to be displayed as trophies of subjugation. The ownership of cultural heritage remains a point of contention throughout the field of museum studies. Despite cries for repatriation, these artifacts continue to be housed in universal museums today. One of the most well-known cases is that of the Rosetta Stone, stripped from the city of Rashid, Egypt …

Asian America And Empathy: Understanding The Chinese American Experience Through The Art Of Flo Oy Wong, Brienne Wong

Master's Projects and Capstones

This capstone examines how the work of Chinese American artist Flo Oy Wong could be an impetus for dialogue for creating empathy for the Asian American experience. The capstone briefly discusses Chinese American history as the Chinese are one of the earliest immigrant groups to the United States and Asian American art history which demonstrates the role of art for Asian Americans. It also describes the importance of empathy in society and how some museums today are trying to apply empathy to serve their communities. Within this framework, I discuss artist Flo Oy Wong whose ability to tell stories about …

Object Handling With Contemporary Craft Objects: An Observational Study Of An Embodied, Social And Cognitive Process, Bruce Davenport, Neill James Thompson

The Qualitative Report

This study focuses on the ways that people interact around contemporary craft objects. The ambiguous quality of these objects holds people’s attention and inhibits autobiographical narratives. The study focused on the relationship between the perceptual language used by participants and the ways in which they interacted with the objects. The analytical approach taken here begins with close observation and careful description of single cases and working towards valid generalisations rather than imposing an interpretation from the outset by explicitly positing a hypothesis. Six pairs of women were invited to participate in object handling conversations in an art museum setting. The …

Nonprofit Hiring And Retention Practices And The Representation Of Women Of Color In Museum Leadership, Breanne Batara

Master's Projects and Capstones

Abstract

This museum studies capstone project centers on the nonprofit hiring and retention practices with an emphasis on the lack of representation of women of color in museum leadership. The literature review encompasses peer-reviewed literature on nonprofit leadership and management and peer-reviewed literature from the museum field as well as secondary sources that encapsulate anecdotal sentiments on this issue. I propose a comprehensive recruiting program that would take place in museums in Oakland, California as one step to attracting people of color, and specifically women, to the museum field.

Keywords: Diversity, Gender, Hiring, Human Resource Management, HRM, Inclusion, Minority, Museum …

Museological Cinema: An Ideal Approach To A Modern Art Form, Steven Groff

Museum Studies Theses

Abstract:

This paper is dedicated to finding a way to better incorporate cinema into museums. The answer as to how came through a number of ways that some museums currently operate that could be adopted by others, a few new ideas, as well as an expansion in the number of museum theatres. A key theme of this is to expand the limited selection of films typically found in museums and galleries to include more popular fare, which would better attract visitors with frequency. I also endorse the idea of constructing new theatres for museums that do not already possess one, …

Women's Work: Sumbanese Textiles From The May Weber Collection, Catherine Nichols, Grace Iverson, Jill Forshee

Anthropology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This catalogue was produced to accompany Women’s Work, an exhibition of textiles from the May Weber Ethnographic collection held from March 16 — June 2017 in the Damen Student Center. The exhibition was curated by Anthropology student Grace Iverson (B.A. Loyola University Chicago 2017).

Hidden Museum: A Behind-The-Scenes Tour For Contemporary Audiences, Michael B. Glazier

Master's Projects and Capstones

The mystery of what lies behind a museum’s closed doors has intrigued visitors and perpetuated museum mythology for decades. Whether it’s peeking into collections storage, or being guided through rooms off the exhibition floor, visitors want unique access to museum collections. This Master’s Capstone project investigates the topic of behind-the-scenes tours within museums, asks what they look like today, and how they will develop in the future. Using this research I have created a project proposal to film a behind-the-scenes tour that will solve questions of public visibility and collection access for a San Francisco area history museum. A successful …

Riding The Wave: How The Philanthropic Revolution Will Impact Museums In The United States And Canada, Sarah M. Mackey

Master's Projects and Capstones

This capstone project explores the history of philanthropy from 1970 to the present, and presents a strategy for museums to leverage contemporary trends in nonprofit giving. The methods proposed in this project are specifically targeted at engaging new community leaders and the family members of legacy donors. I have researched and created an updated job description and hiring plan for a Transformational Gift Officer. This person would be responsible for identifying, cultivating, and stewarding the donor portfolio outlined in this project. The individual who will be successful in this role will be able to move past institutional silos and collaboratively …

Model Behavior: Using Photogrammetry For Collections Storage Planning, Katherine Sundra

Master's Projects and Capstones

Proper and efficient collections storage is often a challenge for museums. As collections outgrow their facilities, institutions struggle to find additional space, often resorting to hasty moves of their objects into ill-fitting placements. A large-scale collections move is a slowgoing process, requiring manual measurement and countless trial-and-error sessions. An unnoticed support beam, a low entryway, or uneven flooring can derail even the most well-planned collections move, costing an organization unexpected additions in time and labor expenses. Advancements in emerging technologies, however, may soon eliminate this problem. This capstone explores the use of photogrammetry and 3D modeling to plan a collections …

Achieving Access: Designing A Museum Accessibility Consulting Firm, Lauren J. Garnese

Master's Projects and Capstones

This capstone paper explores the need for an accessibility consulting firm to help museums and cultural institutions implement Americans with Disabilities Act policy adherence, universal design and accessible programming that increases the inclusion of people with disabilities in their organizations. The paper begins with a literature review that synthesizes the history of disability legislation and its relationship to museums, explores how museums can go beyond legal compliance and discusses the infrastructure suggested to implement accessibility efforts in an institution. The paper then proposes a project to create an accessibility consulting firm that assists museums in achieving their accessibility goals and …

Increasing Access In Art Museums: Teen Programming For English Language Learners, Lindsey C. Stoll

Master's Projects and Capstones

The following paper discusses the need to increase access for English Language Learners (ELLs) and recent immigrant teens in contemporary art museums through the implementation of participatory programming. This capstone project proposes a teen council program for English Language Learners and recent immigrants at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA, and was created with the following goals in mind: (1) to increase access for ELL and recent immigrant teens in art museums, (2) to increase participatory programming for ELL and recent immigrant teens, and (3) to foster meaningful relationships between ELL and recent immigrant teens and museums. The …

Creating Exhibits For Small History Museums On A Limited Budget, Annveig Bugge

Master's Projects and Capstones

In this capstone project, I study the process of developing an exhibition for small history museums. Working with the Treasure Island Museum, a small history museum in San Francisco, I explore the different options for developing exhibitions for small history museums, with small budgets, in contrast to the more well funded practice that larger museums have the opportunity to produce. For museums, exhibits are the media used to communicate with visitors, and it is important to install new ones regularly. Being limited by budget and staff constraints this can be a challenge, but I argue that the benefits from the …

The Museum Wiki: A Model For Online Collections In Museums, Morgan Schlesinger

Master's Projects and Capstones

Museums increasingly use the Internet, digitization, and social tagging to publicize their collections in online databases. However, these online collections museums frequently lack contextual and interpretive information that objects require to be understood by the general public. Other sources, such as Wikipedia, consistently deliver more in-depth information on artworks than museums. The Museum Wiki proposes a solution for the Museum Studies field to address this information gap by emulating Wikipedia’s framework of interlinked articles for online museum collections. Additionally, this model raises the online visibility of these collections by editing relevant Wikipedia articles with information from articles written for …