Appel à communication : « Lost Museums » (Rhode Island, mai 2015)

 In conjunction with the year-long exhibition project examining Brown University’s lost Jenks Museum, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and the John Carter Brown Library invite paper proposals for a colloquium on lost artifacts, collections and museums.  The colloquium will be held at Brown University May 7 and 8, 2015.  Papers from the Colloquium may be published as a special issue of  Museum History Journal.

Museums, perhaps more than any other institutions, think in the very long term : collections are forever. But the history of museums is more complicated than that. Museums disappear for many reasons, from changing ideas about what’s worth saving to the devastation of war. Museum collections disappear : deaccessioned, traded away, repatriated, lost to changing interests and the ravages of time.

We are interested in this process of decline and decay, the taphonomy of institutions and collections, as a way of shedding light not only on the history of museums and libraries, but also on the ways in which material things reflect and shape the practices of science and the humanities, and also to help museums think about current and future practices of collections and collections use. We invite presentations from historians, curators, registrars, and collections managers, as well as from artists and activists, on topics including :

We welcome case studies of museums and categories of museums that are no more. What can we learn from museums that are no more ? Cast museums, commercial museums, and dime museums have mostly disappeared. Cabinets of curiosity went out of and back into fashion. Why ? What is their legacy ?

“Lost and found” in the museum
How are art and artifacts “rediscovered” in museums ? How do old collections regain their importance, both in artistic revivals and in new practices of “mining” the museum as artists finding new uses for old objects ?

Museum collections policy
How have ideas about deaccessioning changed? How should they change ? How do new laws, policies, and ethics about the repatriation of collections shape ideas about collections.

Museums going out of business
When a museum needs to close for financial or other reasons, what’s the best way to do that ? Are there good case studies and legal and financial models ?

The future of museum collections
How might museums think about collecting the ephemeral, or collecting for “impermanent” collections. What new strategies should museums consider for short-term collecting ? How might digitization and scanning shape ideas about the permanence of collections ?