Passion on All Sides

Controversy is not necessarily a bad thing; rather, it is evidence of passion on all sides." - Ed Linenthal

----

Like I'm sure most of us are doing, I have been working on the articles for the museums class. I've found some really interesting stuff, but this article definitely takes the cake. From the January 2010 issue of  Curator:

"Passion on All Sides": Lessons for Planning the National September 11 Memorial Museum

Alice Greenwald is my new hero. She is the director of the 9/11 museum, and her passion for her work is extremely evident in her writing. She explains many of the exhibits that will be in the museum, which sound amazing, terrifying, graceful, and poignant all at once. You can read about them in the article.

Two quotes from this article stood out to me and inspired me. They don't relate directly to the 9/11 Museum, but they are still important. I'll explain their context, and then tell you what the quotes are, and then I'll tell you why I like them.

Quote #1
Greenwald was affiliated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. for almost 20 years. She explains that the museum's director, Shaike Weinberg, developed the idea of the storytelling museum, which leads the visitor along a timeline of events in an engaging fashion.

"Under Shaike's leadership, the Holocaust Museum became a laboratory in which one might distill a fuller understanding of the role of memory as a catalyst for transformative learning."

I love that Greenwald calls the museum a "laboratory." This implies that it is always growing, changing, and inspecting new ideas. Memories can cause us to learn about other people, places, and events; however, their power to transform us is immense. Transformative learning is my new catch phrase.

Quote #2
To illustrate the storytelling aspect of history, Greenwald explains a couple examples. First, she tells about a Civil Rights memorial celebration in 2005. Every bus in Montgomery County, Maryland left a seat at the front open with a sign that said "Reserved for Rosa Parks." Second, she explains a memorial in Berlin and in some other European cities. Plaques in front of private homes and apartments read "Here lived..." with the person's name, birth date, and the date he or she was deported to a Nazi concentration camp or death camp.

"Both memorials point to absence and an encounter with the void. This lens of absence enables us to reach another level of understanding, and through an encounter with the void we see the world differently."

I love the concept of "the void." I've always wondered what to call that feeling of absence. "The void" makes us wonder what was, or what could have been.

I think these concepts, transformative learning and the void, can be used in museum exhibits extremely successfully. The 9/11 museum utilizes both of them, and the article is really insightful -- so go read it.

It's funny how you can learn something really interesting when you're doing a random assignment.