The following was contributed by William Hosley from the New Haven Museum:
Tuesday a delegation of New Haven Museum trustees, staff and Cindy Clair from the GNH Arts Council took a field trip to the Mattatuck Museum of Arts & History in Waterbury to see “Coming Home: Building Community in a Changing World,” their new civic history gallery, and to meet with museum director Marie Galbraith and exhibition curator Ann Smith to learn how it was done.
As an urbanist and preservationist with 30 years experience in the museum business — I will say without hesitation that this new gallery as the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a machine that manufactures Americanism and its distinct notions of citizenship and civic engagement.
Not since a visit to the Martin Luther King National Historic Site in Atlanta a couple years ago — where the National Park Service has done such an astonishing job of conveying and contextualizing a giant figure in American history in deliberately relevant and contemporary ways — have I been more inspired by the fundamental value of what the history biz is good for and how necessary it is to our collective ongoing struggle to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Humpty Dumpty is the fractured relationships between cities and surburbs, past and present, immigrants and locals, globalism and localism. If that doesn’t sound like a full plate of issues to deal with “Coming Home” also confronts race and place and accomplishes all of this with a free-spirit and a relentless embrace of new and interactive technologies without pandering to a tech/gaming, child-centered culture. The interactives are consistently inspirational in their purpose and message and ease of interface. Tech and text are designed so that a 5th grader can figure them out, but no less engaging to adults – a not insignificant triumph. Too many museum interactives elicit (from me at least) a groan of “what’s the point” or wondering if the darn thing is designed as an IQ test, thus flunking user-friendliness. All of the interactives in “Coming Home,” from the plethora of phone banks with oral history audio segments that Waterbury has gathered for a generation now, to the use of touch screen access to photographs and civic imagery, serve a purpose and are fun to use. Somewhat more complicated is the “Community Conversation Table” that combines digital maps and demographics with contemporary issues aimed at teaching something worth knowing – how political perspective is formed. It doesn’t teach what to think, but what political engagement involves – and is a perfectly remarkable invention – one of only a handful in the country and very likely the best of them, because what it is designed to do is so site-specific and unapologetically proscriptive. The Mattatuck Museum WANTS its visitors, which includes city-subsidized visitation from all 4th and 5th graders and many suburban districts, to learn the mechanics of citizenship, to see the place of their ethnic or interest group (including some of the most recent ethnic groups) in the flow of a civic journey, and to ponder a challenging future, taking at least some comfort in seeing — vividly — how the community has triumphed over past adversities and reinvented itself.
Wholly aside from the content and interactives, the greatest joy about “Coming Home” for an unreconstructed collections and objects person like myself is that it is overflowing with great stuff. Machines, furniture, ceramics, paintings, tools, industrial products, ephemera — everything from Teletubby dolls (don’t ask) to locally made firearms and furniture. As America becomes more globalized and homogenized it’s almost a sacrament to be in a room filled with so many place-markers — distinct, real, authentic stuff created out of the unique matrix of location, natural resources and human ingenuity that made Waterbury, Waterbury.
“Coming Home” also presents some powerful and controversial stuff; including horrifying statistics about accidents and loss of fingers and limbs in industrial accidents.
About a decade ago the Mattatuck Museum embarked on a public airing of a secret that took courage and vision to reveal. Their collection contained the skeleton of an African-American servant name Fortune who died in 1798 and whose body was used for anatomical teaching by a local physician. How to deal with this in ways that would not only not offend sensibilities, but would honor a neglected facet of Waterbury’s heritage was the assignment and it has been carried out with grace, imagination and respect and is another unique component of this most unique museum experience.
In describing this exhibition the Mattatuck observes that “We have all come here from somewhere else. For three centuries new families have come to the Waterbury region. Some came for opportunity, some to escape troubles: war, persecution, and poverty. Enter our new history exhibit and be transported into the worlds of colonial farmers (1680 – 1800), factory workers and industrial magnates (1800 – 1950), and citizens of our new world (1950 – today).
Forget any ideas that you have about passively looking and reading. This exhibit is packed with hands-on activities designed to entertain while educating. Build a village and then compare it to what the early settlers actually built. Choose your possessions and compare them to the valuations assigned in the 18th century. Work the production line and realize the stress of making a button in 30 seconds. Play Risky Business, an actual pinball game, but be sure to avoid the pitfalls of floods, fires, and army contracts or you’ll go bankrupt! You’ll meet people from our past and hear their stories, but this is not just the story of our past. This is a story of America’s future!”
It’s hard to imagine a higher and better use for museums. Preparing young people to compete in a global environment without at the same time fostering a sense of connectedness, community, and civic pride is a form of educational mal-practice.
Connecticut’s cities are the threshold of Connecticut’s future. It’s where Connecticut keeps the best of our cultural and educational amenities. There are a great many things that Connecticut needs that only its cities can or should provide. Hubs and spokes need one another. We do not need 169 symphony orchestras. It’s great that a few of our hub cities offer such things that we can all enjoy and share.
We also need tools — learning environments — that create sense of place and convey the story of our journey from farms to factories through highways to suburbs and beyond. Absent a strong sense of place, we are all at risk of one form or another of displacement – which is bad for community, bad for the economy, and a terrible impediment for our children. The great virtue of “Coming Home” is that it was not another top-down, Adrian’s Landing-type bricks and mortar-based experiment in urban revitalization but offers great promise in accomplishing that goal. Without pretense, but with a great deal of listening, learning and feeling the pulse of their environment, The Mattatuck Museum has transformed its civic history gallery into one of the most indispensable teaching environments in Connecticut.
Run, don’t walk, to Waterbury to see “Coming Home: Building Community in a Changing World.” If you’re intrigued and would like to participate in a discussion workshop on “The Role of Museums in Fostering Civic Engagement and Sense of Place” in September or October, email me a request to be reminded.
William Hosley
Executive Director
New Haven Museum (email here)