Connecting to the Public

The Connecting to the Public panel was moderated by Gwendolyn Wright, Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University and host of PBS' History Detectives. She explained, “The real rock stars of this program are librarians and museum curators and conservators, because we show the world how cool you are. We show the world how you think. What I do is take the role of the public and I’ll say, wait a minute, how did you know that? How did you decide to give me this book instead of that book? How did you look at this picture and figure out who it was? And we need to bring those kinds of questions from other people who may feel less confident asking a question of you.”

Eric Jolly, president of the Science Museum of Minnesota, talked about his institution’s outreach programs and how various communities are connecting with the museum’s collections. "I’m often struck by the conciseness of a saying of a Sengalese environmentalist in 1968," he said. "You may know of Baba DeYoung. He said, in the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand. We understand only what we are taught. And so the question is how do we teach. At the Science Museum of Minnesota we are experimenting with ways to teach by pairing the known with the unknown, the common with the uncommon, the valued with the invaluable. For us, it’s always about people."

Kathe Hambrick-Jackson noted that community support was at first hard to find for the River Road African American Museum when she founded it, but going out into the community and getting the word out helped the museum expand its collections and audience. "As we try to get people to visit the museum, I realized well if they won’t come see us, well I’ll go see them. So we started to do festivals, Real Men Cook, which is a fundraising activity that we did for a number of years, but it wasn’t just the Real Men Cook that you normally hear about in most cities. We did an exhibit on the African influences on Louisiana cuisine."

Joyce Hill Stoner, Professor of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware, presented an overview of successful conservation outreach programs around the country, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lunder Conservation Center, in-gallery conservation projects, and grass-roots programs such as Save Outdoor Sculpture! and Rescue Public Murals. She said about the Antiques Roadshow: "It may not be kind to participants, but conservators are very grateful when owners are told, 'Ah, madam, if you had not cleaned that painted chest yourself it would have been worth $200,000 and now it’s only worth $200.' It is a wonderful form of preventive conservation."