University of Delaware Museum Studies Program

Hillary Mohaupt
Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, Evanston, IL
Glessner House Museum, Chicago, IL

After nearly two weeks of putzing around two smaller museums in Chicagoland, I was musing over what to blog about. That is, until I went on my second tour of the Glessner House today.

Last week, the ED of the Glessner House thought I should go on a tour of the 17,000 square foot historic home designed by great American architect H. H. Richardson in order to get a feel for the story of the place; this wek, I thought it would be a good idea to go on house tour again in order to get a better feel. I've spent the last two weeks in a former servant's bedroom, now an office, surveying forty websites for historic homes, in an effort to help the Glessner House revamp its own site. After two weeks in front of the computer, though, I was ready to stretch my legs and see if I'd learned anything. So, late by accident, I joined up with today's 3pm tour and soon the docent started deflecting questions my way, as though I should know when elite housing got central heating or what year the Glessners got married. The tour became a test of authenticity -- I was comparing the docent's knowledge and style to the first tour I took, and she was testing my grey edges. (It turned out she didn't even know I was an intern at GHM. Do I just LOOK like a historian?!?!)

That conundrum of authenticity has cropped up for me at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, too. The Mitchell is a collector's museum, so the collection is based on large donations from collectors and provenance isn't necessarily copacetic. My project for the moment is to write short panels that provide a story for each gallery of objects, organized by region. How to pick what stories to tell? Where to strike the balance between comfortable knowledge and new knowledge? Which stories are true, and which are myth?

Writing these gallery panels seems to me a lot like the storytelling at the GHM: mixing oral history, secondary sources, primary research. Everything history can be, in a public setting.