Material Religion

The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

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Museum space and the experience of the sacred

Gretchen T. Buggeln

To cite this article: Gretchen T. Buggeln (2012) Museum space and the experience of the
sacred, Material Religion, 8:1, 30-50, DOI: 10.2752/175183412X13286288797854
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 30

valparaiso university
the sacred
the experience of
gretchen t. buggeln
museum space and

Material Religion Volume 8 Museum Space and the

Gretchen T. Buggeln Issue 1 Experience of the Sacred
Gretchen T. Buggeln

Gretchen Buggeln holds the Duesenberg Chair
of Christianity and the Arts in Christ College, the
Honors College of Valparaiso University. From
1994 to 2004 she served as associate professor in
the Winterthur Program for Early American Culture
and as director of the Winterthur Museum’s
residential research fellowship program.  She is the
author of the award-winning Temples of Grace:
The Material Transformation of Connecticut’s
Churches, 1790–1840 as well as numerous book
chapters and articles on religious architecture
and artifacts, museums, and American religious
history. Her current book project, Churches for
Today: Modernism and Suburban Expansion
in Post WWII America, is an exploration of
1950s’ and 1960s’ modern-style churches in
the American Midwest—their architecture, their
architects, and their congregations.
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the dichotomous way we talk about
and experience the sacred in art museum space. While
Western museum culture has generally encouraged
the notion of the museum visit as a quasi-religious,
even transcendent, aesthetic encounter with art and
architecture, it has shunned particular and obvious
expressions of religious devotion. Why is a certain
understanding of “sacred space” permissible, while
other meanings of that term seem to make museum
professionals uncomfortable? Using numerous examples,
this essay first considers museum space and the way we
have come to talk about it, paying particular attention to
the evolution from classical to modern architecture and
the effect that has had on the museum experience. It then
considers the treatment of religious artifacts and cultures
in museum spaces and how this might be changing
today, as museums deliberately pursue exhibitions with
a more ambitious social agenda, one with contemporary
religious content and relevance. The author uses Stephen
Greenblatt’s formulation of two contrasting modes of
museum experience, “resonance” and “wonder,” to think
through varying dimensions of visitor response, and
suggests how a sacred/not sacred tension in Western
museums is a product of specific historical relationships
between culture, art, and museums.
Keywords: modern architecture, sacred architecture,
interfaith dialog, public space, museum history, museums
and religion
Material Religion volume 8, issue 1, pp. 30–51
DOI: 10.2752/175183412X13286288797854

FIG 1
Installation of medieval templon at
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, May 2009. Photo: G. Buggeln.
32
Museum Space: Secular and Sacred?
In May 2009 I visited New York City’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art with a group of college students.
Wandering through the galleries, I paused at an installation
destined to attract an architectural historian such as
myself: a reconstructed wooden screen inset with two
marble panels, placed under a high arch that led to an
“apse” (Figure 1). Two small icons, one of the Virgin and
the other of the Christ adorned the screen left and right,
and across the top horizontal element of the screen
copper decorative panels were evenly spaced. Additional
icons hung on the side walls of the enclosed space, and
a center case displayed an illuminated manuscript. An
orderly arrangement of small artifacts in a curved case
Experience of the Sacred
Museum Space and the
was set into the far wall, and the many labels and glass-
Gretchen T. Buggeln
covered cases all strongly suggested that this was not
an ecclesiastical space. On the wall to the left of the
installation was an extensive label that has continued to
attract my interest.
First the text described the barrier screen, or
“templon,” as a form “developed in Byzantine churches
to separate the sanctuary, located in the apse, from the
public space, or nave.” The label called attention to what
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Gretchen T. Buggeln
Material Religion
 was there and how it functioned in its original setting,
noting the absence of the central door that would have
blocked entrance to all but clergy. This reconstructed
barrier was “meant to evoke the medieval templon,”
precursor to the magnificent iconostasis of the later
Byzantine churches. Curiously, the text ended with this
statement: “The entrance has been deliberately widened
to underline that sacred space is not represented here.”
On the same trip my students and I visited the National
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. After
spending a few emotionally exhausting hours crawling
our way through the three dark and crowded floors of
the permanent installation, we passed some time sitting
in silence in the vast, open, light space of the Hall of
Remembrance. The other visitors in that space at the time
were similarly respectful and contemplative. This space felt
sacred, rendered so by the weight of human tragedy and
the promise of hope, as well as by the lofty and luminous
architecture and a verse from Genesis inscribed on the
wall. Many visitors engaged in silent contemplation in the
museum’s Hall of Remembrance, and the signage and
architectural cues encouraged this behavior. Down the
road at the National Museum of the American Indian, a
building which Native American architect Douglas Cardinal
oriented to face east towards the rising sun, there were
multiple overt references to Native American religions
and spirituality, and the entire museum presented itself
as a kind of sacred space. “The newly opened museum
has already achieved the aura of the sacred” (Livingston
2005). We found remarkably similar contemplative space
and reverential behavior at many art museums on our
tour, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and the
Metropolitan itself.
These are not isolated examples, but representations
of an interesting, sometimes puzzling dichotomy in the
way we talk about and experience the sacred in museum
space. In the first instance, the Metropolitan’s gallery, what
concerns prompted the forceful denial of sacrality? In the
33
latter examples, what tradition of museum architecture
and function makes the creation of a “sacred” space seem
unquestionably appropriate? How do museum architects,
professionals, and critics employ the verbal and visual
language of the sacred? Why is a certain understanding
of “sacred space” permissible for museums, while other
understandings of that term seem to make museum
professionals uncomfortable?1
This essay will explore these questions from two
primary directions. First, a consideration of museum
architecture and space and the way we have come to talk
 about it. Second, a discussion of the treatment of religious
artifacts and cultures in these museum spaces, and how
this might be changing today. The architecture and the
exhibition of artifacts are of course inseparable when
critiquing the museum experience, so these two lines of
inquiry will likewise converge. Visitor perception of the
sacred in museums is infinite in its variety. An experience
of the sacred might erupt anywhere and at any time based
on a visitor’s unique encounter with space and artifacts,
and many aspects of this encounter are out of the control
of the museum. Yet museums do, in a variety of ways,
attempt to engage or hold at bay the power of the sacred.
I will not pursue an exploration of human experience of
the sacred in museums. I am concerned, rather, with

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
what museums want to enable visitors to experience, and

Gretchen T. Buggeln
how architecture and installation practices reflect those
concerns.
For the sake of clarity, I will be concentrating my
remarks on museums of art and culture, particularly
American institutions.2 Many local historical and cultural
museums interpret religious objects and themes, and
some of the most innovative recent exhibition programs
have originated in these institutions. Yet it is more often
the grand scale museums of art and culture or smaller
art museums dedicated to the interpretation of “great”
works of art that are likely to build exceptional buildings
that engage the idea of sacred space. My conclusions are
not meant to be normative or prescriptive in any way, but
I hope to suggest how this sacred/not sacred tension in
Western museums, particularly its relationship to museum
architecture, is a product of our historical relationship to
culture and art and the changing role of our museums.

Museum Architecture and Sacred Power

New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger has
observed, “We have in our culture conflated the aesthetic
and the sacred, which is why, I suppose, that the art
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Issue 1

museum seems to have replaced the cathedral” (2010a;

34 see also Goldberger 2010b). Goldberger is hardly alone in

his supposition. Educated Westerners have a long history

of approaching museums, especially art museums, as
quasi-religious spaces.
This was not inevitable. The eighteenth-century
rise of museums in Western Europe was a product of
Gretchen T. Buggeln

Enlightenment thought about the origin and structure

Material Religion

of rational knowledge, as well as the rise of the nation-

state.3 National museums with their vast and magnificent
collections celebrated art (and collectors), history, and
native culture. For many in that day, and for many
subsequent observers, Enlightenment rationality seemed
 incompatible with religion, leading to a divide between
knowledge and faith. Museums were rational spaces,
with objects organized according to modern science,
meticulously labeled, and seemingly disenchanted. But
despite this rationalist project and rhetoric of separation,
the language of the sacred was present in museums all
the time. Promoters of these spaces and collections knew,
perhaps unconsciously, that there was something to be
gained by suggesting a supernatural power behind their
enterprise.
Consider American polymath and entrepreneur Charles
Willson Peale’s 1822 portrait of himself pulling back the
curtain to his Philadelphia museum (Figure 2). The cool
rationality of the specimens in the background, nestled
in their small compartments in an endless grid pattern,
is belied by Peale’s dramatic and mysterious figure in the
foreground. Peale, a Deist, found little use for traditional,
doctrinal religion, yet he believed God’s “benevolence
was manifest in all the works of nature” and expected
that human beings could find God in these material
expressions (Ward 2004: 81). Artifacts, whether natural
or cultural, were not devoid of ultimate meaning, and the
museum was a place to capture and display this power.

FIG 2
Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in his
Museum, 1822. Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.

35
 National collections (and the way of knowing that they
reinforced) quickly took on the weight of supernatural
truth as they presented the most deeply cherished myths
of nation and culture. And, although the art presented in
these new museums was freed from dependence on a
religious institutional context for its authority and power, it
retained aspects of both. For even as art gained autonomy
outside of a sacred framework, new philosophical ideas
about the value and meaning of art and beauty restored
its aura. Eighteenth-century philosophers of aesthetics
believed that vision and taste, particularly the ability to
recognize and appreciate true beauty, were intimately
connected with moral sensibility, and this language found
its way into public discourse. The metaphysical power

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
believed to be inherent in art objects rendered them

Gretchen T. Buggeln
not just mere artifacts but shapers of the human spirit,
and this had a powerful religious and moral dimension.
Carol Duncan writes, “the invention of aesthetics can be
understood as a transference of spiritual values from the
sacred realm into secular time and space” (1995: 14).
What was previously the domain of religion—revelation,
transcendence, transformation—found a home in the
secular museum. This is not to say that organized religion
itself stopped serving a transcendent function, but that a
visit to the museum could be deeply meaningful in similar
ways, experientially if not theologically. The visitor/believer,
through predisposition or proper instruction, could achieve
a private ecstatic state similar to religious epiphany within
the walls of a museum. Even in the eighteenth century,
there are countless references to museums as “shrines,”
“sanctuaries,” and “temples.” The language of the sacred
was a natural match for the deeply felt, transformative
experience the pilgrim encountered in the museum.
Many nineteenth-century museums tended to be more
populist and democratic, at least in principle. Progressive
museum professionals and critics looked to museums as
places for “improvement,” spaces that would transform
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Issue 1

individuals and thereby mitigate social problems. John

36 Cotton Dana, for instance, at the Newark Museum in New

Jersey, cultivated an ideal of “municipal patriotism” through

his public art and craft programs in the Progressive Era
(see Shales 2010). But in the twentieth century, Duncan
argues, another kind of art museum experience came
to dominate. She charts the rise of what she calls the
Gretchen T. Buggeln

“aesthetic museum,” museums that promoted “art for art’s

Material Religion

sake” rather than art for technical or historical knowledge

or political and social transformation. Art experienced in
these spaces might indeed transform the visitor, but in
ways that were personal and internal. Duncan argues
that the galleries reflected this intention, and she shows
 how “installation design has consistently and increasingly
sought to isolate objects for the concentrated gaze of
the aesthetic adept and to suppress as irrelevant other
meanings the objects might have” (Duncan 1995: 17).
This practice of display, of course, is still common
in many art museums, particularly those that implicitly
stake a claim to “high culture.” Here curators take
objects out of their original settings and place them in
new contexts that promote one kind of concentrated
attention and purposeful looking. Visitors tend to respond
by approaching museums and their contents with care
and awe. “Indeed,” Duncan and Alan Wallach argue,
“the museum experience bears striking resemblance to
religious rituals in both form and content” (2004: 483). In
her Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Duncan
uses the idea of “liminality” to describe the museum
visitor’s behavior. The experience of entering a museum
removes the visitor from the concerns of everyday
life and the normal march of time. The architecture of
museums, exterior and interior, reinforces this divide.
For nearly two centuries most notable art museums
looked like classical temples, with their grand entrances,
pillars, and porticos. Although these temple forms were
somewhat domesticated to represent secular knowledge
and enlightened civilization, as Duncan notes, they also
contained numerous spaces that called for ritual behavior,
“corridors scaled for processions, halls implying large,
communal gatherings, and interior sanctuaries designed
for awesome and potent effigies” (Duncan 1995: 10).
The ritual atmosphere thus created by the architecture
promoted an attitude and receptivity in line with Western
expectations of what it means to encounter great works of
art or significant artifacts of culture.
Architecture can contribute forcefully to the experience
of the transcendent, an effect not limited to churches
or museums. In The Experience of Place, Tony Hiss
wrote about a particular kind of visceral reaction that
humans have to hushed, vast, open space, especially
when it contrasts with the hustle and bustle of life on the
37
outside (Hiss 1990: 3–26). He described his entry into
the Grand Central Terminal in New York City, after being
jostled through the claustrophobic subway tunnels. As
he entered Grand Central’s great hall, he felt himself fully
present, aware of his physical body and his full mental
faculties. He felt sharp and alive. This “simultaneous
perception” described by Hiss is akin to what happens
in many museums and churches. It is an architectural
sublime; we feel expanded at the same time we sense a
relationship to something much bigger and more powerful
than ourselves. Because the encounter with architecture
 is often similar in museums and ecclesiastical spaces, a
visitor familiar with both will find the sensory and spiritual
aspects of one experience graft to the other, the aesthetic
conflating with the divine. And in museums, it isn’t only
the architecture itself that evokes the sacred or the
sublime, but the cultural expectations, the rarified air which
accompanies the experience of space.

Modernism and Sacred Space

Whereas nineteenth-century museums were often jam-
packed with art and artifacts, modern art museums
are often clean and spare, both their architecture
and installations, lending themselves well to the
decontextualized, “art for art’s sake” approach noted

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
above. One might think that the turn towards modernism

Gretchen T. Buggeln
in museum architecture in the twentieth century would
have reversed the sacred references provided by the
neoclassical temple form. As Goldberger writes, “Modern
architecture, as everyone knows, often made claims to
being utterly and totally rational, a claim that, if true, would
make modernism altogether incompatible with the qualities
of sacred, or religious, space” (Goldberger 2010a). But,
he continues, “of course, as everyone knows, thankfully
modernism was not always true to its claims, and not
nearly as rational as it pretended to be.” Modernism in
fact reveled in co-opting the language of the sacred. Louis
Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1972)
is a perfect example of this, a numinous museum space
lauded by critics and frequently described in ethereal
terms. Kahn was a most austere modernist, working in
simple and bold geometric forms, often in raw, unfinished
concrete, yet he spoke fluently about the spiritual nature
of architecture. And, although I’m uncertain how extensive
an audience they attract, architectural theorists further this
interpretation. Robert Harbison, for instance, writes this
about Kahn’s architecture: “When Louis Kahn designs a
museum, a similar emptying out occurs. These are sacred
Volume 8
Issue 1

spaces for supra-earthly contemplation, where light is

38 treated as a mystical presence or supernatural visitor,

providing a model of what human users might aspire to”

(Harbison 1997: 155).4
Museum design of late has become more and
more spectacular, the largest commissions producing
showplaces for architectural virtuosity, masterpiece
Gretchen T. Buggeln

buildings by “designer architects” upon which cities

Material Religion

pin their hopes of revitalization.5 The spectacular and

transcendent properties of such buildings thus become
a civic marketing tool, often called the “Bilbao Effect”
after Frank Gehry’s unique and captivating Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao, Spain. I could cite numerous additional
FIG 3
Tadao Ando, Pulitzer Foundation for the
Arts, St Louis, Missouri, 2000. Photo:
G. Buggeln.

examples, including Santiago Calatrava’s addition to the

Milwaukee Art Museum and Renzo Piano’s new Modern
Wing at the Chicago Art Institute. In these instances,
creating spaces that awe seems to be more of a priority
even than creating spaces that are functionally effective
places to show art. A quieter, contemplative space in the
tradition of Kahn is the new, diminutive Pulitzer Foundation
for the Arts in St Louis, designed by Japanese architect
Tadao Ando (Figure 3). Ando is known for his pared down
concrete buildings, among them museums and churches.
The Pulitzer building, in its use of smooth concrete walls,
starkly sparse and intimate spaces, and dramatic use
of natural light, has much in common with Ando’s best
known ecclesiastical building, the Church of the Light in
Osaka, Japan, a small church with a simple cross cut
into the altar wall. Ando wanted the Pulitzer Foundation
to be a “sanctuary” as well as a “laboratory.”6 That the
terrain of “sacred” architecture is shared by ecclesiastical
structures, museums, and memorials is demonstrated by
the discussion of multiple museum and memorial sites
in a recent collection of essays from a Yale School of
Architecture conference titled “Constructing the Ineffable:
Contemporary Sacred Architecture” (Britton 2010).7
39
As architectural critic Philip Jodidio noted in 2010, “the
number of new museum buildings designed by celebrated
architects within the past 20 years almost defies listing”
(Jodidio 2010: 10). Although high modernism has been
tempered by concerns about local context, green building,
and rising costs (especially in the wake of the 2008
recession), the “clearly established correlation between the
world of culture and that of the higher end of architectural
design” shows no sign of abating (Jodidio 2010: 15).
Jodidio’s claim that “the museum as a sanctuary, a sort
of humanist temple, is now a thing of the past” is hard to
 believe as long as architects like Ando continue to use
the language of the sacred to describe their buildings
(Jodidio 2010: 17). Another Japanese architect, Shiguro
Ban, supposedly modeled the new Centre Pompidou-
Metz (2010) after a Chinese hat, yet the building looks
remarkably like a 1960s’ church, and the architect refers to
the central interior space as the Grand Nef (nave) (Jodidio
2010: 88–91).
Today “sacred space” is a trendy topic in the culture
at large. Paul Goldberger delivered the lecture cited
above at a summer 2010 Chautauqua Institute, during
a weeklong series in which an assortment of public
intellectuals variously addressed the question “What
Makes Space Sacred?” “Sacred Space” is also a notable

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
tourist draw for a new kind of spiritual pilgrim. In 2009 the

Gretchen T. Buggeln
National Geographic Society published Sacred Places
of a Lifetime: 500 of the World’s Most Peaceful and
Powerful Destinations. It is no surprise that museums,
also tourist destinations, are capitalizing on this desire for
transcendent tourism.
Exhibitions as well as spaces are following this trend.
The Pulitzer Foundation’s current exhibition in the Ando
building is “Dreamscapes,” a show of a few dozen
artworks that, together “with Tadao Ando’s architecture
offer new ways to think about the content and purpose of
dreams on numerous levels: physiological, psychological,
cultural, and spiritual.”8 The museum’s minimalist approach
requires that no labels are placed by the works of art “to
allow the visitors to interact directly with the art” (although
museum guards stationed liberally throughout the space
remind visitors they must stand at least three feet back
from the works). In 2008 a prominent exhibition installed at
the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, “Traces du Sacré,”
also capitalized on this interest in the spiritual content of
art.9 This exhibition began with the assumption that in the
twentieth century a pervasive loss of conventional religious
belief led to the disappearance of a conventional God,
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Issue 1

although metaphysical questions persisted in the work of

40 artists, musicians, and filmmakers. In the exhibition, visitors

followed a labyrinth of escalators and hallways full of

disorienting sounds—competing versions of the infinite—
towards the exhibition entrance. The exhibition celebrated
art as a “secular outlet” for irrepressible spirituality, and
the installation attempted, through dramatically installed
Gretchen T. Buggeln

gritty, grim, insistent, triumphant works of art, sound, and

Material Religion

film, to grab all that sacred power and locate it in a grand

museum of the contemporary international literati.
The foregoing discussion has sidelined the numerous
and obvious places where sacred space (in the
conventional sense) and museum space are one and
 the same. Many historic religious buildings and shrines
are also museums of art or architecture. The apotheosis
of this dual nature might be Mark Rothko’s Chapel in
Houston, Texas (1971). Presented as a “tranquil meditative
environment,” the chapel is a “sacred place open to all
people, every day.”10 It is both a showcase of Rothko’s
designs and paintings (fourteen grey-black large canvases)
and home to religious services of many faiths, as well as
a locus for human rights activity. All three functions—art,
religion, politics—blend seamlessly in the space and its
interfaith programs.
In sum, in the West there is a long tradition of thinking
of museums as “sacred” places in a vaguely spiritual
sense, and museums seem entirely comfortable with that
sensibility. Secular museums may fear promoting particular
religious belief (proselytizing) but are generally comfortable
endorsing generic transcendent experience. Lest we
interpret this acceptance of a generic form of spiritual
experience as indication of a democratic predisposition,
however, we should keep in mind that this transcendent
experience is hardly available to all. It provides its own
kind of exclusion. Despite contemporary rhetoric about
inclusion, the class dimensions of the museum experience
still run deep. Art museum visitation is in part a class-
determined performance, one that rests on the cultural
capital the visitor brings to the experience. There is a
particular kind of spirituality being celebrated at places
like the Pulitzer Foundation in St Louis and the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, and it is every bit as dependent on
visitor knowledge as are more conventional kinds of
individual religious experience.

Museum Spaces and Sacred Artifacts

What happens, then, when more particular varieties of
religious experience and expression come calling at the
museum? Scholar Meera Viswanathan tells a story about
visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with her
mother when they were recent Indian immigrants to the
United States. In the South Asian galleries, Viswanathan’s
41
mother would always touch the statue of Nandi, a bull
associated with Shiva and an auspicious object, and pray.
Every time she did this the museum guard would ask her
not to touch, yet she never ceased this practice. “No one
can persuade her that this is a desacralized object in a
museum,” Viswanathan claims (Hughes and Wood 2009:
36). Her mother’s instincts highlight the persistent sacred
power of religious artifacts in museums, as well as the
changes that might be coming as a Western secularized
notion of public space is challenged by immigrant groups
and practices.
 A related story comes from Nina Archabal, former
director of the Minnesota Historical Society. In 2008 the
society opened a traveling exhibition of artifacts from
the Vatican. Archabal worried “about the association of
my secular institution with the Roman Catholic Church”
(Jungblut and Beier-de Haan 2010: 123). Questions of
behavior also were of concern to Archabal: “I worried
especially about the inclusion of the Mandylian of Edessa,
a rectangular cloth from the first century, which is thought
to be the earliest image of Jesus Christ. I learned when
the exhibition was shown at a museum in St Petersburg,
FL, a number of visitors had fallen to their knees before
the image. To my knowledge, this did not happen during
our showing of the exhibition, though the religious

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
effect of the object was obvious in some of the faces I

Gretchen T. Buggeln
observed” (Jungblut and Beier-de Haan 2010: 123). What
if visitors had “fallen to their knees before the image?”
What if Orthodox believers at the Metropolitan Museum
gesticulated in front of the templon? What harm would
such behavior do? Why declare “sacred space is not
represented here?”
There are numerous sensible reasons museums like
the Metropolitan and the Minnesota Historical Society so
scrupulously avoid the presentation of art or artifacts in a
way that might invite particular ritual behavior in museum
spaces. Religious topics and artifacts can of course be
contentious. Museums might find themselves embroiled
in unwanted controversy about the ownership and display
of religious objects (such as current struggles over the
ritual artifacts of first peoples commonly found in many
types of museums) or the installation of contemporary art
that aggressively challenges religious tradition and belief
(for instance, the 1999 hullaballoo over the installation
of “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi
Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum). Many secular
museums receive public funding and thus naturally, for
practical and political reasons, they hesitate to do anything
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that would make them seem to endorse particular religious

42 beliefs (or religion in general). There is concern that if an

object or space in the museum becomes sacred in any

particular sense it will exclude other perspectives and
opinions. And museums worry, given their responsibility for
scholarly accuracy, about providing an interpretation or a
space that is incorrect, one that might offend believers, so
Gretchen T. Buggeln

they treat religious themes with caution.

Material Religion

Despite the reservations discussed above, numerous

museums are increasingly interested in welcoming religious
practice into museums (Paine, forthcoming). Will this be in
keeping with the museum experience as we have defined
it in the West, and the accepted nature of nonpartisan,
 secular, cultural institutions? One might expect a clash of
interests and expectations regarding visitor experience,
museum responsibility, and the nature of the museum
itself. How will the architectural space factor into this
developing conversation? And, how might the welcoming
of particular religious expression surrounding individual
artifacts affect the idea of the museum as an overall
“sacred space”?
Several years ago I attended a conference in
Luxembourg where a group of primarily northern European
museum professionals shared experiences and ideas
regarding the interpretation of religious themes and objects
in their institutions. As Isabelle Benoit, of the Museums
of Europe in Brussels stated, “it is not the mission of
museums to explore or communicate the experience of
faith” (Jungblut and Beier-de Haan 2010: 72). I noted how
many of my European colleagues had internalized the
notion of society as secular (as an American, I’m more
accustomed to religion’s persistent public presence).
All of us, however, were inclined to reconsider the role
of religion in light of the recent world upheaval along a
religious axis. Religion is back in the sights of museums,
and not just as an object of curiosity. The potential
contribution of museums towards promoting tolerance
has motivated institutions to think anew about why and
how they might exhibit religion, and they are beginning to
see themselves as sites for meaningful interfaith dialog in
their communities. Museums imagine a role counteracting
other sorts of media that present religion only as extreme,
dangerous, and divisive. They are interested in telling
stories of ordinary, rather than extraordinary, religious
practice. This has spatial and ritual dimensions. Does real-
time dialog and engagement with beliefs and practices
erase the “generic” sacred aura of the museum space as it
becomes a forum for conversation and debate?
In museum spaces such as Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer
in St Louis, questions about particular belief can be
kept at arm’s length. Context is not on the agenda. The
recent reinstallation of the American art galleries at the
43
de Young Museum in San Francisco displays a different
approach (Figure 4). In each gallery substantial interpretive
labels reflect an interdisciplinary, politically sensitive
approach to American art, and the “instructive” aims of
the labels are palpable. The main introductory label, for
instance, foregrounds the “many voices” approach to
American culture: “cultural diversity and complexity is
a historical fact of life in the United States, one whose
impact is increasingly visible in the objects displayed in
these galleries.”11 In order to bring art to life, the curators
sometimes paired objects from the collections with
FIG 4
“Art of the Americas” gallery at the
De Young museum, San Francisco.
Photo: G. Buggeln.

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the

Gretchen T. Buggeln
contemporary analogs, “the juxtaposition of the old with
the new is intended to foster a dialog between the past
and the present.” This practice did not dominate the
installation, but the pairings were often intriguing. For
instance, one case in the “Colonial Cultures” gallery paired
an early eighteenth-century painting “Nuestra Senora del
Refugio de los Pecadores” (representing the presence of
Spanish Catholic Missions in California) with eight modern
votive candles of the kind commonly available in grocery
stores, and the same number of modern prayer cards and
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medals below. The label read: “The presence of modern

44 votive candles serves as a reminder that objects often

retain their original meanings—or accumulate new ones—

after entering museum collections. The ‘Pancho Villa’
candle reveals the status of this Mexican Revolutionary
general as a secular saint to many Mexicans, while
candles labeled ‘Juan Soldado’ (Joe Soldier) typically are
Gretchen T. Buggeln

used by families praying for members serving in the armed

Material Religion

forces.”
I include this example here to illustrate an honest
attempt by an art museum to take religious content
seriously and bring it to life for the visitor. In terms of
choice of objects and manner of installation, however, the
 exhibition is straining between the “aesthetic museum”
model of display and an urge to say more. Perhaps
because of the somewhat heavy-handed nature of the
interpretation, the objects and label provoke thought,
but the aura of the art and the space dissolves in the
clutter. One is still much less likely to encounter this kind
of labeling at museums of contemporary art, where a
minimalist approach to labeling is still most common.
One way to make sense of the tension between
museums as sacred spaces and museums as secular
institutions is to consider Stephen Greenblatt’s oft-
cited and highly useful formulation of two models for
the exhibition of works of art: resonance and wonder
(Greenblatt 1991). Resonance, Greenblatt explains, is
“the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond
its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the
viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which
it has emerged and for which it might be taken by a
viewer to stand.” Resonance often leads the observer to
a further series of questions about the object, questions
of manufacture, use, and meaning, the invocation of “an
imagined ethnographic thickness” (Greenblatt 1991: 48).
Wonder, on the other hand, he defines as “the power
of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her
tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to
evoke an exalted attention” (Greenblatt 1991: 42). This
kind of “enchanted looking” cuts off contextual stories
and questions in the presence of the charismatic, unique,
marvelous object and the aesthetic pleasure it provides.
Being in the presence of things of ultimate value is
perhaps a central component of the experience of a
museum as sacred space. The dynamic of the sacred
in museum spaces, therefore, involves a dialog between
the architecture of the place (both the exterior, which
shapes visitor expectations, and interior, which directs the
experience of viewing the objects), the inherent qualities
of the objects, and the nature of the interpretation. Might
a visitor experience both the “generic” sacred of the
space and the “particular” sacred of the artifact, enjoying
45
a sacred atmosphere and the aura of wonder while still
experiencing the greater understanding of resonance?
In the de Young example, resonance seems to diminish
wonder. At the Pulitzer, designed for wonder, resonance
is hard to come by. Yet these two modes of apprehending
a religious object in museum space need not be mutually
exclusive. An example of a recent installation where a
balance was sustained was “The Sacred Made Real:
Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700,” at one of
the American shrines to high art, the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, DC (jointly organized with the National
 Gallery, London) in the spring of 2010. The exhibition
consisted of a mixture of seventeenth-century Spanish
religious paintings and lifelike, life-size polychrome
sculptures of Jesus Christ and various saints, objects of
the Counter-Reformation meant to spur devotion. From
a film explaining the techniques used to create these
works, I learned how the layering of gesso and paint in
a particular technique led to the appearance of skin that
looked translucent and lifelike.12 I also learned about the
close relationships between the sculptors (important in
their day, now largely forgotten) and the painters, such as
Velázquez and Zurburán, well known to museum-goers.
The film began with images of a Holy Week procession
in modern Spain, with the narrator saying “the heartfelt

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
devotion lavished on them can, for non-Spaniards, be hard

Gretchen T. Buggeln
to comprehend.” We are told that this is a neglected art
form that had a critical role in shaping a Spanish painting
tradition and well as bringing observers/worshippers
“closer to the Divine.” I also learned about the craft guilds
that promoted the exchange of technique. In short, this
exhibition provided plenty of good contextual/historical
information, in the film (shown in a separate gallery) and
visitors were also provided with a small Guide to the
Exhibition that included additional information about
sculptors, painters, and figures depicted, as well as some
religious content (explaining, for instance, belief in the
Immaculate Conception, meditations on the Passion and
the ritual use of the sculptures).
But these images and sculptures were originally
intended to “shock the senses and stir the soul”
(National Gallery of Art 2010: 3). How can a museum
communicate that in a modern gallery installation? These
are magnificent artifacts, and the relatively small gallery
space was darkened, making the luminous statues glow
under their spot lights. Ample space between the artifacts
enabled visitors to look without distraction at each figure
or painting. Finally, one Zurbarán painting, Christ on the
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Cross (1627) was displayed in a reproduction of the

46 arched chapel alcove of the Dominican friary in Seville

where it originally hung. The guidebook quotes Antonio

Palomino, an eighteenth-century art historian and painter,
who offered this description of the painting in its original
setting: “There is a crucifix from his [Zurbarán’s] hand
which is shown behind a grille of the chapel (which has
Gretchen T. Buggeln

little light), and everyone who sees it and does not know
Material Religion

believes it to be a sculpture.” There was room here for

the experience of the particular, confessional sacred.
The installation allowed for religious experience of both
the generic (aesthetic) sort and the particular, Christian
 devotion, in large part because the drama of the art
museum space itself was cultivated and accentuated.
My examples so far have been of exhibitions that use
the art and artifacts to talk about art and artifacts. When
museums deliberately pursue exhibitions with a more
ambitious social agenda, one with contemporary religious
content and relevance, other ambitions are at play. At the
University of North Carolina’s Ackland Museum, a multi-
year, multi-exhibition “Five Faiths” project used religious
art and artifacts to explore different faith traditions in
the context of community interfaith conversations. The
educational mission of this art museum was, through
the exhibition of decorative artifacts and works of art,
to enable visitors to come to understand more about
contemporary religious belief and practice, especially
unfamiliar traditions. The Ackland’s exhibition team began
with fundamental questions such as “By what means do
museums communicate what they consider appropriate
responses to objects?” And, “What happens if museums
expand their definitions of ‘appropriate’ to allow for feelings
of reverence and empathy towards sacred objects?”
(Hughes and Wood 2009: 25).13
In preparation for the exhibition program, the Ackland
brought together religious studies scholars, faith leaders,
and museum professionals to talk through these questions
while testing ideas in actual exhibitions. The museum
found it was important to define “the boundary between
endorsement and empathy” while recognizing that “to
say nothing about the religious significance of an object
… is not a neutral position. It privileges the curatorial
perspective …” (Hughes and Wood 2009: 26–7). This
important realization brings us back to the “sacred space
is not represented here” label at the Metropolitan. Has
discouraging visitors from fully engaging the particular
religious power of artifacts been a strategy museum
professionals have used (however unconsciously) to
protect their cultural authority against other competing
authorities? Is there a concern that the overall sense
of the museum as a powerful, cultural sacred space
47
will be challenged or disrupted if the curatorial voice
more deliberately draws out other voices, traditions,
and practices in the presence of “art”? The book that
chronicles the Ackland’s experience, A Place for Meaning:
Art, Faith, and Museum Culture, is a treasure house of
pertinent questions and thoughtful responses regarding
the proper place of religion in the museum space. At one
point in the project, the museum installed its Jacopo del
Sellaio (attrib.) altarpiece Madonna and Child with Saints
in a manner “suggesting its original worship context”
 thereby “for the first time, the Ackland had an opportunity
to test the limits and potential of a work of art in context
as a strategy to promote understanding of an active faith
tradition” (Hughes and Wood 2009: 11–12). The museum
was cautious about the way that the artifact and the space
together suggested appropriate visitor behavior. The
exhibition of a Shiva Linga in a central location likewise had
both faith leaders and museum employees concerned that
they were “encouraging, or even compelling a devotional
attitude for outsiders and insiders alike” (Hughes and
Wood 2009: 33). They hoped to bring the visitor to the
point of recognition or genuine empathy without crossing
this line. Just why crossing such a line would be a problem
is not entirely clear, but I am suggesting that this concern

Experience of the Sacred

Museum Space and the
was not simply about representing religion accurately

Gretchen T. Buggeln
and fairly. Perhaps less consciously, it reflected a sense
of what might be lost in the process—a sacred aura and
authority encompassing a unified institutional presence,
the kind of aura celebrated by architectural theorists and
civic boosters who have a long tradition of talking about
museums as sacred places.
The nature of the Five Faiths project, undertaken by an
important art museum that saw its attendance double in
the process, indicates the presently changing relationship
between museums and the sacred. To “underline that
sacred space is not represented here” denies the ways
that the sacred—either generic or particular—is or might
be constructively present in a museum. It also masks a
tradition of museum architecture that tacitly or deliberately
creates spaces that are impressive, challenging, tranquil,
and sublime—spaces that intend to evoke the sacred. In
many ways, the power of the sacred can be integral to
the museum experience, leading to individual discovery,
transcendent experience, or (perhaps in a more sinister
fashion) an unconscious acceptance of the power
and authority of the institution and its donors. These
processes, in tandem with the architecture that houses
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them, should be challenged and investigated, not denied.

48

Gretchen T. Buggeln
Material Religion
 notes and references
1
 For an excellent treatment of
this topic, particularly as it relates
to the display and interpretation
of religious artifacts, see Arthur
(2000).
2
 This is not to say that other kinds
of museums of all sizes can’t
provoke a transcendent response.
Natural history museums are
crawling with ghosts, and even a
ramshackle local history museum
might stir one’s recognition of
eternal truths.
3
 For a thorough discussion of this
topic, see Duncan (1995).
4
 Cited at http://www.quondam.
com/19/1972a.htm (accessed
June 10, 2011).
5
 This rash of museum building
is also the result of competition
among museum patrons, for whom
such buildings are emblems of their
own power, prestige, and taste.
See Filler (2005).
6
 Statement by Pulitzer museum
guide, March 5, 2011.
7
 Memorials, with their emphasis
on life, death and civil religion, have
a natural fit within the parameters
of “sacred space”; conversation
about memorials to the victims
of war or other tragic events,
such as the 1995 bombing of the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City or the various
9/11 Ground Zero memorials in
New York City, is suffused with
the language of sacred place. But
49
the links between the sacred and
buildings that house collections of
art and culture are more oblique.
It is notable that a majority of the
sacred museum or memorial sites
considered in Constructing the
Ineffable are Holocaust memorials
of one kind or another, like the
American National Holocaust
Memorial Museum cited above.
The National Museum of the
American Indian is another often
cited example, suggesting that
sacred–secular divisions are not
desired by these institutions.
Sacred language perhaps furthers
political aims.
8
 http://dreamscapes.pulitzerarts.
org/ (accessed March 7, 2011).
9
 See http://traces-du-sacre.
centrepompidou.fr/ (accessed May
18, 2011).
10
 http://www.rothkochapel.org/
index.php?option=com_content
&view=article&id=3&Itemid=6
(accessed May 18, 2011).
 Fine Arts Museums of San
11
Francisco/de Young, Native
American and Spanish Colonial
American Paintings gallery.
Observed July 2010.
 “Making a Spanish Polychrome
12
Sculpture,” produced by the J.
Paul Getty Museum, 2010 (12
minutes).
13
 See also project website:
http://www.ackland.org/
fivefaiths/01_00_00.htm.
Arthur, Chris. 2000. Exhibiting
the Sacred. In Godly Things:
Museums, Objects, Religion, ed.
Crispin Paine. Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1–27.
Britton (ed.), Karla. 2010.
Constructing the Ineffable:
Contemporary Sacred
Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing
Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums.
London: Routledge.
Duncan, Carol and Wallach, Allan.
2004. The Museum of Modern
Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An
Iconographic Analysis. In Grasping
the World: The Idea of the
Museum, ed. Donald Preziosi and
Claire Farago. Aldershot, UK and
Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 483–500.
Filler, Martin. 2005. Museums
and the Maecenas Touch: The
Outcome of the Architecture Often
 Depends on Who the Client Is.
Architectural Record, November 1,
99–103. Available from LexisNexis
Academic: http://www.lexisnexis.
com/hottopics/lnacademic/
(accessed June 10, 2011).
Goldberger, Paul. 2010a.
Architecture, Sacred Space,
and the Challenge of the
Modern. Paper presented at the
Chautauqua Institution, New York,
August 12. Available online at
http://www.paulgoldberger.com/
lectures/46.
Goldberger, Paul. 2010b. Epilogue:
On the Relevance of Sacred
Architecture Today. In Constructing
the Ineffable: Contemporary
Sacred Architecture, ed. Karla
Britton. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 223–35.
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991.
Resonance and Wonder. In
Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics
and Politics of Museum Display,
ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D.
Lavine. Washington, DC: The
Smithsonian Institution, 42–56.
Harbison, Robert. 1997. Thirteen
Ways. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1997.
Hiss, Tony. 1990. The Experience
of Place. New York: Knopf.
Hughes, Amanda Millay and Wood,
Carolyn H. 2009. A Place for
Meaning: Art, Faith, and Museum
Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: Ackland
50
Art Museum and the University of
North Carolina Press.
Jodidio, Philip. 2010. Architecture
Now! MUSEUMS. Cologne,
Germany: Taschen.
Jungblut, Marie-Paule and Beier-
de Haan, Rosmarie. eds. 2010.
Museums and Faith. Luxembourg:
ICMAH.
Livingston, Heather. 2005.
The National Museum of the
American Indian: Sacred Space
for the Public. AIA Journal,
July 2005. Available online at
http://info.aia.org/nwsltr_aiaj.
cfm?pagename=aiaj_a_20050730_
Experience of the Sacred
Museum Space and the
american_indian.
Gretchen T. Buggeln
National Gallery of Art. 2010.
Guide to the Exhibition: The Sacred
Made Real: Spanish Painting and
Polychrome Sculpture, 1600–
1700. Washington, DC: National
Gallery of Art.
Paine, Crispin. Forthcoming.
Religious Objects in Museum: Their
Private Lives and Public Duties.
London: Berg.
Shales, Ezra. 2010. Made in
Newark: Cultivating Industrial
Arts and Civic Identity in the
Progressive Era. Piscataway, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Ward, David C. 2004. Charles
Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in
the Early Republic. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
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Material Religion