Curator as Auteur

Author(s): Steven Lubar

Source: The Public Historian , Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 2014), pp. 71-76
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public
History
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Comments on Rabinowitz,
‘‘Eavesdropping at the Well’’

Curator as Auteur
Steven Lubar

Richard Rabinowitz is one of our best exhibition curators, and his two-
part ‘‘Slavery in New York’’ at the New-York Historical Society is among the
most successful exhibitions of recent years. His essay on how he created that
exhibit is valuable as a case study. It is also worth reading as a how-to guide,
a master class in curation. Students of museum studies and curators and other
museum staff can benefit from Rabinowitz’s thoughtful step-by-step analysis
of his work on this exhibit.
But the essay is much more than just a case study describing the decisions
that helped create a fine exhibition, more than a how-to guide for curators. It is
also a manifesto for the interpretive exhibition, and for the curator as auteur.
Rabinowitz believes in interpretive exhibitions, exhibits that tell stories.
He argues that objects need context; that research is a key part of curatorial
work; and that the curatorial work that leads to exhibitions can provide new
knowledge.
And he believes that the developer of an exhibition is an auteur, a creative
mastermind. Although there’s collaboration here, and Rabinowitz is careful to
give historians, collections curators, designers, and other staff credit for their
work, the exhibit curator is in charge, the author and architect. For Rabinowitz,
exhibition development is an art, the developer an artist whose medium is

The Public Historian, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 71–76 (February 2014).
ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.
© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California and the
National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site:
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10/1525/tph.2014.36.1.71.

71

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72 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

ideas, artifacts, spaces, and (most interestingly) the public. ‘‘My job as a cura-
tor,’’ Rabinowitz writes,
is to arrange these objects . . . no, I mean these stories, so that they move visitors
to invent stories for themselves. The art of the gallery is to furnish the imagi-
nation with the makings of good stories—human characters, human actions,
human places, human rules, and human tools—so that visitors can feel them-
selves dramatizing the past. I do my art so that you can do yours. This is the task
of interpretation.

Rabinowitz does not base his arguments for what works in exhibition on
educational or psychological theory, or visitor surveys. He’s not interested
in the general trend toward exhibitions curated by committees of content
specialists, designers, audience advocates, and experts in visitor experience,
let alone those crowd-sourced to the community. Nor does he pay much
attention to the politics or infighting of museum bureaucracy or fundraising
or master plans. He points instead to the experience gained in his ‘‘550-plus
projects,’’ to his time watching visitors move through exhibitions, and to a deep
immersion in historical research. He knows what works, he knows what the
public needs, and he pushes the museum to make it happen. He does his work
‘‘intuitively,’’ he says.
For Rabinowitz, interpretive exhibitions are a form of narrative art closely
related to theater, or film, or perhaps a compelling work of fiction. He’s
looking for ‘‘a compelling yarn.’’ He uses the word ‘‘stories’’ a lot. He makes
direct analogies to other narrative media:
A narrative exhibition clusters its documents and artifacts as elements of a single
storyline, as would the scenes in a novel or feature film.
...
The narrative employs a variety of literary devices—characterization, flashbacks,
contrasts in tone, questions posed and resolved, foreshadowing and ‘‘side-
shadowing’’ (what was happening at the same moment)—to propel the visitors’
movement through the story.
...
Think of the overall exhibition as a Play. Each of its galleries is an Act that
contains several (episodic) clusters (or Scenes), which in turn are assemblages of
individual elements (Dialogues, Soliloquies, etc.).

But this is narrative in three dimensions, or four, or five. Rabinowitz adds

to space two dimensions of time: historical time and the motion of visitor
through space. He writes:
In these interpretive acts, the museum curator becomes a theater director
operating in two time frames at once. The contents of an exhibit case are
transformed into an animated field of action. To interpret is to imagine one cast
of historical actors stepping out of the document, and another set of modern-
day visitors coming across it. Historical time and exhibit time flow together.

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 CURATOR AS AUTEUR & 73

Our job as exhibition curators, says Rabinowitz, is to ‘‘create the devices that
we hope will bridge this divide—the artifacts, images, and documents of the
history and the interpretive media that make them accessible to our audi-
ences.’’ We need to create a sequence of stories arranged in a ‘‘densely in-
habited space’’ with the right shapes, color, lighting, sound track, and objects
in a range of cases and settings, labels, and interpretive media.
Like any good auteur, he has theories about exhibits and how they work.
Exhibits need to be about stories. They need to be about people. Rabinowitz
provides an excellent discussion of the difference between themes and nar-
ratives, something too few curators appreciate. (His narrative statement here
is masterpiece of the genre: ‘‘At each era, visitors would be invited to visualize
and to imagine slavery as a dramatic face-off between the Europeans’ slave
regime and the slaves’ power to resist and retain some autonomy even in
slavery.’’) He insists on the importance of narrative to interpretive design,
making disparaging remarks about exhibition designers that don’t appreciate
historical narrative, and historians and curators who don’t appreciate inter-
pretive design.
There are hints to new curators: Didn’t pick objects and then go to the
designers; work with the designers to choose among objects. There’s good
advice on label writing, on the way to use a hierarchy of labels, on the different
uses of different parts of a single panel. He provides a perspective on scale,
urging us to think of overviews and immersions.
Rabinowitz believes in real artifacts—but not in a simplistic way. ‘‘The real
thing is a priceless avenue for an empathetic connection with the people of
the past,’’ writes Rabinowitz.
A history museum exhibition needs objects, three-dimensional artifacts. Stuff
creates presence and immediacy. Even when an object is cased in Plexiglas, it
still invites visitors to adopt a kinesthetic relationship to the story, to extend their
own senses.

But objects need interpretation. For Rabinowitz, there is no ‘‘sharp line

separating the ‘object’ itself from the interpretive and physical interventions
made by curators and designers.’’ You use objects because they are ‘‘sticky
things . . . meanings adhere to them.’’ ‘‘Meanings adhere to them,’’ but they
don’t tell stories, in themselves. That’s the curator’s job.
And if there are no objects? Rabinowitz wants the curator to be creative.
‘‘Our method,’’ he writes, ‘‘was to turn the key historical sources inside out and
upside down.’’ No artifacts from black New Yorkers? Research—‘‘an original
reworking of the historical narrative’’—would find new stories to tell about
‘‘white’’ objects in storage. (Rabinowitz acknowledges Fred Wilson’s influence
here.) No images of black New Yorkers? An artist created wire-frame figures
that captured their essence. No written documents that preserve their voice?
Rabinowitz wrote ‘‘prose poems,’’ and worked with actors to ‘‘render them
aurally.’’ ‘‘Our goal,’’ Rabinowitz writes, ‘‘was to bring the human actor for-
ward, in all his or her individuality and particularity.’’

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74 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

For Rabinowitz, the exhibition curator is author, director, and dramaturge.

His or her job is to figure out the story to tell, and how to tell that story.
Rabinowitz presents an appealing model of exhibition development—at
least for those of us who would like to imagine ourselves as auteurs. But is this
a good model? Should museums turn exhibitions over to Rabinowitz and
others like him, doing away with the model of teamwork, audience participa-
tion, and the endless meetings and compromises that define modern exhibi-
tion work? We wouldn’t miss the meetings, but would we miss the range of
expertise and points of view that they bring? Is it reasonable to ask one person
to do all of the things that Rabinowitz asks of an exhibition developer? What
do we gain and what do we lose?
It’s an appealing possibility, the exhibit curator as auteur. Some of the most
important and interesting exhibition projects have been done this way. In
addition to some of Rabinowitz’s work, one might point to David Wilson’s
Museum of Jurassic Technology, Fred Wilson’s ‘‘Mining the Museum’’ at the
Maryland Historical Society, and Jeshajahu Weinberg’s U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum as exhibits that took on big challenges and changed the
way we think about what museums can and should do.
But it seems an unlikely model to be widely adopted, for both good reasons
and bad. Small museums don’t have the collections, staff time or money to
produce complex, innovative shows. Large museums have a corporate culture
that prefers the certainty of a good exhibit, done on time and within the
bureaucratic structure, keeping everyone happy, rather than taking their
chances and rolling the dice for great. Auteurs can fail badly, with no safety
net. They can create exhibitions that work for themselves, and other aficio-
nados, not the general public. Exhibition evaluation—asking the public if an
exhibit works—provides important feedback, and assurance, to museum man-
agement and funders. There are too many stakeholders, both inside and
outside the museum, who want a seat at the table. And few of us have the
range of skills needed to pull it off.
But there is something to be learned from this model. Note that Rabino-
witz is not suggesting that exhibitions be turned over to historians or curators,
as one might imagine from his own academic background. Rather, he’s argu-
ing that there is a set of skills that exhibition developers need, skills that in
most museums are scattered among many staff members. What are those
skills, and—whether they are represented in one person, or in a group—what
can we do to put them to use in all our work? How might we learn them, and
teach them? What should exhibition developers know?

1. Understand your audience. Rabinowitz is a keen observer of visitors in

exhibitions, noting how they move from place to place, noticing what
they notice, even paying attention when they move their lips as they
read labels. Don’t spend all of your time in the back rooms of the
museum with the collections or in the library with the researcher or
in front of the computer with the designer. Get out there on the

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 CURATOR AS AUTEUR & 75

museum floor. Watch your visitors. Talk to them. See what works and
what doesn’t.
2. Understand the content of the exhibition. Rabinowitz argues for a deep
understanding of a historical story, beyond the facts of the researcher,
beyond the thematic overview that the historian, beyond the artifact
knowledge of the curator. Rabinowitz argues that the exhibition auteur
must be a historian in the most profound way:
Producing such visualizations and dramatizations of history requires lots
of research. Some of that is curatorial—identifying the correct costumes,
making the language as accurate as possible. But even more of it is deeply
historical—attributing a full humanity to the people of the past, even
when their lives are largely undocumented, then discovering what might
have been important to them, and finally surrounding them with plau-
sible versions of the historical settings, actions, and experiences missing
from the archive.

Immerse yourself in both the historical literature and primary sources.

Understand the artifacts. Inhabit the time period of the exhibit, so that
you can see it from within.
3. Understand design. ‘‘Much of what gets communicated,’’ writes Rabi-
nowitz, ‘‘is signaled aesthetically, subliminally, through the atmospher-
ics of the exhibition.’’ You can’t leave that to the designer. Indeed,
curation and design are intermingled. There’s no throwing the script
and object list over the wall to the designer, no ‘‘checklist’’ of objects for
someone else to arrange. You pick artifacts based as much on what will
work for the design as for purely historical reasons.
4. Think like a dramatist. As exhibit curator, you are a creator of narratives,
shaper of the five-dimensional space-time of history and visitor motion.
Here’s the goal for ‘‘Slavery in New York’’ exhibition—not the list of
‘‘things the visitor should learn’’ that’s all too common, but something
much more profound:
We aimed to encourage these museumgoers to identify with enslaved
people and then follow their passage to liberty. We laid out a journey for
the visitors, starting in oceanic brightness, swathed in local verdancy,
descending into murderous and fearful darkness, seizing tiny moments of
light, lifting themselves up amid revolutionary chaos, and then assuming
a role in the public space, at the civic rostrum, to contend for full equality
and freedom.

This is narrative of the highest order, a physical and emotional journey for
the visitor to take through history, and through the exhibition, an interaction
with the past and the present, mediated by objects and experiences.
Not everyone will develop all these skills, or have chance to hone his or her
skills over the course of hundreds of exhibitions. And of course, if you’re
working as part of a team, knowing how to work with others is another
key skill. But there’s a roadmap here that might both guide an individual’s

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76 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

development, and the development of dynamic, memorable, interpretive

exhibitions.

Steven Lubar is professor of American studies at Brown University, where he

directs the Public Humanities program, and formerly Chair of the Division of the
History of Technology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

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