From the Editor-in-Chief

The special section in this issue of the Journal of Museum Education (JME) is devoted to exploring ways that museums are working with migrants and tackling global issues of displacement. The magnitude of migration and its cascading effects in the world today can make museums that address it seem overly political. Yet museums have a long history of serving migrants as visitors and collaborators (not simply as topics for exhibiting and collecting), and doing so is neither new nor radical.

One of the earliest American museum responses to migrants took place at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, when secretary and trustee Benjamin Ives Gilman formed a group of docents in the 1890s to make the museum more welcoming to the migrants and immigrants who had moved to Boston in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Although Gilman held progressive views and believed that art had the ability to transport and elevate,¹ his fellow trustee, Henry Lee Higginson, had a more xenophobic argument for educating newcomers;

How else are we to save our country if not by education in all ways and on all sides … now, before the country is full and the struggle for bread becomes intense and bitter. Educate and save ourselves, our families and our money from the mobs.²

At the turn of the twentieth century, a few notable museum leaders contributed to the progressive era’s reforms, which included efforts to Americanize immigrants and to educate and enlighten the poor. Newark Public Library and Newark Museum director John Cotton Dana believed that museums and libraries existed to improve society, and that educating the public was of paramount importance. He bought library materials in foreign languages for the city’s immigrants,³ and created exhibitions designed to engage Newark’s working-class residents, many of whom were foreign-born. Dana focused much of his attention on children. One project was to create a 10,000-object loan collection primarily for use by the schools, but available to anyone with a Newark library card. The museum delivered loans to classroom three times per week by truck.⁴

Another progressive era museum director, Anna Billings Gallup, was equally dedicated to opening the world to children. She created exhibitions, programs, classes, clubs and performances about birds, mammals, rocks, shells, insects, and history at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.⁵ When she discovered that foreign-born children had a hard time understand American history as taught in the schools, she and her staff created “a series of puppet tableaux to illustrate American history from the time of Columbus to the present date,” according to a 1910 New York Times article. These miniature dioramas attracted immediate attention, according to a staff member:

It caught the children from the start … Even before the model was set up the boys were interested. One day I was working by a window and noticed that it grew darker and darker. Finally I looked up to discover that the window was literally so filled with children that the daylight was shut off. So I arranged a compromise, by which two at a time were permeated to stand outside the window and watch. Thy would stand there by the hour, these little boys and girls, while I made the figures or put the scenes together … ⁶

Gallup hoped that the museum’s activities would stimulate conversations about American history in the households of the immigrant children, and that their parents would visit the museum to see their children perform in plays.⁷

A century after Dana and Gallup expressed their hopes that the museum could be a welcoming resource and an Americanizing force for newcomers, a wave of immigration museums opened around the world with the converse message; that migrants contribute to the civil fabric of their new homes. Some of these museums celebrated culture and serve as centers of remembrance and identity, while others focus on migration and immigration as a social and political process.⁸

One museum that went further to provide social services for migrants and other visitors was New York City’s Tenement Museum. It quickly became a leader in demonstrating how museums could provide face-to-face discussion forums for people with differing backgrounds. In the mid-1990s museum staff began to invite immigrants from a variety of places to share their stories with each other. From there the museum developed “Kitchen Conversations,” positioning the museum as a neutral space for strangers to come together to discuss sometimes heated topics, facilitated by staff around a kitchen table. With cookies.⁹

There are scores of additional twentieth-century examples of museums – both in the US and in other countries – that focused on serving migrant and immigrant audiences through programs and services. But information about them is difficult to find. In the past, museum professionals have not excelled at sharing models of audience interactions and their impacts.

Today, with social activism a museum activity accepted and valued by many, and with more venues for distributing information and ideas, it is easier to find models. Some museums have wholly embraced the role of community catalyst. “I like to joke,” wrote Santa Cruz Museum of Art & Industry (MAH) museum director and provocateur Nina Simon, “that both our biggest advocates and our biggest critics say the same thing about the MAH: ‘that museum is a community center.’ They’re right.”¹⁰ Yet not all museums have taken on this role, and nor should they. The world would be a boring place if every museum defined itself the same way. We should never have a cookie-cutter approach to museum operations, programs, or missions.

Guest editors Patricia Lannes and Lauren Monsein Rhodes have chosen their moment well: Migration and immigration are hot topics, and museum educators and their allies around the world are eager to know what is going on. My dear reader: please use the ideas, information and models in these pages to create your own programs and services, and then share the results with your peers through JME.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nathaniel Prottas for ideas and feedback.

About the editor-in-chief

Cynthia Robinson is the director of museum studies and senior lecturer at Tufts University, where she specializes in museum education. She spent 25 years working in and with museums and has extensive experience in developing programs, curricula and exhibitions, as well as in museum management and administration. Cynthia received the 2017 John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership, presented by the Education Committee of the American Alliance of Museums. The award recognizes individuals outside the field of museum education who exhibit outstanding leadership and promote the educational responsibility and capacity of museums. It has only been awarded 9 times in the past 32 years.

Notes

1 McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” 18.

2 Giltinan, “The Early History of Docents in American Art Museums: 180—1930,” 108.

3 “John Cotton Dana -Newark’s First Citizen.” Rutgers University Libraries, https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/dana/john_cotton_dana

4 Winser, “The Newark Museum’s Service to Schools,” 657.

5 Schauffler, “The Children’s Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, NY.” 202–219.

6 “Puppet Tableau to Teach History,” The New York Times, January 2, 1910.

7 Provenzo Jr. and Provenzo, Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education, 125.

8 There are dozens of immigrant museums around the world, including the Migration Museum in Adelaide, Australia (opened 1986), the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Australia (opened 1996), the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York, USA (opened 1990), Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris, France (conceived in 1989 and opened in 2007), The Red Star Line Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (conceived in 1992, opened in 2013), and the Museu da Imigracao, SanPaulo, Brazil (opened 1993), to name some examples. See https://museumsandmigration.wordpress.com/museums/.

9 Abrams, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum,” 63–6.

10 Simon, “I’m Shifting from Local to Global in 2019,” Museums 2.0, November 27, 2018.