Lisa Corrin questions “whose truth is on exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society” in her examination of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum intervention held at the institution in 1992 (Corrin 338). The Society’s collection, which was re-imagined and redisplayed by Wilson to highlight the stories that have gone untold in the context of history as preserved by the Maryland Historical Society (MHS), focused on white men throughout Maryland’s history, omitting the stories of the African American and Native American communities in the same areas. Corrin suggests this gap in the collection is a shortcoming of the MHS’s programme, but is it truly? Does the institution bear responsibility for collecting all of Maryland’s history, or is it acceptable, or even preferred, for museums to focus on a chosen component of history and cultivate their collections in that direction?
It is perhaps the Maryland Historical Society’s lack of objects relating to African American and Native American history that allowed Wilson’s intervention to tell its story so powerfully. Sometimes the absence of truth highlights an even deeper truth, as is the case with Wilson’s restructuring of the institution’s collection: the negative space left by nonexistent objects could be converted into space for that missing history to permeate and expand, offering sharp contrast to the stories of the physical objects placed throughout the galleries. Corrin questions whether “no one [saw] fit to ‘collect’ or commemorate” those non-white histories, but it is precisely this deficient collection that helps an important set of truths and stories come to light via Wilson’s reimagining (Corrin 338).
If museums were to pursue wholly comprehensive collections that sought to record all histories and truths, perhaps our institutions would lose their perspective, originality, and power. While striving for diversity, equality, and inclusion is necessary among museum staff and leadership, leaving space for additional histories in collections can only empower a self-reflexive museum, for it creates opportunities for powerful non-tangible growth. Truth lies not only in a collection’s objects, but also in the spaces between objects. Filling those spaces with more objects may serve to silence the truth, rather than amplify it.
Works Cited
Corrin, Lisa G. “Mining the Museum.” Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, 2nd ed., edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 329-346.
Originally written October 2022.
Art with an Opinion 