Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions

This book includes accounts going back to the 1970s of efforts to engage visitors as contributors to exhibitions and active participants in museum conversations. Included are 27 essays by practioners from children’s museums and science centers, natural history museums and art galleries, history museums and living collections. The book offers practical guidance and concludes with reflections on the value and meaning of visitor contributions to exhibitions. Co-editor Pollock poses a question that in retrospect seems prescient: "Finally, have we considered carefully enough the possible downsides of collecting and displaying visitors’ fleeting thoughts as if they were so much wallpaper—brief, lacking context, only hinting at thought? In 1985, social critic Neil Postman wrote of the hazards of public talk that aims primarily to amuse—the direction in which, even then, television news was headed.  Talking heads don’t constitute a conversation. Neither do Post-its, juxtaposed. They may attract attention and even provoke thought. But could we do more to foster genuine conversation in museums, around topics that matter?"