Inside the Lost Museum

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors' interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors.

Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum's past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums' usefulness and service.

Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes – collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building – through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.

    Introduction: Explore
    Part I: Collect
        1. Why Collect?
        2. Collectable
        3. Acquisitions
        4. In the Field
        5. Who Collects?
    Part II: Preserve
        6. Into the Storeroom
        7. Paperwork
        8. The Ethics of Objects
    Part III: Display
        9. Objects, Stories, and Visitors
        10. Objects on Display
        11. Organ izations and Juxtapositions
        12. Explanations and Encounters
        13. Setting the Scene
        14. Turned Inside Out
    Part IV: Use
        15. What Use Is a Museum?
        16. Museums Make Communities
        17. Learning from Things
        18. Teaching with Things
        19. The Promise of Museums
    Coda: Critique
    Notes
    Acknowledgments
    Illustration Credits
    Index