Display Case: A Well-Balanced Field

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As the future of museums receives increasing attention these days, we must critically rethink the training of our museum professionals. How can we revamp graduate programs to meet the needs of changing times?

Traditionally, the system of these programs has been bifurcated—one for curators and one for other museum staff. In graduate school, the aspiring curator receives training for limited aspects of the job’s requirements: scholarship and research of the collection that evolve into exhibitions. Falling within the purview of museum studies programs, however, are curatorial practice and collections management, communication, exhibition and lighting design, development, education and visitor services.

The expectation is that the newly minted Ph.D. will learn curatorial skills on the job, but this obscures the complexity of such expertise. Similarly, museum studies graduates learn about professional practice with the assumption that a range of content can be readily plugged in. Yet, this underestimates the demands of scholarly interpretation.

In order to discuss these challenges, 20 academics, critics, curators, designers and museum educators gathered last year at New York’s Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in collaboration with Parsons The New School for Design. The participants were asked to consider how we see the future of museums and how we can best prepare the next generation of museum professionals to realize that vision. The group identified the differentiation in graduate training as particularly ill suited to a design museum, where the practice of design is present not only in the objects on display but in gallery space installation, exhibition programming interactivity, visitor experience orchestration and the virtual experience of the museum website. The substance of the exchange, however, clearly had implications for the future of museums in general—not just design museums.

Content is not simply produced by the curatorial departments and handed off to exhibition designers and educational programs. But while collaboration is increasingly integral to museum practice, it generally remains absent in most graduate education. Ideally, the curriculum should encourage students of art and design history to join students taking courses in communication and product design, exhibition and lighting design. This approach would facilitate reciprocity between historians of design and design practitioners. And such collaborative studies could better prepare their graduates for best practices in museums. Jamer Hunt, director of Parsons’ M.A. program in transdisciplinary design, argued at the gathering that collaboration needs to be a methodology rather than a means to an end. “Collaboration is a buzzword, but there are ways of doing it badly. If we are going to do it, we have to do it reflectively,” he said. I would add that collaboration should model how exhibitions are produced and how collections are exhibited and understood.

A related critique concerned the typical graduate seminar requirement for students to produce a research paper as their culminating project. Venues for publication are rapidly dwindling, and the prospects for turning research into an article, book or catalogue are limited. Journals are moving online, and the Web presence of a museum and its collection is often considered more significant than its physical visitorship. Graduate students should therefore be encouraged to adapt their research projects for a range of formats, media and technologies.

Consider one forward-thinking example: the “Museum Lab,” a graduate seminar that Tim Ventimiglia, studio director at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, runs like a research lab—identifying a problem, studying context and precedent, proposing hypotheses and developing models of exploration. In last year’s “Museum Lab: The Future of Museums,” students identified what they saw as an upcoming challenge for a particular museum in New York City. The student team then proposed a solution that would effectively anticipate and resolve that challenge. A culminating symposium at the end of the term allowed the students to present their recommendations to senior staff from the museums under scrutiny.

New ideas of scholarship would better suit changing visions of the museum experience. Would scholars and curators ask different questions if they weren’t obligated to come up with a single interpretation? Could the open-endedness of a blog, for example, be liberating for scholarship? How can we prepare young curators to provoke and engage in an exchange with the museum visitor rather than simply demonstrate a well-argued thesis?

There was a rich exchange on the shift of the designer’s role from making products to making ideas. Constantin Boym, a founding designer at Boym Partners, argued that museums should be able to “become a catalyst of ideas, not just a mirror that reflects the existing development.” Susan Sellars, a partner at the graphic design firm 2x4 and a senior critic at Yale University, spoke eloquently on the current tendency of curatorial studies to feature the “critical object—the single scrutable object that can symbolically represent the big ideas.” Design making and thinking are so fully integrated, she posits, that museums should convey design practice by allowing design artifacts to be experienced in context. Some argued that, in order to participate in this broader discourse, graduate students should become fluent in ecology, biology, political science, science, sociology and technology. As the conversation became more animated, the list of mandatory areas of expertise expanded. Participants clearly emphasized an openness to methodologies that would span a range of expertise and make the museum more interdisciplinary and pluralistic. Graduate education should not do away with specialized areas of knowledge but create new paths for collaboration and exchange.

In closing, we discussed the difference between a professional degree and a humanities-based degree. How can substance and critical reflection remain integral to learning professional skills? And how should professional skills be integrated as an aspect of critical reflection and historical study? Andrew Blauvelt, design director and curator of architecture and design at the Walker Art Center, voiced his wariness of academic programs created to fill industry needs. I agree that this trend only reinforces museums in their current form rather than reshaping and redefining them. It would be a significant loss if every curator or exhibition designer underwent identical training, no matter how perfectly tuned the curriculum.

Our conversation did not end in consensus, nor did it result in a readily applicable list of recommendations for graduate education. But it did underscore the urgent need for graduate programs to recognize the formative role they can have in the future of museums. Graduate school should not aspire to perfectly prepare the next generation of museum professionals for what museums need but prepare them to challenge, explore and redefine what museums can become.

In order for these considerations to become pedagogic principles, graduate programs need to begin with a revised articulation of their educational mission. Particularly in the current economy, there is a strong demand for graduate training that translates readily into job placement. Graduate programs must be able to convincingly convey the value of a curriculum in which students challenge and redefine the possibilities of museum practice. Schools should communicate with confidence that this model of graduate education will empower their alumni to assume positions of meaningful leadership in the future of museums.