Lost Museums: A Symposium on the Ephemerality & Afterlives of Museums & Collections
MAY 6 – 8, 2015
BROWN UNIVERSITY & THE RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN
PROVIDENCE, RI
Held in conjunction with the year-long exhibition project on Brown’s lost Jenks Museum, the symposium addresses the history of museums from a new direction: not their founding, but their disappearance. We know a great deal about how museums are born and how new collections come into being, but not nearly enough about how these fragile institutions pass out of existence, how artifacts decay and disappear as times and interests change.
What happens to a collection when once-prized objects are no longer seem valuable? Or when ethical standards shift, as in the movement to repatriate cultural artifacts to the peoples or nations from which they were taken? How and why are specimens and artifacts deaccessioned or traded away? How do changing ideas about the evidentiary, educational, and research values of artifacts affect what seems worth saving? How do wars, natural disasters, and other cataclysmic events shape collections and impact institutions of heritage, preservation, memory, and knowledge production? What can we learn from museums that have been forgotten and then revived in a new cultural context? Is permanence a virtue, or might we embrace notions of ephemerality in museums?
We received about 180 proposals from six continents addressing these questions. From that impressive pool, we have invited 30 presenters to join us in Providence May 6-8, 2015.
FOLLOW UP:
A selection of papers from the Symposium was published as a special issue of the Museum History Journal in 2017: Volume 10, Issue 1. Access here.
The Lost Museums Symposium is generously sponsored by:
Department of History, Brown University
The John Carter Brown Library
Dean of the Faculty
Edna Lawrence Nature Lab
Department of Science and Technology Studies, Brown University
Lost Museums Symposium 