Nez Perce dress, ca. 1920, on exhibit at the NMAI

For our third week of visits, Nancy asked us to explore three museums focused on the history or art of specific communities. I chose to visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the National Museum of the American Indian. I had visited the Museum at Eldridge Street a few weeks ago, and my time there is still fresh in my mind, so I’m including that as my third.

These three museums are geared toward fairly different audiences. The Museum of Jewish Heritage, I think, is geared toward a general adult audience, but assumes that the majority of its visitors may have some knowledge of Jewish culture. The National Museum of the American Indian is geared toward a broader audience of casual visitors, including children, and it assumes no prior knowledge of Native American culture. Eldridge St. is a very small, very specialized museum that assumes a specific interest in local Jewish history or in the history of the Lower East Side; docents accompany visitors, so there’s an opportunity for the material presented to be geared toward different knowledge levels (e.g. tourists, school groups, genealogists).

Visiting the Museum of Jewish Heritage, I was first struck by how big it is and by how amazing its setting is, looking out over Battery Park and beyond to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The building feels monumental, keeping in line with the museum’s mission as a living memorial to the Holocaust. Entering the museum is a little intimidating– the foyer is large and echoing, and there were no other visible visitors when I arrived. The staff at the admissions desk inspected my student ID far more closely than any museum I’ve ever been to, which made me laugh, which in turn somehow broke the ice a little, and suddenly the staff were much friendlier than they had appeared at first. MJH is a very linear museum; there is essentially one way through the core exhibit, which is arranged chronologically. The entrance to the exhibit is very impressive and overwhelming. It gave me a sense of history and culture flooding the space, which, I think is a good way to prepare people for the exhibits ahead. This entrance piece does a great job of framing the exhibit, and its use of technology definitely helped to make me feel immersed in the content. The use of multimedia in the following rooms, however, felt confusing, as sound bled from different exhibits into each other. The first two floors felt packed and crowded with too much information for me to take in, although it helped to have it all framed in a linear way. An interesting choice was made to break up the floors into three sections: the first floor covers history and culture before the Holocaust, the second covers the Holocaust, and the third covers more recent history. In a way, I loved that it was broken up this way, as riding the escalator between floors gave me a very specifically allotted time to contemplate what I had been viewing or would be viewing, and it gave a great weight to the second floor. However, after reading Frisch’s The Memory of History, I can’t help but wonder if this way of organizing the exhibits doesn’t place the Holocaust outside of the continuum of history, isolating it as something so different from ourselves that we can’t apply our learning from the exhibit to our own present. The thing that most impressed me about the MJH is how well the people there have considered the need for contemplation after taking in so much information, much of which is very difficult to process. The inclusion of meditative spaces like Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones seems absolutely necessary in this context.

In contrast to the MJH, where everything seemed so thoughtfully laid out and so well-planned, the National Museum of the American Indian felt a little like someone’s afterthought. The museum  is housed in an incredibly stately old place, but I felt like I’d wandered in to the wrong building when I first entered. The layout made no sense to me, down to the orientation of the security tables. I also found that I couldn’t tell what much of the signage in the exhibits was actually referring to (e.g. a pillar with information on the Ghost Dance dresses was standing on the other side of the room from where the dressed were being shown). I also found some of the children’s exhibits to be annoying busywork where the activities were not actually associated with the content they seemed to be presenting. For example, at one table the text asked, “Can beads be used to tell a story?” but the interaction was simply a jigsaw puzzle with an image taken from a beaded dress. A number of the interactive pieces provided very little user feedback, which was also frustrating. I was frustrated by some of the museum’s lack of organization, and I was disappointed that there wasn’t more general historical context given to the exhibits. However, I did really appreciate some of the content, particularly the use of oral history and video interviews.

I visited the Museum at Eldridge St. for a project at work, so I got a more specialized experience than I would have as a more casual visitor, but the tour was fascinating. I am often reluctant to sign up for tours at museums and historical sites, but whenever I do actually participate in them, I’m often surprisingly engaged by the docents’ enthusiasm. Eldridge St. was no exception to this. Although I could tell that the staff had told some of these stories many times, they still had a contagious spark and excitement about the material, and they provided a level of detail that made the history of the place palpable. There is something very special about being able to talk about the history of a place when you are actually in that space, and the docents here took very good advantage of that by doing things like having us reach down and feel the grooves in the wooden floor made by so many years of men praying. The use of technology at Eldridge St. is very specialized in that it is meant to assist the docents as a storytelling tool, as well as an interactive piece for visitors to explore. Interactive tables of the sort here are often used to simply provide an option of more information than can fit on a print sign or to provide a thin layer of participation; I really appreciated that one of the tables here was used to provide views of the space that would be impossible to achieve in person.