NYC AND THE HISTORY OF MUSEUM

This course will introduce students to the history of museums and display practices through New York collections. The birth of the museum as a constitutive element of modernity coincides with the establishment of European nation states. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, museums were founded in major European and American cities to classify objects, natural and manmade, from plants and fossils to sculpture and clothing. This course presents the alternate art history that can be charted through an examination of the foundation and development of museums from cabinets of curiosity to the collection-less new museums currently being built in the Middle East and beyond. We will consider broad thematic issues such as nationalism, colonialism, canon formation, the overlapping methods of anthropology and art history, and the notion of 'framing' from the architectural superstructure to exhibition design. We will visit a wide variety of museums from the American Museum of Natural History to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum as in-depth case studies of more general concepts. Students will have the opportunity to meet museum educators, conservators and curators through on site teaching in a variety of institutions.