Public History and Civic DialogueBarbara Franco |
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Throughout the 1990s, the American Association of Museums made Museums and Communities a central initiative. A few mainstream history museums, the Chicago Historical Society, Minnesota Historical Society and Historical Society of Pennsylvania, for example, all experimented with community-based history exhibitions that struggled with issues of insiders and outsiders, multiple voices and contested identities. Each of these projects concluded that working in a dialogic way with communities required endless meetings, facilitation skills, diplomacy and unlimited time—a new set of skills and new ways of working for historians and museum staff. Few of these individual exhibition projects were repeated or permanently changed the museums' approaches to public history projects. Americans for the Arts recently embarked on a multiyear initiative with support from the Ford Foundation to demonstrate that civic dialogue and art could come together to stimulate public discussion about difficult issues and at the same time encourage broader and more diverse participation in the arts. Civic Dialogue, Arts and Culture and an accompanying series of published case studies document both the process and the diverse projects that involved 35 institutions from 2000 to 2004 (3). While the original goals of the Animating Democracy initiative were to increase involvement of individual citizens in public dialogue through the unique capacities offered by the arts and humanities, the most lasting outcome of the initiative may be the development of a consistent methodology that can be used for a wide variety of artistic and historical projects.
Animating Democracy also found that "Arts-based civic dialogue requires an understanding of the relationship between feeling and thinking, and a rethinking of the assumption that emotion is private, not public, or that public dialogue equals rational dialogue (4). A documentary film by Katrina Browne tells the story of her DeWolf family ancestors and their role in the American slave trade. In the summer of 2001 ten DeWolf relatives retraced the steps of the Triangle Trade from Bristol, Rhode Island, to the slave ports of Ghana and sugar plantations of Cuba. Browne writes in her case study that "we purposely went on a physical journey, because that would at least create action and visuals. But even so, the real journey is internal and was hard to convey without being too wordy. It is also important to note that shifting attitudes is not as rational, cognitive and clean a process as is often assumed. Emotions are key . . . . All of these competing tensions have led me to feel increasingly, as the project has progressed, that the power of stories is pivotal. Stories lie somewhere between reason and emotion" (5). While oral historians have long stressed the importance of narrative and stories in understanding history, historians, both public and academic, are rediscovering how powerful personal stories can be in engaging public audiences in serious historical analysis. When I worked on developing exhibits for the 1992 opening of the Minnesota History Center, our exhibit development teams explicitly focused on giving visitors an opportunity to make a personal connection to the experiences of people in the past through interactives, personal accounts and theatrical role playing. Audience research at the Minnesota History Center confirmed that visitors who had an emotional experience as part of their museum visit were better able to absorb, analyze and discuss the intellectual content of the exhibits. An audio visual object theater in an exhibit on Families brought many visitors to tears and was also the element of the exhibition that most people remembered and talked about long after their visit. The recent Slavery in New York exhibit at the New-York Historical Society used stories of individuals as an effective way to reintroduce a history that had been previously ignored in the collective memory of New Yorkers and allowed visitors to share their reactions to the sometimes jarring content of the exhibition. Nontraditional audiences including young black men and families with children were engaged by the use of first person narrative in a video recreation of a slave recounting the uprising of 1712 in both Akan, the language of Ghana, and in English. When I visited, I had to stand in line to listen to audio presentations of four emotionally wrenching stories of how slavery personally affected individual lives. Recording booths allowed visitors to leave their own reactions to the exhibition. Many of the Animating Democracy projects took place after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Like many historians, artists in the Animating Democracy projects found themselves confronting their own identity as citizens in deeper ways than the outward trappings of patriotic symbols. Artist and writer Suzanne Lacey concluded that, "For an artist, art is commitment. For a certain kind of artist, like those in the Animating Democracy projects, that commitment is linked to social justice and public good, and gives us a fortitude that delivers us through the pains and doubts of public life" (6). Ron Chew at the Wing Luke Museum has been enormously successful in adopting a dialogic approach to exploring both art and history in a public venue. The web site for the Wing Luke Museum outlines their current New Dialogue Initiative to address community concerns about contemporary social issues and current news events. "New Dialogue's goal is to bring together community members, artists, and other professionals to jointly shape and implement the programs. The Initiative strives to connect diverse people in the dialogues and create innovative ideas. As various members of the Asian Pacific American community collaborate on each program, our hopes are for the New Dialogue Initiative and the community itself to be transformed and strengthened" (7). Transformation is essential to the process of dialogue. Patricia Romney's essay on "The Art of Dialogue" points to the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) who saw the goal of dialogue as "responsive understanding" and believed that dialogue always meant change (8). The case studies of the Animating Democracy projects make clear that the institutions and their staffs were as changed as the community participants. But how sustainable is that change? Historian David Thelen realistically notes in his introduction to history-based projects, that while civic dialogue may be held up as an ideal and become a new buzz word, it is still easier said than done (9). There are many possible dialogues—between artist and viewer; between museum and audience; among viewers; between museum and community. What degree of mediation is necessary to spark meaningful dialogue? How much time can cultural organizations devote to this work? Without support from the Ford Foundation will these institutions be able to continue to develop these models? William Westerman, a folklorist recently named director of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum in Chicago, presented a paper at the ICOM general conference in Seoul, Korea, in October 2004. His paper entitled, "The Queen City Manifesto: The Potential for Civic Engagement in Local Folklife Museums," argues that museums need to break down what the theater community refers to as the "fourth wall" dividing the audience from the stage and to invite communities into the museum as full participants. He describes his experience with an oral history project and exhibition on the 1963 March on Washington at a local historical society that achieved its community goals only to have the Board insist on a return to safer colonial period exhibits of old things (10). This cautionary tale is all too familiar. I have heard many presentations at national meetings that describe model projects in history museums both large and small that embrace the methodology and philosophy of civic dialogue and community participation. Most presentations end with enthusiasm for the success of the undertaking, but realism that it will not be repeated or sustained because of lack of funding, changes in leadership or institutional fear of risk. Until public historians and the institutions they work for can truly change the way they work with communities, it is hard to imagine how these experiments can become sustainable models. Institutions like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Wing Luke Asian Museum have adopted missions that include public dialogue and openly embrace the need to change both museums and the communities they serve, but they are among only a handful of organizations that have institutionalized this process. The methodology of Animating Democracy is not limited to art projects or museum presentations. Troubled by the fact that the concept of citizenship has become so politicized that K-12 students are no longer taught the basic tools of democracy, some history museums, public history projects and humanities programs are looking at ways to reconnect American citizens with the civic dialogue that is necessary to sustain democracy in a pluralistic nation. The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is part of a Pennsylvania coalition to improve civic learning for K-12 students (11). As a supporter of PennCORD's educational goals, Pennsylvania's First Lady, Judge Marjorie Rendell, likes to point out that, "The Constitution was the creation of people disagreeing in fundamental ways about principles and that's how they created this extraordinary document" (12). "Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life" is committed to artistic, critical and historical work that contributes to public debates, public consequences and public value with programs at more than 75 participating universities (13). Here in Pennsylvania, seven communities are using the civic dialogue model to create Pennsylvania Civil War Trails that tell more complex stories of how surrounding communities participated in the prelude and aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg by including women and children under siege, contributions of African Americans, home front support as well as battles and troop movements. Bringing together tourism agencies, local historical societies, reenactors and historians, each community is delving deeper into their local history, forging new relationships and changing how they see and present their heritage. In the future, civic dialogue and the benefits that it can offer both communities and cultural organizations, will depend on whether we can harness both reason and emotion to truly initiate dialogue that changes us as well as the public we engage. The Animating Democracy case studies are a great place to start. Barbara Franco is the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Animating Democracy's publications may be ordered by calling 1-800-321-4510 or online at <http://www.AmericansForTheArts.org/bookstore>. For more information about Animating Democracy, visit: <http://www.AmericansForTheArts.org/AnimatingDemocracy>.
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For the past two decades public historians and history organizations have been experimenting with new ways to involve the public in dialogue with each other and the past. Much of the early work involved specific communities of geography or ethnicity. When John Kuo Tchen's article, "Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment," was published in 1992 his ideas about engaging community members in using personal memory and testimony to inform historical scholarship had been in practice for a decade at the New York Chinatown History Project, now the Museum of Chinese in America (
The Animating Democracy methodology addresses many of the problems that earlier community history projects faced. Getting people to discuss difficult topics outside their normal comfort zones requires a safe place to disagree and discuss. Dialogue is different from argument and assumes that a variety of perspectives can lead to a new understanding rather than one side winning or losing. These new rules of engagement and best practices for civic dialogue require a change in thinking for both historians and artists. The role of the historian or scholar in civic dialogue must be focused on creating safe places for disagreement rather than on documenting facts or achieving a coherent thesis. Similarly, artists engaged in civic dialogue must take on new roles of facilitation, often putting the ultimate creation of an art work aside to allow the process of dialogue to unfold.