On a Saturday night last December, Museum of Science & Industry employees looked on in amazement as some 25 people gathered outside the building to demonstrate against, of all things, the institution’s seemingly innocuous new agricultural exhibit, “The Farm.”
The highly vocal protesters were a loose coalition of family farm supporters and animal-rights activists opposing what they claim is a distorted, Pollyannaish view of modern agribusiness portrayed by the exhibit.
The museum was rented that evening for a Farm Bureau dinner and the attendees had to walk a gantlet of angry placards and other signs as they entered the building. The demonstrators, called Families Against Rural Messes (FARM), were peaceful, orderly but, to be sure, passionate, as they loudly branded the show a “lie” and rebuked organizers for failing to depict “hog factories” and hens crammed into minuscule cages. They also got zero media attention — lifeblood for any protest — and have had no discernible impact on the exhibit.
The farm protest came as a surprise to MSI officials, who were reminded — in case they’d forgotten — that no exhibit is immune from becoming a rallying point for a particular point of view.
More and more, as museums become increasingly popular venues and attendance grows, the stories they tell and the artifacts they put on display receive increased scrutiny from the public and media.
And administrators have become more aware that not everyone likes, or agrees with, what they see.
“We have art museums, history museums and science museums in our umbrella and there is not one of them that has not been touched by controversy, not one area, in my six years here,” says David Umansky, chief of public affairs for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. “No one can really avoid it.”
Museum administrators and curators have increasingly found themselves grappling with a variety of headaches. Here is a sampling:
– In one of the higher-profile controversies, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off funding last year for the Brooklyn Museum of Art because of its “Sensation” exhibit, which included a dissected cow and pig, castrated male dummies lashed to a wire, and “The Holy Virgin Mary” painting with its splash of elephant dung. The show attracted sizable crowds despite Giuliani’s threats and the fact that several hundred protesters from the Catholic League showed up outside the museum on opening day.
– The Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg drew intense protest from the International Indian Treaty Council, plus other Native American groups, over an exhibit featuring ancient Inca remains from Peru. Protesters were upset at how the display was presented, citing advance publicity that they said created a “Halloween” atmosphere by emphasizing ghoulish aspects of the native culture. The display ran its course unchanged, with no noticeable drop in attendance.
– Paintings of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh in an Oakland art gallery drew 1,500 demonstrators last year. Many of the objectors were Vietnamese refugees or U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War, who labeled the exhibit “propaganda” for the Asian nation. Gallery director Geoff Dorn said he didn’t think many of the protesters actually looked at the paintings. “They didn’t seem to be very spontaneous,” he said. “I think they were just using the show to get their message across.” Other Vietnamese paintings drew similar protests a few months earlier when they were shown in a Southern California museum.
– Colonial Williamsburg, the restored historical community depicting 18th Century life in Virginia, touched off objections from the NAACP and other civil-rights groups when it re-enacted slave auctions with actors. Those opposed to the realistic dramatizations said they “trivialized” and “turned into entertainment” one of the most painful chapters in U.S. history. Officials said the auctions, which ran as scheduled, served to educate visitors.
– At the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, a tug-of-war is being waged over the 9,300-year-old remains of Kennewick Man, the skeleton of a Native American male found on the Columbia River banks. Anthropologists seeking access to study the bones are suing the federal government, which plans to turn them over to local Native American tribes. The museum held a five-part, public Kennewick Symposium lecture series in the middle of the controversy, including one session called “Native American Claims to The Past.”
Museum of Science & Industry officials in Chicago would be well-advised to heed these examples in October when they unveil an exhibit likely to ignite far more protest than the farm display did, and perhaps as much as any other museum exhibit has ever generated.
It will be called “Genetics: Decoding Life.”
MSI officials say they will tackle the subject in a comprehensive way that will exceed anything ever done by any U.S. museum. Among items to be part of the show will be live, genetically altered frogs, mutant flies and cloned mice.
These may sound more like ingredients for a witch’s brew. And in some ways they are. Recent biotechnical advances in gene research — from cloning healthier dairy cows and sheep to altering food crops to tinkering with embryonic human cells — have drawn serious ethical and religious debate from special-interest groups and the general public.
Europe’s “Bio Valley” laboratories, where much of the controversial work is being conducted, have become regular targets for demonstrations and similar demonstrations have reached the U.S.
Protests against GMOs (genetically modified organisms) has drawn support of organizations such as the Sierra Club, Public Interest Research Groupand Friends of the Earth, all experienced hands at organizing dissent. Much of their focus has been on genetically altered food. Such a demonstration, led by Greenpeace, was launched last May in Genoa, Italy, where more than 4,000 activists clashed with 5,000 riot police to protest a biotechnology show organized by the food industry to promote genetically modified foodstuffs.
The Chicago museum’s ambitious aim is to have a cutting-edge exhibit, exploring the latest advances as well as the social ramifications of scientists altering plant, animal and human genes. But it could touch off a powder keg.
At the very least, MSI officials are braced for what they’re terming “lively dialogue” next October.
“Science is so exciting right now and a hot topic in museums, yet people have trouble grasping exactly what’s going on,” says Gary Edson, executive director of Texas Tech University’s highly respected School of Museum Science. “It’s important that museums keep people stimulated by exploring issues, but you always run a risk. DNA, cloning — it’s all a very confusing soup of ideas to many. Certainly not everyone is going to agree with what’s being done and shown.”
Richard Hayes, director of the San Francisco-based Exploration Initiative, a loose federation of environmental groups exploring ways to influence public policy on genetic engineering, said it is imperative for museum curators to be responsible in such public education campaigns.
“It cuts both ways,” said Hayes, former assistant political director of the Sierra Club. “You don’t ever want to say artists and curators can’t put something out there. That’s anathema. But you do want to say they have to take responsibility like anybody else. They need to be aware of how consequential this whole area of genetic modification is. What is at stake is our common human future.
“Human genetic modification could be the most dangerous technology since the hydrogen bomb. Like each of us, curators and artists ned to decide whether they want their work to encourage or discourage its use.”
Asked if the MSI show might spark protest from some circles, Hayes declined to make predictions, but noted that the issue “can be terribly divisive.”
Whether it’s demonstrators at the door, letters in the newspapers, callers on radio talk shows, or simple boycotting of the institution, this disagreement can manifest itself in a variety of ways.
“The thing we have to keep in mind is that, in these media-savvy days of the Internet and cable television’s insatiable appetite for content, it is much easier for one small group to grow in a hurry,” said the Smithsonian’s Umansky. “This makes it a lot easier to raise the level of any controversy.”
At Texas Tech, says Edson, the curriculum studied by future museum administrators and curators increasingly covers areas such as censorship, stewardshipand controversy. “One way we look at it is in the context of how to work with issues and exhibits that stimulate outsiders and deal with the problems they may create,” he said.
Nearly six years ago, in what many in the museum world agree was a textbook example of an exhibition gone wrong, the National Air and Space Museum touched off a storm of protests with plans for a display commemorating the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. Veterans’ groups and politicians were opposed to the intended interpretation of events, which they felt was too deferential to the Japanese and pacifist point of view.
The methods used to organize the exhibit also came into question, and the display’s eventual thrust was changed as a result of the objections. The pressure led to the resignation of the museum’s director, Martin Harwit.
As a result of this controversy, the Smithsonian, which operates the National Air and Space Museum, created a six-page, internal guideline to be followed when organizing subsequent exhibits. It covers an entire system for accountability, budget, and chain-of-command in planning.
“Museums in general, and the Smithsonian in particular, are increasingly flash points in the debates that characterize our nation’s transition from a society that depends for coherence on a single accepted set of values and practices to one that derives its strength and unity from a deep tolerance of diversity,” noted the Smithsonian directive. “This happens because museums, to fulfill their missions, must prepare exhibitions that record and illuminate this transition.”
Not as well-known in this country is that in 1999, following the acrimonious National Air and Space Museum debate, the chronicling of World War II by a new Tokyo national museum also met with public criticism in that country. Pacifists, as well as veterans, in Japan objected that officials seemed to back down from original plans to deal with issues of military responsibility for the war, concentrating instead on civilian hardships on the home front. One protester filed a suit against the government for misuse of tax money to build it.
“Museums are good targets because they regard themselves as the holders of truth and then, all of a sudden in this era, we’re finding that a lot of people don’t accept one truth anymore,” said Phelan Fretz, vice president for programs at the Museum of Science and Industry. “Museums can’t satisfy everybody. Everything has become a lot more difficult for them.”
No one knows that better than Leonard Krishtalka, director of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. The institution is located in an area in which the Creation vs. Evolution debate is still hotly waged on several fronts, with school curricula, government agenciesand museums frequently in the middle.
Krishtalka said his museum occasionally gets busloads of Creationists, or Christian fundamentalists, coming to the institution to conduct their own tours of how to interpret exhibits that feature the evolution of man from apes.
“Sometimes I tag along just to hear what they say,” said the director. “The thought of coming into a natural history museum and using it as a place to prove creationism is sort of funny, actually. It’s a little like conducting a tour of a hospital maternity ward and saying this proves the `stork theory.’
“We observe the highest scientific standards, but if someone wants to challenge us — that’s fine. It comes with the territory. Getting the facts right and getting people to agree with them can be two different things.”
In Chicago, where more than 8 million visits were logged in museums (and zoos) in 2000, there is plenty of history to show our institutions aren’t always on the same page with the public.
Recently, animal-rights advocates, upset over the captivity of Beluga whales and dolphins at the John G. Shedd Aquarium, have been the most prominent critics.
But their efforts at protest almost pale when compared to the outrage nearly 10 years ago at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where a student project featured a U.S. flag spread across the floor for visitors to walk on as part of the exhibit — a controversy that led to protests by veterans, removal of the workand some arrests.
Neil Bremer, an Elmhurst-based museum consultant who worked at the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, says we’re moving further into an era in which art has become more challenging for everyone. “It’s a lot like music in the late 1950s and ’60s, when the artists started singing about poverty and war,” he said. “The way we’re going, acts of protest may actually become part of the exhibit.”
In fact, that could almost be considered the case in 1997 when museums and galleries here observed a “Day Without Art” to commemorate World AIDS Day by either lowering their lights or shutting down entirely.
Terry Barnhart, who teaches historical administration at Eastern Illinois University, notes that, as museums move out of what he calls “the sacred grove of neutral ground,” new strategies are being employed.
“Most museums go about it today by putting advisory groups together and, if the resources are there, building educational outreach programs around an exhibit,” said Barnhart. “We’ve introduced more voices into how things are interpreted. Museums used to be considered the sole authority, but now their displays are seen as something to be negotiated, and that can lead to controversy.”
Details for the MSI’s genetic show next fall have not been finalized, but Barry Aprison, the institution’s science and technology director, said a series of discussions and forums will be on the agenda to allow input from the public.
Aprison likens the upcoming exhibit to the museum’s AIDS display that he mounted in 1995, which was about dispelling misinformation as well as information on the subject.
Numerous outside special-interest organizations were consulted, and input from focus groups was incorporated into the format.
The exhibit created meaningful dialogue on all fronts and generally is considered one of the museum’s most successful efforts of the decade.
“What can we do this time that the public will want to see about genetics?” said Aprison. “We think we have some really good solutions.”
