Object Stories: Rejecting the Single Story in Museums

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Early in 2012, I came across a particularly inspiring TED talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Her talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story,” quoted above, warns that if we tell or hear only a single story about a people or culture, we risk a critical misunderstanding. Our lives and our cultures are composed of many overlapping stories, and all of those stories matter and deserve to have a voice.

As I was listening to Adichie’s transformative words, I immediately thought about museums and the cultural power they have historically possessed to tell a single story—the single story. As museums continue to adapt to become more relevant in the 21st century, they have also been struggling with whose stories to tell, whose voices can participate in that telling, and how much power can or should be handed over to our communities to tell and share their own stories.

Since first listening to Chimamanda Adichie’s talk almost a year ago, I have experienced an exciting career and life transition as I moved from St. Louis to Portland, Oregon, to become the Director of Education & Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum. And these issues of power, voice, storytelling, and community engagement are central to one of the Museum’s most widely expanding educational projects, Object Stories.  Launched almost 3 years ago, this project begins to address the need for museums to reject the single story, to create and share a multiplicity of stories around its collection, and to bring the meaning-making process of storytelling into the galleries. And one of the major arms of the project right now is called “Object Stories from the Middle,” a 3-year initiative that involves teacher professional development, classroom residencies, and museum visits — all focused around telling stories. The project is currently being evaluated, and there will be a full report after the project concluces.

The Portland Art Museum’s Object Stories project was recently featured by EmcArts and ArtsFwd in their ‘Business Unusual’ Contest, and I’m very proud to say that we won the contest with a broad base of support from across our community (the Mayor of Portland even gave us a shout out, along with dozens of other cultural organizations across Oregon).  Originally posted on ArtsFwd.org, the text below was created through a full team effort from the Education Department, including Jess Park, Stephanie Parrish, Amy Gray, Danae Hutson, Betsy Konop, and especially my amazing predecessor Tina Olsen, who passionately led this project from its inception to where it stands today. And I would also like to publicly thank Jess Park, our Interpretive Media Specialist, for driving this submission to ArtsFwd and garnering support far and wide during the Innovation Contest.  As a team, we are pushing this project to new areas and breaking down boundaries inside the museum as well as both locally and globally.

>> READ FULL POST about the Object Stories project at ArtMuseumTeaching.com

And visit ObjectStories.org to explore more than 1,000 stories from community members, students, and museum staff.


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