Cross-Purposes: Museum Display and Material Culture

Body and Language: Enlivening Exhibitions of Colonial Women in Australian Museums

“…Clothing presents vast potential for interpretation, particularly in exhibitions focusing on the individual stories and historical imprint of women, as it enables visitors 'to make tangible, meaningful mental links with the past'. 48 The embodied nature of costume collections enables a more personal connection with the audience. 49 Displaying costume collections in a manner that is authentic to the historical figures being represented is a challenge.…”

Material Girls: Consumption and the Making of Middle Class Identity in the Experiences of Black Single Mothers in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area

“…Meanings are attached to things which provide new, deeper understandings of social life. In museum studies, scholars no longer reference material culture, such as period dresses and textiles, as onedimensional examples of a time period, but often as "complex composites with multiple histories that should in turn be examined from multiple perspectives" (Petrov 2012). Material culture displayed in museums (and even objects not housed in museums but that are part of everyday life or ethnographic studies, for instance) can therefore tell many stories about various aspects of individual lives, groups, geographic spaces, and more and provides multidimensional analyses of social life (Petrov 2012;Brumfiel and Millhauser 2014;Francis 2009).…”