VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
In 1949, the National Museum in Warsaw launched an unprecedented traveling exhibition program in an industrial trucking trailer. According to curator Kazimierz Michalowski, this Museobus presented a novel exhibitionary format, but its greatest significance was “fostering culture and art in every section of the population and every corner of the country.” In this presentation, I examine postwar experimentation with museum as site, material heritage, and museum education as seen in the Museobus – specifically its first exhibition – to show how and why this carefully crafted show was devised for and disseminated among Poland’s rural villages. I argue that the Museobus responded to postwar upheaval by taking collections on the road to share with a new, more democratic audience, breaking away from pre-war expectations of aristocratic, site-specific engagement with heritage objects in museums. Further, this program rapidly increased the war-torn Polish people’s access to their own cultural heritage at a pivotal time in the nation’s history. For decades, dialogue around postwar museum history has focused on the reconstruction of museum buildings and returning looted objects, but scholars have not attended to mobile museum practices – activities beyond the traditional, physical museum. Although the Museobus was short-lived, it demonstrates shifting notions on how the museum could best reach its audience. This project ultimately revises the discourse on postwar museums, replacing the narrative that museums were site-specific institutions focused on recovery with one more inclusive of innovations engaging heritage and community – experiments aimed at creating something new for the future, not rewriting the status quo.
Leah Sherman is the Visual & Performing Arts Librarian and a doctoral candidate in Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. As both an art historian and information professional, she is interested in the intersection of GLAM institutions and cultural heritage studies, specifically museum history. Her dissertation focuses on the new internationalism emerging within museum professionalism and practice in the mid-twentieth century, especially with the rise of UNESCO during the postwar period.