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Texas Standard kicked off a new project in August: The Texas Museum Map. To begin, we decided to get answers to some challenging questions about museums. This Texas Extra is an extended version of that interview with Kenneth Hafertepe, a fellow with the Texas State Historical Association and chair of the Department of Museum Studies at Baylor.
The full transcript of this episode of Texas Standard is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Laura Rice [00:00:00] Hello, Texas Standard podcast listeners, it’s Laura Rice with a Texas Extra — additional content just for you. Have you heard about our new project, The Texas Museum Map? We’re pretty excited to explore the state through its unique and fabulous museums. You can check out the stories we’ve collected already at Texas standard.org/museums, and this project will grow and quickly, we hope. There. You can also suggest which museums we visit. But we kicked off our museum journey with questions about museums, some of them a little challenging. Here’s a longer version of our interview, and I’ll tell you it’s still not the full thing. Turns out, there’s a lot to say about what we collect and how, and it can get a little sticky in some cases. I hope you enjoy this deeper dive, and of course, feel welcome to reach out with questions or suggestions. And please check out Texas standard.org/museums. Thanks and happy listening. You’ve got it tuned to the Texas Standard. I’m Laura Rice. Let’s play a thought game for a moment. What do you picture when I say the word museum? Is there marbles in your picture? Tall ceilings and long corridors. What’s on the walls? How does it sound? How do you feel? Are you comfortable? Intimidated? We’re kicking off a new regular segment here on the Texas Standard. All about the state’s museums. We’re calling it simply the Texas Museum Map. And our idea is to explore and highlight museums, big and small, traditional and a little weird. Some of our choices might push the boundaries of a definition of a museum. But wait, how do we define a museum? For help, we turn to Kenneth Hafertepe, a fellow with the Texas State Historical Association and chair of the Department of Museum Studies at Baylor. Professor Hafertepe, welcome to the Texas Standard.
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:02:02] Hi there. Good to be with you.
Laura Rice [00:02:03] So let’s start with that big question. How do you define a museum?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:02:10] I think it’s fair to say that, a museum has traditionally been thought of as a collection collected by someone who considered it to be significant, culturally significant, scientifically significant, or the like, and that they hope is going to be preserved for perpetuity.
Laura Rice [00:02:32] So there are lots of subcategories of museums. What types typically come to mind?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:02:38] Yeah, well, probably the most common types are art museums, which you were alluding to with some of the rare paintings or sculpture that might be in a gallery. It can also be history museums, artifacts out of the American past, European past, or other cultures of the world. There, has been an evolution in terms of science museums. They tended originally to be natural history, which some museums still use in their their name. But it’s expanded to include a broader view of science to include physics and just all sorts of science. Now, in addition to to that, you have science centers where there isn’t necessarily a collection, a permanent collection, but newly built machines that help people understand scientific principles and related to those, you find newer types of museums, like children’s museum. And that is not a museum about children, although some people wonder, but a museum for children that can can discuss any topic that you think children might be interested in. And so those tend to be much more hands on, much more interactive. And because of that, the, the offerings tend to be, less, you know, rare objects here. Play with this Picasso painting or whatever, and more things that kids can use, explore, play with. And then there’ll be another in the closet that you can bring out for the next kid. So our modern thoughts about what makes a museum successful has really, led us to challenge and rethink the idea of collections being the basis of the museum, because there can be, other types of museums as well.
Laura Rice [00:04:34] Well, you point out, you know, children’s museums really challenge that definition of a museum a little bit. There are also other things that aren’t quite museums but are closed. Some thinking animals on display at a at a zoo or an an aquarium. What would you include in that not quite museum category?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:04:53] Yeah, well, museums and zoos really developed in America at roughly the same time. Interestingly enough, the Smithsonian, which is one of the most important, early American museums, had a living collection, which is what we tend to refer to, animals, in the care of a, of a museum, which, included, some bison, which were actually penned outside the Smithsonian Castle. Over time, though, they were able to create a separate national zoo in Rock Creek Park. And so the National Zoo grew out of the Smithsonian. But, basically, zoos have living collections, but they’re they’re here to educate people about animals. And also, modern zoos tend to think of themselves as encouraging a concern for the environment and the natural habitat. Habitat, of animals. And the same thing is true of aquaria. It’s interesting because there is a separate association of zoos and aquaria. From the American Alliance of Museum, but there can be an overlap of membership you have. You don’t have to be in just one or the other. Another type of collection that that is closely related to museums are special collections libraries. And so you can think of things like the LBJ library or the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library. You know, those are officially archives of presidents papers, but they also take on a museum function as well, that they’re there to inform and educate people about what happened in the time period that the those presidents were in office or, here in Waco, the Armstrong Browning Library, is a library, but it is also, a beautiful building with, with exhibits and display cases. So it takes on some of the, the roles of museums as well. And so there can be even confusion among people who work in the Special Collections library. You know, doggone it, I’m a librarian. I’m not a museum curator or something. But sometimes they find themselves doing, doing work that that we might tend to think of more as, as a museum professionals work.
Laura Rice [00:07:16] So collecting and, and sharing information sort of seem, at least in most part, at the core of what a museum is. Could my collection of Barbie dolls or vacuum cleaners be a museum if I opened up my home?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:07:36] Well, it’s kind of like the person who decides that a painting, which makes no sense whatsoever to me, but some person decides that it’s art. And if you have an artist and a person who buys it and says, this is beautiful, this is art, by golly, you’ve got yourself a definition of art. However, the the American Alliance of Museums spent a lot of time trying to come up with a definition of what a museum actually is. To use a fancy phrase, it gives institutional parameters of what a museum is, which emphasizes both a collection but a collection that is permanently held that’s cared for, by a professional staff who present it to the public on a regular basis, that sometimes we’ve thought that a museum needs to be a nonprofit, which most museums, are, which is to say that, you know, you you still have to pay to get into to most museums, but there’s not any thing left over at the end of the year that that goes into the pockets of a, of an owner or a, you know, investors or that sort of thing. And most museums, if they have an excellent year, you know, that surplus of money goes right back in to planning for, you know, upgrades to the building or repairs to the building or all the expenses that just naturally happen in an institution.
Laura Rice [00:09:03] What is it worth interrogating who has traditionally decided what is worth collecting or displaying?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:09:11] It’s definitely worth interrogating what the motives are. I mean, in in the very earliest time, some of the, some of the, the great collections tended to be the collections of kings or queens or noble people. Or the collection could be, the collections of the Catholic Church. Museums today are trying to adapt to an audience that might not be as interested in collections as they used to be, but are interested in experiences.
Laura Rice [00:09:47] What trends, I guess, are you seeing with that and with new technology?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:09:52] It’s it’s interesting in the sense that museums are trying to creatively adapt new technologies to fill in the holes of collections that, you know, a lot of times the things that have been collected through the centuries tend to be things of great beauty or that are associated with a historic person. And, almost always the things that are associated with a historic person tend to be very upbeat, artifacts, or put that person in a good light. And how do you deal with difficult topics of conversation, like slavery, for example? And I’m thinking of, the case of Monticello right now because they have been trying to step up their interpretation of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who had a relationship with Thomas Jefferson that resulted in several children. And there are no pictures of Sally Hemings. There are no artifacts that were owned by Sally Hemings. What they are trying to do at Monticello is to incorporate video, which uses silhouettes that are active on. Background so that you can show activity. You sort of get around the notion of needing to show a picture of Sally when we don’t know what her specific, features were. So you can use new technology to fill in some of their, those gaps where we might know from a letter that things happened or from an account book. But, you know, that’s that’s not going to make much of an impact for people. But using new technology can, can help make it a fuller story.
Laura Rice [00:11:36] You know, there’s another controversy, I guess is, is the general word that you would use about museums. I can think I was at a museum recently that displayed an Egyptian mummy, which was shocking in a few ways. How has the conversation over who owns history and and where it rightly belongs been evolving over recent years?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:12:01] The whole question of who owns a culture has kind of come back to haunt museums, in the sense that a collector may feel completely entitled to buy or even take artifacts from another culture. And that’s certainly happened in the case of a lot of the sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens, which ended up going to Britain and going into the the, the British Museum or, you know, one of the other famous examples, is Native American artifacts in the the very early years of the Smithsonian. A team of what was called ethnologist studies of different ethnic groups, were sent to the southwest to New Mexico, to be precise. And in the 1880s collected a very wide variety of artifacts, including, sculpture, an altarpiece from the mission church, but but also some, some sacred sculptures that pertained to native religions. And that that was particularly in the Zuni. So in the modern time, representatives of the Zuni have come to Washington and said, hi, can we see the paperwork on, that your purchase of those artifacts from our pueblo? If we were to take that comes out of repatriation to its extreme, it would be sort of a vacuum effect of, artifacts being taken out of museums and back to the place where they were made, which is a challenge, because the good thing about having artifacts from, you know, Egypt or Greece is that people in Omaha, Nebraska, can learn about ancient cultures. And a lot of it is it’s the the good old principle of private property. If a museum can show that they paid, a rightful price for an object from another culture, I think that they’re safe. Although one of the challenging, topics as well is dealing with, Nazi looted art in, the 1930s and through World War two. There are actually records of Nazis, paying for, things out of the collections of Jewish families, but it was basically being done under duress.
Laura Rice [00:14:26] I have a pop quiz for you. Do you have a favorite Texas museum?
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:14:33] This is a silly analogy, but how can you choose between your children? The the first Texas museum that I ever went to, or I should say historic site, was the Alamo.
Laura Rice [00:14:45] Yeah.
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:14:45] In the aftermath of being a Davy Crockett fan and seeing, both, Davy Crockett on Wonderful World of Disney and then the John Wayne movie, which was kind of traumatic for a six year old me. The first museum that I ever worked with. I have a fun place for it. And that’s the French Legation State Historic Site in Austin, which I worked at as a tour guide back in, the at the very end of my graduate school days. But, have fond memories of going to the Dallas Museum of Art because, I grew up in Dallas. Probably I would not be in Texas right now if it was not for miss. I’m a hog who created the wonderful collection of American decorative arts at the Bayou Bend Collection, which is part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. And, she also created the Wayne Dale Historical Center, restoring to antebellum, which is to say, 1840s, 1850s houses and creating. Basically, she did it as, as an attempt to, get Texans up to speed on what was best practices of, of historic preservation. So there are so, so many that. That, that I enjoy.
Laura Rice [00:16:03] Kenneth Hafertepe is a fellow with the Texas State Historical Association and chair of the Department of Museum Studies at Baylor. Professor Hayford. Thanks again.
Kenneth Hafertepe [00:16:13] Well, thank you, I enjoyed it.
Laura Rice [00:16:16] So what about you? What are your favorite Texas museums? Share them with us as we begin to explore, and you can take a tour with our Texas Museum map with The Witches, which is in its infancy stage right now over at Texas standard.org.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
