How to Read a Dinosaur & Other Museum Tales
Lon Dubinsky & Carolyn Sale
Have you ever wondered how museums come to display dinosaurs that roar and lunge about, snapping at their prey? Have you ever thought about how much work goes into making those dinosaurs seem "real," and how much scientific research and painstaking interpretation goes into bringing those fascinating creatures to "life" in a museum?
Dinosaur skeletons are just one kind of artifact in a magnificent array that can be found in Canada's museums. How to Read a Dinosaur & Other Museum Tales will lead you behind the scenes in some of Canada's most interesting museums to show you just what goes into the stories curators tell when they select, label, and display those artifacts for us. We'll look at everything from the thigh-bone of a duck-billed dinosaur to the miniature masks made by people who lived in the Canadian north over three thousands years ago to the monochromatic paintings of Québec artist Louis Comtois, and discover not just how curators tell stories, but the amazing range of stories they can tell. We'll also explore the political and theoretical issues that occupy Canada's curators every day as they design and shape the narratives that they present to us in museum exhibitions-everything from how local tribal museums argue for the repatriation of their culture's prized artifacts to how museums like the Pointe-à-Callière in Montréal put digital technology to work in the dark depths of their museum's crypt. One thing we'll learn: that in response to theoretical developments in the academic world and elsewhere, curators invite museum-goers to share with them the responsibility and the authority that come with making museum artifacts tell stories.
Research museums like the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta are places where knowledge is produced, but Canada's museums are more than storehouses for information: they are creative, theatrical, and political spaces. We'll see how curators use those spaces to challenge us to consider what history is and what kinds of objects can tell it; what art is, and how it can become an opportunity for Canada to redefine itself as a nation; and how anthropology museums and tribal centres are places where we can represent Canada's diverse cultures in ways that liberate us all from stereotypes. We'll also see how Canada's museums are places where we can conjure ghosts from the past, reinterpret historical events, and piece together the fragments from pasts so ancient they boggle our imaginations. But maybe most surprisingly of all we'll see how in the sacred space of museums an object as simple and everyday as a toothbrush or as ephemeral as a song can be the means by which we can imagine not just the past but the future. In short, we'll join museums in that special brand of tectonics by which they make beautiful things and represent the past, the present, the future-and ourselves.
Lon Dubinsky teaches at Concordia University in Montreal and is a consultant to the Canadian Museums Association. Carolyn Sale is a book editor and doctoral student at Stanford University.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: How to Read a Dinosaur
Chapter 2: Conjuring the Past
Chapter 3: Art Matters
Chapter 4: The Politics of Representation
Chapter 5: The Digital Museum
Featured Museums & Travelling Exhibitions
Publication Date: June 1997
Museum Studies/Museum Education
Cloth, 96 pages, full colour, 8-1/2 x 11
ISBN 1-895766-27-3 $34.95
Pacific Educational Press
Faculty of Education
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4
CANADA
Telephone: +604-822-5385
Fax: +604-822-6603
