My local museum redid its whole Native American hall and I barely recognized it when I walked in yesterday | Archaeology Discoveries - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
My local museum redid its whole Native American hall and I barely recognized it when I walked in yesterday
I go to the Field Museum in Chicago maybe twice a year and I walked into the Native American hall yesterday and honestly thought I went through the wrong door. Two years ago that room was dark wood cases, everything behind glass, mannequins in headdresses with little typed cards from like 1950. Now it's bright, the cases are open on top, and nearly every label says who made the item, what tribe, and when the museum got it. One case that used to say "Plains headdress, date unknown" now says it was collected in 1893 and the museum got it in 1928 from a dealer in New York. There's a whole wall where tribal reps from several nations wrote their own text, and one quote from a Ho-Chunk elder talks about how the items were taken. I stood there way longer than I planned because it felt like a different museum. I know some people hate when museums change stuff, but has anyone else seen a hall get redone like this, and did it change how you looked at the old labels?