Exhibitions for Social Justice by Elena Gonzales

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exhibitions for Social Justice by Elena Gonzales Sarah J. Seidman (bio) Exhibitions for Social Justice By Elena Gonzales. New York: Routledge, 2019. 212 pages, 6" × 9", 45 b&w illus. $128.00 cloth, $37.56 paperback, $37.56 e-book. Elena Gonzales's Exhibitions for Social Justice is a valuable handbook on museums that mount exhibitions explicitly engaged with social justice. Not intending to rationalize the need for this kind of work, Gonzales instead seeks to provide support and evidence-based examples for people working in this field. By drawing a bit on neuroscience, Gonzales focuses on how best to engage viewers; what leaves the most lasting impression with them; and how that can lead to an array of impact and actions over time. Although the book was published in 2019, it remains as relevant as ever, as museums and their employees have grappled with their content, collections, and in some cases their very existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gonzales presents an optimistic take on the importance of museums, arguing that socially engaged work is both doable and meaningful. A range of scholars and readers may find Gonzales's work compelling. The book is directed at people who study or work in museums, with worksheets and checklists at the back of the book. The introduction offers a useful engagement with literature in the field, but overall, the book is accessible and readable to practitioners with a range of backgrounds and training. It is also valuable to public historians and to historians who want to think about how the narratives they craft are received by broad audiences. That said, there is not much specific to New York history or institutions—other than a brief mention of the early iteration of the Museum of Chinese in America—as a deliberate choice on the author's part. Gonzales focuses on inland and international institutions, with Chicago museums (art museums, history museums, zoos, and aquariums) at the heart of the book. Still, the case studies, of which there are a lot, both speak to, and transcend, place and allow Gonzales to make the larger points that animate her work. Chapter 1, "From Empathy to Solidarity," introduces foundational terminology for the book. As someone who has written about solidarity and social movements, I was fascinated to see this term being used in the museum context. Gonzales argues that before we reach solidarity between museum staff and visitors, we must work to propagate empathy in museums. To do that, we must challenge "groupness"—through bringing in those historically considered outsiders to museums or to a particular museum's community—and engage in hospitality. Hospitality initially sounded like a for-profit consumer model, but the example Gonzales gives, of the historic house museum Hull-House serving tea to visitors in what [End Page 408] was activist and Hull-House founder Jane Addams's bedroom, makes a powerful case for the application of this concept (30). The crux of the first chapter shows how exhibition content that emphasizes individual narratives can engender empathy. Gonzales gives several examples, but dwells on the children's exhibition at the Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, dedicated to Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. Gonzales discusses Holocaust museums throughout the book with admirable nuance, and here shows how the exhibition provides glimpses into Dutch experiences by physically building house-like structures for four people who were children during the war. She moves toward solidarity using her own experience as a curator on the show Roots, Resistance, and Recognition: Who Are We Now? (2006) at the National Museum of Mexican Art, which explored Mexican and African Americans solidarity in the United States and Mexico and created an institutional priority to extend solidarity to African American museum goers. She also shows how solidarity can function between institutions themselves, through networks such as the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which left me curious for more examples of employee and institutional solidarity and how that can shape content. The second chapter argues that physical experiences, in addition to "resonant content," imparts visitors with lasting memories of their museum visits (58). In addition to touching on Stephen Greenblatt's classic essay "Resonance and Wonder...