Museums Will Forget: Critical Approaches to Catalog-Centered Historical Research

Abstract

This article shares the approaches, research and consequences of catalog-centered historical research at the Museum of Cornish Life, a result of the author’s Art Fund Headley Fellowship in 2022. It argues that museums are inherently forgetful institutions that avoid and often do not preserve their own history. If museums are to think and do things differently, particularly when employing decolonial approaches, they must start with reconstructing and understanding their own institutional and documentation ancestry. In the absence of an organized institutional archive the author turned to using critical close readings of both the historic and current collections catalogs to reconstruct patterns of curatorial preference, language, terminology, and classification use, and their impact on collections making. This research, coupled with piecing together scattered fragments from newspapers and surviving correspondence, led to the start of a major long-term effort to create a new museum knowledge base in the form of a digital archive to preserve the multiple voices and influences of the museum and its collections.