|
|
|
Exhibition Review
"In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn's Vietnam Veterans." Brooklyn Historical Society. Brooklyn, N.Y. http://brooklynhistory.org.
Temporary exhibition, Dec. 14, 2007–March 8, 2009. 700 sq. ft. Sady Sullivan, oral history program coordinator; Kate Fermoile, vice president for exhibits and education; Andrea Del Valle, director of education; Amy DeSalvo, education coordinator; Alison Cornyn, founder and director of Picture Projects; Philip F. Napoli, co-curator.
|
| The Brooklyn Historical Society is nestled in Cosby Show brownstone Brooklyn, in a landmarked redbrick, 1881 Queen Anne–style building that has recently undergone a prize-winning renovation. Its halls are filled with gilt-framed portraits of the great men of Brooklyn, and it was in part these portraits that inspired the exhibit designer and producer Alison Cornyn's innovative and strikingly successful vision for the presentation of oral history in museums. |
1
|
|
"In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn's Vietnam Veterans" began in the third-floor hallway encircling the museum's grand central stairway and continued into a wood-paneled room. The exhibition revolved around the stories of sixteen Vietnam War veterans from Brooklyn. Visitors might read the short panel of introductory text, or they might immediately be drawn beyond it to one of the formally posed full-length photographic portraits of nine of the sixteen veterans. Each portrait was printed on canvas, framed in gold, and identified by an engraved brass panel. In front of each portrait was a round pad on the floor where the viewer could step onto two outlined footprints. With less than a second's delay, the pressure on the pad activated a speaker above and began a three- to five-minute audio excerpt of the subject's oral history. Visitors heard the voice while looking directly into the eyes of the narrator, an encounter that could be disquietingly intimate. The hypersonic speaker created a tightly focused column of sound that was audible only to the listener standing on the pad; to visitors moving through the exhibit, the recordings sounded like quiet, cocktail party murmuring. |
2
|
|
Some of the selections from the interviews, conducted by Philip F. Napoli, an assistant professor of twentieth-century U.S. social and public history at Brooklyn College, plunged right into a story: "For me the day that John left was one of the most indelible days in my memory." Most began with an introduction situating the narrator in time, space, and culture: "My name is Edward Blanco; I live in Queens, New York, with my wife, Nancy. I was born in 1948 in Manhattan; that was two years after my mother arrived here from Puerto Rico." The core of each recording tended to be a vivid narrative—about, for example, witnessing a death, coming of age, or coming home—with a beginning, middle, and end. The interviewees interpreted, analyzed, and looked back on their experiences, speaking to their stories' meaning in the present. |
3
|
|
The narrators were diverse in race, class, gender, politics, and experience. The veterans had helped shape the exhibition, since they were invited to the museum several times during the year the exhibit was developed to give their input into the evolving portrayals of their stories. |
4
|
|
Accompanying each story was a display containing personal artifacts—five to ten photographs, medals, military paraphernalia, or letters—housed in a wooden, glass-topped box bolted to the wall next to the portrait. To reach the box and the removable binder on a shelf below it, the visitor had to stretch uncomfortably outside the column of sound or step off the pad, stopping the recording completely. It was clear that the creators of this exhibit intended the visitor to listen to the narrators' voices without the buffer of a written text and to focus on audio before artifacts, inverting the more usual use of oral histories as supporting documents for objects displayed in museums. |
5
|
There are about 942 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
|
