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Exhibition Reviews
"Open House: If These Walls Could Talk." Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, Minn. http://www.mnhs.org/exhibits/openhouse/.
Long-term exhibition, opened Jan. 2006. 3,000 sq. ft. Benjamin Filene, exhibit developer; Ayesha Shariff, associate exhibit developer; R. Brad Thiel, Therese Scheller, exhibit designers; Aaron Novodvorsky, project manager; Michael Mouw, Dan Beck, Jesse Heinzen, exhibit media developers.
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| "Open House" is a brilliant exhibit at the Minnesota Historical Society's Minnesota History Center. The idea for the show is simple and smart—to tell the stories of everyone who lived in an ordinary house that still stands in St. Paul's East Side Railroad Island neighborhood, from the time the house was built in 1888 to the present. The "object" exhibited is rich. The house, 470/472 Hopkins Street, has been home to more than fifty families living through several historical epochs. And the execution is excellent—the exhibit team has, to great effect, created a space that is insistently house-like and relies almost entirely on the stories of the residents to draw visitors through the exhibit. |
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The exhibit developer, Benjamin Filene, describes it this way:
the house frames a set of stories about people, the sorts of people who often remain hidden in history or lumped in aggregates: "the immigrants," "the working class." We didn't know if we would find enough information to add up to anything. But that was the point. Every house tells a story. Every story counts. We would pull out from the historical record people who seemed lost to time—partly to retrieve their stories and partly to prove that we could. (Benjamin Filene, "The Ones We Left Behind," Minnesota History, Winter 2005–2006, p. 335)
This exhibit disaggregates those lumps remarkably well, pulling individual stories into the light without disassociating them from the large economic and global political shifts that have shaped life in St. Paul. Although Filene was speaking to the challenge of finding information, the greater challenge is in figuring out how to use that information to tell distinct, individual, and linked histories over time. |
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This exhibit is not a new response to the problem of representing immigrant and working-class life. In 1988, for instance, when the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (lestm) opened in New York, it took up the challenge of representing immigrant experiences through the reconstruction of various apartments over time in one tenement building, 97 Orchard Street. That museum's mission has been "to promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a gateway to America" (Lower East Side Tenement Museum, http://www.tenement.org/about.html). The lestm has been fulfilling this mission through public programs and guided tours of the apartments. "Open House" is a particularly successful example of this genre for two reasons. First, the exhibit insistently and unobtrusively connects the experiences of those inside the house to the outside world. Second, it represents the struggles of the immigrants, refugees, and poor working people of 470/472 Hopkins without being either sensational or patronizing. |
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While looking for examples of working-class houses in St. Paul, Filene happened upon a photograph of 470/472 Hopkins in the Minnesota Historical Society collections. The stories that eventually emerged from this house proved irresistible. He found prosperous German immigrants, newly arrived Italian railroad workers, hard-working Swedes and African Americans, and, finally, Hmong refugees. The curators undertook basic genealogical research, relying on city directories, birth and death records, obituaries, immigration documents, and oral histories to track the past residents of the house. These were people whose relationship to the historical record was sketchy at best, and the thin (but substantive) set of discovered documents forms an important thread that runs through the exhibition. |
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