90. Civil Rights Progress Isn't Linear. The Grove Museum Interprets Tallahassee's Struggle in an Unexpected Setting.
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.
Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection.
In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on the Civil Rights movement.
“So the whole idea of historical preservation in the United States has been what is worth preserving. And here we are, interrogating the source material to reach back in the past and bring stories that have been deliberately excluded or silenced, now into a place where they can be told.” - John Grandage
Gallery Continues ⏭️
For further context on Tallahassee’s Black history and the museums that interpret it, listen to episode 85 featuring an interview with Althemese Barnes. Grandage argues that without Barnes’s work on the John G. Riley house, the Grove Museum might look very different today.
“There are many ways to interpret history through aspects of this house. One of the first things I did when I came here, I said, “we don't want to just be a museum with pictures on the wall.” I wanted to document history that has been ignored, neglected.” - Althemese Barnes
Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures Plenary
The Plenary roundtable discussion I participated in as part of the Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures Conference is now available on YouTube. In it, I discuss how remote installs of museum media might outlive the COVID-19 pandemic.