Missing Persons Exhibits.pdf

The article "Where did you cry? Crafting Categories, Narratives, and Affect through Exhibit Design" by Corinne A. Kratz explores how museum exhibits shape cultural categories, histories, and narratives, particularly in the context of missing persons and the "unsettled dead". The author draws on her work on the History Galleries at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC, which addresses the history of slavery, lynching, and other forms of missingness in the US.

The NMAAHC's History Galleries, spanning 400 years, incorporate episodes of missingness that have constituted US society, including slavery, colonialism, and segregation. The exhibit's design is crucial in shaping the narrative framework, defining actors, actions, events, connections, and relationships. The author's research involved documenting design elements, layout, and content, observing and interacting with visitors, and collecting visitor comments and reviews.

The article highlights the importance of exhibition design in crafting categories, stories, values, and emotional engagement, and mediating visitors' understandings and experiences. The NMAAHC's exhibit design navigates segregated memories, histories, and scholarship, and recalibrates relations among different strands and representations of popular history. The article contributes to the special issue of Kronos, which focuses on the fraught issues related to persons who are missing and missed, and how historical knowledge and political meanings are produced and contested.