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 14. The Exhibits at Deaf Museums

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Intro Chapter 14

Intro Chapter 14

Most Deaf Museums collected their exhibits by networking and sometimes even by 'dumpster diving: they rescued objects from garbage bins.  

Ownership is important for Deaf Museums, too. Who owns Deaf history? Who can display it, who can tell its stories?

14.1 Exhibits at Deaf Museums

14.1 Exhibits at Deaf Museums

What exhibits a Deaf Museums uses, depends on a number of questions:

    • Is it a physical or virtual Museum or a combination: a hybrid Museum?
    • How much space does the Museum have? 
    • What story does the Museum want to tell? A story about Deaf Education, about a specific School for the Deaf, a Deaf Club, a specific Deaf person, or all of the above?
    • What objects can the Museum collect? By asking, finding, saving, or buying?

Exhibits of most Deaf Museums include photos, videos, technical equipment, books, magazines. Most also include items used by deafblind people - now or in the past. 

deafblind equipment BDM

Exhibits about deafblind people at the Deaf Heritage Centre UK 

Museum of Deaf Education, NL

The Museum of Deaf Education in the Netherlands unfortunately had to close in 2021 because the old buildings of the School for the Deaf in Sint Michielsgestel (NL) were sold.

The collection - now in storage -  started out with objects, documents, photos and videos of the school for the Deaf in Sint Michielsgestel. Piet Borneman who worked at the school as the Head Nurse, started collecting objects out of personal interest. There was no Museum yet, there were no plans even for a Museum.
Once it became known that Piet was collecting, other schools for the Deaf contacted him - usually when they were moving to a new location. "Piet, if you want our books, desks, photos, come and get them, now because everything will be thrown out." Piet became good at 'dumpster diving' and saved many irreplaceable documents and objects from destruction. 

When the Museum was opened in 2015, the exhibits included many objects and books from other schools for the Deaf in the Netherlands. For the full story, see elsewhere on this website. 

Because of Piet's personal interests, the collection of the Museum also included examples of hearing aids and audiometric equipment through the ages. hoorhulpmiddelen

Finnish Museum of the Deaf, Kuurojen Museo

The Finnish Museum of the Deaf started out by telling the story of Carl Oscar Malm, the founder of deaf education in Finland . It exhibited the donations given by Fritz and Maria Hirn to the Museum in 1907. The Hirns were students of Carl Oscar Malm, and they donated photographs and materials dating back to their school years. The Museum's collections increased gradually and the first exhibition, Carl Oscar Malm's  room, was opened to the public for the first time on 12 February 1915.

Today, the museum's permanent exhibition is still dedicated to the life of  Malm.

In addition, changing exhibitions and the web-museum show the history of the sign language community  in Finland. 

RoomCarlOscarMalm

The room of Carl Oscar Malm in the Museum

Deaf Heritage Centre, UK

The collection of the Deaf Heritage Centre in Manchester is a national collection that consists of numerous artefacts, deaf artwork and paper archive collections of all kinds.

See the video of Maureen Jackson, one of the volunteers working at the Deaf Heritage Centre UK, who tells us about the Centre's collection and one of its exhibits that was saved from destruction: a sweater with fingerspelling (BSL with English Voice Over, December 2021): 

14.2. Deaf Ownership

14.2. Deaf Ownership

Ownership is more than just who has an object or artefact in his or her possession. Who owns - and can tell - the overall story of the Deaf minority in a hearing world? The big overall story as well as the 'small' individual stories? In the past, much of Deaf History was claimed by hearing professionals, hearing educators: they told the stories from their hearing perspectives. 

Museums, historians and curators who claim ownership may do this from the best of intentions: "We know how to preserve your artefacts", "We know how to tell your story." But this can be seen as or can actually be a sign of paternalism: "We'll do this for you, because we can do this better than you can, because we can tell your stories better than you can. "Today's Museums and curators are aware of this and will work with the actual owners of artefacts and history. 

Ownership is important for Deaf Museums too, for three more reasons:

    • When a Deaf Museum works together with a mainstream Museum or with Museum professionals, both parties will have to work together in a way that avoids paternalism. Both parties must respect each other's expertise.
    • It is important that the local, regional or national Deaf community is involved in the creation and running of the Deaf Museum. Deaf people of all ages should feel from the start that the Museum is 'their' Museum, that they co-own the Museum and are responsible for its survival.
    • When Deaf Museums want to tell a specific story in an exhibition, maybe the story of the Deaf LHBTI community or Deaf people of colour, or maybe even Deaf education, they must take into account that these stories are owned by these groups. "Nothing about us, without us" is relevant for subgroups too.  
14.3. Deaf Stories and Signed History

14.3. Deaf Stories and Signed History

For sign language users, we can call 'oral history': 'signed history'.

Stories can be used to support other materials. An example: a Museum can show an antique text-telephone and add one or more stories told by people who actually used these phones in the past. This will make the object come to life.

It will also make people aware of the important role that the text-telephone, or technology in general, played in the history and the emancipation of Deaf people. 

A Museum can also use stories instead of objects in our exhibitions.  The stories can be personal memories, poems, jokes - as long as they support or illustrate the story that we want to tell.

DeafCommunityInterviews

image 2020 11 06 095101

 

On the Deaf Museum's website, we have collected a number of 'signed' stories from different countries, see: https://www.deafmuseums.eu/index.php/en/resources/all-resources/category/personal-memories

Further Reading: 

 

14.4.. Preserving, Storing and Archiving Deaf Exhibits

14.4.. Preserving, Storing and Archiving Deaf Exhibits

Most Deaf Museums do not have the resources for the proper - and safe! - storage of documents and objects. 
Unique objects and documents can easily get lost, stolen or damaged. 

mini TomassoPendola

Unique objects and photos at the Tommaso Pendola Museum in Siena

Many Deaf Associations have started to digitise and archive national documents and magazines. This is almost always done by volunteers. Each group and organisation uses its own system to do this. Not all archives are accessible online. You can find an overview of these groups elsewhere on this website. 

Two examples:

Scottish Deaf History Archives Archives of Deaf History Scotland

Rotterdam Archives

Archives of "Historie Doven Rotterdam" NL

  Digitizing Deaf Magazines and Documents

One of the partners in the Deaf Museums project, DeafStudio (Slovakia) had a large number of old magazines for the Deaf. They decided that they would digitise these magazines and make them available in an online archive.  

At first, the plan was to do the scanning of the magazines by hand, maybe by roboscanvolunteers. They did some research and found a university that had a robot that could do this for them, quickly and cheaply. So instead of using volunteers who could maybe scan 600 pages per week, they had a robot scan the magazines. Ultimately, the robot scanned 6410 pages from  331 magazines, in just 2 weeks. 

To make the information in the scanned articles accessible, the digitised magazines were published as 'flipping books', on their website.

Finnish Museum of the Deaf

In 2020 the exhibits of the Finnish Museum of the Deaf were catalogued and digitised by contract. What of the collections were revealed when one of the boxes in the collection was opened?

Finnish Sign Language and Finnish subtitles.

 

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Quotes:

  • "It was only during the past decade that recognition of the importance of preserving Deaf history has emerged. In the main, Deaf heritage, culture and folklore has been passed down from generation to generation via the medium of sign language and fingerspelling. (..) It is also vital that the history of Deaf people is made available to future generations, especially Deaf schoolchildren as part of their history lessons."
    A. Murray Holmes,  in: Cruel Legacy, an introduction of Deaf people in history, by A.F. Dimmock, 1993
  • "What has become clear is that museums don’t just function as custodians of the past anymore; instead, they have embraced their responsibility towards the communities of the present: a responsibility to represent them, to speak to them, and to be open to dialogue with them."
    Tim Deakin, August 2021
  • "The UN Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community”. This is based on the principle that citizens are not just consumers of cultural capital created by others; we have agency and the right to contribute through culture to the wider good of society."
    Source: A manifesto for museum learning and engagement
  • "Inclusion is moving from “we tolerate your presence” to “we WANT you here with us”.
    Jillian Enright in The Social Model of Disability, 2021
  • "Histories have for too long emphasized the controversies over communication methods and the accomplishments of hearing people in the education of deaf students, with inadequate attention paid to those deaf individuals who created communication bridges and distinguished themselves as change agents in their respective field of endeavour."
    from: Harry G. Lang, Bonny Meath-Lang: Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences, 1995
  • "Museums can increase our sense of wellbeing, help us feel proud of where we have come from, and inspire, challenge and stimulate us."
    Source: https://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/museums-change-lives/
  • "An important matter for any minority group is that written documents in public archives are often drawn up by the majority group and do not always reflect a minority as it sees itself. Thus, preserving sign language narration is of the utmost importance and a challenge to those working in the field of Deaf history."
    In: TIINA NAUKKARINEN, Finnish Museum of the Deaf: Presenting the Life of Carl Oscar Malm (1826–1863)
  • "Beyond works of art and objects, museums collect shared heritage, memories and living cultures as well as what we call intangible collectables."
    Source: We are Museums

  • "Opening ourselves to the Deaf community, listening to and respecting them as co-creators and experts telling the stories they want told, makes our practice richer, and has ongoing positive effects for the community.
    These embryonic relationships hopefully encourage Deaf people to feel welcome in our space — it’s their space too.
    For both side, communities and museum professionals, while genuinely, openly and truly committing to working together can be time-consuming, it repays any investment many-fold."
    Corinne Ball: ‘Expressing ourselves’: creating a Deaf exhibition", 2020
  • "The most significant function of museums is as centres for cultural democracy, where children and adults learn through practical experience that we all have cultural rights. Having the opportunity to create, and to give to others, may be one of our greatest sources of fulfilment. Culture is everywhere and is created by everyone."
    Source: A manifesto for museum learning and engagement
  • “One story makes you weak. But as soon as we have one-hundred stories, you will be strong.”
    Chris Cleave in "Little Bee", 2008
  • "Deaf people have always had a sense of their history as it was being passed down in stories told by generations of students walking in the hallways of their residential schools and by others who congregated in their clubs, ran associations, attended religious services, and played in sporting events.
    With these activities, the deaf community exhibited hallmarks of agency — an effort to maintain their social, cultural, and political autonomy amid intense pressure to conform as hearing, speaking people."
    BRIAN H. GREENWALD AND JOSEPH J. MURRAY, in: Sign Language Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Fall 2016
  • "And yet, even within a large and, in many ways, traditional organization such as this (Trøndelag Folk Museum, Norway), the museum's encounter with Deaf culture contributed to profound changes and a process, still underway, which challenges our own understanding of what a museum is today, our role in society and our obligations towards more diverse audiences than those we had previously engaged or even recognized."
    Hanna Mellemsether, in:  Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, 2013
  • "As recently as the 1970s, deaf history did not exist. There were available sketches of various hearing men, primarily teachers, who were credited with bringing knowledge and enlightenment to generations of deaf children, but deaf adults were absent."

    In: Preface to: "Deaf History Unvailed, Interpretations from the New Scholarship". John Vickrey van Cleve, editor
    Publisher: Gallaudet University Press, 1993
  • “If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.”
    Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
  • “Stories of disability are largely absent from museum displays. Where they appear, they often reflect deeply entrenched, negative attitudes towards physical and mental difference. Research reveals that museums don’t simply reflect attitudes; they are active in shaping conversations about difference.
    Projects created with disabled people show that museums hold enormous potential to shape more progressive, accurate and respectful ways of understanding human diversity. Why wouldn’t we take up this opportunity? ”
    Richard Sandell, co-director, Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, University of Leicester
  • "Museums can increase our sense of wellbeing, help us feel proud of where we have come from, and inspire, challenge and stimulate us."
    Source: Museums Change Lives
  • "Until the fall semester of 1986, the history department at Gallaudet University had never before offered a course in the history of deaf people.
    In the 122 years, to that point, since the founding of the university, which was specifically intended for the education of deaf peoples, no one had ever taught a course about this very group of people.
    In all of those years the history department had offered courses on a wide range of topics but never deaf history. "
    ENNIS, WILLIAM T., et al. “A Conversation: Looking Back on 25 Years of A Place of Their Own.” Sign Language Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2016, pp. 26–41. 
  • "Deaf mute, deaf and dumb, hearing impaired – the choices are many and not without consequences. Words have many meanings, they convey attitudes and prejudices and may hurt, even when used in a well-intended context."
    Hanna Mellemsether, in:  Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, 2013
  • "The Finnish Museum of the Deaf) was founded by deaf people, and, thus, its task has been to strengthen their identity and historical communality.

    Most of our materials have a connection to the key experiences that generations of deaf people have shared. These are important in understanding the past and keeping the collective memory alive."
    In: TIINA NAUKKARINEN, Finnish Museum of the Deaf: Presenting the Life of Carl Oscar Malm (1826–1863)
  • "This (Deaf) Museum is not intended as a casual show, to be seen once and forgotten. Its pretensions are nobler; it has a humanitarian aim. By its solid and tangible evidences, making history memorable and attractive by illustration, it serves a double purpose: to dispel ignorance and prejudice regarding the deaf, and to raise the victims of this prejudice and ignorance to their true level in society."
    The British Deaf Monthly, Vol. VI (p.265) 1897. In: Deaf Museums and Archival Centres, 2006

  • the past can hurt

    From: Walt Disney, The Lion King

  • "The Deaf community is international. What binds Deaf people, despite their different national sign languages, is their shared visual communication, history, cultural activities, and the need for a Deaf “space” where people come together."

    from: The Cultural Model of Deafness
  • "For many members of the Deaf community their shared history is both personal and social. Deaf people will have gone to the same school, in many cases boarding schools where most of their younger lives will have been spent together, and then met again at their Deaf clubs, Deaf social events, reunions and other more personal events.
    One of the first things a Deaf person will often ask on meeting, before asking your name, is what school or Deaf club you go to. Making this connection is an important part of any greeting, as it will then help an individual to understand what shared history or people in common you may have."
    from: The Cultural Model of Deafness
  • "After all, we are all of us explorers, and we all have much to bring to each other from our own
    journeyings."
    Ladd, P. (2003). Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood.
  • "Access to and participation in culture is a basic human right. Everyone has a right to representation and agency in museums, and communities should have the power to decide how they engage."
    Source: A manifesto for museum learning and engagement
  • "Nina Simon has described true inclusion in a museum context as occurring when museums value the diversity in their audience, value those individuals’ potential and contributions, when they actively link those diverse people across differences, and when the organisation reaches out with generosity and curiosity at the core.
    On a practical level this sort of museum practice would see widespread inclusion of people with disabilities in the planning of museum exhibitions, on museum boards and steering committees, and working in curatorial roles."
    In: Corinne Ball: Expressing Ourselves, 2020