2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

For a century museum period rooms have presented recreations of specific historic interiors. Critically ignored, these spaces have been viewed as seemingly transparent windows onto the past. In recent years curators and contemporary artists have began to leverage the narrative power of the period room to reveal stories about gender, power, history and museum practice. Whether through performance, historical fiction, or artist interventions, these projects offer compelling opportunities to generate historical empathy and to present complexity, helping visitors make connections across time.

This roundtable brings together curators Sarah Anne Carter and Nicole LaBouff, and artist Fo Wilson to discuss the innovative ways they have worked to reactivate or to create historic interiors. Carter and her colleagues created a period room to tell the story of a (fictional) nineteenth-century collector and her vision of a culturally diverse early America. Nicole LaBouff is planning a display of objects and rare books that blends fact and fiction in two English eighteenth-century interiors to show how women consumed and contributed to scientific knowledge through their daily practices. Wilson’s project, Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities constructs a full-scale slave cabin as its central object in imagining what a nineteenth-century woman of African descent might have collected and stowed in her cabin as her own unique “wunderkammer.”

Can perspectives from queer studies and performances studies amplify the impact of these projects? Can these new “period rooms” become feminist spaces in museums for the next century?