Portfolio Archives - Wendy Pollock

Bike night at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Conviviality

A good society needs places where our common humanity comes first and where trust can take root and grow. Museums should be among these places. Over the years, in our work with museum exhibitions, my friend Kathy McLean and I had observed that how we organize physical space and how we inhabit it has...

7 years ago

Waiting in line to see King Tut exhibition 1976

The shadow side of traveling exhibitions

If you were around 45 years ago, you too may have memories of The Treasures of Tutankhamun. Mine include a train ride from Philadelphia and a shivering line outside the National Gallery of Art. Tut was a cultural event of late 1970s America that established a benchmark for museums. As one of the fir...

8 years ago

Experiment Gallery, Science Museum of Minnesota

Slow science

Like Slow Food, the science center movement grew out of a radical and restorative view of the human relationship with the world. Its defining values also have to do with leisure in its best and classic sense—that is, the active and collective pursuit of a good life. Just as the Slow Food movement ...

8 years ago

Writing reflections in an exhibition about race

Vox populi

It seems like a distant dream sometimes, as Fox News stirs up dark passions and Sunday pundits trade blows, to consider a public space where all ideas are welcome. That’s what Kathy McLean and I had in mind, though, when we started to work on a book called Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions. We ...

9 years ago

A lifetime of curiosity

Although science centers and museums nearly all have missions that embrace the whole community (“from 1 to 101” or “kids of all ages,” as they sometimes say), in reality their audiences tend to skew toward school age children and their families. This report offers encouragement to science ce...

12 years ago