Curating the West

Each Month We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World.

Joan Marshall
Director, The Bryan Museum
Galveston, TX, (409) 632-7685
www.thebryanmuseum.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?

The museum is organizing an exhibit that looks at man’s fascination with the moon through the centuries and the merging of science and popular imagination in the 1950s and 1960s at the start of the Space Race. The exhibition continues through the Apollo missions and tells the often-overlooked story of the “space doctors” whose work studying the effects of space travel on the human body made manned missions possible. We have great resources to draw on for the exhibition—NASA’s Johnson Space Center Space is just down the road and the University of Texas Medical Center in Galveston has a treasure trove of material in its largely unknown Space Medicine Archive including a series of concept drawings of space colonies on the moon dating from the 1950s.

What are you reading?

Why Learn History (When it’s Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineberg. I’m concerned about the increasing marginalization of the teaching of history and social studies in the schools. Weinberg makes the case that learning to think like a historian is essential to succeeding in the 21st century if we want citizens to navigate the mass of information around them and make informed decisions. We have to change the way history is taught and borrow some of the innovations being used in the teaching of STEM subjects.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s recent traveling exhibition Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography was a knock-out installation combining photography, video, costume and large-scale graphics.

What are you researching at the moment?

We’re working on an exhibition of 100 Years of Beachwear that opens at the museum in June 2020. Did you know that the first Miss Universe Pageant was held in Galveston in 1920—then called The International Pageant of Pulchritude?

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?

Very few people know that Texas had a navy. The Texas Navy played an important role in the fight for independence as well as during the republic period—it’s a fascinating story and much of it happened in Galveston. This is an exhibition high on my list. —