Alexandra Lord, a curator at the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., started to get worried in February. She was deep into planning a major exhibition called “In Sickness and in Health” that was partly about the disease outbreaks that have changed the country’s trajectory, from the Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793 to the viruses brought West by white settlers in the eighteen-thirties, which killed huge numbers of indigenous people. The exhibit was slated to open next year, but Lord and her colleagues were suddenly reading reports of a virus that had surfaced in China and that was beginning to blossom around the globe: on a cruise ship in Yokohama, at ski resorts in France. As the chair of the museum’s division of medicine and science, and a specialist in the history of public health, Lord had been on pandemic watch for a long time. Was this another SARS? Was it another Spanish flu? “By March, it was pretty clear,” she recalled recently. “This was going to be a huge story.”
The story would have to be part of her exhibit, and the museum would need to start collecting new objects in order to tell it. Lord, who has a purposeful, upbeat way about her, had already contacted people at the United States Public Health Service, and she began discussing ideas with colleagues. She and her supervisor, Benjamin Filene, set up weekly meetings to develop collecting strategies and to decide how the museum would respond to the pandemic more generally. On March 14th, the museum, along with the other buildings that make up the Smithsonian Institution, was abruptly closed. All but a handful of staff were locked out. Like workers at office jobs across the world, the task force would have to operate online.
Rapid-response collecting, as it’s called, is not new. For decades, the Smithsonian has dispatched curators to scour for memorabilia on Presidential campaign trails. In the days after September 11, 2001, the New-York Historical Society began collecting artifacts while the dust was literally still settling. The Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, launched an ongoing Rapid Response project in 2014; among the items that now form part of its rotating display are Brexit paraphernalia and a knitted pussy hat, worn during the women’s marches in 2017.
COVID-19 has pushed even more cautious institutions to try to make sense of the moment, in the moment. The Autry Museum of the American West, in Los Angeles, has collected diaries that were kept by children and masks crafted by members of the Navajo Nation. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, in Canyon, Texas, acquired a hair-raising essay written by an eighty-one-year-old man about what it felt like to catch the coronavirus on a Carnival Cruise ship, in January, and nearly die. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, in Winnipeg, has asked visitors to identify “acts of kindness” that have lifted their spirits and to record them in online videos.
There is barely a museum in North America that hasn’t tried to make sense of the pandemic, and nearly all of them have done so while finding new, remote ways to curate and communicate. This is the shadow looming over museum-land: Covid-19 is not just an intriguing interpretative challenge but a disease that has killed friends and family members and put the institutions that employ curators and other staff on life support. The American Alliance of Museums estimates that institutions have lost, on average, eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue since the pandemic began. A third of the eight hundred and fifty museums that the alliance surveyed are at risk of permanent closure in the next twelve months.
Anthea M. Hartig, the director of the National Museum of American History, told me that the museum, which is largely federally funded and maintained, isn’t in immediate danger. There are, however, tough times ahead. The strain that museums are feeling now only increased her sense of responsibility to do justice to the events of the past year, she said, when a pandemic, resulting unemployment, a series of political controversies, a climate crisis, and a mass movement against racial injustice came together under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances. “We are in the gristmill of history,” she said. “Sometimes, the stones are further apart, to use the metaphor, but, right now, they’re close together.”
What would you put in a Covid-19 time capsule? Masks, presumably. Hand sanitizer. YouTube videos—of a teacher leading remote instruction, say, or an at-home yoga session. An obituary section from a local newspaper that runs several pages longer than normal. A worn storefront sign brightly informing customers that a shop will reopen soon.
Lord and her colleagues knew that the coronavirus story was huge, but they didn’t yet know what, exactly, the story was. Take that scribbled sign. Perhaps it belonged to a store that eventually ended up reopening. Or maybe it belonged to one that closed for good. “That one handmade sign may tell a story of hope,” Hartig said. “Maybe it will tell a story of resilience. It’ll certainly tell an economic story.” Lord noted that even the look of signage communicated something. “In April, the signs were more quirky, hand-done,” she said. “Now they’re more professionalized. That change is really interesting.”
Sometimes, museums can engage in so-called passive collecting, waiting to see what turns up. That clearly wouldn’t suffice now. At the same time, normal curatorial fieldcraft was almost impossible, as stay-at-home orders remained in force. There was also anxiety, early on, that handling objects might itself spread the virus. The Wellcome Collection, in London, a medical museum, posted stern guidance to curators seeking Covid-19 objects: do nothing that exacerbates the crisis. Many museums donated personal protective equipment to hospitals.
The fear of handling objects later receded—and became largely moot when buildings and mail rooms stayed shut, meaning that normal collection procedures had to be suspended altogether. Members of the Smithsonian team made a public appeal for donations of items, and they also sent countless e-mails to potential donors, asking them to hang on to objects and preserve them as carefully as possible. Lord and her colleagues quickly recognized three interlocking problems. They didn’t yet know what posterity would want to see, but they had to decide what to collect now, because some objects wouldn’t survive otherwise. Plus, the narrative of the virus was continually shifting.
Journalists are used to dealing with the zigs and zags of current events—it’s understood that they are writing history’s early drafts and will write a new story tomorrow. Curators don’t really have that luxury: what goes into a museum collection almost always stays. In common with many institutions worldwide, the Smithsonian is forbidden from disposing of, or “deaccessioning,” artifacts unless strict criteria are met. The National Museum of American History alone has more than 1.8 million items, while the Smithsonian Institution as a whole possesses more than a hundred and fifty-five million objects, the vast majority of which are in storage. If curators want to add to the pile, and take on the duty of caring for an object in perpetuity, their case needs to be irresistible.
With that in mind, Lord spent the spring and early summer like so many of the rest of us: glued to the TV and constantly refreshing various Web sites. She was scanning for “flash points,” she said—moments that felt like events, and events that crystallized as indelible moments. Collecting digital items—photos, videos, audio recordings—is more important than ever. But most curators are trained to think in terms of physical objects, and that’s what most people come to museums to see. Often, the most eloquent artifact is an ephemeral thing that bears the weight of a history far larger than itself: a glass bottle melted by the heat of the bomb at Hiroshima; or a desk clock salvaged from the rubble of the Twin Towers, with its hands frozen at 9:04 a.m. These are the items least likely to survive; finding and preserving them is an enormous challenge. And, with the coronavirus, curators are looking for an object that stands in not for a single hour or day but for months, if not years.
In search of contacts and firsthand testimony, Lord and her colleagues reached out to meat-processing plants and restaurants and care homes. As it became clear that the virus was having a disproportionate impact on people of color, they redoubled their efforts to speak with members of communities that have not traditionally been well-served by the Smithsonian. “Our collections do not always reflect the diversity of the American experience,” Lord acknowledged. At one task-force meeting, Amanda Moniz, who curates the history of philanthropy, spoke about the challenges of collecting oral histories from health-care centers in predominantly Latino communities. Some of the employees at these facilities are undocumented or waiting on a change in immigration status, and are reluctant to speak to official figures, even curators. “These are difficult voices to find,” Moniz said.
What’s more, this pandemic has been marked, perhaps above all, by withdrawal and isolation: older people trapped in care homes; different generations waving at each other across garden fences; the appalling remoteness of saying farewell to a loved one through a screen held up by a nurse; even just being stuck on the sofa, glued to Netflix. These stories, common to us all, will be difficult to convey to our descendants.
On an afternoon in early September, I sat in on a task-force meeting, via Zoom. Lord and seven of her co-workers, a mix of curators, archivists, and collections specialists, dialed in from across the D.C. area. Lord began by outlining plans for an online colloquium series, which would be open to the public, and which would try to involve people in their research on topics ranging from racial scapegoating in previous pandemics to voting during national crises. One session, scheduled for later this month, is called “Looking Good on that Zoom Call: Personal Appearance During a Quarantine.”
But the primary topic of the meeting was the hunt for a possible “anchor object” for the second floor, which would host the new Covid-19 section of the “In Sickness and in Health” exhibition. Various potential acquisitions were up for debate. Back in the spring—as Governor Andrew Cuomo was pleading for thirty thousand ventilators for New York, and back-yard inventors were attaching hoses to resuscitation bags—it seemed that Covid-19 might be best symbolized by such a device. Then, as other treatments were tested, ventilators came to seem less central—or, at least, not as central as P.P.E. or the scramble for a vaccine. In any case, it wasn’t as if the Smithsonian could ask a hospital to keep a ventilator aside, in case one would be needed for the museum’s collection. “We’re constantly just evaluating,” Lord told me.
There was a flurry of eagerness on the Zoom call when someone mentioned a dress crafted from duct tape, during prom season, by a teen-ager from Illinois. Designed for an event that never happened, it would certainly have jumped out on the museum floor: a splendid, royal-blue-and-gold, A-line confection emblazoned with vivid images of essential workers, accessorized with a coronavirus-shaped purse and a mask bearing the injunction “FLATTEN THE CURVE!”
Great idea, everyone agreed—but there were questions about how durable the duct tape would be, particularly if it would be six months before the museum could call it in for inspection. “If a fabric conservator can talk to her about how she’s storing it now, that would be great,” someone said, sounding doubtful. “It could end up being a big pile of goo.”
It had become clear, as the months progressed, that masks, humble objects now freighted with all manner of social and cultural and political baggage, were key items. Lord said that she was interested in homemade face coverings, the more haphazardly crafted the better. “It tells us a great deal about how desperate people were,” she said. As always, the hope would be to find an object that has eyewitness value, so to speak. “We’re more interested in a Black Lives Matter mask that might’ve been worn at Lafayette Square or in Portland than just buying one off the Internet,” Lord told me.
But if masks served as the centerpiece, what would that look like? Should there be just one mask on display? A mask wall of some kind? Masks accompanied by photographs? There was also the shadow side of the mask story: people refusing to wear them for reasons of ideology or paranoia. But you can’t put non-masks in a vitrine, Lord pointed out. I mentioned the sight of a possibly contagious Donald Trump returning from Walter Reed hospital and tearing off his mask on the Truman Balcony at the White House. “There’s a photo of that,” Lord replied.
A few days later, I mentioned to Hartig that her team was still searching hard for an anchor object. She laughed. “You know, we’re not collecting the cruise ship,” she said.
In addition to searching for new artifacts, museums telling the story of the pandemic have put their existing collections to work. Suburbanites losing it in supermarkets and conservatives gathering at anti-mask rallies might seem very 2020, but Lord noted that, as with so much else, we’ve been here before. During the Spanish flu, as American communities locked down, there were debates about infringements on civil liberties, and deep fears about the economic consequences. “People who sold tobacco said that mask-wearing prevented people from smoking,” Lord told me. “It damaged their business.” During the polio epidemic of the nineteen-fifties, American parents were terrified to let their kids play outside, for fear that they’d spend the rest of their lives in an iron lung. So they turned to TV and endless board games and home crafting. Today, people have turned to Animal Crossing and Minecraft—plus TV and board games and home crafting.
Pointing out such echoes is one of the most worthwhile tasks that museums can perform. While the Victoria and Albert was shut, the Rapid Response curators put together an online series called Pandemic Objects, spotlighting items from the museum’s archive. The researcher Kathleen Walker-Meikle contributed an essay on the history of hand washing, featuring a seventeenth-century Iranian ewer, used for the Muslim ritual of wudu, and a nineteen-sixties British sink. Other blog posts addressed pandemic beards and toilet paper. An essay by Catrin Jones, a V&A curator at the Wedgwood ceramics museum in the English Midlands, focussed on mourning jewelry. Until the Victorian period, it was customary to set money aside in your will so that your friends could buy a ring, say, to remember you by. In the essay, Jones wonders whether social media is bringing us “a new language for grief,” or whether, after lockdown, we will “return to the more tangible mourning traditions of the past.”
Many items from the past do not survive, of course; sometimes, the things that museums don’t have are as revealing as the things they do. Even before Lord began researching her exhibit, she was astounded by the museum’s paucity of objects relating to the Spanish flu—there’s almost nothing. “It’s amazing,” she said. What explained this? The Smithsonian had different policies back then, she told me: museums weren’t so interested in the lives of everyday people; the social-history revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies was still a ways off. Plus, it took time for people to realize how serious the flu pandemic was. But Lord thought that there might have been another, deeper reason: “The truth was that people really wanted to forget.”
American museums typically generate half of their income from people walking through their doors, Laura Lott, the president and C.E.O. of the American Alliance of Museums, told me. That figure includes ticket sales, café and gift-shop purchases, and rental fees for corporate and other events. Right now, Lott said, even for museums that have managed to reopen, the numbers are horrifying. These institutions are operating at about thirty-five per cent of their usual capacity, per the alliance’s most recent survey.
But Lott detects rays of optimism, too. Some museums, forced to close their buildings, have found a new public online: preliminary data suggest that up to half of the people visiting museum Web sites—which have seen a surge of traffic, Lott said, with pandemic-adjacent content doing particularly well—were those who had never visited the museums before. “It’s a whole new audience,” Lott told me. She also believes that a renewed spirit of civic purpose is abroad in the museum world. Museums have made themselves available as classrooms for schools that are unable to reopen. Some have distributed food and operated as blood-donation sites. The Institute of Contemporary Art San José spotted a loophole in California state law that allowed it to reopen briefly if it was repurposed as a polling place. “Come to Vote, Stay for the Art,” the Times suggested.
Lott told me that many curators and administrators now feel an obligation beyond the educational duties that they typically perform, to help people deal with the emotional challenges of the past year. “It’s always been an element, but it’s been up to the visitor to use the museum in that way,” she said. “I think we are taking a more proactive approach right now.” Covid-19 is a reminder that museums can function as therapeutic spaces, she said, “really serving people in a time of need. People need a place to go.”
