For Night Kitchen, It’s Personal

• By Jenny Parker
• January 19, 2008

Night Kitchen’s vision for an immersive, participatory museum experience is inspired by many sources – from theorists Philip Yenawine and Hilde Hein to the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Sendak. But our inspiration also comes from personal experience. Take a look at Matthew Fisher’s opening to our 2007 paper, Remixing Exhibits:

Growing up in Philadelphia, the historical cradle of the United States, I – and my peers – developed a barely palpable yet inescapable disdain for America’s founding fathers. Unaware of the origins of this resistance at the time, today I can clearly see how the stilted, celebratory and altogether unrealistic narrative that historians, tour guides and teachers wove around such greats as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin made these icons seem all too unapproachable.

Launching Franklin Remixed, a project where middle school students remixed artifacts and narratives from two museum exhibitions about Benjamin Franklin, we detected in students this very same contempt toward arguably the most famous of the founding fathers. But Franklin Remixed featured a dramatic departure from the usual textbook contraints. We invited students to explore his faults and complexities along with his achievements. And most importantly, we asked students to contribute their own points of view about Franklin, and the world he lived in. They pulled pieces of the exhibits to create something new, and put the spotlight on their own unique perspectives.

The results were amazing: Initial distain turned into lasting engagement. Students brought Franklin down to earth, and, in doing so, found deep personal connections to his story and struggles – they found stories and struggles they could relate to. And they also developed – dare we say – a newfound respect for Franklin as a man who was real, full of faults, and yet, still great.

It is exactly this transformative visitor experience that we as museum professionals aspire to facilitate.

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