Saturday, February 16, 2013
Room 311 (Hynes Convention Center)
The increased presence of all kinds of live animal exhibits in both natural history and science
museums has played a role in shifting visitor expectations of displays, museum education, science,
and animals; this paper will chronicle and analyze the twentieth-century history of these
developments. Live animals have been included in natural history museums since their inception,
but starting in the 1930s, American scientists and museum educators envisioned new kinds of
displays which made different educational uses of living creatures. In exhibits developed by the
American Museum of Natural History, live animals were displayed alongside devices designed to
insure a dynamic, interactive presentation of a key biological concept. Starting in the early 1950s,
science museums introduced yet another approach: live animal exhibits that simultaneously took both
biological concepts and human-animal interactions as their subjects (even when those subjects
presented contradictions). The chick hatchery display at the Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry represents a case in point. When the Exploratorium’s 1972 Watchful Grasshopper display
parted company with what came before it – by asking visitors to engage with its animal subject by
playing the role of a scientific experimenter – this approach backfired. Rather than teaching a simple
scientific concept and drawing attention to the excitement of doing life science, as its designers had
intended, embodied interaction with live animals through experimentation led museum visitors to
reflect on the limits of laboratory methods of control and manipulation.
museums has played a role in shifting visitor expectations of displays, museum education, science,
and animals; this paper will chronicle and analyze the twentieth-century history of these
developments. Live animals have been included in natural history museums since their inception,
but starting in the 1930s, American scientists and museum educators envisioned new kinds of
displays which made different educational uses of living creatures. In exhibits developed by the
American Museum of Natural History, live animals were displayed alongside devices designed to
insure a dynamic, interactive presentation of a key biological concept. Starting in the early 1950s,
science museums introduced yet another approach: live animal exhibits that simultaneously took both
biological concepts and human-animal interactions as their subjects (even when those subjects
presented contradictions). The chick hatchery display at the Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry represents a case in point. When the Exploratorium’s 1972 Watchful Grasshopper display
parted company with what came before it – by asking visitors to engage with its animal subject by
playing the role of a scientific experimenter – this approach backfired. Rather than teaching a simple
scientific concept and drawing attention to the excitement of doing life science, as its designers had
intended, embodied interaction with live animals through experimentation led museum visitors to
reflect on the limits of laboratory methods of control and manipulation.