The Museum – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, to round out Season 3 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, a few words about my love for museums.
I learned about our cosmos from visiting museums and reading books as a child. Where my books could thrill my imagination into creating whisps of wonders that would dance about my mind and keep me enchanted during the quieter moments, museums offered me the physical embodiments of many of those same wonders. The older Irish word for a museum is iarsmalann, or “reliquary.” Museums, the seat of the muses of the Ancient Greek cosmos, are where we house our greatest treasures today. They are places which the public can visit and learn about our human world and the natural cosmos it inhabits. Museums are seats of knowledge where we can wonder about a great many things that otherwise would not be accessible to us.
My favorite museums to visit are the ones I return to the most. From my youth, I loved wandering the halls of Chicago’s Field Museum and Art Institute most. In the acknowledgements of my dissertation, I will note that it was in the Field Museum as a small child that I first experienced wonder, and that that is where the passion, beauty, and joy that drives my career and my life today began. One of my last truly awe inspiring visits to the Art Institute was in January 2019 on the last day of the American Historical Association’s meeting at the Hilton on South Michigan Avenue. That afternoon as I wandered around the labyrinthine halls of the Art Institute, I was struck at how endearing I found the Early Republican galleries, rooms which previously I’d been frustrated by because I still have trouble finding my way out of them. I’ve returned to the Field Museum more in the following years both to wander the halls and to remember all the joyous times I’ve had in that building as a child, a teenager, and now an adult.
Here in Kansas City, my favorite museum by far is the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. When we first moved to Kansas City, 25 years ago this summer, my Dad took me to the Nelson in hopes of filling that role that the Field Museum had for me back in Chicago. As I grew and matured, I found myself returning to the Nelson more and more, seeing the same art each time sure, but more so appreciating the constancy of that art than anything else. In the last six years I’ve grown to love the Kansas City Zoo & Aquarium as well; perhaps the Zoo is a better equivalent locally to the Field Museum with its dominant focus on the natural world over anything else. I think of the Zoo like another sort of museum, a living and breathing museum situated in the expansive wooded grounds of Swope Park. One of my dreams is to contribute a museum to Kansas City, ideally a natural history museum where my own particular contribution would be in a History of Science gallery.
Elsewhere, during my year in London I fell in love with many of that city’s great museums. I became a member of the British Museum and would often walk there from class and spend my afternoons wandering and loving how much I could learn there. It was on these visits to the British Museum that I decided to do my doctorate in History or Classics; I settled on History as you know, though I ended up in the Renaissance in part because of my love for the Banqueting House on Whitehall and Hampton Court Palace, two expansive palaces now turned into museums by Historic Royal Palaces. Initially, I wanted to study Roman history and focus on how the concept of Roman citizenship expanded as the Republic’s and later Empire’s borders expanded outward from the City of Rome. Yet, I instead decided to settle in the Renaissance, a period that seemed to me to evoke some aspects of the idealized Rome that I thought of while still feeling closer to home. In London too I loved my visits to the Natural History Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, two that I returned to on several occasions on this most recent, if brief, visit to the British capital in October.
The more I’ve traveled, the more museums I’ve visited. In many respects they fill certain roles which I set in my mind from early on depending on their focus. In Upstate New York, if I wanted to visit a natural history museum I would go to the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca or if I wanted to wander around an art museum for an afternoon, I’d go to the Rockwell Museum in Corning or the Everson Museum in Syracuse.
I’ve been fortunate to see so many of these places and experience the life we give them amid all the relics of our past. In more ways than I probably even recognize, these museums have inspired my career, and I hope that I may contribute a verse to their songs one day.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 