AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

The 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, NY houses a collection honoring and commemorating the victims, survivors, first responders, and recovery workers of both the catastrophic 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. In addition to oral histories, digital images, audio, and video, the collection comprises approximately 30,000 physical objects, including damaged and recovered artifacts, items donated in memory of victims, and tribute art. Many of these items are composed of ephemeral, light-sensitive materials which were never intended to be preserved. However, their personal significance, and the resulting need for accessibility to the local, national, and global 9/11-affected communities cannot be overstated.  In addition to a conservation approach that emphasizes the person connected with the object, other factors associated with a memorial museum context complicate the decision-making process for artifact lighting and display.  

Storytelling personal narratives is a primary consideration from the acquisition phase through installation, exhibition, and storage, particularly because stakeholders are also predominantly the collection’s donors. Decision-making for exhibition duration and light levels becomes a collaborative but sometimes fraught process between the conservation, curatorial, and exhibition teams. For every object slated for display, 9/11 Memorial Museum staff must consider its myriad values which may include its historical value, its associated individual victims or stories, its significance as evidence of the attacks, and the existence of identical objects or similar examples. We must also weigh its social value, i.e., the perceived needs of both present-day community members and future generations with no living memory of the day. These values factor in addition to material concerns. The inevitable result of achieving this balance is longer display periods and the reluctant acceptance of potential fading. 

We propose that “lifetime fading allowances” be flexible to acknowledge that a particular object may have greater impact to the current generation than to a nebulous “posterity.” When “light” and “dissociation from social/trauma context” are given equal weight as agents of deterioration, the decision to keep light-sensitive objects off view resting in storage is not so straightforward. This is especially true if an object contains a fugitive material that will degrade in storage regardless.  

Conservators at the 9/11 Memorial Museum are working across departments to collaborate on a lighting policy unique to the needs our institution. These include staff resources; bespoke and inaccessible exhibition fixtures; and a lack of light-induced fading data for many of the unique and under-studied materials on display. As the factors weighing lighting decisions in traumatic contexts are not always straightforward, we are developing a decision tree to help parse out the questions bearing significance providing clarity to an otherwise daunting and subjective process. This talk will provide examples that highlight the nuances of this approach, including the identification of duplicate or similar objects as substitutions, or the creation of facsimiles, where physically and ethically feasible. As current caretakers, we acknowledge the privilege to make these subjective decisions that affect future generations’ ability to understand, display, and view these artifacts and the gravity and accuracy of their stories.