Period rooms: between exhibition space and living room, negotiating past and present

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The period room is a hybrid form of museum display that negotiates private interior decoration and public cultures of display aiming at conveying a style, a historical period or a particular region or locale. Originating in German, Swiss and Scandinavian museums at the end of the 19th Century and then taking hold in the US in the 1920s and 1930s where they are common until today period rooms are part of a visual culture addressing issues such as interior design and the home, the presentation and didactics of history, nation building as well as issues on gender. The first part of the project examines the politics of American period rooms during their invention and will explore the period room as a hinge between historicity and modernity. It will target the period room’s position negotiating decorating and curating, the home and public forms of knowledge making. By comparing two museums, one in the US the other in Germany it is the aim of the second part to unpack the contemporary strategies dealing with the period room by artists and curators. The objective of this project are two monographs: one of them is planned as an enhanced e-book, that will make it possible to include the heterogeneous material and new sources recovered during two research trips to museum archives in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cambridge Mass. The project-results will be presented and discussed during two workshops that target the period room’s relation to the home and the period room’s function as a transnational intersection within museum history.