(High resolution) April 2011 (PDF

Articles
Art of the possible: Transforming the
permanent displays at the Higgins Armory
Museum, part 1
Jeffrey Forgeng
The permanent exhibits at the
Higgins Armory in Worcester,
Massachusetts, were installed in the
1980s; they represented a major
achievement for the institution at the
time, but after a quarter of a century
they are naturally in need of updating.
Making this happen, here as
elsewhere, is a challenge constrained
by finances (in 2010 the museum had
an exhibits budget of $0), display
space (the museum’s medieval-style
Great Hall is a spectacular setting to
display suits of armor, but is less
hospitable to individual armor
elements), and of course the profile of
the collections themselves.
Beginning in 2009, the museum
initiated a series of projects to revamp
self-contained areas adjacent to the
Great Hall with exhibits on Knights,
Non-European Arms, and Swords. Two
of these projects are complete, and
the third will be finished within the
next few months. While these new
displays leave the main area of the
Great Hall untouched, they are already
having an impact on the visitor
experience well beyond the space and
money that were allocated to them.
Visitors perceive the Higgins
Armory as a ‘museum of knights’ and
a ‘museum of the Middle Ages,’ a fact
familiar to us anecdotally and
confirmed by a series of visitor
interviews undertaken at the outset of
these projects to help determine their
direction. Yet prior to 2009, our
exhibits had virtually nothing to say
about knights, and only a handful of
our displayed objects were actually
from the Middle Ages. We therefore
decided to deinstall our four ‘Timeline
of Armor’ vitrines and replace them
with displays focusing on knights:
‘Days of Knights’ (a chronology of
knights), ‘Knight Life’ (chivalric and
courtly life), ‘Cutting Edge’ (weapons),
and ‘Dressed to Kill’ (armor).
While each vitrine was organized to
tell a coherent story, the display was
designed in the knowledge that the
visitor experience is chiefly organized
around the objects themselves. This
installation allowed us to display star
pieces from the collection that had
hitherto received little exposure in the
harness-oriented environment of the
Higgins, including a significantly
increased number of medieval
artifacts, as well as important objects
acquired through the acquisitions
program initiated by Walter Karcheski
in the 1990s.
Readers familiar with the Higgins
may recall the rather mysterious
alcoves between the Timeline vitrines.
These had been built to house
audiovisual content, but this plan had
ISSUE 06 MAGAZINE 45