At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, a curator’s judgement decides what joins the campaign collection, not a rulebook. Larry Bird, curator of the campaign collection in its division of political history, told Smithsonian Magazine there was no formal process for choosing what joins it. What he looked for instead was proof that ordinary people cared.
That makes his collection an unusual window on how museums choose what to keep. A campaign button costs a couple of dollars and has almost no value on its own.
Who decides in the first place?
In most museums the job falls to curators. Writing in Artforum, a critic set out their traditional duties as acquiring work, looking after it in store, and putting it on show. The same piece placed the curator close below the director, who runs the museum.
Objects also arrive without anyone going out to find them. Smithsonian Magazine noted that families often offer items after the original owner dies, and that owners sometimes give them directly. Its examples included Second World War Italian Air Force artefacts for the Air and Space Museum and a portrait of Andrew Young for the National Portrait Gallery.
Beyond gifts, Museum Link lists purchases, bequests, exchanges between institutions and field collection as the other routes in. It adds that a museum can turn a gift down when it falls outside its collecting scope or its storage.
How does a campaign curator choose?
Bird started from the events a person on the street would recognise. Each presidential primary season, that meant the Iowa caucus and then New Hampshire, with the aim of getting something from every national candidate before they dropped out. The collection stayed at the national level rather than chasing local races.
He split the material into two kinds. One is what a campaign hands out on purpose to spread its message, such as a button. The other is what supporters make and wear for themselves: a lapel pin, or a sign they painted.
The second kind was the prize. Bird said the object worth having is the one its owner cannot bear to hand over, because it means so much to them. His phrase for the goal was collecting “the material of activism and engagement”, whatever the cause or candidate.
Why a taped-up sign counts as museum worthy
“Museum worthy” sounds like an aesthetic verdict. Bird put beauty well down the list. His objects can be rough, flawed and fixed with duct tape to a paint paddle.
Their worth comes from scarcity of a different sort. Gathered over a whole year, a pile of cheap pins becomes a record that exists nowhere else, he said.
What happens after the rally
Collecting is only the first cut. Once the material returns to the museum, the staff who attended an event talk it over, and the curator makes the final call.
That review is practical as much as historical:
- Duplicates go, and the best example stays.
- The team favours what will last, such as the sign with the least tape on it.
- Anything with an “inherent vice”, a flaw that will make it destroy itself, counts against it.
Bird framed that last test as courtesy to the next curator, who would inherit any object that was falling apart.
The net is wide. Everyone in the division, seven or eight people, was encouraged to collect. Bird said someone could go out for lunch, be handed a leaflet, and come back with an addition to the collection.
Where it all ends up
Not everything a museum owns goes on display. Some museums keep collections out of public view for researchers and specialists. Space on the Smithsonian’s own exhibition floors is hard to come by, the magazine noted.
Bird, at the museum since 1976, named his favourite object as one that was already there when he arrived: Jefferson’s writing desk. The same building holds a framed collection of presidents’ hair. Somebody, once, judged that worth keeping too.
