Village News

Relevancy and Exhibits as Experiments in Community Partnerships – Part I

  • Andrea Klassen, Guest Author
  • Senior Curator, MHV
Kitchen
A kitchen in the Russländer exhibit of a Mennonite kitchen in the Soviet Union in 1918 after anarchists ransacked it.

Mennonite Heritage Village (MHV) was established in 1964 as a project to preserve Mennonite history. At the time, grandparents and parents guiding their young families through the museum could point at things and say “I remember when we used to use this…” Today we have people who are two and three generations removed from the personal connection their parents, would have had. Additionally, Steinbach is increasingly diverse and no longer uniformly shares the Mennonite background prominent in previous generations. As soon as this personal connection is lost, through time or through personal experience, the relevancy of what a museum is preserving and the work it does to that end is at risk because the personal investment in the history is also lost.

As a lover of history, it’s easy for me to say people should be interested in it because history is, in and of itself, interesting, or – at the very least – as the saying goes (cue the patronizing voice), “it’s important to know your own history!” But the fact of the matter is, many people don’t care about history or the museums that house and interpret it.

I would argue that it is more helpful to consider this issue of how to matter more to more people from the perspective of relevancy, rather than approaching it as a “problem” to be solved. Nina Simon, author of a riveting book called The Art of Relevance, equates relevance with a key that unlocks doors of meaning for visitors, doors that open to “experiences that matter to us, surprise us, and bring value to our lives” (25). So relevance “leads you somewhere. It brings new value to the table” (29). Cognitive scientists Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber define two criteria that make information relevant: 1) “How likely that new information is to stimulate a positive cognitive effect” – that is, “to yield new conclusions that matter to you.” And 2) “How much effort is required to obtain and absorb that new information” (29). So relevance is not about staying on top of the latest trend – is both about content (what you’re presenting) and barriers (what prevents people from engaging with that content).

MHV’s 2019 exhibit, The Russländer, is about the over 24,000 Mennonites who fled the Soviet Union for Canada between 1923 and 1930. It is a story that is in some ways unique to this particular migration of Mennonites living in the newly formed Soviet Union and finding their lives uprooted by the political changes occurring around them. This story belongs to a particular people and to a particular time. And yet…how much of this history is still so familiar to us today? This is a story that still resonates and one in which Mennonites in Canada now find themselves on the opposite side – not as those seeking a new homeland, but those who can accept or reject applicants seeking to immigrate. This is a story that is still as important today as it was in the 1920s and ’30s and applicable to other groups who don’t share the particulars of a Mennonite past.

So now, back to relevance. Sometimes we think “relevance” means to water-down our differences, to embrace change just for the sake of change, or to drop our specific mission and become more general and all-encompassing. According to Simon, relevance isn’t throwing your mission out the door and jumping on board with the “next best thing.” It is doing what you do very well and then using it to open doors of meaning for your visitors. Remember, relevance is about content and barriers. So from the point of view of relevance, the first task is to fulfill one’s mission to the very best of one’s ability. I’m convinced that the very best thing MHV can do for our community is to rise to the challenge of our mission and vision statements. In the context of this exhibit, this means that we came up with new ideas we’d never tried before in our temporary exhibits, like including a life-sized diorama of a Mennonite kitchen that has just been ransacked by anarchists in the Soviet Union in 1918. We wrecked the best kind of careful havoc on the scene that type-A, organizationally sensitive curators can possibly muster. We spent extra care on our exhibit cases, refinishing their exteriors and making sure the artefacts inside were laid out in beautiful, eye-catching ways. And we included as many artefacts from our collection as we could, to bring the history up close and personal for the visitor.

But this is where I think we need to “get over ourselves” because it’s tempting to think that this history will be important just by virtue of itself and that the exhibit will be a success just because we did a good job. But instead of seeing the exhibit has an end unto itself, I started to learn to see it as an asset that we could leverage to make a difference in our community and that community partnerships might just be the key to making this difference. Next week, we’ll look at how partnerships have impacted and changed how MHV sees itself and the role we play in our community, and how that translates into increased relevance as a museum.