Summary:
Significant Objects: Meaningful Objects from the PEA Community encouraged Phillips Exeter Academy community members to contribute a personal object and an accompanying written reflection to display within the Open House: A Portrait of Collecting exhibition. The project engaged PEA employees, families, and students in the exhibition’s themes by magnifying the exhibition’s affective registers through the lens of the personal and the familiar.
Meaningful Objects from the PEA Community:
The objects contributed for the Significant Objects project ranged from toys to housewares to paperweights. The objects were not usually part of a personal collection as defined by the lender, but became part of a collection within the curatorial setting.
The inspiration for this component of the exhibition was based on Rob Walker’s and Joshua Glenn’s Significant Objects project, where objects that were paired with a narrative rose in economic value. The focus of our version of the Significant Objects project was to assume value beforehand, for the person and the object: value made visible by the invitation, display, and public reception.
Affect & Recollection
People readily agreed to lend objects. The conversations at that stage were professional, collegial. “Why not? It seems like a good community project.” Soon, however, it became more intimate. Some lenders anguished over what object to lend, and then how to narrate the object.
Often the lender had not considered the linguistic framing of the object—had never set it down or notated it in written form with the purpose of having it shared, reinterpreted, or replayed by someone else’s perception. Unlike writing with literary ambitions, the impact of the reflective writings by contributors was an offering to the wider community: to share an aspect of themselves.
A Score for Empathy and Exchange
Through this staging of joint attention, the audience could come to know the lender, themselves, and their potential interconnections, via the pivot point of the object and its story. Common thematic areas included memory, care, recollection, contemplation, personal achievement, nostalgia, grief, and inspiration.
These sensations were amplified by the objects’ and stories’ settings among the other objects in Open House. Photographs from Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s (an Exeter alumnus) 1941 project on tenant farmer families in the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (click for a PDF version of the text), or Claire Jensen’s collection of white rocks, in proximity to the assorted (and unprovenanced) objects found in the Classics department’s vitrines, could raise poignant, critical, or humorous questions about the nature of history, authenticity, and identity.
Preserving & Extending Memories
After the exhibition closed, we compiled the Significant Objects items and their narratives into a soft-bound booklet (click for PDF) as a gift for each contributor. In that way, the lender could revisit their object in conversation with the objects of other contributors, and continue to engage with their colleagues.
