January 05, 2016
In The Mix

The Context of Curation

Familiar series espouse a new point of view at New York's Museum of the Moving Image.

Christine Champagne

Barbara Miller's production career was off to a promising start when, in 2001, she was Emmy-nominated as part of the research team for American Roots Music, a PBS documentary series.

But before long, she switched gears. "I realized I was much more interested in understanding how things worked," she says, "as opposed to participating in the making of things."

After earning a PhD in cultural anthropology at New York University, she joined New York City's Museum of the Moving Image in 2009, where she is now curator of the collection and exhibitions.

Miller has overseen some illuminating television-themed exhibits at the Astoria, Queens, institution, including 2013's "From Mr. Chips to Scarface: Walter White's Transformation in Breaking Bad" and this year's "Matthew Weiner's Mad Men."

Emmy magazine contributor Christine Champagne recently found Miller knee-deep in puppets for "Jim Henson: The Exhibition," scheduled to open next year. The following is an excerpt of their chat.

What do visitors glean from a museum exhibit devoted to a television show that they can't get from watching the show or reading about it?

In any museum, you're going to see material that — even if it is very familiar — is interpreted from a point of view. You're being asked to look at it in a very different context,

For example, with Mad Men, we talked about the ideas that went into creating the show in the first two sections of the exhibit, and we presented a replica of the writers' room and showed the drafts the writers worked on.

We gave visitors that background before they stepped into the section with all the costumes and props. In a way, we're resensitizing people to the material, and we're telling a story. We're talking about the creative process and giving people access to something that they wouldn't have had otherwise,

Can you tell us about re-creating the Mad Men writers' room?

It was sort of a happy accident. We hadn't thought of including the writers' room. We made several trips to Los Angeles while the show was still in production and talked to various department heads,

After the series wrapped, Matt [Weiner] was editing the final episodes, and he still had his office space, but the rest of the offices in the Mad Men production suite were empty, including the writers' room.

I was sitting there, going through boxes of script material, and I looked around and realized that the room that I was sitting in was the real story. I have to thank the people I work with at the museum — they didn't tell me I was crazy to want to ship a room from Los Angeles to New York, They were like, "Okay. That sounds good."

Is your work process similar to that of curators at other art museums?

At a lot of museums, a curator will borrow items from another museum or institution. It's a very straightforward process. [Curating television exhibits] is a little bit more rough and ready — what you get depends on the relationships you forge with people in the business. I spend lots of time in warehouses going through boxes.

How can networks, studios and showrunners help you produce a great exhibit?

With anything we do, we like to have independence. We're not here just to promote something.

We need to feel like we have the freedom to interpret the story that we want to tell, and we need to have enough access so that we can tell the story we want to tell.

Can you give us a preview of the Henson exhibit?

We're trying to give visitors a sense of what it was like to work with Jim Henson and his colleagues as they moved through different eras. There are so many things people don't knowabout Jim Henson and the roots of the Muppets.

We also want to give visitors a chance to put a puppet on their hand and look at a monitor and understand what it means to do puppetry on television, of which Jim Henson was such a profound innovator.

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