How do museum curators select which objects stay in storage and which are displayed in the galleries?
When starting to plan an exhibition, curators decide what stories they wish to tell in the galleries. This decision affects the selection of works of art and the organization of the display. Sometimes a story is better told if the objects are shown chronologically, and sometimes geographically. At other times, curators decide to exhibit objects in a more thematic way, as in the adjacent American Identities installation. Curators are always eager to put a recent acquisition on display; and if the Museum receives an important collection of objects, the group might be placed on display for a period of time before being incorporated into existing installations. Some objects, such as works on paper, textiles, and photographs, are limited in the amount of time they can be on exhibition owing to the inherent fragility of their media. Fragile objects are therefore rotated back into storage and replaced with similar objects from storage.
