Rhetorics of Value: Exhibition Design and Communication in Museums and Beyond

In Rhetorics of Value, Corinne A. Kratz explores how exhibition design creates and conveys values that have the potential to touch, educate, and engage visitors. Drawing on case studies from the Victoria and Albert Museum, museums in South Africa and Kenya, a Hawaiian resort hotel, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, among others, Kratz shows how exhibits help shape and narrate cultural categories, values, and histories while provoking questions and evoking memories and experiences. She crosses contexts to consider ethnographic, history, and art exhibits in national and community museums and other display settings. Through these examples, Kratz traces how exhibition designers combine objects, texts, images, lighting, audio, space, and narratives to craft a complex, multilayered communicative form that visitors experience as they move through museums. By investigating the relationship between audience reception and exhibition design strategies, Kratz contends that through design, exhibits can shape the ways we know, the stories we tell, and our contours of meaning and engagement.

Corinne A. Kratz is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University and Research Associate of the Museum of International Folk Art. She is coeditor of Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition and Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation.