Archiving grief: Museums learn to preserve memorials left at mass shootings
LAS VEGAS — Cynthia Sanford sat in a Clark County Museum storage room and fretted over the email she was about to send to Jeff Schwartz, president of the Parkland Historical Society in Florida.
“I’m not sure if I should overwhelm him with tips,” Sanford said.
In the quiet, she began typing: “Try to get on the same page as the public works department or whoever owns the land where the memorials are located.”
She paused. Typed some more: “You can’t save everything. Flowers, food and other organic materials can’t be saved. Paper items blow away, fragile items get broken and large items can be a public hazard.”
It had been about five months since Sanford was in Schwartz’s place. Las Vegas was then the focal point of tragedy after a gunman killed 58 people attending the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. People began leaving candles, posters, flowers and crosses at the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign at the south end of the Strip.
The Clark County Museum is small and, even though Sanford has a degree in anthropology and a certificate in museum studies, the curating and archiving of more than 15,000 items was daunting. She knew she needed help. She got it from a museum in Orlando, Fla., site of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Since Columbine High School in 1999, police, schools and hospitals have offered each other advice, and sympathy, after each mass shooting. Now add museums to the unlikely mix of those groups forced to forge a plan on how to deal with the rise of massacres.
Museums have created an informal support network — each site of a mass shooting passing along lessons learned about preserving items left at makeshift memorial sites. Charleston, S.C., helped Orlando. Orlando helped Las Vegas. Las Vegas is now helping Parkland.
Last year, the American Association for State and Local History hosted a panel titled “Commemorating Tragedy, Healing Wounds: Mother Emanuel, AME Charleston, S.C.” The group will probably hold a similar panel at a convention in Kansas City this year.
John Dichtl, president of the association, said establishing protocols that museums can follow is an “emerging area for history museums” and that it can help them do “a better job getting in front of the collecting challenges in mass tragedies.”
Museums are planners by nature, moving slow and contemplating the weight of exhibits before mounting a display that puts a moment of time in historical context. They keep most of their artifacts in storage under exacting conditions to slow deterioration. When items are received by a museum, it’s usually a few at a time.
Mass shootings and the memorials that spring up are exactly the opposite. Thousands of items are subject to rain, heat and sometimes snow and build up quickly. Intake, cataloging and archiving can take years.