Amelia Wong
(Routledge – 2025)

WHY READ IT

“How Museums Tell Stories” offers a fresh and thoughtful way to understand museums – not just as places that hold objects, but as powerful spaces where stories are told, shaped, and experienced. Its value lies in showing how narrative works – not only in books or movies, but through objects, exhibitions, and even the architecture of museums.

It helps you see museums as active storytellers that influence how we remember, learn, and make sense of the world.

TOPIC

This book explores how museums work as a form of media that narrates stories.

In general a story is an event or sequence of events that a person sees as meaningful – something worth knowing and, therefore, worth telling. A narrative is the way a story is told, and it can take many forms – books, performances, conversations, movies, etc..

Museums tell stories in many different ways because they use a wide variety of media and formats: an exhibition can tell a broad, structured story, for example, the evolution of a species, or a guide can tell a story in a personal, spoken way, like sharing an anecdote during a tour. Even a single object – or collection of objects – can tell a story on its own, through its history.

After defining the elements of narrativity, it turns to the questions: How do museums, as a form of media, narrate? According to the author, examining the history of the museum as a medium provides insight into how it represents information, how that information is perceived and interpreted, and why it is understood in particular ways.

Elite europeans’ collecting habits during the renaissance and baroque periods reflects various aims. While royal collections were to evoke awe and assert power, private collectors focused on rare or curious objects that reflected their personal interests or scientific intrigue. Collectors’ decisions about which objects to collect and how to display them, reflected shared ideas about how to produce or convey knowledge by seeing things. In this way they created a visual and spatial language of display meant to suggest or reveal larger truths about nature and the world. Hence this early storytelling “showed” rather than “told.”

When museums transitioned from private spaces of study to public institutions of education for more varied audiences, they began using objects to tell broader stories about history, identity, and culture. They arranged items chronologically or recreated their original settings, helping visitors see connections and historical change more clearly. Displaying objects in a sequence of events (that suggests causal relationships) and reconstructing their original settings (like diorama or period rooms, that creates the spatial dimension of a story) are two particulary important elements of narrative.

Moreover public museums borrowed the architectural motifs of ancient Greek temples and churches emphasising the idea of the museum as a temple of art or monument to culture. Together with these architectural conventions, display practices cultivated museums as a form of media that not only presents objects but also tells history through the interplay of objects, space, and visitors’ embodied experiences.

By the early 20th century, it was widely accepted that museums, and their exhibitions, should tell stories. Objects alone were no longer seen as enough; they could show information but not convey it narratively. Defining a clear theme or “main point” that unifies all elements of an exhibition is today recognized as a best practice in exhibition design. This principle is closely linked to the concept of the narrative exhibition, which distinguishes itself from other forms by its explicit intention to “tell a story.” Narrative exhibitions achieve this by incorporating multiple narrative elements – events, entities (characters), change, and storyworlds – and by emphasizing each strongly. Sequence may be used, but it is always only one among several narrative strategies at play. Such exhibitions convey a strong sense of “what it is like” through display methods, immersing visitors bodily, viscerally, and emotionally in the story.

In the end, the book argues that modern museums, by acknowledging the limits of narrative and their own biases, can become the kind of media we need today. They help us reflect on which objects we value and why, how we build meaning, and how both people and institutions shape what we call truth.

GLOSSARY

Story: an event or sequence of events that a person sees as meaningful – something worth knowing and, therefore, worth telling.

Tellability: the sense that certain events are noteworthy and should be told.

Narrativity: the elements that help us perceive a story and its meaning include the following: events; entities; a double sense of time; sequence; change aka problem; space aka storyworld; particularity; and what it’s like.

AUTHORS

Amelia Wong is a content strategist and communications specialist who has worked in museums, universities, and government for nearly 20 years. She holds a BA in History/Art History from UCLA and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She lives in Los Angeles, USA.