Museum/space/discourse: analyzing discourse in three dimensions in Denver’s History Colorado Center

Abstract

Museums have recently gained attention from cultural geographers as important sites of cultural production and reproduction. Within this growing field of ‘museum geographies’, we focus on how discourses are arranged in the three-dimensional spaces of galleries and exhibits. We argue that the spatial arrangement of text, media, and artifacts shape narrative storylines and suggest sequences, connections, progressions, and pathways within and between exhibits. In doing so, the spatial arrangement of these museum ‘assemblages’ is tied to the meaning of the underlying discourse. Looking at discourse in three dimensions offers a way for cultural geographers to contribute to an interdisciplinary study of museums, as well as to other modes of discourse where the spatial form of the text contributes to its meaning. We explore this methodology through a study of the History Colorado Center, a recently opened museum in Denver, CO. The center’s exhibits, designed to confront critical histories of the state and the American West, are designed as immersive multimedia reconstructions of Colorado sites and stories, and include iconic regional imagery as well as more dissonant episodes of Colorado’s past. Through an analysis of these exhibits, we highlight how the connections made across museum spaces can enhance or detract from intended exhibit themes. In the History Colorado Center, these spatial arrangements both contribute to and detract from the museum’s presentation of a critically nuanced state history. However, we argue, the spatial arrangements of discourse merit further attention, for museum geographies as well as across other media.