Materializing History: The Making of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition
The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture
by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

The idea to create a museum of the history of Polish Jews emerged in 1993, inspired by the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., that year. After more than a decade as a project, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was cofounded in 2005 by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, which initiated the project, the Ministry of Culture, and the City of Warsaw. An international architectural competition for the building followed. Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, POLIN Museum is located on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood. After suppressing the Warsaw ghetto uprising in May 1943, the Germans reduced the area to rubble. As a result, the museum project began without a historic neighborhood, without a building, without a collection, and without funds. Its greatest asset was the story it would tell, a thousand-year history of Polish Jews. In exploring the creation of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition and extensions of it, this series of lectures by curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will explore how the museum materialized history and created and discovered novel kinds of objects.

Lecture 1: Masterplan: Theatre of History
This lecture explores how the Masterplan attempted to plot the thousand-year history of Polish Jews in space, how the exhibition evolved as a theater of history, and how the materializing of history led to the creation of a new kind of object.

February 27 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall