Everyone on Westminster Street last weekend became part of a museum. Volunteers distributed stickers reading “CURRENT EXHIBIT,” and more than a hundred white labels papered the two blocks between Dorrance and Union Streets. Most took the cue: dozens of perusing pedestrians clustered around labels describing the stories of subjects as diverse as “The Kresge Building,” “Trash Can,” and “Ted.” Like the museum labels we know, these made you look again at the objects they described. One label explained that the tree it was affixed to—a special hybrid of honey locust and kwanzan cherry—was planted because of its resistance to urban conditions and could live up to 130 years. Another label pointed your eye upward, to a ceramic peacock adorning a building’s facade.
This was the Museum of Westminster Street: a project bringing curatorial practice to a public space. The street becomes museum, the buildings and people its collection. Lyra Monteiro, a PhD candidate at Brown, and Andrew Losowsky, a writer and photographer, created and co-direct the Museum On Site, an organization that rethinks the purpose and methods of the traditional museum.
The experiment we call museums—buildings open to the public (not just the itinerant aristocracy) showcasing art, culture, and history—is still in its infancy. Only in the last couple hundred years have these institutions existed, and the Museum On Site wants to remind us there is potential for the concept to grow outside its traditional walls. This philosophy can be traced to numerous sources: from the ’60s performance art blend of high and low culture to museum education programs and oral histories. The website for the organization cites inspiration from projects as diverse as The New York Times’ “One in 8 million” series, Le Cool’s travel guidebooks, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Last century’s “white cube” model is under attack; its critics are dismantling and reassembling it on the web and outdoors. The Museum On Site’s inaugural exhibition in October 2008, A Thousand Ships, commemorated the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. They drew on research from Brown’s Slavery and Justice report, bringing it to those who wouldn’t otherwise read it. Using Barnaby Evans’s WaterFire as a staging ground, a hundred people poured water into the canal, after an African ritual, then walked through the crowd taking on the personae of historical abolitionist figures. Two hundred years after slave ships traveled up the same canal, it became a site for art, celebration, and remembrance.
As with the Westminster project, the idea was to force the performance-exhibition onto the public, rather than drawing the public into the space. Monteiro explains that “traditional humanities presentations tend to happen away from site, and to intellectualize the content. We want to provoke an intuitive reaction first,” which she hopes will inspire the interested viewer to explore topics further. Losowsky points out that museum-goers tend to be students or of the upper-middle class; by using the streets, one offers a free public experience to a chance audience.

A MODEL MUSEUM
The Museum of Westminster Street started as Westminster Stories, part of Providence Art Windows; an organization funded by local and federal arts endowments that transforms Providence’s empty storefronts into creative spaces. Since December 2009, 191 Westminster has displayed a photographic diorama of people and buildings along the street, along with their stories (the display ends this week, but new stories will continue to be posted at themuseumonline.com/westminsterstories).
A team of about 30 researchers and photographers conducted 160 interviews with well-known personalities and random passersby. A sort of This American Life for the street, the dioramas are organized around themes like “Work,” “Love,” “Christmas,” and “Getting Around.” Each week, a new set of printed texts float above the cutouts on the street. Like the radio show, they value everyone’s story. For example:
Most days, you can find David writing poetry at a table in Tim Horton’s, on the other side of Dorrance Street. “I have an international following.” He worked in technology until 2005, when his $98,000 job went overseas. “I lost my home, my job, my marriage. I was homeless for 13 months. But I’m better off now then I was before. When you have to start over again, you appreciate what you have.” He’s been writing poetry for almost 40 years.
Then there are recognizable figures like “Buddy” (Cianci): his blurb tell of his childhood memories of streetcars on Westminster and of his unrealized plans to revitalize the street as mayor. The window generates a community feel; as Monteiro points out, “Providence is small. Everyone knows someone in the window.” She says exclamations like “Hey, did you see me?” and “There’s my secretary!” are common by the display.

HITTING THE STREETS
For two days the Museum of Westminster Street took that diorama, itself modeled on the street, and magnified it back to life size. The small photos of people became five-foot cutouts and the labels 8.5″ x 11″ sheets.
A small crowd gathered around Jane, one of the “exhibits” in the museum with a label around her neck, as she stood next to her near-life-sized cutout. Asked how she made it into the museum, she said “I was just walking down this street, and they approached me. I thought, I’ve got time, I’ll just talk to them.” One girl remarked, “You’re like a celebrity now!” This underscored the privilege we grant to the curated: though she was selected for no other reason than being in the area one day, we look more closely at her story and her cardboard likeness. The labels parody the formula of the plaques that guide visitors through museums. Each object has a date and “accession number,” the date a building opened, or for people, “Late 20th Century,” along with a code like WSM.101.
Though these riffs on museums might raise a smile, they are serious critiques of the staidness of institutions and our assumptions about the cultural value of objects. The logo for the Westminster project literally inverts the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s iconic “M.” It’s a telling target for the two year-old project. The beaux-arts 130 year-old New York institution claims to house the greatest artistic achievements of the last 5,000 years, entirely indifferent to the stories of people on the street.
But it’s difficult to break people of their familiarity with traditional institutions. Losowsky says a common question people have is, “which building is the museum?”
Unlike museum labels, some of those on Westminster described objects and buildings no longer present, adding an historical bent to the project. Monteiro wants to “help people develop a greater sense of ownership” of the street, by equipping them with history and anecdotes they can share with their friends the next time they pass through. For example, the plot of land hosting the museum’s diorama was once the Chin Lee Chinese restaurant, opened in 1914 by a Chinese immigrant. In 1924 he moved to New York and started a restaurant there with a capacity of nearly a thousand.
But the goal here is not to privilege Westminster street itself. Monteiro says they didn’t choose the street because for any particular quality, but to point out that the project could be replicated almost anywhere. That is, the idea of the street—any normal, busy, downtown walking area—inspires the project. As Losowsky said, “a lot of people ask us why we do this. My response is, because we want to live in a world where things like this happen.”

Ryan Wong B’10 is a Late 20th Century work.