Art and Public History

Art and Public History: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges examines the relationship between art and public history, outlining opportunities, challenges, and insights drawn from recent initiatives. With a special eye towards audience engagement and challenging historical narratives, all of the case studies and projects combine historical interpretation with contemporary and historical forms of visual art in unique and insightful ways. In addition to emphasizing the kind of practical advice found in the best case studies, this volume also offers a critical discussion of the concepts, tools, skills and technologies that contribute to fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. These issues are addressed through sections on projects related to historical artworks; contemporary art and artists; and public art and the built environment.

It addresses how public historians can incorporate art into their practice by outlining opportunities, challenges, and insights drawn from recent projects in the United States and Britain. These projects have taken place across a variety of platforms, including local and national history museums; art galleries; digital archives; classrooms; historical markers; and public art projects. The case studies incorporate the perspectives of different stakeholders, including public historians, artists, and audiences.

The book will provide both public history practitioners and academics with useful guidance on how art can be integrated into public history initiatives, through critical discussion of tools, strategies, and technologies that contribute to fruitful collaboration and audience engagement across a variety of platforms. Readers will walk away with new ideas, strategies, and practical considerations for interdisciplinary projects to attract audiences in new ways.

Rebecca Bush is Curator of History/Exhibitions Manager at the Columbus Museum in Georgia. Her professional interests include local history in all its variations, especially in rural communities, and multiple-perspective interpretation. She often focuses her research on social history of the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rebecca earned a BA in History from Kansas State University and a MA in Public History from the University of South Carolina.


Tawny Paul is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter (UK). Her work combines academic and public history. Alongside research in eighteenth-century British social history, she has an interest in contemporary uses of the past and in how academic histories can be presented to wider audiences, and has worked professionally as an interpretive planner. Tawny earned her BA in History from Vassar College and holds a PhD in Social History from the University of Edinburgh.