WISH YOU WERE HERE

Preserving Cultural Memory: the power & place of communication through Cumberland’s archives.

Wish You Were Here is a nod to the historical forms of communication we can find in archives, such as letters, invitations, and postcards. Wish You Were Here is also a call to visitors to participate in the care and preservation of their own forms of communication across mediums like social media, digital writing platforms, and voice memos. 

Archival care of all these forms of personal correspondence is essential to preserve Cumberland’s cultural memory. They reveal to us the richness of our community’s stories, our daily preoccupations, our views, and our place in history. 

Curator’s Introduction

The Wish You Were Here exhibit looks at the power of communication, past and present, through Cumberland’s archives. Specifically, the museum’s archival collection includes personal correspondence like letters, postcards, legal documents, diaries, community-made quilts, and oral interviews. 

This exhibit intends to connect to a richer understanding of Cumberland’s community, past & present. These various forms of communication have important, diverse cultural and community identities connected to them. Hopefully, we can think about how we communicate with each other today, especially in our digital world, and what are we leaving behind for future generations, and how can we preserve it?

Archives arrange and preserve cultural memory. Our archival collection (like most archives) is the result of decades of decisions made by museum professionals and community members on what to preserve and what not to bring into the collection, and these decisions have impacts on which stories are represented. So, Wish You Were Here is also a call to think about what stories we may be missing and how we can take future steps to ensure we have a fulsome and inclusive collection.