I was surprised the other week that no one corrected Mindy Lehrman Cameron's
statement (unless they did so off the list):

 <<Fred Wilson is an artist who has curated with museums to tell a story using
their collections. I saw a show of his called "Mining the  Museum" at the
Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, Maryland in which he told a history
of African Americans.  In it, for example, he had a vitrine filled with silver
objects from around the mid-nineteenth century (i.e., the Civil War). There
were  cream pitchers and silverware and then there was a slave shackle also
made of silver just there simply among the artifacts.>>  (quoted in Lee
Boyko's message yesterday)

 I believe that if Mindy and Lee look more closely at the documentation of
Wilson's "Mining the Museum" show they will find that a genuine (i.e. iron)
slave shackle was used in the section "Metalwork."  It's my opinion that the
installation was a success because it used genuine objects from the Historical
Society's collection, and did not fabricate such fantasy pieces as silver
shackles, which would not create the frisson of the real thing.

 David A. Penney
 The Baltimore Museum of Art
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 David A. Penney in Baltimore, Maryland
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 06-Jul-1995