Crossing the velvet rope, jokes, and nerf gun wars. Is that what fourth graders really want? For the Creativity Incubator: Long Island, we brought Museum Anarchist Frank Vagnone to Oyster Bay to visit Raynham Hall Museum. But he wasn’t our only voice of anarchy – we got input from 75 fourth graders, a major constituency of the museum.

Originally built around 1738, Raynham Hall was home to the Townsend family – including “Culper Jr.” – George Washington’s spy. The house is furnished to both the Colonial and Victorian eras, and has the notoriety as one of the most haunted buildings on Long Island.  Raynham Hall Museum, like many historic sites, connects well with 4th grade local history curriculum. For a typical fourth grade tour, if the weather cooperates, the students start outside to hear about the differences between the architecture of the Colonial and Victorian eras evident in the house. Then, the kids are given a tour of the house, get to handle Colonial objects from a teaching collection, and see a demonstration of invisible ink.
 
The tour incorporates different types of activities, but what do the fourth graders really think about it? To prepare for the workshop we decided to ask some students who had recently visited. And even crazier, we wanted to ask them to be museum anarchists too.

As I wandered the, at times, confusing hallways & rooms of the Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay I first took notice of the typical reproduction carpets and wallcoverings. I was taken upstairs into the third-floor collections spaces which is where I found core of this site. I asked Jessica Pearl, the Collections Manager what her favorite item was in the collection, and she searched to find a pair of very sexy shoes. The shoes were wrapped in acid-free paper and encased within an acid free box. As she pulled them out, I could see why she loved them. We admired them and returned them back to their mausoleum.

​This experience perfectly symbolized why these “Creativity Incubators” are so needed and successful. We are all given the chance to find, see, and use collections items in new and compelling ways. Things that have been hidden behind a screen of professional stewardship, or relegated to a stage set within a period room, can now be pulled aside and made more substantive by collaborative context with other items. This is the stuff that curators are made of, and often find it hard to do; that is to use their incredible knowledge base to expand a narrative and tell more powerful stories.

​To see other photos from this session, click here.