Penn Museum
Below, Pablo Helguera, Director of Adult and Academic Programs, MoMA gives a brief introduction to his presentation on popular museum education television series, What in the World?
What in the World?
What in the World? was inspired in a popular television show of the same title created in the 1950s by the then-Penn Museum Director Froelich Rainey. The program featured a rotating panel of museum scholars and celebrities who examined individual artifacts from the Museum’s vast collections, puzzling out where they came from and how they would have been used. The national television show, a pioneer project in the field of museum education at the dawn of the telecommunications age, lasted for several seasons.
The relativization of connoisseurship of the program allowed for the audience to feel empowered and invested in the decoding process of the pieces, while also encouraging them to learn by following the process of visual analysis of the experts. What in the World? was a game show and made good television, but it also opened a door amongst mainstream audiences, creating an awareness of the value of museum collections.