Museum Publishing as Interpretation

Museum publishing is a form of critical interpretation that reflects and advances the mission of the museum and provides context for its audiences. Within the museum, publishing operates through a series of editorial and design decisions that include author commissioning, format and the structuring of paratextual elements – texts adjacent to the main work such as indexes and bibliographies.1 Through these choices, the museum distributes interpretative authority, frames narratives and articulates its institutional position. Beyond the museum, publishing circulates through bookshops and libraries, carrying the museum’s interpretative voice to audiences who may never visit the institution itself. In the past, museum publishing tended to reach specialist audiences through established formats such as catalogues and scholarly texts. Today that reach is expanding through a broader range of publication types.

This article situates museum publishing within the broader literature on interpretation and critical museology. For the purposes of this paper, museum publishing is understood as a range of texts produced by museums, including catalogues, monographs and exhibition-related books, as well as more accessible formats such as children’s and digital publishing. While exhibition publications serve as a record of an exhibition, many extend beyond that to function as scholarly surveys of an artist, movement or period. In doing so, they become key reference points long after an exhibition has closed. However, they are often addressed to specialist audiences and representative of a singular authorial or institutional voice.

In the 1940s Monroe Wheeler, the first Director of Publications at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), observed that museums had long functioned as publishers and that the art book trade was closely connected with the rise of modern museology.2 Wheeler positions museum publishing not as an internal administrative function, but as part of a wider field of art publishing, responsive to both the museum and the commercial trade. This article builds on such contexts to consider how contemporary practices position museum publishing as an active and evolving site of interpretation, engaging multiple readerships through shifts in authorship, design and modes of address.

The article proposes the following methodology: commissioning as critical practice; design as argument; editorial apparatus as interpretative device; and circulation as legacy. When approached in this way, publishing empowers diverse voices and prolongs critical engagement beyond the walls of the museum.

Rethinking situated interpretation

Interpretation emerged as a distinct field of museological inquiry during the second half of the twentieth century. Across this period a shift can be traced from understanding museums as sites of preservation to recognising them as sites of meaning-making. In the 1990s the museum studies scholar Eilean Hooper-Greenhill described museums as sites of knowledge production, where interpretation was not only integral to classification but also preservation, by actively shaping meaning for every object.3 This reframing positioned museums as sites that organise and mediate knowledge through display, text and narrative, rather than simply housing objects. Hooper-Greenhill’s later formulation of the ‘post-museum’ extends this position, describing an institution that favours multi-vocal narratives and community collaboration over singular curatorial authority.4 Similarly, the museum interpretation scholar Graham Black describes the ʻengaging museumʼ, where interpretation is reframed as constructed communication with audiences rather than a singular authoritative voice.5 More recently, the museum and heritage studies scholar Laurajane Smith contends that meaning is generated through the emotional, social and cultural experiences of audiences, positioning interpretation as a process that is co-produced among museums, their objects and their publics rather than being delivered by museums alone.6

These approaches move away from interpretation as something fixed or universal, understanding it instead as something always shaped by context and the audiences it reaches. There is no singular audience for the museum – as the philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, publics have differing claims and needs. Within this framework, interpretation becomes a process of addressing multiple, and sometimes competing, forms of knowledge and experience.7

This multiplicity requires that interpretation be understood as what the sociologist Lucy Suchman refers to as situated – embedded within cultural and material conditions that shape its form, authority and circulation.8 As the linguist Louise Ravelli has shown, museum texts are never neutral, but are always embedded within frameworks of institutional authority and communication.9 The critic Michael Brenson and the curator Mary Jane Jacob highlight this dynamic in their dialogues on contemporary art, observing that interpretation is continually adjusted in response to changing audiences and evolving artistic practices.10 Extending this further, the interpretation scholar Juliette Fritsch argues that gallery interpretation is inseparable from the material culture of the museum, insisting that meaning is co-produced through objects, texts, spatial arrangements and institutional practices.11 What emerges from these positions is an understanding of interpretation as both relational and material: produced across people, practices and forms.

If interpretation in the gallery is contingent and situated, then the same must be said of publishing. Publications are situated interpretative artefacts – often purchased in the museum shop after a visit or encountered later as a supplement of institutional identity, they possess a distinctive capacity to circulate and extend interpretation across temporal and institutional boundaries. As Douglas Bassett has noted, museum publications are not mere appendages but play an active role in framing curatorial work for both professional and public audiences.12 Attention to publishing also requires focus to content beyond form alone. Publishing and design scholars consider the book as both a material and structured object. The book artist and scholar Johanna Drucker describes books as containing ‘graphical arguments’ that make their case through format and visual features, highlighting how the multimodal elements of design – including typography, layout, images and sequencing – shape interpretation as much as the written text itself.13 To recognise publishing as interpretation is to acknowledge its apparatus – essays, image sequences, captions, indexes, glossaries and bibliographies – as part of the museum’s meaning-making infrastructure.

Methodology

1. ‘Polyphonic commissioning’ organises authorship as a negotiated or mediated practice by diversifying who speaks and how voices are placed in adjacency.
2. ‘Apparatus as interpretation’ foregrounds indexes, glossaries, bibliographies, acknowledgements and credit lines as deliberate choices that reveal who and what has been included, and on whose terms, making the conditions of knowledge production visible.
3. ‘Multi-modal design’ treats the book’s material form as argument: the sequencing of essays, images and paratexts, along with layout and typography, produces meaning, enabling layered and non-linear readings.
4. ‘Durability and circulation’ recognise that publications endure within libraries and citations, shaping understanding across audiences as they circulate beyond the museum.

Case studies

This article adopts a practice-based approach informed by my role as Head of Publications at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (NGV). As part of my role I took part in developing and editing one of the two selected case studies, Colony: Australia 1770–1861, which was published to accompany two exhibitions at the NGV in 2018 (fig.1).14 In this article I draw on my knowledge of the project to examine both the publication itself and the processes that shaped its production. This approach recognises that studies of museum publications have often focused on the finished object rather than the tacit knowledge of museum professionals.

A comparison of Colony: Australia 1770–1861 and Disobedient Objects, published by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A), in 2014, demonstrates how editorial commissioning, multi-modal design, paratextual apparatus, and durability and circulation extend interpretation beyond an exhibition or museum context. These publications further curatorial inquiry through strategies that continue to generate engagement beyond the exhibition. Their publication dates further allow consideration and legacy over time, enabling assessment of their ongoing interpretative function.

Disobedient Objects represented a notable departure from more conventional publishing models associated with the V&A, reflecting the distinct ambition that shaped its editorial framework (fig.2).15 The analysis of this publication is undertaken from the perspective of a reader who did not visit the exhibition and provides an opportunity to examine how interpretative values are communicated independently of the gallery encounter.

Colony: Australia 1770–1861

In 2018 the NGV presented a pair of exhibitions: Colony: Australia 1770–1861 and Colony: Frontier Wars.16 The first was a large loans-driven exhibition examining the art and visual culture produced during Australia’s colonial period, following British settlement in 1788. Colony: Frontier Wars was a smaller collection presentation of Indigenous art. The decision to produce a single publication for both exhibitions was not a logistical compromise, but an interpretative stance: that Indigenous histories are constitutive rather than supplemental to the history of Australia.

The accompanying publication is an argument in material form – a site where editorial and design decisions come together to form a positioning statement. The 394-page, section-sewn hardback comprises fourteen essays and twenty-eight shorter texts by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, curators and artists. Read alongside audience-centred and collaborative models of interpretation and within a broader museological turn to decolonising practice, Colony proposes publishing as a vehicle for broader interpretation. In line with the methodology proposed above, I here consider the book’s critical approach to the elements of commissioning, apparatus, design and circulation.

Interpretation as negotiated authorship

Colony adopts polyphonic commissioning, presenting interpretation as negotiation among knowledge traditions. The sequencing of texts by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors invites counter-readings, privileging debate over consensus. The introductory essay, for example, is paired with a counter-introduction by the Indigenous historian Lynette Russell, deliberately positioning First Nations perspectives at the outset of the publication. Throughout, the reader has access to historical and contemporary accounts from varying perspectives, of different tones and lengths. Accounts by colonial historians are interwoven with contributions from artists and First Nations writers such as the Worimi filmmaker Genevieve Grieves and the Bidjara artist Christian Thompson.

The project was conceived by an interdisciplinary editorial group and supported by Tony Ellwood, Director of the NGV, who was critical to the project’s development. The group included myself, exhibition curators, external consultants, historians specialising in Australian colonial history and colonial art, and First Nations Elders and community representatives. Meeting regularly throughout the development of the publication, the group shared input on contributors, identifying areas of expertise while also considering how lived cultural experience might be represented. As texts were drafted, these were circulated among the group for review and discussion, while smaller meetings were convened on specialist aspects of the project, including historical interpretation, First Nations content and editorial structure.

This approach differed from more conventional museum publishing models, in which a publication concept is developed primarily by curators and subsequently delivered to a publishing team for production, often resulting in a book that closely mirrors the physical exhibition in terms of structure, thematics and flow. In such models, the publication can function largely as a documentary record of gallery displays. In contrast, the editorial process for Colony positioned curators, publishers, external advisors and community representatives as collaborators. Underlying this model was an acknowledgement that the museum did not hold all relevant expertise internally.

The project challenged conventional museum hierarchies by extending aspects of consultation beyond the museum to draw upon multiple forms of expertise. These discussions developed beyond content selection to questions of interpretation, including what works and contextual material required reproduction to support the publication’s arguments, and how practical considerations, including loan agreements and reproduction commitments, influenced editorial decisions. With several hundred works under consideration, the publication prioritised narrative and interpretative frameworks over an encyclopaedic account of the exhibitions. The aim was not simply to reproduce the exhibition in book form, but to develop a publication capable of operating within broader scholarly and trade contexts. Rather than bolstering the voice of a single author or institution, the varied contributions draw attention to the complexity of bringing multiple perspectives into dialogue. Rather than producing a singular institutional narrative, the publication enables readers to encounter multiple and at times competing understandings of Australia’s colonial history. This collaborative structure helped shift authority away from a singular curatorial voice towards a more expansive model than is often possible within physical exhibitions alone.

Apparatus as interpretation

While indexes, glossaries, bibliographies, credit lines and contributor attributions are frequently treated as neutral end matter, in Colony they are foregrounded as interpretative devices. These reveal what the publisher and editor Michalis Pichler describes as ʻeditorial politics’, making visible the contributors, consultations and editorial decisions that shaped the publication’s interpretative framework and acknowledging forms of expertise that extend beyond the museum.17 In the publication’s end matter, credit lines found in the List of Works indicate custodianship and protocol by identifying First Nations language groups and place names, acknowledging cultural authority that extends beyond museum ownership or collection records.

In his essay ʻOnce Knownʼ, Myles Russell-Cook, Curator of First Nations Art at the NGV, introduces a pivotal intervention in understandings of First Nations Art and museum practice.18 He addresses the cataloguing convention of ʻArtist Unknownʼ as a symptom of the belated recognition of First Nations art in museum records, arguing that the attribution should instead be read as ʻArtist Once Knownʼ. The essay reframes caption attribution not as a neutral descriptor but as an act that produces knowledge. It draws on research that audited museum records, tracing provenance where possible and reinstating names on display labels where they could be responsibly restored. Where certainty could not be achieved, the piece proposes ʻOnce Knownʼ as a deliberately accountable formula: an acknowledgment that the makerʼs name existed, was obscured by colonial record-keeping and may yet be recovered, exposing rather than smoothing over the politics of museum. However, the term ‘Unknown’ appeared throughout the publication, reflecting prevailing museum and scholarly labelling conventions. The essay therefore functioned as an argument placed into circulation through the publication, creating space for alternative approaches to attribution.

Following the book’s publication, numerous museum records were revised and display labels updated, adopting the ‘Once Known’ formulation for the exhibition and into the future. Rather than emerging as institutional policy, Russell-Cook’s intervention was articulated through the publication, using the book as a space in which established conventions could be questioned and alternative approaches proposed. In interpretative terms, this is not merely a metadata improvement; it is a change in the museum’s institutional voice, shifting from a stance that treats anonymity as neutral towards one that acknowledges uncertainty and remains open to correction. This also aligns with the book’s polyphonic commissioning: decisions about naming were guided by consultation with Elders and community specialists, embedding plural accountability within the apparatus itself.

Multi-modal graphic design

Interpretation is produced through the publication’s multi-modal graphic design, where form constructs meaning alongside written text. Historically exhibition catalogues have developed recognisable graphic conventions, often presenting introductory essays as uninterrupted text before moving to separate sections of image plates and object documentation. These conventions position images as illustrations of scholarly argument rather than participants in it. The graphic design of Colony deliberately departs from this model.

Essays, images, captions and artist interventions are interwoven throughout the publication so that meaning emerges through their visual relationship. Long-form historical essays are punctuated by black pages and chapter headings set in a sturdy slab-serif typeface (figs.3 and 4). These graphic interruptions slow the pace of reading and interrupt the visual continuity of colonial imagery. They signal moments where the publication shifts from historical narration to contemporary artistic and First Nations perspectives (fig.5). Rather than functioning as section dividers, they contribute to the publication’s interpretative structure by building historical and cultural context through rhythm, pacing and visual hierarchy. Meaning is therefore constructed not only through what the publication says, but through how graphic design organises relationships between texts, images and readers.

One such example occurs when a section exploring colonial family portraiture and representations of childhood is immediately followed by an artwork by the Badimaya artist and scholar Julie Dowling (figs.6 and 7). The accompanying text addresses the well-documented removal of First Nations children from their families by European settlers. This sequencing unsettles the apparent domestic harmony established by the preceding essay, exposing the disconnect between the experiences of colonial settlers and those of First Nations families. The publication places these stories in dialogue, prompting readers to reconsider colonial images through lived realities. The interpretative effect emerges not from either contribution in isolation, but through their sequencing in the publication.

The typography and format of Colony balance convention with interpretative intervention. The publication adopts the familiar material language of the museum catalogue through its section-sewn hardback binding, restrained typography and generous proportions, establishing the authority expected of an art publication. Within this recognisable form, however, the graphic design introduces moments of disruption. The typography balances legibility (Quadraat for sustained reading) with marked transitions (Clarendon Wide Stencil for impactful headings). The shift between typefaces is not simply stylistic but interpretative, marking changes in voice and signalling a transition between historical narrative and contemporary intervention.

In contrast to the conventions of art historical catalogues, which often favour legible and aesthetically coherent cover images, the book’s French-folded paper jacket offers no immediate clarity as to its subject. On the front, an engraving depicting a clouded sky is largely concealed by the book’s black masthead, prompting the question of what is being withheld. When the jacket is removed and unfolded, the image is revealed as Natives of Cape Diemen preparing their meal c.1800, a duotone engraving by Jacques-Louis Copia after Jean Piron (figs.8 and 9).

The image was first published in 1817 in Jacques Labillardière’s Voyage in search of La Pérouse, an account of an expedition to Australasia led by the French navy officer Antoine Raymond Joseph de Bruni, chevalier d’Entrecasteaux, in 1791–3. The scene presents a meeting between First Nations people and European settlers that stands in marked contrast to the violence, dispossession and frontier conflict of the period (fig.10). A group of First Nations men, women and children are gathered in preparation for a meal. They sit together in conversation, baskets and cooking fires dispersed throughout the image. Acts of exchange and care are foregrounded. A European settler is shown playing with a First Nations infant while the child’s mother carries a basket of gathered food. As the art historian David Hansen describes, this is an ʻextraordinary encounter of racial harmonyʼ within a broader history of colonial violence.19

Rather than functioning as promotional packaging, the cover establishes the publication’s interpretative position before the reader opens the book. The decision to partially conceal the image, revealing it only as the reader unfolds the jacket, invites readers to question the apparent harmony it depicts before encountering the critical histories that unfold within the publication. The temporal disjunction between the moment depicted in the image and its later publication foregrounds the image as a constructed historical artefact rather than a transparent record. Developed collaboratively by the designer Thomas Deverall with the editors, the book jacket is a calculated departure from the conventions of such catalogues, the covers of which often feature images of pastoral pleasantry. Rather than offering immediate visual resolution, the cover requires the reader to navigate between concealment and disclosure. This device mirrors the publication’s broader concern with histories that have been obscured, recovered and reconsidered. Graphic design therefore performs the publication’s interpretative argument before a single page has been turned.

The multi-modal design of Colony demonstrates that interpretation is produced not only through authored text, but through the visual organisation of the book. Through its cover design and the sequencing of texts and images the publication creates interpretative relationships that extend beyond those possible within the exhibition itself.

Disobedient Objects

The V&Aʼs 2014 exhibition Disobedient Objects, curated by Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, surveyed objects of protest and activist design from across the world.20 The project sought to highlight the ‘previously underexamined area of the art and design of object-making within social movements, a peopleʼs history of art and design from below’.21 The exhibition introduced audiences to an unconventional selection of objects that the curators describe as having ‘helped win rights, change laws and even topple governments’.22

Through commissioning strategies, multi-modal design and use of publication apparatus, the accompanying book framed activism through the lens of design history, producing a durable legacy of interpretation across geographies and contexts. Disobedient Objects is a compact publication that brings together curatorial essays, activist testimony, campaign ephemera, photographs, posters and archival material, placing documentary evidence alongside museum interpretation. It shows how publishing can construct and circulate counter-canonical histories within and beyond the museum.

Commissioning as interpretative redistribution

The commissioning strategy of Disobedient Objects exemplifies how museum publishing can expand the range of contributors beyond specialist academics, curators or museum staff. Rather than positioning activist voices as subjects of curatorial interpretation, the publication commissioned them as authors, allowing campaign organisers, designers and participants to speak directly about the objects they created and used. Essays by museum staff sit alongside first-person accounts, campaign histories and activist testimony, placing institutional and lived knowledge in dialogue rather than in hierarchy. This diversity redistributed interpretative authority, situating knowledge not solely within the museum but in the lived experience of those who created and used the objects. The resulting book is an open-ended and layered publication offering varying access points for a reader.

In the publication, historical analysis is juxtaposed with first-person testimonies from movement participants. This embeds interpretation of the exhibition objects into the contexts from which these objects emerged, unpacking their design, orbit and use in a practical or applied sense. In an essay written by David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist situates large puppets used in protests in the United States as performative devices that reshape the dynamics of protest.23 By reframing puppets as interpretative mediators between publics, authorities and participants, Graeber demonstrates how interpretation emerges from practice itself, rather than being imposed retrospectively. His account brings to life the objects’ contexts and forces that surround them by weaving in quotes from the broader activist community.

The commissioning strategy of Disobedient Objects offers a layered interpretative frame in which curatorial scholarship, activist testimony and critical theory are placed side by side. In doing so, it demonstrates how museum publishing can embed interpretation in lived contexts and reposition objects not only as artefacts of design but as actors within wider struggles for social justice.

Materialising interpretation through design

Issued as a square paperback with an exposed spine and printed on uncoated stock, the material form of Disobedient Objects departs from the graphic conventions of the museum catalogue. Rather than signalling authority through the visual language of the oversized art book, its material qualities draw on the aesthetics of independent and activist publishing, positioning the publication closer to alternative traditions. Designed by Marwan Kaabour, the publication adopts what I term a ʻdisobedientʼ graphic hierarchy, a design that deliberately resists the orderly visual conventions of museum publications such as consistent typographic scales and predictable layouts. Instead, typography shifts in scale, while layouts continually vary across the publication (figs.11 and 12). These decisions draw on the visual language of activist print culture and independent publishing, aligning the publication with these graphic forms.

The interpretative effect of this design also lies in its staging of multiple modes of material and voice. Readers encounter posters, pamphlets, placards and signs as legible documents rather than supplementary illustrations. These materials are not absorbed into a single curatorial narrative but retain the visual and textual qualities through which they originally circulated. The reader therefore moves between different forms of knowledge – curatorial interpretation, activist testimony and documentary evidence – without one mode subsuming another. Scholarly essays are placed in deliberate juxtaposition with object dossiers and instructional how-to guides for activist tools (fig.13). Rather than directing readers through a single interpretative pathway, the publication creates a productive tension for the reader, not because the different forms of material contradict one another, but because they retain their distinct voices and communicative purposes. Rather than a linear reading, the book encourages readers to follow thematic threads or shifting between testimony, visual archive and critical analysis.

The bookʼs design mirrors the open, networked character of protest movements themselves. Rather than presenting a singular institutional voice, Disobedient Objects models a distributed, polyphonic interpretative space in which design becomes an active agent in shaping meaning.

Apparatus as interpretation

The paratextual apparatus, made up of the book’s chapter openers, glossaries, captions and marginal quotations and notes, perform a critical interpretative function. Extended captions, pull quotes and section openers punctuate the text, while margins are mobilised quite literally to disclose supplementary information that situates objects in their political and social contexts (fig.14).

Collective authorship and activist networks are explicitly acknowledged in credit lines, foregrounding the ethics of naming, recognition and erasure. Many activist objects are inherently ephemeral, created to mobilise action within a particular campaign rather than to endure as museum artefacts. Rather than presenting these objects as isolated collection items, Disobedient Objects documents the campaigns through which they were originally produced and circulated. In doing so, the publication restores the social and political contexts that gave the objects meaning while recirculating those histories to new audiences. Interpretation therefore moves beyond the museum’s institutional voice, recognising that these objects acquired their significance through collective political action.

In this sense, the publication’s paratexts extend museum documentation beyond conventional cataloguing, making visible the communities, networks and histories to which the museum remains accountable. Rather than presenting activist objects as self-contained museum artefacts, the apparatus positions them within the social and political infrastructures that produced them, demonstrating how museum publishing can sustain the circulation of knowledge beyond the exhibition itself.

Durability and circulation

Publishing studies have examined how books circulate, accrue authority and shape knowledge over time. The cultural historian Robert Darnton reminds us that books sustain cultural memory; the book historian Adrian Johns that print networks shape authority; and Leslie Howsam that publishing reframes histories for future readers.24 The circulation of both Colony and Disobedient Objects have extended their interpretative positions beyond the walls of the museum and into broader pedagogical and political contexts.

During Colony’s exhibition period, the NGV edition of the publication sold out. In the following year a trade edition was produced with Thames & Hudson Australia, placing the volume into national bookshops and libraries. As trade availability extends the publication’s audience beyond museumgoers to students, teachers and general readers, Colony accrues authority and becomes a reference point for subsequent research. The second edition of Colony is not merely a reprint but a redistribution: it converts a museum-specific argument into a widely accessible pedagogic resource. Disobedient Objects has likewise endured as a resource in classrooms, libraries and activist networks. It has been adopted in design history and museum studies teaching, reframing activist design as central rather than peripheral to the field.

In Colony, circulation is expanded through national trade, library and educational infrastructures, embedding its interpretative frame within public discourse and curriculum. In Disobedient Objects, circulation operates through transnational disciplinary and activist circuits, enabling the publication to function as an ongoing pedagogical and political resource. These differing circulatory conditions show how each publication operates as interpretation: Colony demonstrates how a museum book can operate as a primary instrument of interpretation rather than a retrospective record. By contrast, Disobedient Objects redistributes authority. As with Colony, the publication functions alongside the museum to extend curatorial interpretation as an autonomous artefact – one that continues to shape both scholarly and public understandings of activist design.

Conclusion

Colony and Disobedient Objects demonstrate the versatility of publishing as an interpretative practice across distinct museum contexts. Both projects use commissioning, design, apparatus and circulation as interpretative strategies, each shaped by their institutional settings, object fields and project goals. Museum publishing is a key infrastructure for interpretation. Rather than functioning as documentation, these books intervene in how institutions contextualise and remember their exhibitions and collections. Publishing serves as a critical method and medium: a site through which interpretation can be redistributed, histories revised and new audiences engaged.25