Salem Witch Trials 1692: Interpreting History and Finding Relevance

For those of us in New England, the story is all too familiar: in 1692, mounting hysteria led to the deaths of 25 innocent men, women and children in the Salem witch trials. Or is this account really all that familiar?
This presentation, by Dan Lipcan and Paula Richter, two Peabody Essex Museum curators, charts the remarkably different ways we can understand the 1692 Salem witch trials. Taking us through four successive Peabody Essex Museum exhibitions that they've curated, 2020 to 2024, they reveal just how many dimensions there are to the Salem trials, and how our views of them change. Salem Witch Trials 1692: Interpreting History and Finding Relevance coincides with the opening of the must-see fourth of these exhibitions, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., on July 6. (We'll be offering exhibition tours, so stay tuned!)
For museum aficionados, Salem Witch Trials 1692 is a curatorial odyssey - the story of how people on the inside of creating exhibitions seek to make relevant and important a single moment in American history.
For us, the public, it's also a journey of understanding. While each of the four exhibitions presents primary sources, including original court documents, books and objects, and tells the personal stories of those involved in the trials, each exhibition poses us with different questions.
Were the witch trials a shocking example of intolerance and injustice or simply instances of individual tragedy and social breakdown? Are they best understood through the eyes of artists? Should we now consider retrospective justice for the victims? In examining four PEM exhibitions they've curated, Dan Lipcan and Paula Richter ask us to consider these different interpretations and how they've evolved over the last four years.
The Peabody Essex Museum is host to one of the world's most important collections on the Salem witch trials and, as a former repository of all the legal documents, offers digital images of this extraordinarily rich collection of legal documents. This exhibition reflects the unique holdings and insights of this most special of museums and its equally remarkable curators.
THE PRESENTERS
Dan Lipcan serves as the Ann C. Pingree director of PEM’s Phillips Library, located at the James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center in Rowley. At PEM, Lipcan leads a talented staff charged with preserving and sharing the library’s extensive collection of books, archives, ships’ journals, broadsides, photography, and ephemera. Together they work to transform the highly respected research library - with its rich and varied global collections - into an innovative and active intellectual hub that supports the overall mission of the museum.
Lipcan has curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions, including “My Dear Davey and Chester…”, Let None Be Excluded: The Origins of Equal School Rights in Salem, Salem Stories, The Salem Witch Trials 1692, The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming, and, most recently, The Salem Witch Trials: Restoring Justice, which opened in the fall of 2023. Prior to his tenure at PEM, Lipcan was associate museum librarian at Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lipcan holds a B.A. in Studio Art (Printmaking) from Allegheny College, an M.L.S. from Queens College-CUNY, and participated in the Columbia Business School Executive Development Program at The Met. He is a member of the Grolier Club and the Art Libraries Society of North America.
Since 2009, Paula Richter has been responsible for curatorial research and support of the museum's changing exhibition program, related publications and core activities within the curatorial department. She has participated on exhibition teams for more than a dozen recent and upcoming exhibitions and numerous gallery installations and rotations. Richter organized the exhibitions, Wedded Bliss, the Marriage of Art and Ceremony and Painted with Thread: the Art of American Embroidery and accompanying publications. She was the coordinating curator for the traveling exhibitions, Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel and American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840.
For the 2003 PEM expansion project, Richter developed the gallery installation, Transforming Tradition: Arts of New England. Most recently, Richter participated in the curatorial teams for the museum’s Fashion and Design gallery and Made It: Women Who Revolutionized Fashion and served as a co-curator of Salem Stories, The Salem Witch Trials 1692 and The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming. Richter formerly worked for the Cape Ann Historical Association, the Sargent House Museum and Landmark College. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, Richter writes and lectures on American textiles and fashion, and New England art and decorative arts.