Curiosity over a curio cued up new Acton Museum curator’s career

When she was 6, Christie Jackson went to an antique auction with her parents. She grew “particularly squirmy,” she says, and to distract her, they bid on a wooden box filled with early clay marbles. 

Rummaging through the worn, blueberry-size purple, blue, and red spheres, she discovered a single glass marble that had “an intricate lattice of yellow, surrounded by thin bands of pink and blue.” It was so “dinged up,” Jackson remembers, “that it wouldn’t even roll an inch” before resting on one of its chips. 

“Why had someone saved it, though it no longer ‘worked’ as a marble?” the child wondered. 

“The joy and sense of discovery” Jackson recalls feeling that day is something she thinks about in her career as a steward of historic properties and objects. As the new curator and director of exhibitions at the Acton Museum, “I want to bring that same sense of discovery to our visitors,” she says. 

Jackson, who lives in Winchester and is the mother of twin eighth graders, brings two decades of curatorial experience to her position, most recently as senior curator with The Trustees of Reservations. She has worked with tens of thousands of objects and dozens of historic homes to connect the public to the stories behind them. 

Among the many historic house museums she helped steward is The Old Manse, which she says “holds so much history within its walls, from its wallpapers layered over time, to the graffiti hidden in nooks and crannies, to its objects that tell the story of local artists, writers, and scholars over the centuries.”

While studying aquatic and marine biology as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Jackson became intrigued by the technology enabling people to travel on waterways, which led to an interest in ship design and interiors. From there, it was “a natural evolution to explore material culture and historic houses.” 

The unusual path the Wisconsin native took to a career as a curator enables her to approach her work “with a very interdisciplinary lens.” She earned two master’s degrees, one each from the Harvard School of Education in Museum Education and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. 

Jackson has long admired the Acton Museum and its “remarkable” collection, which allows a curator “to really be creative” when approaching exhibits and “to help make historic objects relatable to our lives today,” she says. 

The museum, Jackson adds, “is a place for dialogue, learning, and gathering within a community. That dialogue can be emotional, beautiful, contemplative, or unexpected — and sometimes all of those things. I feel very happy to be part of the team here.”