Exhibit Workshops + Cultural Heritage Professional Gatherings in Vermont

Same old excuse for not blogging, though I have what feels like a dozen ideas a day. I can't remember the last time I sat down at my home computer to do my own writing/thinking!

But regardless, here is a very cool thing I've been working on at my job: exhibit workshops and cultural heritage professional gatherings around Vermont. I'll be teaching program planning & community outreach in preparation for Vermont History Expo at each of these workshops.

Thinking about an exhibit for the 2014 season? Whether you are planning an exhibit for Vermont History Expo, your historical society building, or to travel to schools or other venues, the Vermont Historical Society would like to invite you to attend a workshop that will provide some useful information for creating a successful exhibit.

These five workshops across the state will offer guidance from Curator Jackie Calder, Public Programs Coordinator Amanda Gustin, and Community Outreach Coordinator and Conservator Laura Brill, as well as provide time for organizations to work on their own exhibit planning. 

All workshops will take place from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm and are free of charge thanks to a grant from the Patrick Foundation. Most will be followed by a reception for Cultural Heritage Professionals in the evening.

Friday, March 28 -- Bennington Museum, Bennington
Friday, April 11 -- Middlebury, venue to be determined
Monday, April 14 -- Vermont History Center, Barre
Friday, April 18 -- Woodstock Historical Society, Woodstock
Monday, April 28 -- Old Stone House Museum, Brownington
If you would like to register or have any questions please contact Laura Brill at laura.brill@state.vt.us or (802) 479-8522.

Here's info on the Cutural Heritage Professionals Gatherings:

Cultural Heritage Professionals - archivists, educators, curators, librarians, conservators, preservationists, students, etc., are invited to join us this April for an early happy hour. We'll get a few appetizers, but other food and drink are up to you.

Friday, April 11 - 51 Main in Middlebury

Monday, April 14 - Mulligan's in Barre

Friday, April 18 - Richardson's Tavern at the Woodstock Inn in Woodstock

Monday, April 28 - Bailiwick's in St. Johnsbury

Curator Jackie Calder, Public Programs Coordinator Amanda Gustin and Community Outreach Coordinator Laura Brill will definitely be at the restaurants from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Please let Laura know if you are planning to attend, laura.brill@state.vt.us or (802)479-8522, and feel free to pass along this invitation to your colleagues!

Thank you to the Sheldon Museum, the Woodstock History Center, and the Old Stone House Museum for hosting the Exhibit Workshops on those days as well, and to the Patrick Foundation for a grant supporting the workshops.

FDR Presidential Museum & Library

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Museum & Library is the first of its kind, established while FDR was still president. (Though to be fair, that was a wide-open window...)

It's an enormous complex, containing FDR's childhood home, a visitor center with exhibits, and the archives themselves, plus outdoor space for exploring. I couldn't possibly do justice to the whole place in a short blog post, but I did want to point out a few things.

First, a re-creation of FDR's Oval Office, which uses a timeless, simple, effective exhibit technique to share more information about the objects in the space. I never get tired of seeing this done, because I can't recall ever seeing it really flop. (I'm sure it's happened somewhere.)

Second, this inviting outdoor sculpture. I often find outdoor sculpture creepy, especially when the figures are sitting on benches, looking very obviously not-alive, but this works for me. I admit to a huge history crush on Eleanor Roosevelt, and the idea of sitting down to talk books and big ideas with her is enormously appealing - and that's just what this looks like.

Basketball Hoops at the Basketball Hall of Fame

I'll admit, I was not impressed, on the whole, with the Basketball Hall of Fame. Some of that is perhaps due to prejudice (it's not my sport), but the larger part of it was frustration with the way their exhibits seemed designed largely for show and not for substance. I'm a fairly thorough museum-goer, usually exploring every nook and cranny, and I was struck over and over again by the bizarre places in which important information was stashed. The crowning moment of that problem was when I nearly missed the jersey that Wilt Chamberlain wore in his 100-point game - we had walked by it several times and only realized it was there when alerted by a (very bored-looking) docent.

That said, there is one thing that they do spectacularly right there, and that is the center of the museum, which is a large parquet floor with basketball hoops all around and carts of basketballs to play with. One side has hoops at varying heights so all ages can practice dunking, and the other has hoops from various eras, an excellent object lesson in history.

Wind Wall at Northshire Museum of Science

I visited the Northshire Museum of Science a few months ago for the first time, and quite liked it. I didn't get to explore fully as I was helping to ride herd on a two year old, but a few things stood out. The first of them was this installation, which showed how wind currents can move. It was simple, ingeniously made, and visually engaging.

Genius

Like many a museum professional, I document brilliant ideas so I can steal borrow them at a later date.

This sign on a door at the Rokeby Museum, a historic house museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, is sheer genius. It's right above the latch handle of a door leadin upstairs that must get opened all the time by over-curious visitors.

Text reads: "Not open to the public. But if you're really curious, ask about becoming a volunteer or tour guide."

Visiting the Shelburne Museum

Though I lived in Vermont for five years during college and afterwards, I never managed to make it to the Shelburne Museum, which I've heard referred to as the "Smithsonian of New England." It wasn't for lack of trying, but while I was in college my busiest times - the beginning and end of the school year - coincided with the only times the Shelburne was open when I was in Vermont; I always returned to Boston for the summer. In the years afterwards, life never quite lined up.

I'm very happy to have finally rectified that gross oversight with a special trip made two weeks ago for my birthday. On May 12, the Shelburne Museum opened "for the last time" - it's opening a new year-round education & gallery space in August, and while many of the buildings will be closed per usual in the winter, they will continue operations in their new building no matter the season. We visited the following day, May 13.

The new building was designed by Ann Beha & Associates, and it's strikingly modern. Most of the buildings & grounds at the Shelburne are rustic, Old New England style; this building takes elements from its landscape and surroundings (the abundance of natural wood and the beautiful copper roof) but its angles and facade are very clearly here and now.

The new building; view looking to the right immediately on exiting the visitors' center.

The building - "The Center for Art and Education at the Shelburne Museum" - will contain 5,000 feet of flexible gallery space, a 130 seat lecture and performance space, and  2,000 feet of classroom space. It will be LEED-certified and have all the bells and whistles one would expect of a brand-new gallery space.

Landlocked lighthouse, looking north.

Here's a more typical shot of the rest of the grounds. We got lucky; the grounds were stunningly beautiful with spring blossoms and growth, though the day was chilly.

One of the centerpieces of the entire museum is the ship Ticonderoga, used for passenger travel up and down and around Lake Champlain through the twentieth century. The museum itself is within just a few miles of the lake, and moving the enormous ship was an engineering triumph. Wandering the decks made me want to take a long steamship cruise - what a way to travel!

Still flying all her flags.

Another highlight of the Shelburne's collections is their textile space. In particular, I loved this way of displaying quilts: it is undoubtedly a bit tough on the fabric, but it really allows visitors to get up close and personal with the designs and the fabric. There were two banks of these panels, and quilts cycled through every two years: year 1 on the right, year 2 on the left.

The panels were enormous - queen bed sized - but moved easily, though I worried about their momentum once I had started moving them and cringed every time they banged even slightly.

A real highlight for me was their unbelievably extensive collection of carriages and wagons. From the jaw-droppingly luxurious to the everyday milk cart, from a Conestoga wagon to a racing sulky, they had it all. I could have spent hours and hours examining each and every piece of equipment - the Webbs' custom tack was incredible - but we only had so much time and the carriage barns were among the coldest buildings on site.

Just one angle of one floor of one barn. There can't have been fewer than 150 carriages and carts on display.

Later this summer, the Shelburne will be opening their summer blockbuster exhibition, "Wyeth Vertigo." I'm a big Wyeth fan - Andrew in particular - and I can't wait to go back to see this. It's got the very clever trope of focusing on the interesting points of view often found in Wyeth paintings, and it brings together three generations of the Wyeth family into one exhibition. The new director of the Shelburne, Tom Denenberg, comes from the Portland Museum of Art, so I'm sure bringing the Maine-based Wyeths to Vermont was right in his wheelhouse.

They're getting ready for the exhibition with this neat little garden, though, which will be planted (or has already been planted? I'm not much of a gardener, so I couldn't tell) with a floral design inspired by the use of color in one of Jamie Wyeth's paintings. The garden plot is right outside the gallery where the Wyeth exhibition will be housed. Great way to link the Shelburne's extensive outdoor space and the beauty of its surroundings with its inside art.

There's not much on the panel but it's titled: "The Shores of Monhegan: A Wyeth Inspired Garden at Webb Gallery." On the left is the planned garden layout; on the right is the inspiration painting, Jamie Wyeth's Asleep and Awake, Monhegan.

I'm glad I finally made it to the Shelburne; I loved many things that I haven't even mentioned here - the elaborately restored train cars, the folk art exhibit, the absolutely wonderful Alphabet of Sheep exhibit, the hat box collection (!), the equestrian bronzes in the Electra Web Memorial Building. There's still a lot left to see, too. It really lives up to the nickname "Smithsonian of New England."

Animal Care Room at ECHO Lake Aquarium

I'm combing through some of my old photos of museum examples, and came across this space, which I remember loving.

The ECHO Lake Aquarium is in Burlington, Vermont, right along the beautiful Lake Champlain waterfront. It does a lot of things very right. It takes some interesting risks in its exhibition - I'm going to try to write about the exhibition critique we did a the NEMA fall conference last year - but it generally holds with an open, crowd-friendly approach.

The animal care room was a neat example of that. Like all aquariums, ECHO has a large animal population that it rotates on and off view. I thought their solution to rotating animals off view was particularly nice, as well as their labeling of that space. Here's what it looked like.

If you can't read the photo, it says: "Taking good care of our animals is our top priority! From touring schools, libraries, and summer camps, to serving as the star attractions in our exhibits, our 'animal ambassadors' are some of our hardest working employees. Inside the animal care room, our creatures take a much-deserved break and receive special care from our staff.

Interactives at the Maryland Sports Museum

I've been quiet here lately, scrambling to wrap up one job, prep for another, and move myself and my horse within the next two weeks, while prepping to present at NEMA and working on some larger projects. I'm excited to be working with National Arts Strategies to write a few blog posts on important arts administration topics in the next few weeks. This Thursday is also the NEMA YEPs Halloween Happy Hour and of course I'm scrambling for a costume, even after all my good ideas.

Setting all that aside, though, I wanted to present briefly some neat interactives I saw at the Maryland Sports Museum in Baltimore, which was quite a nice museum all around. It had one room that was specifically directed at kids, and contained a number of interactives. Some worked well and were fun; others were just quirky and didn't seem to have a clear educational goal. I'll present each very briefly.

Entrance sign, talking about the significance of the locker room in sports and inviting families to play with the interactives.

Mimicking the actual signed baseballs in the museum's collection. Kind of neat, but didn't have much educational oomph to it, and was placed high enough that many kids would have trouble reaching past the middle of it.

By far the most popular section, demonstrating uniforms and equipment for each Maryland sport. The family in the picture spent nearly their entire time in the room in this section with their two sons. Could've used more interpretive labeling but what was there got the point across.

This was right outside the room space; it was really quite nicely reactive, and played well, but seemed to have absolutely no value beyond "whoa, cool." That said, I still played several games.

Museum Mules

The American Museum of Agriculture, a new museum under construction in Lubbock, Texas, recently purchased and euthanized two mules in order to mount their hides for use in a new exhibit.

The incident has gotten a fair amount of play in the press recently - Google "mules museum" and after a link to the American Mule Museum - which sounds like a cool project - just about the only results are negative news articles about the Lubbock museum.

The furor seems to have been started when the museum itself issued a press release on September 17 stating that it had purchased two mules - aged 28 and 32 - either directly from their owner or through the intermediary of a livestock dealer. The animals were no longer suitable for work and would have been transported to Mexico to be slaughtered for their meat.

The museum has been working with exhibit developer Museum Arts in Dallas, TX to create new galleries and dioramas, including one showing the McCormick Reaper (presumably) being pulled by two mules. Phil Paramore of Museum Arts stated that the exhibit's authenticity absolutely depended on presenting stuffed, rather than fiberglass, mules: "The reason that you use a real animal is to most accurately show the way the activity was done at the time. A fiberglass replica just doesn’t convey the same message."

This has gone over about as well as one would expect. An equine rights advocate named Elaine Nash started a campaign to save the mules, based on conflicting reports about the scheduled date of their euthanization, and a Lubbock area rescue named Ranch Hand Rescue started an online petition to do the same.

Nash told newspapers, in response to the museum's statement that they saved the animals from inhumane slaughter methods, "All they saved the mules from was a nice rescue home grazing under an apple tree — loved and petted and given treats … they could have had a wonderful life."

I think there have been a few major missteps in this whole situation that are going to haunt this museum for some time.

First: why the press release? It starts off reading like a triumphal announcement of future quality, and then degenerates into a defensive morass. Was the museum being threatened with exposure? Were they trying to be up front and transparent about the creation of their exhibit? Were they genuinely proud that they had saved these animals from slaughter? Did they have any idea of the anger the press release would invoke? Why not just stick with reporting on the exciting new exhibits?

Second: saying "they should have been rescued!" is a simplistic analysis. As the recession grinds on, thousands of horses have been neglected or abandoned, and every horse rescue in America is bursting at the seams. If they hadn't suddenly become famous, these two mules would not even have been a blip on the radar of the lucrative business of hauling horses across the border for slaughter. (Slaughter in the United States was abolished several years ago, which has led to only a small decrease in the numbers of horses meeting that end, and means that all horse slaughter now takes place in other countries, beyond the USDA's sphere of influence.)

If the mules genuinely were aged, no longer comfortable in work, and their owner would have trucked them to slaughter, then humane, veterinary euthanasia may have been a blessing for them. It's possible they were in chronic pain after a lifetime of hard work, and would not have been comfortable or happy in prolonged lives.  They would not have whiled away their hours in a field eating apples and adored by small children. Many would argue that responsible rescues should devote time and resources to animals that can have a second chance. These mules would have faced an uphill battle to be placed with an owner who could afford to keep two non-working animals.

Third, and most difficult to get at, is Paramore's claim that the exhibit would have suffered in impact with fiberglass reproductions of mules. I'm trying to think if I've ever seen another museum exhibit in which mounted & stuffed animals - of any species - were used as supporting evidence. Generally, animals displayed in that manner are the provenance of natural history museums. I know of a few prominent stuffed horses in museums - Winchester, Comanche, and Misty all come to mind - but all were famous in their own right and died natural deaths. Their identity as witnesses to history is the source of authenticity in their exhibits.

We talk a lot in museums about the power of objects. We argue that the real thing, the actual physical historical object, is the draw. For all that there are some excellent discussions to be had about the educational uses of reproductions, awe is usually reserved for the actual thing itself. Does that awe extend to the more ancillary pieces of an exhibit? Would I be less awed by an original McCormick Reaper if it were pulled by fiberglass mules? To use a comparison: am I less awed by equestrian armor at the Higgins Armory because it is displayed on a fiberglass horse?

I really don't think so. I believe the museum erred in taking Mr. Paramore's advice. I couldn't tell whether Museum Arts has used this technique with success in the past. Their website shows one possibility in its portfolio gallery of the East Texas Oil Museum, but it's tough to say whether the horses in the photo are reproductions or mounted. I would be extremely interested to see any studies or evaluations done on exhibits - history exhibits, not natural history - comparing the effectiveness or impact of stuffed & mounted animals as opposed to recreations.

It seems to me that in taking life in order to embellish its galleries (not for scientific purposes), this museum has crossed a line. They are reaping the consequences of that action now as well; as of September 25, the Museum of Agriculture's Facebook page had 392 likes, and the Save the Lubbock Mules campaign's had 1,266.

Where are they now?: Three approaches

One thing that I always appreciated at the various battlefields and museums we visited was when sites told us what happened after the fact for the individuals they talked about in their exhibits or videos. During the trip, we saw three different ways to do that, each of them effective for different reasons.

The first was at Shiloh, whose orientation video was far and away the best that we saw during the entire trip. It integrated first person stories - focusing on specific individuals during the battle - with broader narrative seamlessly, had just the right amount of excitement and seriousness, and was well-edited and well-filmed besides.

After the video but before the credits, each "character" from the film, from Ulysses S. Grant on down to couriers and privates, was given a short biographical slide with a photograph from later in life and a text description of where they went in life. It was great to see, for example, that the young Confederate courier we saw in the film survived the war and returned to the battlefield to help establish it as a National Park many years later. I thought that this style was an effective way of bringing out a personal story and then sharing its ending without lecturing or spending too much time.

The second was at the Museum of the Confederacy in Appomattox, Virginia. It featured two different "continuation" sections, one focused on soldiers, and one focused on civilians. These two sections were in different parts of the exhibit space; the first was in the midst of the space telling about the army and fighting of the war, and the second in the war's aftermath section.

Where are they now? Soldiers Edition.

Where are they now? Civilians Edition.

This method had the benefit of being interactive, and of allowing the visitor a choice as to which soldier or civilian to learn more about. One major problem, however, was that the panels didn't stay turned. They were difficult to turn over in the first place, and unless you held them down, they would snap right back to their top photograph very quickly. This discouraged me after reading two or three stories.

The last way of sharing stories was at the Chancellorsville Visitors Center. It was a small space, with generally outdated exhibits; it looked to my eye as if this particular section was a much more recent installation. It wrapped around an interior U-shaped wall of the entire exhibit space. No matter where you were in the space, one of your walls (to your left or behind you) was covered with stories.

In case you can't read the small label that began the exhibit, it explains: "Green panels in this exhibit identify individuals who survived the war. Black panels denote those who died."

I loved this approach. Several things about it were simple and yet effective.

First, the background color was subtle yet immediately obvious. Choosing a dark green instead of a bolder color meant that you could pick up quickly the information they wanted to convey, but your eye wasn't constantly drawn to the bright colors instead of the black colors. Standing at one end, or stepping back, gave an immediate overall sense of the horrors of war - there were so many black panels.

Second, soldiers and civilians were side by side. Each person had a short story to tell, and the text captured it succinctly. Putting everyone in together emphasized the point that any war, and especially a civil war, takes a terrible toll on a country's civilian population in addition to its soldiers.

Third, it continued throughout the entire gallery. No matter what you were learning about, you had a reference point and a consistent source of interesting information that grounded all the broader exhibits about corps organization and medical care.

Fourth, I even like the somewhat random scattering of these signs. No long, straight line, but a natural jumbling up that allows the eye to move from one panel to the next with interest.

Has anyone ever seen a "where are they now?" installation done? What do you believe are the most effective techniques for doing so?