Exhibits Three Ways

Ask any museum professional, “What’s the craziest part of the museum schedule?” and most will promptly reply, “Exhibit Openings.” New exhibits require nearly everyone in the museum to take on a plethora of tasks from object-based work such as design, label copy, condition checks, and install to behind-the-scenes work including fundraising, marketing, and educational programming. So, it might seem absolutely looney that alongside the normal WPAMC schedule, I have been working on three physical exhibitions in my internships and a digital exhibition for a class.

When I began working with Winterthur’s Senior Curator of Ceramics and Glass, Leslie Grigsby, this summer, she had already begun planning the upcoming major Winterthur exhibition Dining by Design:  Nature Displayed on the Dinner Table (though at that point in time it was still affectionately referred to as “The Dining Show”). When Dining by Design opens in April 2018, it will explore motifs of nature on dining tools and instruments in a unique and engaging way, which may evoke more of a sense of contemporary art installation than traditional decorative arts exhibition. Nearly all of the objects in the show are Winterthur-owned or promised gifts. When I jumped into the project, we performed condition checks and color comparisons on thousands of objects, seeking out Winterthur’s best examples. We even measured historic tables, taped those dimensions on the Ceramics and Glass study carpet and laid out entire table services to determine how we would best organize the displays. As we still have a few months before the exhibition opens, we’ve spent most of the fall refining the label copy, staging the objects and adding fun and unique designs for the cases and displays.

 

When I began interning with Chester County Historical Society (CCHS) Collections Manager and WPAMC alumna Heather Hansen this fall, I found CCHS was also engrossed in new exhibit mania. CCHS was gearing up for an exhibition to open November 24, 2017 titled, “You’ve Got Mail,” guest curated by renowned philatelic and long-time CCHS volunteer Bill Schultz. It explores the history of the American postal service through the 18^th and 19^th centuries, particularly through the lens of Chester County, PA – certainly a change of pace from my work with tablewares! Like Dining by Design, this exhibition promised to have plenty of objects, but instead most of them would be loaned to the museum by members of Bill’s widespread philatelic network. By time I became involved with the project, install was almost underway. Rather than selecting and editing objects as I had done with Leslie, I helped facilitate the pick-up of loan objects – which one time even involved shimmy-ing twelve full-sized philatelic frames out of a garage, around a Buick Skylark, and across an alley! Rather than drawing designs for cases and walls, I jumped right in with mounting trade signs, organizing objects, taping up labels, and painting out hardware. In just a few weeks we went from a room full of quilts, to cleaned, rehoused, happy, resting quilts and a room full of stamps!

 

All the while, I have been taking a digital humanities course with Dr. Michael Zarafonetis at the University of Delaware. Our final project? To create a digital exhibition on a topic of our choice. When we got the assignment I thought, I’m ready for this, I’m already working on physical exhibitions. Since I already knew I wanted to use technology to bring life to my thesis research, a study of parlor aquaria and private fish keeping, 1850-1915, I already had a topic. But, in designing a digital exhibition interface, I found that while there are many similarities in theoretical process, the list of tasks varied quite extensively from my exhibition experience. I still had to gather objects, but suddenly the photographs of them became far more important. Rather than loan condition reports, these photographs carefully documented clear images of nearly every inch of my objects and would serve as the central evidence for my argument. Additionally, instead of design ideas, I found myself wireframing, or outlining how visitors will navigate and encounter the information on my site. This had me stumped for a while as I wanted visitors to still feel like they are entering an exhibit and experiencing objects first-hand. I find myself constantly adjusting where things are and how visitors get to them – an experience not unlike moving objects over and over until the flow feels just right. I also still needed tombstone and label information, but I wanted to think more creatively about the process of sharing it. Since the internet offers plenty of tools for all kinds of interactive images, maps, and timelines I was able to vary from the typical lists and paragraphs in favor of some more engaging models. As I work to finish the project, I find myself constantly referring to the processes I have been experiencing in my internships, but utilizing web tools to tweak the ways I conceptualize exhibit space. I have found that this necessary tweaking has allowed me to be more creative in my process and consequently in the proliferation of my ideas.

In the end, my exhibitions internships have taught me a whole host of new skills – from how to identify particular ceramic manufacturers to how to use a staple gun. But more importantly, they taught me umbrella lessons. Regardless of how you conceive of exhibits – big or small, in-house or loaned – or what stage you’re in – planning, wireframing or installing – they rely on the participant’s ability to use their toolkit (figuratively or literally) to creatively problem-solve. Building a narrative in a physical, or even digital space, inevitably comes with a number of headaches, which is what makes them feel so crazy in the first place. But in the end, the ability to provide access to a collection and to share a story is what museums do best. When it finally all comes together, no matter how crazy the process, we all leave with proud smiles on our faces – that is, until we have to take it down again!

 

By Rebecca Duffy, WPAMC Class of 2018