Join OMSI for the ExhibitSEED: Beyond Green Exhibits Workshop

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) is presenting 5 regional workshops this spring on sustainable exhibit development. At this one-day hands-on workshop, exhibit developers, designers, and fabricators will discuss practical skills for creating more sustainable interactive exhibits. The workshop will focus on case studies and concrete tools that allow exhibit teams to make more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable choices throughout the exhibit development process.

There will be a series of five workshops this spring. We are currently registering for the first workshop which will take place on February 25, 2012, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (1945 SE Water Ave, Portland, OR). The other workshops will be hosted by the Children’s Museum of Houston, the Miami Science Museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and The Franklin Institute.

To register, or for more information, visit www.exhibitseed.org.

The workshop is free for selected participants. Participants may also request travel funding. ExhibitSEED and the ExhibitSEED workshops are funded by the National Science Foundation and developed by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) with input from local and national museum industry and design advisors.

2012 Redd Award Recipient: Exhibition Overview

By: Elizabeth Sutton

Through the Looking Glass: Obsidian Travel and Trade in the Great Basin, Recipient of the 2012 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for Exhibition Excellence

The Utah State University Museum of Anthropology was honored at this year’s Western Museums Association Annual Meeting in Palm Springs as the recipient of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for Exhibition Excellence. The award was presented in recognition of the museum’s exhibit, Through the Looking Glass: Obsidian Travel and Trade in the Great Basin. This award is particularly meaningful to the USU Museum of Anthropology as we are a small teaching museum and committed to offering free admission and programming to the community.

The exhibit, Through the Looking Glass: Obsidian Travel and Trade in the Great Basin, at the Utah State University Museum of Anthropology.

Fifty years ago, our museum was unofficially founded in the basement of the Old Main building at Utah State University, as anthropology faculty began displaying archaeological artifacts and ethnographic items in cases in the hallway. Very much a labor of love by the anthropology faculty, the museum evolved over the years and was granted exhibition and curation space by the university, which was then filled with collections obtained by faculty during their course of their research and by select donations from community members. Currently, the Museum of Anthropology employs one full time Deputy Director who teaches courses in museum studies and anthropology, and oversees approximately thirty part time students each semester with program design and management, exhibition design and evaluation, and curation. The museum serves not only the students, faculty, and staff of Utah State University, but also the 100,000 residents of Cache Valley in Northern Utah. Our popular Saturdays at the Museum of Anthropology, funded by an IMLS Museums for America grant, provides free cultural programming almost every Saturday throughout the year. Students majoring in Anthropology and enrolled in USU’s interdisciplinary certificate in Museum Studies design each Saturday’s program around a theme, and engage audiences in hands-on activities and presentations by local scholars, artists, and experts.

As a university museum, we often struggle with the task of interpreting current scholarly research in relevant and engaging ways for our patrons. Interpreting academic journal articles for the general public is clearly not easy, but when it is successful, it has the power to bring the community together to appreciate and enthusiastically support academic pursuits and initiatives at the university.  In the fall of 2010, former Museum of Anthropology curator, Monique Pomerleau, and a group of anthropology and museum studies students began to plan the Through the Looking Glass exhibit as a vehicle to garner support for archaeological research conducted by Utah State University faculty. Everyone knows that archaeologists like to study rocks, but though this exhibit we hoped to educate people as to WHY archaeologists spend so much time with rocks. Using case studies of current archaeological research, the Through the Looking Glass exhibit explores the science and technology of obsidian studies, what obsidian was used for in the past, and how archaeologists use data from obsidian studies to reconstruct the behavior and movements of ancient peoples as they moved across the vast landscape of the Great Basin.

Under the mentorship of Ms. Pomerleau, students researched current articles on obsidian studies, wrote exhibit text, and agreed on the design of the exhibit. The success of our museum projects always relies on the collaboration of students, staff, faculty, and the community. A community member hand-built the base of the main exhibit structure and students spent hours sanding down the extremely treacherous edges of obsidian cobbles so that patrons would not be inadvertently injured.  Maps and other visuals were prepared in the Utah State University Spatial Data Collection Analysis and Visualization Lab as a joint project between museum and Geospatial lab staff and students.

Anthropology student Sarah Mooso carefully polishes obsidian cobbles for the exhibit.

Through the Looking Glass: Obsidian Travel and Trade in the Great Basin opened on January 22, 2011 with much fanfare. Community support was high and patrons turned out to see the new exhibit and enjoy flint knapping demonstrations highlighting the obsidian tool manufacturing process. Community feedback from the opening and subsequent exhibit tours has been extremely positive. The new exhibit is located next to our permanent exhibits on Ancient Life in the Great Basin which is frequently visited during school group tours. Local teachers consistently relate that they believe the Through the Looking Glass exhibit is a wonderful addition to our museum, and a needed contrast to the permanent cultural history exhibits. After learning about the history of human occupation of the Great Basin, students acquire knowledge as to specific methods professors at the university currently employ to continue to make discoveries as to how people lived in the region in the past.

A flint knapping demonstration during the exhibit opening engages audiences and illustrates the obsidian tool manufacturing process.

The Utah State University Museum of Anthropology is grateful to the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for granting us this award for exhibition excellence. This recognition is especially meaningful to our museum because we are committed to providing our students with professional skills and confidence in their ability to successfully compete in the museum employment market after graduation.

 

Elizabeth Sutton received her B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles and her M.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently a Ph.D candidate in Anthropology at UCSB where she specializes in household archaeology. With over 12 years of experience in education and 7 years of museum experience, Elizabeth has trained countless students and volunteers in curation and museum management and held curatorial positions with the John Cooper Archaeology and Paleontology Center at Cal State Fullerton, the National Park Service, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and the UCSB Repository for Archaeological and Ethnographic Collections. She currently serves as deputy director/curator of the Utah State University Museum of Anthropology where she also teaches courses in anthropology and museum studies and directs the interdisciplinary certificate program in museum studies for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Gearing up for Field Trips in Los Angeles

By: Clayton Drescher

Why do we work so hard on field trip programs?  Scheduling logistics, paperwork, lesson plan development, docent training, etc. require a massive group effort. Is it because we can all remember field trips from our youth?  Is it because an early museum visitor becomes a frequent museum visitor?  Is it because teachers often use words like “actual,” “genuine,” “first-hand,” and “new,” when asked what helps their students engage and learn? As museums, we are uniquely positioned to provide students with access to the kinds of experiences highlighted by those key words and it is important that we do our best to serve these audiences and be more than merely a repository for authentic art or historical artifacts.

Teachers need to justify field trips by citing what standards will be met, and students are able to find relevance and connections between a field trip experience and curriculum content in the classroom. But another undeniable benefit to field trips is the intangible, sometimes un-quantifiable, experiential learning that takes place.  My childhood memories of school field trips range from the dream-like (how did we end up at a dairy in West Texas?) to the detailed (Saturn’s moon Mimas looks suspiciously like the Death Star). These outings were highlights of the academic year; they exposed me and my classmates to new environments outside our neighborhood school, and made an impression on our young minds that helped us learn and think in new ways for the rest of our lives.

For almost the entire history of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles (founded in 1994), the school field trip format has been essentially the same: a walking-talking docent-led tour of essentially the entire museum with special emphasis on teacher requests and interests.  We host approximately 15,000 students of all ages each year and all our field trips are led by volunteer docents, 95% of whom are retired to semi-retired men. We have many docents who have been with the museum since the beginning and have a certain way they like to structure their tours. Such long-term habits are very hard to break and, overall, our docents generally prefer to tour older students and adults, who can interact on a more advanced level. Many of our docents do not engage as well with younger students (grades K-2, for example) who seem less focused and less able to comprehend the concepts behind some of our exhibits. Various efforts to provide refresher training on pedagogy and inquiry-based touring have met with some success but the difficulties surrounding K-2 tours were a frequent area of frustration.

A Petersen docent tours a class through the historic Streetscape exhibit, showing one hundred years of Los Angeles and the automobile.

For myriad reasons, we would neither forbid K-2 groups to visit nor would we turn them loose en masse and unstructured. So Petersen education staff decided to upend the touring status quo and create a program that would facilitate more positive interactions between our docents and our K-2 groups and also provide a more meaningful experience for the students themselves. Our goal was to offer a program that is at an appropriate comprehension level, inquiry-based, and allows students to exercise their imagination through hands-on art projects.   If those aren’t the core tenants of museum education, I don’t know what are.

The process of radically restructuring our 17 year-old tour experience for K-2 groups began in the summer of 2011 and continues every day.  We have learned so much along the way about tour logistics, volunteer management, teacher collaboration, and how children learn in our museum.  Some of the challenges we expected to face never surfaced while new difficulties show up out of nowhere.

Students create their own business and design it to attract fast-moving motorists.

We are proud of the work we’ve done at the Petersen and feel that other museums may benefit from seeing our program development process from the ground up.  But our program is still in its early days. K-2 school programs at our cross-town neighbors, the Autry National Center in Los Angeles have been going on for years!   They offer a wide variety of hands-on tours and activities designed specifically for targeted age groups, especially K-2.  Their organization and audience is quite different than that at the Petersen and I think comparing our two programs will present you, our museum education colleagues, with a broad range of possibilities to explore in your institution.

And what about the teachers?  THEY are who we have to convince to visit in the first place and to return as often as possible.  What input do teachers have on these programs and what suggestions would a professional classroom teacher have for us in the museum field?  Come and find out at the session “Gearing Up for New Audiences: Preparing Your Site, Staff, and Volunteers for K-2 Field Trips” on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 23, in Palm Springs!

Clayton Drescher has a background in archaeology, visitor studies, and museum education.  He has been with the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles for more than six years and has focused the work of the Education Department on finding new ways to engage diverse audiences with automotive history.

 

Recipe for Success: Arizona State Museum

By: Lisa Falk

Arizona State Museum’s project Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living encouraged conversations, understanding and action related to diabetes prevention, a critical issue in our world today, and especially in Native American communities. It began with a traveling exhibit of the artwork from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Through the Eyes of the Eagle series of books, which links diabetes prevention to Native American culture and targets elementary-school-aged children and their parents. When the museum decided to book the exhibit the question was raised as to how this display of watercolor drawings would have an impact in our community. So we turned to the community to ask.

What they told us and helped us create was an expansion of the exhibit to include the local story, active programming, and creation of a culturally relevant book aimed at older youth. After nearly three years of planning, the result was an expanded exhibit co-curated with Tohono O’odham Community Action, a reservation-based non-profit working to use cultural knowledge from the past to create solutions for the future, and inclusion of objects from the museum’s collections, production of two related videos, creation of a unique cutting-edge digital comic book, It’s Up 2 You!, and a traveling exhibit of the comic book. In addition some of the Eagle books’ artworks were on display at the University of Arizona Worlds of Words Library and we worked with them on school programs.

We used this opportunity to design exhibit and programmatic experiences that would engage family audiences. Programming included a large multicultural health fair produced in partnership with the Tucson Indian Center and many community groups, K-12 school programs, public library outreach programs, and lecture and film programs. In addition, blogs, TV, radio and print media coverage, resource materials for schools and the public, and jobs were created. University students learned via related internships and the museum’s collections grew to include Native designed skateboards.

One of the unique products of this project continues to engage youth in making healthy decisions. The It’s Up 2 You! comic book resulted from consultations with Native American and Latino teens and was co-written and illustrated by Native American artist/educator, Ryan Huna Smith. The comic book resides on the Pima County Health Department’s healthypima.org website and is also available as a free app on iTunes. The digital comic includes audio in English, Spanish and Tohono O’odham and a healthy challenge game. The University of Arizona’s College of Public Health and the American Diabetes Association served as content consultants and students and faculty from Ha:san Preparatory and Leadership School provided the audio recordings. A traveling exhibit of the comic book was on display at the Pima County Public Library where approximately 42,000 visitors saw it.

In evaluation surveys, the majority of people expressed that the exhibit and programs made them think about and inspired them to focus more on being active, eating healthy, and making others aware of how to live healthfully. They also stated that the exhibit and programs were as or more memorable, enjoyable, interesting, engaging and informative then other similar exhibits and programs.

Ingredients for Success:

As important as the products and their impact on our community’s health, was the deepening of the museum’s relationships with the community and the creation of new programmatic partners. We discovered that an exhibit that provides an unexpected angle on an important community and personal issue naturally lends itself to diverse partners and they encourage a variety of strategies for engagement. This in turn, helps make fundraising and PR easier and provides unexpected new resources. The experience made us feel that what we do is relevant and perhaps could help make a difference in our community.

• Collaboration: Invite wide participation as collaborators—not consultants. Allow your community to provide ideas and ownership of pieces of the project. Listen and be open to new ideas. When inviting others to become involved send an open invitation and invite them to invite others—you may be surprised by who comes and who later pops into the project. Don’t forget to invite your colleagues at the museum—they have ideas to offer outside their job areas and can become your allies for the project as it grows bigger than originally expected.

Several times when I didn’t know what to do, a community collaborator stepped in and made something possible. Our collaborators co-curated sections of the exhibit, organized programs, presented activities at programs, provided content expertise, and provided resources or funds. Tohono O’odham Community Action co-curated the exhibit and involved youth from their health program in the development. They also presented at programs and co-sponsored the opening. Their work gained broader exposure in Tucson, the youth got museum training, and the materials from their section of the exhibit will be used again in their own presentations. The Worlds of Words Library displayed some of the Eagle book artwork, provided programming for school groups, and gave the comic book voice during the Tucson Festival of Books. As a result, more people visited their library and learned what they did. The Pima County Health Department Communities Putting Prevention to Work project provided funds and marketing/promotion, participated in programs, printed the comic book and other materials, and is hosting the comic book on their website. The project helped foster their goals and they got a wonderful, cutting-edge product. The comic book pages are the most visited part of their website. These three collaborators provided big contributions that expanded our project and helped ensure reach and impact.

All collaborators, big and small, provided ideas, excitement, furthered outreach and made the project fun to work on. Be sure to keep your partners informed throughout the development, during presentation and to stay in touch afterwards. Thank them publically and privately reflect together on the process and outcomes.

• Be Creative: Don’t toss out ideas because they are too wacky, too big, or you’ve never done them before. The digital comic book was not something we’d ever taken on before and there was some resistance, but this aspect helped drive fundraising because it was “cutting edge” and relevant to the population for which it was intended, attracted an important partner, gave the project on-going life and furthered potential for impact.

• Engagement on Many Levels and Via Diverse Approaches: In your exhibit, provide information in many formats—from labels to hands-on activities to media to participatory techniques. Provide different avenues for engagement with the topic—from the exhibit to programs to materials created to ways for reflection. Remember that museum visits are social and that food, weight, and disease are family issues, not individual ones. Some programs or materials may be just for adults or just for youth and that is fine as long as you provide ways for families to interact with the information at other programs.

• Empowerment: What do you hope your project will accomplish for the visitor? We designed opportunities for visitors to think about issues of health and wellness, to better understand the social, cultural, political, historical and economic reasons for our national health crisis, to reflect on their own lives, and perhaps to take action to become healthier. Create ways for them to do something small to take the first step. Visitors received a pledge card for one thing they could do for themselves or their family to be healthier. At the cultural health fair everyone received prizes for participating in activities and making a pledge—instant gratification for taking the first step towards living in a healthy way.

• Resources: Take on the responsibility of gathering the resources so together you and your collaborators can make the vision a reality. Don’t be afraid to ask for help in approaching others for donations of products, services or money. Also, don’t worry if you don’t have all the content or audience expertise in house—your community collaborators will help fill in the gaps! Be sure to find the funds to hire staff to help make your project successful. Your partners don’t want to be saddled with the logistics of program coordination; they want to be involved with the creative stuff and presenting.

• Communication: Keep everyone in the loop and take responsibility for the timeline and communication. Report on your successes, and your challenges. Don’t forget social media for getting the word out as the project develops. Also, think about the messages in your exhibit and programs—are they creating stereotypes or helping to dispel them by presenting ways for deeper understanding? Be inclusive and don’t point fingers—most social issues affect all of us in some way.

• Involvement: Don’t make it hard to participate—you will discover how much time each person or group can devote and how they would best like to be involved. At first some of your partners may have ideas but may not see themselves actively participating, but as you continue to let folks know the direction things are taking, they may see the perfect spot for their involvement. And if you see a good spot for their expertise, don’t be afraid to ask or give them ideas of how they fit. Invitations and open doors are important. For our project, the Worlds of Words Library was initially interested but reticent to become too involved. They turned out to be an essential exhibiting and programming partner.

• Give Credit Where It Is Due: Publicly give credit and thanks to your partners.

This Recipe for Success was created for the revised edition (in prep) of AAM’s Feeding the Spirit Cookbook: A Resource and Discussion Guide for Museums, Food and Community http://futureofmuseums.org/events/lecture/upload/Feeding-The-Spirit-Cookbook-Final.pdf. A related essay on this project appeared on the Center for the Future of Museums Blog http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2012/01/its-up-2-you.html in January, 2012.

Notes on Technique:

Be open to learning as you put your project together. There are loads of resources about your subject, but you have to develop the skills to work with lots of different people yourself. Don’t worry if things don’t flow exactly as you thought they would—look at where they are going and how you can make it work. Nuture unexpected, but good ideas. Be sure to give credit to your collaborators. And remember, it takes more muscles to frown then to smile and jokes and laughter break tension.

For More Information:

It’s Up 2 You! comic book: look at it on the web at healthypima.org as a free app on iTunes for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (keyword: It’s Up 2 You!). It’s big—download over WiFi.

It’s Up 2 You! comic book: read about the project on the Center for the Future of Museum’s blog  futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2012/01/its-up-2-you

Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living exhibit at Arizona State Museum, general information pages on our exhibit: statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/eyes_of_the_eagle and various blog entries about different facets of the exhibit: statemuseum.arizona.edu/blog/

A Healthy Celebration video: watch on Arizona State Museum’s youtube channel youtube.com/user/azstatemuseum/videos

TOCA Youth video: watch on Arizona State Museum’s youtube channel youtube.com/user/azstatemuseum/videos

Tohono O’odham Community Action: a wealth of information on traditional Native foodways and culture. Visit it at tocaonline.org

Through the Eyes of the Eagle books: Check out the books and resources at www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pubs/eagle/index.html

Through the Eyes of the Eagle: Illustrating Healthy Living For Children traveling exhibit: www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pubs/eagle_exhibition.htm and www.cdc.gov/Features/EagleBooksExhibit/

Arizona State Museum www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/, www.facebook.com/arizonastatemuseum,
www.twitter.com/azstatemuseum

 

 

Lisa Falk, Director of Education (Project Director/Lead Curator), Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Note she will speak about this project at the WMA Annual Meeting.

 

Native Alaskan Communities: Telling Their Stories

By: Sarah Asper-Smith

In November, I traveled to Nome for the first time. I have been surrounded by incredible beauty my whole life—I grew up in the coastal rainforest of southeast Alaska, and stare out my window at tall mountains and lush, green forests. But the flight to Nome was breathtaking. Every region of Alaska carries its own beauty, different from the others. My nose was pressed to the glass for the entire flight from Anchorage, hoping that my iPhone would capture the grandness of this amazing place.

I have worked as a designer since high school, and started museum exhibition design in 2004, when I approached Bob Banghart, an accomplished exhibit designer, about his profession. He invited me along on a trip to Barrow at the very northern part of the state, and I have been hooked ever since. After working with the Juneau City Museum on subjects ranging from basketball to motorcycles, I decided to apply to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for their MFA program in Museum Exhibition Planning and Design. It proved to be everything I dreamed of, plus more. Being there intensified my desire to return to Alaska and work with small museums all over the state. Not only would I be able to help these communities tell their stories, but I could meet the extraordinary people in my extended Alaskan community!

November in Nome is of what you imagine when thinking of frozen Alaskan winters. It is not advisable to go out walking for long, but there was enough light that first day to photograph the frozen Bering Sea. Nome, population 3,600, formed as a city because of gold mining and at one time had a population of 20,000. Nome is a hub community for the small Native villages in the Bering Strait region.

The next day I presented to the Cultural Advisory Committee of the Beringia Center. The Beringia Center operates under the direction of Kawerak, Inc., a tribal organization that serves the Native communities of Bering Strait. And the Beringia Center aims to serve the fifteen different rural communities as a central hub of art, culture, history and science. There are plans for the development of a building in Nome, but the Beringia Center also wants to be a museum without walls, bringing exhibits and activities to the villages of the region that it serves.

That’s where I came in. My task was to develop the first of these exhibits. The Beringia Center has a collection of ancient harpoons in storage, and we wanted to develop a traveling exhibit based on these small artifacts. My first step was to meet with the Cultural Advisory Committee; to learn about harpoons and ask them their ideas about the kind of exhibit they would like to see. The Cultural Advisory Committee consists of a representative from each of the fifteen villages. Elders and community leaders sat around the table, ready to offer their knowledge and expertise. While the meeting took place in English, it was peppered with words and phrases from each of the Alaska Native languages represented: Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Siberian Yupik. The group patiently answered questions that I had about the harpoons–how did the toggling harpoons even work? They explained how the blade would fit into the tip of the harpoon head; after it penetrated the skin, the harpoon head would toggle and become stuck in the animal. In this way, the hunter could pull the seal or walrus out of the water, and the animal wouldn’t sink out of his grasp. Merlin Koonooka, an Elder from St. Lawrence Island told me: “we never hesitate to improve our equipment. We adopt to modern ways very naturally.” I also learned that traditionally, a young hunter’s first catch is given to an Elder in the village. It is a sign of respect, and also ensures luck for the hunter. I thought about how lucky I was to be sitting in this room with kind people willing to share their ancient knowledge.

I left feeling inspired, knowing that this intersection of adaptation and tradition is a powerful place to be. I also knew that it would not be appropriate for me to approach this project as an expert in harpoons–I’m not! But I can ask questions, I can provide a forum for discussion and sharing, and I wanted to learn as much as possible from Elders and community leaders who know more than I.

It was determined that the village of Elim would be the first exhibit location. And it had to be done in one month! I worked closely with Amy Russell, the executive director of the Beringia Center and others at Kawerak to develop an exhibit that would travel the ancient artifacts to Elim for a one-day exhibition. After consulting with language speakers, the exhibit title became Unaaq Asaaquq Uunghag, the words for harpoon in the three Alaska Native languages of the Bering Strait region.

I returned to Juneau to work on the exhibit, ordering necessary materials and planning a case that could transport the objects on a small plane. While I was in soggy Southeast, a powerful winter storm blew water from the Bering Sea up to the base of buildings in Nome and made national news. Returning to the community, I discovered that an already somewhat isolated and inaccessible place had become even more so. Everything in Alaska depends on weather. Unfortunately, this meant that many of the materials we had ordered for the exhibit were stuck en route in Anchorage or Juneau, and we had to adapt and make do. It seemed fitting, given the theme of the exhibit.

We traveled to Elim, population 300, a day early because we were worried about stormy weather delaying flights. The plane took 3 passengers: myself, Amy and a man who got off in Golovin on the way to Elim. We were met by a snowmachine pulling a sled, and so our exhibit traveled by car, plane and snowmobile to reach its destination!

Unaaq Asaaquq Uunghaq was held in the Elim City Hall from 5–9pm on December 15th. The exhibit contained a display of 7 harpoon heads, 2 harpoon blades and 1 counterbalance from the Beringia Center’s collection. Labels accompanying the artifacts described harpoon technology and told stories of hunting. A slideshow of historic and contemporary images as well as seal hunting and toggling harpoon simulation video clips played on a wall. We asked questions of the visitors, and displayed themed exhibit panels.

Visitors had been asked to bring in their own artifacts to share, two did so. It was thrilling to see contemporary harpoons alongside the ancient artifacts, and listen to hunters and Elders discuss the way the tools worked.

I designed eight different dialogue panels to ask questions of the visitors, and provided big sheets of paper and markers. Asking the community what they knew was very important to the project, as we wanted the community to feel ownership of the exhibit. Integral to this process are the stories of the community. Many visitors responded to these questions with personal answers, and I overheard visitors talking about the questions with their friends. The questions started some conversations, and the answers provided insight into Elim life. Harpoons and hunting segued nicely into a topic that everyone loves to talk about. “What is your favorite food that is hunted or gathered or caught?” The answers were written in different colors all over the paper:
Crab, rabbit, snow geese, moose, caribou
Mangtuk, beluga whale (maktak)
Half dried fish in whale oil
Black berries mixed with salmonberries
Pickled beluga whale
Agutak (a traditional dish of seal oil and berries)
Aged beluga whale
Aged seal flippers
Geese
Oogruk (bearded seal) and seal blubber, walrus meat
Panaaluk (dried oogruk meat)

We received 65 visitors during our exhibit, in addition to over 50 students that Amy spoke with during school hours. We knew it had been a success when we heard a visitor ask: When are you coming back?

Sarah Asper-Smith has the best job in the world. She is a museum exhibition and graphic designer in Juneau, Alaska, but gets to travel all over the state meeting interesting people. She was a Wanda Chin fellowship recipient in 2010, while she attended graduate school at the University of the Arts. She can be reached via her website: exhibitAK.com

The DIY Exhibit: A Walk Along San Francisco’s Waterfront

By: Jenny Meyer

It is safe to say that we are living in a time where most people are looking to save money and one of those ways is through “Do It Yourself” (DIY) projects. However many museums have been practicing the DIY mentality before it became popular.

I spent some time in 2006 working with Richard Everett and Amy Hosa at the San Francisco National Maritime Historic Park working on the exhibit “Cargo is King” which is installed aboard Balclutha a floating 1886 ship. I found that they did most of their exhibit work in house and that it was very hands-on. The opportunity to take on many roles, is what drew me to museums. There is a continual need to wear many hats along with something new to be done and learned everyday. I recently went back to help them with their latest exhibit The Waterfront located in their Park’s Visitor Center. The exhibit is a time machine that takes visitors on an immersive walk along the edge of San Francisco’s historic working waterfront.

I interviewed Richard Everett, San Francisco National Historic Park’s Museum Curator and project manager of The Waterfront to discover from his point of view as both museum professional and DIY exhibit expert, what it was like to produce and build this exhibit in-house.

 

1. What was the process to create a new exhibit in the Visitor Center at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park?

The front of the Visitor Center is your typical Visitor Center and orientation area with few artifacts and a basic orientation to maritime history. It sets the stage for the much richer exhibit in the back and was completed nine years ago. Although we designed the whole project from front to back, the back end of the Visitor Center was not completed until recently and the build-out took three years. It took seven years before we actually had enough money lined up to build the back and so during that time we installed a succession of three large temporary exhibits.

It took months and months of bureaucratic paperwork to get the money for the new portion, and the highest amount that we could ask for was 400,000 dollars. My team and I knew that was not enough, but we also thought we could get more and luckily that turned out to be the case.

We were lucky to have the experience and ability in-house to manage and hire experienced people to augment our staff, although it wasn’t all in-house with the design and planning.  I managed to convince Dean Weldon of Academy Studios, to take on the job of designing the exhibit with us. His staff and ours collaborated on a design for the whole project. We worked as a team coming up with the content, photo choices, the writing, and the layout of everything.

2.  What was the inspiration for “The Waterfront”?

The inspiration for The Waterfront actually arose from the ashes of failing to design a great and worthy exhibit for the back of the Visitor Center.  Initially we tried to do a major review that included all of west coast maritime history in a 3000 square foot space, since that is the mission of our park. Because the stakes were high, we luckily had a formative evaluation done to test our approach .  Many groups of people were consulted: tourists at the airport, tourists at Fisherman’s Warf, parents with children, educators, and also other museum professionals. The different groups were polled and they all said essentially it was “boring”. “It feels like a history lecture”, and “It tries to cover too much.”

So, Stephen Canright, the park historian then came up with the solution for the The Waterfront late one night. When he came in to work the next day he excitedly presented his idea to Amy Hosa, Visual Information Specialist, and myself. Stephen’s idea essentially began by recognizing that most of West Coast maritime history came to San Francisco and since San Francisco’s maritime history was what people really wanted to learn about first and foremost, “lets tell it as if they were walking along the waterfront of San Francisco back in time”. It can be immersive and can tell the story of the different kinds of shipping but also the stories of immigrants that came to our wharfs from around the world. Our imaginations took off and we fell in love with it. Everything else just seemed to drop into place.

3. What do you feel is the importance of why people should know about the Waterfront?

San Francisco has completely changed from the old maritime San Francisco that once was. The city leads as a center for creative thinking; in business, art, science and all kinds of other ways. Because it was a port, so many nationalities, people, immigrants, sailors and working types came here from all over the world, which lent the city its somewhat unique character and its multinational charm, its liberalism, politics and its creativity. Others of course… don’t agree with that but many do. It is important to show people all of history.  People benefit from knowing their pasts, their peoples past, and their locations past so they know where they are and how far along they have come. Then we can learn from mistakes of the past, or choose from the best of the past to help create the future. We hold a mirror up against what the old waterfront use to look like, what its character was, and we try to show what vestiges are still left today and how they influence the city. The old Waterfront influences today’s San Francisco and that is what we are trying to show.

4. What was the biggest challenge of building the exhibit?

The biggest challenge was to get it done. We knew we didn’t want to contract it out, because we had done it that way with the front of the visitor center and it that had cost almost a million dollars and could have been better. In addition, the low side estimate for building the back was 1.4 million with 6 computer kiosks; we eliminated the computer kiosks and substituted three video kiosks. Our staff had lots of experience building exhibits ourselves and so we knew we could do it for less. It would take more time, since money was the problem more so than time. The biggest challenge was bringing it in on budget. Still given that 2003 1.4 million estimate, we built it for a million flat, nine years later. I looked up the dollar difference in inflation and that is almost half price.

The biggest challenge was the amount of work, and to do it yourself at a museum quality level. The huge number of revisions, the technical challenges, hanging things at unusual angles and packing the exhibit full of films and audios…

5. Looking back, what advice would you give yourself knowing now what you know now?

One of the main things I learned, is that the project manager needs to be on site—in the space, in the office—where all the decisions need to be made all the time.  Being right on site is important to ensuring that things are efficient, the right decisions are being made, and things are not over or under built. Also, try to focus on one thing at a time, impossible though that is.

6. What would be your advise to other historic museums and staff wanting to create a exhibit?

First be really sure your plan is worth doing! I mean if you are doing it for the public ask them in an unbiased way if they would like it. The only way to really achieve this may be to work with an outside experienced evaluation team. Examine the goal then test first in real life whether this is what it actually should be. Really watch your estimates, budget estimates, and time. The quantity of work can get to you at times, so it is important to the people you are managing and project managing to keep it fun and moving forward at all times.

 

 

Japan at the Petterson Museum

By: Carol Gil

Through Labor Day 2012, the Petterson Museum of Intercultural Art is Celebrating the Traditional and Modern Arts of Japan with over 150 objects on display. The museum has almost 1300 Japanese artifacts from which we have selected a small sampling to represent various aspects of life in Japan in the last two centuries. Clothing and accessories, textiles, prints, musical instruments, ceramics, scrolls, metalwork, masks, figurines, dolls, tools and household utensils from the early 18^th to the late 20^th century are on view.

One of the treasures currently on display is a fragment of an imperial obi. The story of how it came to the museum is typical of many of our artifacts. It was donated in 1977 by Richard and Alice Petterson, the museum’s founders. They had purchased it at the Pilgrim Place Festival held at the retirement community of the same name, to raise money for their Health Services program and where the eponymous Petterson Museum is now located. The Festival in some respects is like a giant yard sale. Residents of Pilgrim Place and the wider community contribute items for sale for the annual charity event. The Pettersons, in their efforts to research the history of the silk and gold textile they had purchased “decided to create a group of interested persons who would undertake the collecting and preservation of Pilgrim Place treasures.” Thus was born the idea of creating what would become the Petterson Museum at Pilgrim Place.

The obi was imperial in its origins – the 16 petal chrysanthemum motif is restricted in use to members of the royal family of Japan. The Pettersons learned it had originally been owned by Miss Frances Clapp, a retired missionary to Japan and then resident of Pilgrim Place.  Ms. Clapp was born in Indiana in 1887, earned a degree in music from Pacific University, Oregon and subsequently studied music in Germany and at Columbia University. She taught piano at Pomona College from 1912-1916 before being sent to Japan by the Missionary Board of the United Church of Christ in 1918.

From 1918-1923 and again, between 1927 and March 1941, she taught organ, piano, choral music and music theory at Doshisha College in Kyoto. She spent the war years in Hawaii, witnessed the Pearl Harbor attack and “served as a buffer between the Japanese Americans and the suspicions of the white population until Japan’s surrender” during the war. One of the first missionaries to return to Japan in 1946 after the war, she continued teaching at Doshisha until her retirement in 1957. In 1965 former students in Japan arranged for her presentation to the Empress in Tokyo. At this event, the sister of the empress cut one of her obis in two and presented half to Frances in thanks for helping her to “set Buddhist scripture to western harmony”. She arrived at Pilgrim Place in 1966 where she died in 1977. Sometime during those last years, she gave her obi to be sold.