This article was published in Museum News September/October 2005.
From the Judges
From the Winners
The 17th Annual Excellence in Exhibition Competition was a standout with a stellar group of entries and a great session at the AAM Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. We’ve already set a few “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” for next year. The most important involves you readers who are involved in creating exhibitions: We’d like to have you enter the competition. Here are three compelling reasons why you should:
1) Get some free press! In the past, savvy institutions have leveraged this award as a great P.R. opportunity for raising visibility and increasing visitorship.
2) Reflect on your own process and product. As you gather everything from your exhibition in one neat package, you will see how much you’ve achieved. We’ve simplified the entry process—a 2- to 3-inch binder is all you need to get started.
3) Be recognized by your peers and further the museum exhibition field by sharing your work. How many times have you gone to a conference and heard of an exhibit or even an institution you knew nothing about and came away inspired? We owe it to our profession and to ourselves to help keep each other motivated and fresh. Sharing our work in the Excellence in Exhibition Competition is one of the best venues for doing that. Not only do we host an awards session at the AAM annual meeting, but we display all of the entries in the Marketplace of Ideas.
Be on the lookout in August for the eligibility dates and entry form at www.N-A-M-E.org (National Association for Museum Exhibition), www.edcom.org (AAM’s Education Committee), or www.curcom.org (AAM’s Curators Committee). For further information, contact the new coordinator, Lindy Farneth, at lindy@farneth.com.
Thanks to our great judges: Keni Sturgeon, CARE; Kevin Tucker, CurCom; Sonnet Takahisa, EdCom; and Michael Sands, NAME. Thanks also to our fantastic AAM Standing Professional Committee chairs, Beth Twiss-Garrity and Zahava Doering, CARE; Jim Hoobler and Linda Eppich, CurCom; Ann Fortescue and Scott Kratz, EdCom; and Phyllis Rabineau, NAME, who ran the competition, and to our new coordinator Lindy Farneth from CurCom. And a hearty thanks to all of our wonderful entrants.
—Gretchen Overhiser, 17th Exhibition Competition coordinator, CARE
From the Judges
By Michael Sand, NAME
“Is it effective?” It’s a seemingly simple criteria by which to measure exhibits, right? Not.
This year’s judges were confronted with 22 exhibit submissions, which for the second year, were not segregated by budget or category. Entries from aquariums, science and technology centers, and art, children’s, history, and natural history museums (as well as societies and governmental institutions) went head-to-head. Projects with budgets under $100 per square foot competed with others approaching $500 per foot.
We were varied, too. The judging panel included curators, educators, designers, directors, and visitor studies specialists. We saw widely divergent but mainly commendable submissions. Many seasoned and a few younger institutions succumbed to the inclination to overstate their impact. In the end, two of the more modest projects leapt out as being particularly clever and innovative at using their limited resources extremely well while remaining relevant to their audiences.
The exhibitions “Courage” from the Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, N.C., and “Teen Chicago” from the Chicago Historical Society carefully looked into the lives of their neighbors to find ideas and issues of great significance past and present. Each went to great lengths to reach out to their communities—individuals, businesses, and institutions—and offer forums and activities that brought them wider exposure, providing two examples of truly effective exhibits.
From the Winners
“Teen Chicago,” Chicago Historical Society
By Daniel Oliver, exhibit designer
Imagine being told to create an exhibition for an audience that by and large thinks history museums are boring. You have few artifacts on the topic and must cover 100 years of a subject that has been but scantily researched. The name of the exhibition: “Teen Chicago.”
The 2,800-square-foot temporary exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society (CHS) tells the story of the teenage experience in Chicago from 1900 to the present using videotaped interviews, artifacts, labels, music, photographs, and interactives. CHS hired a 15-member Teen Council, a cross-section of the city’s diverse youth, who became an important voice in the exhibition’s development, conducted more than 100 oral history interviews, and helped us to build a teen audience with a series of teen-oriented programs. Their mission: to make us cool. The exhibit takes visitors from a time when teens worked rather than attending school to high school’s role in creating teen culture to teen’s relationships with their parents. It ends, of course, with a section on play—dating, music, and hanging out.
What did we do right? We engaged teens—they see themselves in the stories presented. Throughout the exhibition there is plenty to do, including watching videos, playing interactives, and looking at objects, without being overburdened with too much information. I began working on Teen Chicago with a healthy dose of skepticism, but it has turned out to be the highlight of my 14 years in the museum field. Attempting something so audacious and having the Teen Council to challenge us sparked the staff’s creativity. As a result, the staff and teens have grown, our visitors connect to the exhibition in a meaningful way, and we have created a model on which other institutions can build.
The Courage Project, The Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, N.C.
By Tom Hanchett, staff historian
In 2004, the Levine Museum of the New South marked the 50th anniversary of America’s landmark school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education with The Courage Project. An exhibition, programming, and outreach, plus an innovative civic engagement initiative called “Conversations on Courage” brought the story to a local and national audience.
The exhibit focuses on Rev. J. A. De Laine, an African-American minister and schoolteacher from South Carolina, who organized more than 100 of his neighbors to file suit for equal schools. Thurgood Marshall argued the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was joined by four others under Brown v. Board of Education.
To tell the story, the museum drew on photos and oral histories assembled by Rev. De Laine’s children, who became active partners in exhibit development. The 3500-square-foot installation took visitors on a journey from rural South Carolina to the Supreme Court to issues of today. Working with a budget of less than $100 per square foot, exhibit designer Darcie Fohrman and museum staff found creative ways to engage visitors. At the start, for example, the gallery entrance was mocked up as a “white school.” The door was locked and a sign directed visitors to a side entry. At the end, life-size cutouts of current middle school students posed thought-provoking questions such as: Are schools now equal? Where is courage needed today? Visitors responded on Post-It notes.
The most innovative aspect of community programming was a civic-engagement effort called “Conversations on Courage.” Groups of executives or leaders from area businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits toured the exhibit together. Then facilitators from the Community Building Initiative, a local nonprofit that promotes race equity and inclusion, met with the groups for reflection and discussion. The opportunity to use history to dig into current issues of race and education attracted top decision-makers from the police department, courts, media, school system, banks, and more.
