Exhibition-making behind the scene
“I love behind-the-scenes stuff and assume you do too”, writes Kathleen Stocker at the National Museum of Health and Medicine as she posts some pictures of the work on their new exhibition ‘Facial Reconstruction’ (with plaster models of faces undergoing reconstructive surgery). More pictures here.
I do indeed love behind-the-scenes images and descriptions. Unfortunately, museums rarely publish material about exhibitions in the making or, for that sake, pictures/movies from their conservation shops or collecting work.
We have done a few attempts in that direction (see, for example here and here), but we could do much more. It’s a great way to engage the public in the making of the museum, from acquisitions to exhibitions.
Sharon MacDonald’s in-depth ethnographic analyis of exhibition-making at Science Museum in London (Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, 2002) is an excellent companion to such more episodic reports.
04 Dec 2008 Thomas
When I was public affairs officer at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC (2000-2007) I actually encouraged media coverage of our exhibit installations.
I asked Washington Post columnist John Kelly if he’d like to help install a new exhibit (my last as PAO at the Museum) and he agrred. We had great fun that day!
Making a Spectacle at a Museum
By John Kelly
Tuesday, February 20, 2007; Page B03
Anybody know whether you can get plexiglass-lung disease from installing museum exhibits?
I mean, when you’re building a see-through sarcophagus for an object, you create a lot of little curls and shards of plexiglass, what with all the cutting and drilling. What if they make a beeline straight for the old alveoli, like dust from a coal face?
This thought came to me last week as I joined the folks at the National Museum of Health and Medicine to help transport and mount a new artifact. That’s the museum on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center that may be best known for its “wet tissue” collection — a human leg swollen with elephantiasis will always be my favorite — and for specimens from the Civil War, when the museum got its start.
It can be a spooky place, what with the skeletons and embryos — the latter destined to float forever in their formalin-filled glass jars. But it’s a fascinating place, too, a testament to both the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to and the ways that doctors try to soothe them.
I’d been invited to help with something that fell into the second
category: a piece of medical equipment called an LSTAT, short for Life Support for Trauma and Treatment.
“It’s basically a portable ICU,” said Alan Hawk, the museum’s collection manager. Not much bigger than a stretcher and weighing 180 pounds, the LSTAT contains a ventilator, defibrillator, infusion pump and EKG machine. Alan had had it about a year, a gift from the manufacturer, Integrated Medical Systems.
The first step was to go to the museum’s warehouse, out Interstate 270 in Montgomery County. Most of the collection is there, stacked toward the ceiling in a setting reminiscent of the final scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Crates are labeled with their contents: “U.S. Army Field X-Ray,” “Kolff-Brigham Dialysis Machine.” A wooden World War I-era wheelchair with a wicker seat sat next to a massive steel contraption that called to mind the unholy union of bank vault and industrial pizza oven.
“It’s an autoclave used to sterilize instruments in the anthrax lab at Fort Detrick,” said Alan. Ah. Best to wash my hands when I get home, I thought.
The LSTAT was on a shelf about 20 feet up, in a heavy-duty case covered with FedEx labels. Alan let me drive the forklift a few yards, but he did the honors when it came time to gingerly lower the LSTAT to the floor. (And I’m glad. I had visions of crashing into part of the museum’s neuroanatomy collection. They have thousands of slices of animal brains mounted on glass slides: cat, raccoon, owl monkey, deer mouse, wombat, Bennett’s wallaby, ringtail possum. . . . One false move with the forklift and I’d have been picking broad-nosed bandicoot brain out of my hair for days.) After we loaded the LSTAT into a quarter-ton truck, Leroy Nelson drove us back to Walter Reed.
If my experience is any guide, a lot of putting on a museum exhibit is spent figuring out how to get things in doors and down hallways. There’s a fair amount of carpentry involved, too. It’s kind of like a big do-it-yourself home remodeling job.
Steven Hill, the museum’s exhibits manager, had designed something he called “big and kid-proof”: three tall plexiglass sheets that would surround the LSTAT, with text and photos on the museum wall to explain what the thing does and show it in action.
Plexiglass doesn’t just install itself, you know, so we drilled holes,
tapped them and screwed the plexi to the wall. We took the LSTAT out of its crate, muscled the crate into the display, then hoisted the olive drab LSTAT — imagine a beefy stretcher with switches and readouts — on top. I think I hung the pictures relatively straight, but it was late and I’d been working since 8:30 a.m.
There’s a lot to see at the museum — priceless antique microscopes, the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln — but I know where I’m taking the kids first when we visit. And they had better not leave any fingerprints.
Hi Steven:
“I asked Washington Post columnist John Kelly if he’d like to help install a new exhibit (my last as PAO at the Museum) and he agreed. We had great fun that day!”
What an excellent idea! I mean: 1) you had a great day!, 2) you got public exposure in the Post, and 3) you got a chance to see exhibition making from an outsider’s point of view.
I’ll pass the idea on to Bente, our public outreach officer, if she hasn’t read your comment already.
Hi Thomas,
Well, thank you for the kind words. In this case, everything did, indeed, turn out well for everyone.
But I have to admit that my zeal for coverage wasn’t always shared by my colleagues in the collections sections.
So, being aware of, shall we call it, the sometimes touchy nature of the folks in collections, I made it a habit to ALWAYS check with them first when I had a promotional idea.
But this approach didn’t always work.
For example, I specifically received a buy-in from all the affected staff to pitch to the producer of the Dirty Jobs show on the Discovery Channel to send host Mike Rowe over to the Museum to help one of our collection specialists change out the formalyn in some large specimen jars. All was well until a Dirty Jobs producer got back to me that they were definitely interested and wanted to come by for a pre-scout.
Suddenly, my collections colleagues got all wishy washy on me, claiming that changing the formalyn wasn’t just dirty, but dangerous, and would be done in under less than pretty conditions that might put the Museum in a bad light, etc., etc.
So, it was my sad duty to inform Dirty Jobs that “we had changed our minds.”
There went my credibility.
And as everyone knows, that’s something that someone in public affairs cannot afford to loose.
So, my counsel to your public outreach officer is, always get pre-approval before pitching an idea for coverage to the media, and GET IT IN WRITING!
:-)