Filling the White Cube: Installation Week

“Text and Textiles: Crafting the Lives of Guy & Irene Buzzard” opened last week, so it seems fitting to look back at Installation Week. The Historic Administration Program staff strove to create a balance between theoretical and practical experiences when they designed the curriculum. Installation Week provided the opportunity to mix the two in a real world exhibit.

We walked into the Tarble Art Center, and viewed the eGallery, a.k.a. the empty white cube. We had one work week to transform the space into a professional, meaningful exhibit before our audience arrived, including the son and grandson of Guy & Irene Buzzard.

Two particularly time-consuming tasks confronted our class: building walls and installing vinyl lettering. Framing wall units was a new experience for most of the group, but within twenty minutes of arrival, the entire class jumped into the task, crawling on the floor, arranging timbers and predrilling holes. Everything proceeded smoothly until all of the cordless drill batteries ran out at the same time. Exhibit Lesson One: no matter how carefully one plans ahead, the exhibit gremlins interject their own complications.  All in all, the walls took the better part of three days to frame out, cover with sheet rock, apply the mud, sand, and paint. 

Installing vinyl lettering posed the other major challenge of the week. Brittany was familiar with this process, but it was new to the rest of us. After an instructional session with Brittany and Mike S., we set to work marking the walls, and placing the lettering. For those unfamiliar with vinyl lettering, it is the same material applied to trucks and cars, only with weaker adhesive. The process includes firmly rubbing the lettering with a rubber blade and peeling the backing off, setting in the label in place on the wall, then repeating the rubbing and peeling steps until the lettering adheres to the wall properly. The process may be slow, but the results are clean and professional.

The rest of the work went quickly, in comparison. The installation of artifacts, setting up the hands-on activities, pointing lighting units and hanging labels kept us busy for the rest of the week. By the end of the day on Thursday, the exhibit was ready to open. That is, until Mike S. noticed a single typographical error on a label. It was minor, but needed to be fixed. Bev in Media Services printed a new label overnight, and it was installed at 2:02pm. Even with this last minute replacement, the HA class completed the project with time to spare.

“Text and Textiles: Crafting the Lives of Guy & Irene Buzzard” will be on exhibit in the Tarble Art Center at Eastern Illinois University until June 27, 2014.

 

 

T-Minus Four Days Until Opening

**I accidentally posted this to our blog from last semester, so this is a few days behind schedule, but hopefully everyone saw it in its original post, and here it is now!**

 

I did a little theater in high school. It was nothing worth putting on my resume, just a few silly small-town shows. Since we’ve entered exhibition install week, though, memories of my brief stint in showbiz are flooding back. Install week is a lot like theater tech week—well-scheduled plans, last-minute alterations, small-scale catastrophes, and of course, THE question: “Will it all be done in time?”

 

I’m inclined to believe the answer is yes. All of the things we have been working on as individuals and in our teams are coming together—quite literally as we assemble the various parts of the gallery space. When we got to the eGallery this morning, there were several objects in the space, but it might have been difficult for an outsider to see what the room was going to be. Not for us, though. Thanks to months of planning (And a lot of help from Sketch Up!), we all have a vision. This construction stage is more exciting than overwhelming, because we know where we are heading, and we have plans to make it happen. Just like a theatrical production, we have memorized our lines and putting on our costumes and arranging the set is the only thing left. We know what Friday night will look like because of our planning. There is still a lot of hard work to cram into these last few days, but it will all be worth it when that curtain goes up.

 

This picture is of our “stage” in the early part of “set construction.”

 

Opening Night: Drama, Nervousness, and Excitement

Opening night has come and gone, and now we can look back and smile. But as anyone who has put together an exhibit knows, or any kind of presentation really, the lead up to the opening is full of drama, nervousness, and excitement. 

We were lucky, or maybe we just prepared well, but the drama was minimal the day of the opening. We had a few labels that still needed to go up that morning, we found out last minute that some of our framed artifacts needed to be re-framed because the attachments for our first choice frames hadn’t been strong enough, and one of our websites that was linked into our exhibit through a QR code didn’t get linked up before the opening, but all in all opening day in the pre-opening hours was less stressful than most of us expected.

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Templin

I can’t speak for my classmates, but I was nervous the whole day leading up to the opening. To be honest though, it wasn’t about the exhibit; we’d done the best we could and it looked really good. I was nervous about the opening and the weaving demonstration that I had to give at it. Less than a week before the opening, I had learned how to weave for the demonstration. So running through my head all day were worries that I would forget what something was called, that I would screw up while I was weaving, or that I would say something that was wrong. Turns out I had nothing to worry about.

Photo courtesy of Desiree Ramirez

And that’s when everything turned to excitement. Our night was finally here, the crowd was large, and I had finally managed to remind myself that weaving was fun, and as long as I could communicate that, everything would be fine. As it turned out, my demonstration lasted much longer than it was originally intended to because so many people had so many questions. I even had the amazing opportunity to talk to the son and grandson of the Buzzards about their memories of Guy and Irene weaving together. In all, the night went well, people enjoyed themselves and our exhibit, and most importantly, everyone left happy.

Down the Home Stretch

With less than two weeks until our exhibit opens, it’s hard to believe that everything is coming together so smoothly.  Most of our mounts have not only been built thanks to Mike S. and the Tarble staff, but painted as well thanks to Brittany and Jim.  All of our labels have been printed by Media Services and are being mounted by all the teams this week.  The Publicity Team has done an amazing job putting postcards, posters, and press releases out in the community.  Amanda and Undercutters have printed our vinyl quotes.  As far as the Exhibition Team goes, we met with Mike S. on Monday at the Doudna Sculpture Studio on campus to go over what needs to be done there before we can begin proper installation.  Starting this weekend, we will build our colored walls and finish painting our mounts so that we are all ready to go on Installation Week next week.  Our Installation schedule is complete with goals for each day.  All that’s left is to finish inserting names into the shifts each day.

Although we’ve had a few bumps in the road (with Midwestern Spring comes sickness) and next week will be busy, I can’t wait to finally see our exhibit become a reality.

History Books and Crochet Hooks

Public historians need a wide variety of skills. In addition to the research and writing skills that traditional historians need, public historians need to be familiar with graphic design, technological applications, customer service, and event programming, just to name a few. The HA program has broadened my horizons in many ways and helped me to begin to develop more skills that need to be kept up the sleeve of any public historian. The most recent skill I’ve picked up is one I had no idea I would ever use for academic purposes: crochet.
The Education Team (Stephanie, Erin, and I) have been working to put together video tutorials for various crafting techniques that the Buzzards used. The lot fell to me to make the tutorial for crochet, but I did not know how to crochet at all. Fortunately, once I began researching, I found that the basic stitches are not too difficult.
After some practice, I was ready to film, and Stephanie ran the camera while I tried to explain and demonstrate what I had just learned. The video editing process came next, and that was a bit of a challenge that also involved some trial and error as I tried to remember what we had learned in our iMovie training session at the Gregg Lab.
Even though I don’t plan on starting any crochet projects for a while yet, it is satisfying to have something concrete that I can use to demonstrate the learning I’ve been doing. I can clearly say, “I now know something I didn’t before.”
Thinking about this has caused me to reflect on the learning process in general and how it can be difficult to measure. We’ve been talking about this in our Interpretation class, and reading from Falk and Dierking’s book, Learning from Museums. As we are looking for jobs and internships, it’s exciting to think that our jobs will be places of learning for us, as well. We will learn new historic content, of course, but we will also develop new skills—ones we might not have even expected, like crochet! The best thing is that this will happen throughout our careers and not just the first few years, because of the very nature of museum work, and that is very exciting.
Since my video is still undergoing editing, here’s Stephanie’s on Huck Weaving—something she did not know how to do before this program, but now she’s quite talented!

Construction has begun!

That’s right, our exhibition construction has started!

Thanks to the assistance of Mike S. and student workers at the Tarble our towel racks and platform risers have been completed!  The three section color paints (green, blue, and red) have been purchased and painting will begin shortly.  Mike S.’s mockups of the platform riser and towel rack are pictured below.

Our label formatting was also finalized this week and all labels and pictures have been submitted to Media Services to be printed!  The class will learn to mount labels in the next few weeks.

Since the beginning of the budgeting process, we have wanted to buy as many materials from local businesses as possible.  Although shopping local has not been an option with all of our purchases, we’ve done pretty well!  One of our largest purchases was vinyl wall-cling quotes to be placed on the wall in each section. Thanks to Undercutters, here in Charleston, we’ve been able to keep that expense local.

The exhibition team also submitted our final budget this week and ended up further under budget than expected.  Some changes were made to the construction of our wall sections, which cut the price of materials nearly in half.  Hopefully we will not encounter any surprises and will continue to be under budget!

Not to scare my colleagues, but our exhibit opens in less than a month!

Outside the Gallery

All museum exhibits have one thing in common: there are more artifacts and information available than can fit into the physical exhibit space. The task of selecting the pieces to display and which stories to tell falls to the design team. Fortunately, today’s designers can move outside the gallery walls and utilize the internet to include items which aren’t selected for the physical exhibit.

Recently, the HA Class of 2014 explored different ways to share information from the Text and Textiles exhibit via web-based software platforms. Utilizing a variety of programs, the team created a series of exhibit elements designed to provide in-depth information about the Buzzard Family including a timeline, photo albums, maps and a family tree.

Dr. Buzzard placed great importance on his family, illustrated by the effort he put into the family newsletter-The Buzzard Beacon. He also created family histories for both his and Irene’s families. The genealogical information in the scrapbook was prepared for exhibit by translating it into a series of family trees using Lucid Chart. The family tree project led to some ethical questions: If a museum owns a document including a family tree, does the museum have the right to publish the genealogy without the permission of living family members? In today’s climate of identity theft, should living family members be included in published family trees? After much discussion, the team decided to publish a family tree ending with the Buzzard’s children, in the interest of security and privacy.

Hobby sites, such as Pinterest and Picasa, make it easy to post photos and create themed photo albums. Seven albums feature images related to the Buzzards and the exhibit. The pins “Starting a Life”, “Moving Forward”, and “Crafting Together”, document Dr. and Mrs. Buzzard’s activities across fifty-four years of their life together. “Textiles Thursdays” features items from the Buzzard Collection of the Tarble Art Center. Visit the “Text and Textiles” Pinterest page to explore these and three additional albums related to exhibit progress and textiles.

Other online exhibits include a timeline of the Buzzard’s lives alongside major events of the twentieth-century, and an interactive map featuring locations important in the lives of the family. Projects like these inspire museums to develop additional content for their exhibits, and allow our guests to further explore topics, stories and artifacts.

For more information about the Text and Textiles exhibit, please visit our website at:

http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html

The Art of Exhibit Trailers

Ever wonder how companies manage to promote their products or events in a short period of time on TV? So do I. In the recent project that the publicity/marketing team is doing, an exhibit trailer is in the works. We had a general idea of what we would like to do: promote the exhibit and promote the Historical Administration program. What we found out that it is easier said then done.

Thanks to Brittany, one of our fellow classmates who is part of the exhibition team, and her work with Google Sketchup, we were able to export the images into a video format. It took about an hour to export the video from Google Sketchup and have it ready for editing on iMovie.

So we now have the footage that is approximately less an a minute, but now what? The next step that we took was to write a brief script of what we would like to say in the video, separated in several parts. Using our press release which we created recently for our publicity launch, some sections for our video were already written up to use in our video.

Next, we needed a voice… a voice that could sound a bit like Dr. Guy Buzzard, hence we chose Jim. After finishing our script, we recorded Jim’s voice using Audacity, a free audio editor and recorder program. Audacity allows us to record, edit, and also export the recordings as MP3’s. Perfect!! Our class attended the Audacity training workshop to get those extra technology skills, which came in handy when creating this trailer. There were some problems we encountered while using the program, but ultimately for it being a free program, it did its job. We were able to clean up the sound, combine various recordings and insert them within the audio that we ultimately used. One of those problems was that one of our recordings that Jim had done for both the introduction and end of the video were somewhat lost. We tried not to panic and loose precious time, therefore I took our script and recorded the introduction and ending to place in our video.

While editing, the next challenge that arose was timing. Timing was not on our side because when we finally got all the audio we needed, the video was too short, or when the video was finally edited and great, the audio was off. The program that we used on the Mac computer in the HA lab  in order to edit our video was iMovie. Just as we received training on Audacity, we also received a workshop training on iMoive last semester. iMovie is an amazing program to use when editing videos because it has so many special features we could use, such as slowing down the video, zooming in or out of a clip, and of course, add audio into it. Since the Google Sketchup video was a bit short in the end, we thought it would be a great idea to use our famous 3 tier image we use and placed our social media sites to promote them as well in our video. (shown below)

Patience is key when doing a trailer so after adjusting the video and audio on iMovie, we were finally able to view our final work.  After 3 long hours, we were finally finished. We recorded the voice tracks, we edited the video clips, created an ending slide to promote our media sites, and lastly we created our first exhibit trailer. Take a look:

Since this is our first trailer (because yes we will be creating more videos for ya’ll to see), it was a great experience to learn how to create one and also take into account that audio and video editing is not as complicated as felt in the beginning.

Check out and follow our progress on our media sites:

Website: http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Textandtextiles2014
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/buzzard2014
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/textandtextiles/
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtWOFohjb8IrKGlpBGhoXlg

The Buzzards Just Keep Coming

At this point, many of our social media followers may be wondering about our use of the Buzzard (original image), especially on sites like our Facebook page. Perhaps you imagine that this was something the Marketing/ Publicity team (Desiree, Stevy, and myself) found on Google and randomly turned into the profile picture for the exhibit. However, the original image as seen below, actually came from one of the pages in the Buzzard Beacons. The Buzzard Beacons are a collection of letters, poems, and sketches of everyday life written by Dr. Buzzard from 1950-1974. In one of the many letters he sent, Guy Buzzard drew this image as a play off his name. Therefore, the Buzzard drawing provides a distinctive way of showing Guy Buzzards unique personality and sense of humor.

While our exhibition class was researching Guy and Irene Buzzard we found this image along with a few others and decided to use them in our exhibit and social media sites. Since then, the Buzzard has undergone several transformations based on the original design. The first image is the original black and white drawing, taken from the Buzzard Beacons. Then, Brittany who is currently a member of the Exhibition team took this image and added the three main colors from our exhibit: green, blue, and maroon.

           Original Image                                                     Colorful Image                                 

                                                         

The next incarnation of the Buzzard recently appeared on our website. As many of the groups complete their digital programs, the Marketing/Publicity team added additional space to the website under the Education page. While these new projects are being completed, Stevy created this new Buzzard image, complete with signpost and construction safety hat.

                                                        Construction Buzzard

After creating and sharing this new image Stevy came up with an inspired idea. As we continue to promote the exhibit through our website and social media pages, she worked with Photoshop to create new images of the Buzzard showcasing different hats, outfits, and careers. Some of these new images include the National Park Service Buzzard, the Detective or Sherlock Holmes Buzzard, and the Eastern Buzzard among others.

         National Park Service Buzzard                       Detective/Sherlock Holmes Buzzard

                                                        

As you can see, not only is the Buzzard an important figure in our exhibit, but Stevy (in connection with the Marketing/Publicity team) was also able to utilize her Adobe skills from several workshops on campus to create new images for the social media sites. Every week a new Buzzard will appear, so be on the lookout to see the newest version. You can also keep up with the Buzzard on Pinterset, Twitter, and Facebook from our website at: http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html.

                                                            Eastern Buzzard

Educating the Public: Interactives and Special Events

When creating an exhibition, the whole point is to educate visitors on the subject that the exhibit focuses on. So when discussing teams for the exhibit this semester, it seemed natural that there would be a team dedicated to education. What I didn’t realize is how expansive education could be within a single exhibit. The education team this semester has worked on everything from exhibit labels (making sure they give good descriptive history without being too long) to interactives and special events. It is the last category that has been the most fun to plan, but also the most frustrating.

Education in an exhibition is troublesome because you have to find a way to make your panels and artifacts educate both children and adults. This is difficult enough for docents and interpreters who can interact directly with the public, but especially so for an inanimate object that can’t read its audience and react. One way that museums in general, and our team for this particular exhibition specifically, have found is that interactives can be a way to diversify the education and allow for a different style of learning. Because the exhibition focuses on textiles and will include a full size floor loom, the education team has chosen to include a hand loom station that visitors can use and try weaving for themselves. The interactive can be beneficial for many age groups, and can even be a bridge point for adults working with children within the exhibition. Although interactives are more traditionally thought of as children’s activities, weaving is more typically an adult hobby in today’s society, making this interactive good for adults and children.

Hand looms like these will be used in the exhibition, providing a learning experience for both adults and children.

Special events are also a part of making an exhibition more personable, allowing direct contact with people rather than just panels and artifacts. Although the exhibits need to be able to speak for themselves most of the time, it’s always exciting to be able to explain more than you can fit on a 70 word count label to someone in a conversation. And even better, there are so many forms this type of event can take! For example, the education team is putting together a curator’s tour, an opening night weaving demonstration and a question and answer event on how the exhibit was made. All three events will draw different types of visitors, allowing different learning experiences and different ways of presenting information.

If you would like to learn more about our events, or explore some of our online interactives, please e-mail us at textantextiles2014@gmail.com or visit our website at http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html.