Exhibiting Excellence: Challenges to Finishing a Museum Exhibit

Associate Director: Collections
Amanda McGuire places exhibit text

Last week, I posted about how a museum exhibit is built. Associate Director of Collections Amanda McGuire took some time to talk with me about what goes into choosing an exhibit theme and content. Today, I'd like to tell you all a little more about the challenges we face when we're preparing our exhibit.

What are some of the challenges you encounter when putting together an exhibit?

Anything and everything.  Sometimes you have too much information, sometimes not enough.  Sometimes you can’t find artifacts to help tell the story and sometimes it is hard to decide what to leave out.  We print a lot of things in house and technology doesn’t always cooperate when you need it.

We have also had guest curators in the past.  In 2009, for the exhibit “Embattled”, Gail Stephens wrote the text.  She has studied Wallace’s military career extensively and wrote the book “Shadow of Shiloh” so who better to write the exhibit text on Wallace’s military experiences

Do you only use artifacts that belong to the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum collection?

No.  We use as much of our own collection as we can but it is very limited so we often look to other individuals or institutions for loans.  We have borrowed items from the Ramsey Archives at Wabash College in the past and last year we borrowed some items from Wallace Scholar Roger Adams.  We do not have any artifacts relating to Wallace’s time in Cincinnati in 1862 and that was a big part of our exhibit last year so we knew we needed to have some objects to help tell that part of the story.  Roger graciously loaned us several items that helped fill the gap left by our collection.  This year we borrowed a jacket and kepi that belonged to Henry Wallace as a young boy from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.  One of the curators there attended a meeting here and told our Director about the items in their collection.  When we decided to do the exhibit about the family, we knew this was something that we wanted to include because we really don’t have a lot of objects related to Henry.  Our Associate Director: Collections got in touch with the curator and started the process of obtaining the loan.

Are there challenges related to the amount of space or the shape of the exhibit room?

Of course!  There is no straight wall in the carriage house so it is hard to get the exhibit cases level and the labels to appear straight on the walls.  The large exhibit case only has two places that it can sit and be level (this year is actually the first time it will be in a different location) so that limits how we can display items as well as the flow of the exhibit.  If you use a level to hang the labels or the large acrylic quotes, they look incredibly crooked due to the slope of the ceiling so it all has to be done by eye and what looks straight instead of what actually is straight.

What factors do you have to take into consideration when planning an exhibit?

You have to think about how much space you have, where artifacts and labels can go to make the exhibit flow well and how to tell the story in an interesting way. Another important factor is the balance of artifacts and text. Visitors at a museum learn from the information on labels, but an artifact can often convey more emotional impact than text, so it's important to have a good balance.

What are some challenges that occurred specifically with “Generations”?

World War I US Marine Corps
uniform belonging to Tee

We didn’t know a whole lot about some of the family members.  At first we didn’t know how we were going to talk about everyone.  It looked like it was just going to be biographies about everyone but that is kind of boring.  After doing some more research we found that there were a lot of similarities so we decided to explore those more.  Making the connection of shared characteristics with Lew and Susan tied the exhibit together.  Once we figured that out it was a little easier to focus the research and ask the family the right questions.  We also did not have a lot of artifacts for some people.  We have a lot of stuff related to Lew’s grandson Tee but it is all centered on his military career.  We barely have any artifacts related to Henry (other than his photographs) and his other son Lew Jr.  Some members of the family like Josephine and Lew III, we had never seen pictures of or only had baby photos.  Members of the Wallace family were kind enough to scan some for us to use in the exhibit.

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Our exhibit officially opens tomorrow, so be sure to stop in and check it out! We're also running a Facebook check-in special to kick off our exhibit opening. If you visit, make sure you check in on Facebook to receive a 10% discount on all gift shop purchases!

Exhibiting Excellence: How a Museum Exhibit is Built

We are all getting excited about our upcoming exhibit. "Generations: The Descendants of Lew and Susan Wallace" opens to the public Tuesday, March 12. If you visited us today, you would find the Lynne D. Holhbein Education Room mostly empty, which just a handful of vinyl labels and an artifact or two. But show up on March 12 and you'll find a full-fledged exhibit!

Since this is my first time behind the scenes of putting together a museum exhibit, I was fascinated by the process behind putting an exhibit together, and wanted to give you all a behind-the-scenes look at how we put together the story you'll see in a couple of weeks.

How do you decide on a theme for an exhibit? Is it done by the whole staff or a single person?

It is usually a staff decision.  We talk about what we have done recently and what questions we get frequently from visitors.  Sometimes the exhibit decides itself.  For example, in 2010 when the Study was closed for renovation, we still wanted visitors to see the iconic pieces of the Study and still be able to tell Lew Wallace’s story without them actually going into the Study.  That led to us doing the exhibit “Sanctuary”.

Right now we are in the middle of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, so last year it made sense to talk about what Lew was doing in 1862 since that was big year in the war for him.  He really didn’t do a lot as far as the Civil War goes in 1863, so we decided to take a year off from talking about the war. We wanted to focus on the rest of his family because that is something visitors frequently ask about, and we wanted to learn more about them as well.

What factors are involved in deciding what the exhibit should focus on?

It helps to already know something about the topic.  Even if we don’t have a lot of information to begin with, as long as we have a starting point, we can usually fill in the rest later.  We also have to think about what artifacts we have to go along with the exhibit topic.  Objects sometimes tell a better story than what we can do through exhibit labels. If we don’t have artifacts in our collection, is there somewhere or someone out there that does have them?

We also have to think about how big of a story it is.  We have a very small exhibit room so we have space limitations to deal with.  No one wants to stand in that room for an hour reading exhibit text, so we need to be able to tell the story we want to tell in a short and concise way that is interesting.

What is the research process for an exhibit?

We always have an exhibit fact sheet for each exhibit.  This tells us the logistics of who is responsible for what, what the budget is, who the audience is, what the thesis of the exhibit is and what impression we want visitors to walk away with.  This really guides where our research should go and what we want to tell our visitors.

Research often starts a year or two before we actually install an exhibit.  We start with what we know and what has already been written about that topic.  Sometimes we have interns who have already researched and written up papers on it. An intern last summer researched Lew Wallace and the Henry Wirz trial and wrote up a paper on it.  We will start with this when we plan our exhibit for next year.  

We also look at Lew’s own words about a subject by looking at his autobiography.  That usually leads to more information or even more questions that need to be answered.  We have a group of Wallace scholars that are always willing to answer questions.  You never know where you are going to find an answer to a question. 

Our Associate Director: Education (Erin Gobel) often does research on the internet and ends up finding some obscure piece of information completely unrelated to her original search.  We always file these away so we have them when we need them.  The Indiana Historical Society has a huge collection of Lew Wallace material so we usually look to see what information they have as well.  For this year’s exhibit, Amanda and Erin spent a day looking through records to find out more about the Wallace family.

Who picks the artifacts that are used in an exhibit? How do you make those decisions?

This is usually done by the Associate Director: Collections (Amanda McGuire) with input from the rest of the staff.  She looks through the collections records and compiles a list of artifacts that are relevant to the exhibit subject and shares that with the staff.  Then it is a matter of logistics and what makes sense.  There are some things that are just too big to fit in our exhibit cases.  Often times these are items that are already on display in the Study so we just make sure to point them out on tours and relate them back to the exhibit. 

If something is in really poor condition, we try not to put it out on exhibit.  If we can, we make a replica to display instead.  This is often done with photographs or letters.  We also try to avoid putting the same things on exhibit year after year.  When we talk about the Civil War again next year we will try to have different items on display than we had out last year.

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Stay tuned for the next post in our series on exhibits, when we'll talk about some of the challenges we face when putting an exhibit together!

Wallace & his Walking Stick

Among the extraordinary items in the Study, the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum has a collection of canes associated with the General. Throughout his life, Lew Wallace maintained a military bearing and erect posture that was frequently commented upon. He did, however, on occasion use canes. Beyond aids to walking, canes were also ceremonial gifts in the 19th century that were offered in recognition of significant events or to honor important people.

Lew Wallace with cane in hand exiting
the Study, ca. 1900.

According to museum records, one of the canes in the museum was made from a sapling that was growing where General Wallace pitched his tent prior to the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. In later years when the General travelled to the battlefield he visited his campsite and asked for wood from the maturing tree. Wallace was given the wood and he sent it off to Tiffany’s in New York where a cane was made and an ivory handle was affixed.

The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum celebrates and renews belief in the power of the individual spirit to affect American history and culture.

A Look Inside Our Collection: Randolph Rogers

Throughout his life Lew Wallace had a deep interest in the creative arts. He created original works of art and he acquired works by others. One of the most recognizable works he acquired was a bronze bust of himself created by the famed American sculptor, Randolph Rogers. Wallace’s bust is signed by Randolph Rogers and dated 1862. It was cast by Jules Berchem of Chicago. Who actually commissioned the bust and how it came to Wallace is unknown. It is, none the less, one of the most important works of art in the collection.

Randolph Rogers was born in Waterloo, New York, July 6, 1825. Growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he moved to New York City at about the age of 20. Various accounts have Rogers moving to New York to pursue a career as a magazine illustrator but ultimately finding work in a dry goods store (some say a department store). At any rate his employers discovered his aptitude for carving and promptly financed his trip to Florence, Italy in 1848 so that he could pursue formal training. In Florence, he studied at the Academy of Saint Marks with Lorenzo Bartolini. When Bartolini died in 1850, Rogers moved to Rome where he established his own studio. It appears he may have returned to New York for a brief period, but for most of the rest of his life he lived and worked in Rome.

Rogers quickly established a reputation as one of the outstanding and most prolific American neoclassical sculptors of his generation. In 1852, he had a sculpture entitled “Night” exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York. Although this work has been lost, it was very well received. He followed this work with one entitled “Ruth Gleaning” in 1853. The enormous popularity of this statue led to his receiving the commission for the main entrance doors of the U.S. Capitol. The bronze doors stand seventeen feet tall and weigh an impressive 20,000 pounds. Called the Columbus doors, they represent scenes from the life of Columbus in bas relief. Throughout the 1850s, Rogers’ works were largely of mythical subjects in a neoclassical design or portrait busts. Perhaps his most popular sculpture was “Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii.” He sold almost 100 copies of this particular statue and it is considered by some to be the most popular American neoclassical sculpture ever created.

Just prior to the Civil War, Rogers received a commission to complete the Washington monument that stands in downtown Richmond, Virginia. This monument had been left unfinished by Thomas Crawford, its original designer. This was a fortuitous commission for another reason because in 1857, during his time in Richmond, Rogers married. Around this time he was also completing a statue of John Adams in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts and “Angel of the Resurrection” for the Samuel Colt monument in Hartford, Connecticut. Beyond these monumental works, Rogers was one of the most sought after sculptors by Americans who were completing their grand tours of Europe. It was customary for travelers who were preparing to depart Europe to sit for a portrait bust in one of the studios in Rome, and Rogers was one of the most popular artists.

By 1863, Rogers was beginning to receive commissions for busts and statues relating to the Civil War. In just a few years he became the preeminent sculptor for Civil War memorials and statues with notable commissions like the Soldiers Monument in Gettysburg, the Michigan Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Detroit (considered among the first large scale commemorations of the Civil War by a large city), an impressive statue called “The Sentinel” for Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, a statue of Abraham Lincoln for Philadelphia and one of William H. Seward in Madison Square Park in New York. In keeping with the Civil War commissions he was receiving at this time, he created the bust of Major General Lew Wallace in his Civil War uniform.

In 1873, Rogers was chosen a professor of sculpture at the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, the first American to be so honored. In 1882, he suffered a stroke and was never able to work as a sculptor again. In 1884, he was awarded the order of the Caviliere della Coronoa d’Italia, an honorary knighthood bestowed in recognition of service to the Italian Republic.

Randolph Rogers passed away in Rome on January 15, 1892. Among the museums in America that boast works by Rogers are the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Detroit Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian in Washington, the Brooklyn Museum/Luce Center for American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and, closer to home, the Indianapolis Museum of Art which has it’s own version of Roger’s famous “Ruth Gleaning.” With the bust of General Wallace created by Randolph Rogers as part of our art collection, the Study is in good company.

The Conspirators

Perhaps Lew Wallace's best-known painting (not that he was famous for art), The Conspirators made the journey from storage to the Study


Movers from Red Ball Moving carry in the custom-made box containing The Conspirators.


Museum staff and volunteers lift the oil painting atop the bookcases in the Study.

Museum Director Larry Paarlberg and Collections Manager Amanda McGuire examine the placement before descending their ladders. The current location not only shows off the painting but also what some of Wallace's artwork would have looked like next to the original colors of the Study interior.

Back Home in Indiana

Lew Wallace's Artifacts are finally back in the Study! Museum staff and volunteers will now spend days unpacking artwork and arranging furniture to reflect Wallace's use of the building.



The furniture, including the grandfather clock, are not in place, but at least they are in the building!

Movers from Red Ball Moving Company, generous supporters of the Museum, prepare to move Il Pensiero (The Thinker) to its pedestal.

Museum Director Larry Paarlberg adjusts the "Girl with Goats" majolica vase in its corner. The colors in the ceramics blend well with the newly restored wall in the southeast corner of the Study!





Associate Director Amanda Wesselmann and Grounds Manager Deb King unveil "The Turkish Princess," a gift to Wallace from Sultan Abdul Hamid II. She is now back in her familiar place above the bookcases.

Found: Letter to Bumpa

During a visit today from Nicholson Elementary second-graders, we showed a few artifacts relating to Lew Wallace's occupation as an author. One object was a notebook Wallace used to jot notes, keep accounts, and draft correspondence. Below we have included images and transcriptions as we read them (General Wallace's handwriting is not always easy to make out, and the spelling is at times inaccurate).


Wallace drafted this telegram to Mr. Howland in Indianapolis. As far as we can make out from Lew's hasty handwriting, it reads, "Capt W Wallace Presidio. S. F. Will be at meeting of GAR San Francisco. Have your acounts ready then. L.W." Notes on other pages refer to plantings and itemized accounts for labor and materials. Some, like the bottom page pictured in the photo, include dimensions for spaces ("7 ft + 9"" is pictured here) - perhaps Lew was planning gardens around his home and Study?

The General was not the only Lew Wallace to write in this notebook. June 14, 1903, a younger writer got a hold of notebook and pen and jotted "Lewis Wallace," and "General Wallace," "Lewis Wallace grand son of general Lew Wallace." Interestingly, the elder Wallace wrote consistently in pencil in this notebook, while the grandson Lew Wallace Jr. tried his hand at pen and ink.

A few years earlier, dated June 3, 1899, a child (we assume Lew Wallace Jr., who was born in 1892) began a letter to his grandfather: "Dear Bumpa We went out rideing yesterday an..." Our guess is that Bumpa, or Grandpa, interrupted the little writer and we will never know what happened during the riding excursion!

The Art of Lew Wallace: Over the Deadline

1865 was a year of events and activity for Lew Wallace. Early in the year he was sent to Mexico to prevent Mexican support of the dying Confederacy. While in Mexico he learned of the end of the Civil War and the death of Abraham Lincoln. Upon his return to Washington, D.C. he served on the tribunal that tried the Lincoln conspirators and he was the presiding judge of the tribunal that tried Commander Henry Wirz for war crimes. Wirz was in charge of the infamous Civil War prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia. After a two month trial, Wirz was found guilty on eleven of thirteen counts of murder and sentenced to death. On November 10, 1865, Wirz was hanged on the site that is now occupied by United States Supreme Court.

During the trial of the Lincoln conspirators Lew Wallace made small pencil sketches to pass the time. During the Wirz trial he also spent time sketching. As the trial unfolded one story in particular haunted the general. He heard stories of the deadline—a line within the stockade which the prisoners were forbidden to cross. Just beyond the deadline was a small stream. In gripping testimony the court heard about a prisoner of war stretching his emaciated arm toward the stream, his hand holding a tin cup. When his hand crossed the deadline, he was shot and killed by one of the Confederate prison guards.

Wallace sketched a vivid image of this unnamed man in tattered pants lying in the mud with his outstretched hand over the stream. This sketch survives, but the whereabouts of a painting based on the sketch is not known. The finished painting was exhibited in Chicago in 1867, in Boston in 1873 and in Indianapolis in 1878. The painting was generally praised for its boldness of conception, technical skill and somberness—although the Boston Advertiser did find it too “horribly realistic.”

Sometime after its exhibition in Indianapolis, the painting disappeared. Whether Wallace retained ownership of the painting and gave it to a friend, whether it was damaged and discarded by family, or perhaps was given to an association or museum and resides deep in a vault somewhere has been lost to history. While the fate of the painting and the name of the subject are both shrouded in mystery, we are fortunate that the sketch survives to convey both the extent of the General’s talent and the personal side of the trauma of the Civil War still so fresh in 1865.

Preserving the Legacy: Cleaning the Collections

In 2006, USA Life One Insurance (previously Ben-Hur Life)donated a ritual trunk to the museum. The trunk contained over 100 items related to the Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur fraternal organization, including hats, capes, leggings, pennants, sashes, pins, jackets and robes. When museum staff went to retrieve these items from the basement of the Ben-Hur building in downtown Crawfordsville, they discovered that the contents of the trunk were damp and moldy. At that time, the best thing the museum could do was to dry out the damp pieces and seal them in plastic bags and boxes so the mold would not damage other artifacts in the museum's collection. Through various grants, we were able to purchase a HEPA vacuum and the necessary storage boxes and materials to properly store this part of the collection.

Acting associate director Amanda McGuire and grounds manager Deb King suited up this week to start the process of cleaning the mold, mildew and dirt off of the donated Tribe of Ben-Hur collection. This required them to wear nitrile gloves, face masks and long sleeves to protect them from the mold. The powerful HEPA vacuum works great in removing the dirt and mold from the items, but the process is long and time-consuming. Care has to be taken to prevent damaging the costumes with the powerful suction of the vacuum and every inch of each piece has to be cleaned.

So far, 4 boxes and 1 plastic bag have been cleaned and moved over to archival boxes. There are still 5 more boxes and 2 more bags to sort through. The next step is to catalog each item so we know what we have, give them a number so they can be easily identified and pack them away in archival boxes with acid-free tissue as padding. Stay tuned for before and after pictures!