Happy Halloween!

Henry's uniform, on loan from
Children's Museum of Indianapolis

If you're handing out sweets today, make sure to stop by the Study and hand some out to us! Director Larry Paarlberg is a fan of anything dark chocolate. Associate Director/Education Erin Gobel is a York Peppermint Patty fan. Grounds Manager Deb King likes peanut butter cookies. Associate Director/Collections Amanda McGuire prefers peanut butter M&Ms and dark chocolate. I personally will take anything that has the word chocolate in it, but Kit Kat and Butterfinger are a couple of current favorites. :) (We're also frequent customers at Dari-Licious!)

In Lew's day, Halloween wasn't celebrated much outside of Irish and Scottish immigrant communities, but even in the 1860s children did play dress-up. Lew and Susan's son Henry was eight at the outbreak of the Civil War, and he had a child-sized Union uniform and kepi. We currently have the uniform on display in our Carriage House. It is on loan from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and in less than two months, when our 2013 Generations exhibit ends, we'll be returning it to them. If you want to see it, make sure you stop in sometime between now and December 14!

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!