Monday, October 8, 2012

The exciting process of creating an exhibit


            After reading the articles from this past week the whole exhibit became real to me. Alice Parman’s article “Exhibit Makeovers: Do-It-Yourself Exhibit Planning” had a wonderful  lay out of a step by step process to use to get the juices flowing with the exhibit one is planning to put on.  However, before Parman went into the step-by-step process she drew from the concept of Romance being an essential component of your exhibit, this element I completely agreed with. Parman stated that in order to have visitors enjoy your exhibit they need to fall in love with it. I understood this as being that in order for the visitor to enjoy the exhibit they need to fall in love with an object being exhibited. I related this to my dress, which is beautiful in itself. However, how can I make the visitors fall in love with my dress? I believe that my label that I associate with the dress will be my key to making the visitor fall in love, which I will touch upon in a bit.
            The step-by-step planning that Parman spoke about I believe is the strongest information that I read this past week. The first step is the Mission Statement, in this step our group decides what our goal of the exhibit it and what we hope the visitors will take away from the exhibit. Additionally, in the mission statement phase we need to develop a story line that will draw the visitors in and keep them interested in the objects throughout the exhibit.  Second Step is when we organize our story line into “galleries of thought”. Parman states that it is important to organize our concepts either based on category, chronology, analogy, observation/deduction, comparison/contrast, theme, and watchword.  All of these organizational concepts are important and we have the ability to choose how we would like to organize our exhibit, I could see us using a couple of these ideas so it will be exciting to see what we will choose. The third step is the inventory which Clare has already chosen what objects she felt were the most important to be displayed. The fourth step is to find a way to motivate and engage your visitors, in which we have to take into account that we will have multiple perspectives and opinions attending the exhibit so we need to take into account all of these experiences and motivate our visitors. The fifth step is when we would plan the “look and feel” of our exhibit where we take into account the color of lighting we would choose to use and the dimensions of the display of the cases being used. The sixth and final step is the production and installation of the exhibit which is essentially the blueprint of our idea and then making it become a reality.
            A point that I connected with in Parman’s section about Romance was that it is important to make the visitors feel like they are learning in their own desirable way. When students visit our exhibit it would be wonderful if the student would pick a piece of clothing or object and immerse themselves in the time and history that surrounds the object. This would allow the student to learn feel as if they are learning but without having to fill out hand-outs or take notes. The label would play a key role in this concept and development of learning. The title of the label needs to draw my visitor in and have them want to learn more about my dress. Which got me thinking about some ideas already yet I need to keep in mind that the label would need to match the overall theme of the exhibit.

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