Preston the Intern - Building "Behind the Wire"

Preston Petermeier

Veterans Memorial Hall intern - Spring 2010

I am a History major at the University of Minnesota Duluth and this past semester; I did an internship at the Veterans Memorial Hall. During my time at as an intern, I was able to be apart of the creation of the new exhibit “Behind the Wire”.

There were three history interns and one marketing intern who all worked together in making “Behind the Wire” come together. We first had to come up with an idea to do an exhibit on, and after narrowing it down to three choices, we all agreed on doing the exhibit on a Prisoner of War. We felt that it coincided nicely with a previous exhibit “Generations of Service”. Once we came up with a topic, we needed to set up educational goals that the exhibit would fulfill for the audience. What were they going to learn from our exhibit?

After we did this, we had to come up with a layout design for the exhibit. This proved difficult, because things kept changing us. Whether it was the way we were going to approach Prisoners of War or whether it was the physical space itself. Plans continued to change until we stumbled across Anthony Jurek’s amazing story and decided to focus just on that. From there, we reached other difficulties, in that we had different ideas how to illustrate Mr. Jurek’s story. Did we have too much text? Or should we add more? It seemed that whenever we were happy with the text, we would find something else.

We came to the conclusion that because this exhibit was smaller in size, we could afford to have more text because people will still read it. So, now we realize this is going to be a text oriented exhibit focusing on the personal story of Mr. Jurek, but we needed more. We decided to illustrate parts of the story through paintings done by local artist. This was a great way to get Mr. Jurek’s story out there and have a visual aid so people can understand it on another level.

What is an exhibit with out artifacts?! Going deeper into this exhibit, we figured artifacts would be a great addition, even if they all were not Mr. Jurek’s personal artifacts. The artifacts help educate the audience who follows the exhibit.

“Behind the Wire” was a great way to get some experience in creating an exhibit. We did everything from doing the research of the topic, to laying it out, and shortening the text to a reasonable size. We also learned how to handle artifacts. So, even though we came across several difficulties, I wouldn’t have changed a thing from my experiences interning at the Veterans Memorial Hall.