Currently I am double majoring in History and East Asian Area Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. I will be graduating this May with a baccalaureate degree.
This is my second semester interning at Veterans' Memorial Hall. Last semester I researched Colonel Hubert Eva's life story, eventually finishing a pseudo autobiography.
At the end of the fall semester, my adviser asked me if I would like to participate in the creation of an exhibit by student interns. I decided to do another semester of the internship, in order to experience the process of creating an exhibit and seeing if I wanted to pursue a career at a museum.
The exhibit was created with a group of four interns, including myself, Preston Petermeier, Alicia Kozlowski and Brittany Houselog. Creating the exhibit was a grueling process. Working with three other interns was a lot of fun and a great idea, but it was also challenging. It was challenging in the fact that we all had great ideas for the creation process, but agreeing on a single idea did not always occur. We had to vote and agree on a plan, which always worked. It was decided that we wanted the exhibit to educate the public by telling a story in the exhibit.
Initially, we had to pick a topic. We threw around a couple ideas, finally landing on Prisoners of War. We had no idea who to research, so we randomly looked up stories of local POWs in WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam. We chose a couple of POWs from Vietnam, WWII and the Korean War. We eventually found out that this was a bad idea, so it was decided that we would focus on a single veteran. We decided to tell the story through Anthony Jurek’s experience as a Korean War POW.
After choosing out the topic, we had to come up with a title and a layout design. We went through a couple of titles, finally deciding to go with Behind the Wire. The layout design was a crucial process because of the positioning of white walls and artifact cases. The area we were going to use was the great hall, so we had to make a layout that would make the exhibit look interesting and large to the audience.
Next, we had to take the 25 pages of text that we had from Anthony Jurek’s interview, and cut it down to one page. Once that was finished, we had to find visuals for the exhibit, including artifacts and pictures. We couldn’t find many pictures or artifacts, so we thought about having local artists make paintings of the stories. I asked my friend Adam Frankiewicz, an artist at UW-Superior, to see if he would like to make paintings. He finished three amazing paintings that added a whole new perspective to the story we wanted to tell.
The week prior to the grand opening, we received horrible news that the exhibit was not going to be in the great hall. It was going to be in a side room next to the hall. It seemed like a terrible situation, but we realized that the smaller room made the exhibit seem larger than it actually was. Not a bad outcome. The construction process was smooth and quick; we pretty much put everything up in one day.
The exhibit was very successful. We had a multitude of people show up for the exhibit and for Jurek’s speech. Overall, the process flew by very fast. The exhibit, Behind the Wire, was a great internship to learn about museum work. It was a great ending to a year, from the Colonel Eva research paper to the exhibit grand opening in April. This experience will help me with future endeavors. I couldn’t have asked for a better exhibit process and internship.
Stephen Nickell - UWS Student
No comments:
Post a Comment