Arts, Faculty of
Anthropology, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Marsh, Diana Elizabeth
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This dissertation traces the relationship between changing institutional cultures and the communication of knowledge to the public through exhibits, explored through an ethnographic and historical case study of a single set of halls at one museum—the fossil halls at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Having documented the first six months of planning for the NMNH’s new exhibit project, Deep Time, I show that many of the values and practices in current exhibits production have their roots in major cultural, professional and institutional shifts of the late-1950s. These changes, enacted and dramatized in exhibits production, came to transform the communication of science through exhibits. Indeed, I argue, the production of exhibits offers unique insight into the workings of an institution by describing a microcosm of the museum where what I have called disciplinary “complementarities” and “frictions” are debated and performed by small, increasingly interdisciplinary groups of people. Exhibit development thus emerges as a political and subjective creative act, rooted in particular institutional contexts and histories, that takes place at the intersection of paradoxical institutional missions and divergent disciplinary cultures. In the chapters of this thesis, I will contextualize and trace collaborative complementarities and frictions that emerge at three levels of exhibits production: exhibit content, group dynamics, and institutional mission. I will argue that these three layers of complementarities/frictions (from the micro-level of content specific to the planning of the fossil hall complex, to the experts that develop exhibits, to the broadest institutional mission of the museum) as revealed in the exhibits production process, have at their root foundational dual roles of the Smithsonian that are both paradoxical and necessary in creative exhibits production.
From “Extinct Monsters” to Deep Time An Ethnography of Fossil Exhibits Production at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History by Diana Elizabeth Marsh B.F.A., Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, 2009 M.Phil., Cambridge University, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Anthropology) The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) August 2014 © Diana Elizabeth Marsh, 2014 ii Abstract This dissertation traces the relationship between changing institutional cultures and the communication of knowledge to the public through exhibits, explored through an ethnographic and historical case study of a single set of halls at one museum—the fossil halls at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Having documented the first six months of planning for the NMNH’s new exhibit project, Deep Time, I show that many of the values and practices in current exhibits production have their roots in major cultural, professional and institutional shifts of the late-1950s. These changes, enacted and dramatized in exhibits production, came to transform the communication of science through exhibits. Indeed, I argue, the production of exhibits offers unique insight into the workings of an institution by describing a microcosm of the museum where what I have called disciplinary “complementarities” and “frictions” are debated and performed by small, increasingly interdisciplinary groups of people. Exhibit development thus emerges as a political and subjective creative act, rooted in particular institutional contexts and histories, that takes place at the intersection of paradoxical institutional missions and divergent disciplinary cultures. In the chapters of this thesis, I will contextualize and trace collaborative complementarities and frictions that emerge at three levels of exhibits production: exhibit content, group dynamics, and institutional mission. I will argue that these three layers of complementarities/frictions (from the micro-level of content specific to the planning of the fossil hall complex, to the experts that develop exhibits, to the broadest institutional mission of the museum) as revealed in the exhibits production process, have at their root foundational dual roles of the Smithsonian that are both paradoxical and necessary in creative exhibits production. iii Preface While much of this work involved important collaborations between Smithsonian staff and myself, the identification, design and performance of research and analysis of the project presented here is my own, and thus far, no publications have resulted from this work. The project, under the title “An Ethnography of ‘Deep Time’: Fieldwork at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,” UBC BREB Number H12-01697, was approved by the UBC Behavioral Ethics Board on August 29, 2012. It was also approved under the title “An Ethnography of ‘Deep Time,’” Protocol Number HS12062 by the Smithsonian’s Human Subjects Internal Review Board on October 9, 2012. iv Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii Preface ........................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ ix List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ x Lists of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. xv Glossary ...................................................................................................................................... xvi Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. xviii Dedication .................................................................................................................................. xxv Prologue: An Exhibit Team in the Badlands .............................................................................. 1 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 18 1.1 Methods and Analysis—Institutional Archives, Oral Histories, Participant Observation & Interviews ....................................................................................................................................... 22 1.2 The Argument .......................................................................................................................... 33 1.3 Chapter Outline ........................................................................................................................ 37 2. Increase and Diffusion: Institutional Contexts From Early Fossils to Modernization . 41 2.1 A Fledgling Museum and Discipline: Smithsonian’s First Fossil Displays ............................ 43 2.2 1880s to 1910: Systematic and Iconic Fossils at the First U.S. National Museum .................. 51 2.3 1910s-1920s: Systematic and Iconic Exhibits Installation in a New Building ........................ 64 2.3.1 Evolutionary Thinking .............................................................................................. 75 v 2.3.2 Paleontological Specimens and Value ..................................................................... 76 2.4 1920s-1940s: Stagnant Arrangements and Small Experiments ............................................... 79 2.4.1 Exhibits Post-installation to the First World War ................................................... 81 2.4.2 Exhibit Reinstallations and Innovations Post-WWI ................................................. 84 2.4.3 Post-1923: Diplodocus the “Show Piece” and Educational/Outreach Experimentation ................................................................................................................ 88 2.4.4 Fossils in the Depression: Display Experiments and Government Projects ........... 97 2.5 1940s-1950s: World War II and Shifting Notions of Access ................................................ 111 2.5.1 The Post-War Return to Peacetime: A New Generation of Scientists and Visitors 118 2.6 Chapter 2 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 120 3. Exhibit Content: Interconnected Processes and Static Things ...................................... 122 3.1 Deep Time 10% Development Process .................................................................................. 125 3.2 Observation Period and Early Group Work ........................................................................... 130 3.3 Meetings—the Work of Exhibit Planning .............................................................................. 135 3.4 Complementarity and Friction in Content Development ....................................................... 139 3.4.1 Not Just Another Dinosaur Exhibit: The Charismatic Real and Layers of Interpretation .................................................................................................................. 141 3.4.2 An Informed Imagination: Levels of Resolution .................................................... 155 3.4.3 Technology with Purpose: The Tone and Density of Media .................................. 170 4.4.4 Majestic and Inviting?: Authority to Participation ................................................ 186 3.5 The Results of Group Thinking: The Final 10% Package ..................................................... 203 3.6 Beyond the 10% Package ....................................................................................................... 209 3.7 Chapter 3 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 211 4. Exhibit Content: The Roots of Frictions and Complementarities ................................. 212 vi 4.1 Modernized Fossil Halls: 1960s Experimentation ................................................................. 214 4.1.1 Modern Exhibit Design: New Techniques for Visitors .......................................... 217 4.1.2 Modern Exhibit Design: New Techniques for Science ........................................... 231 4.1.3 Reflections of New Scientific Thinking ................................................................... 238 4.1.4 The Ice Age Hall: Additional 1960s Experiments .................................................. 243 4.1.5 New Thinking & Techniques for Process and Time ............................................... 245 4.2 The 1980s & the New Hall of “Highlights” ........................................................................... 246 4.2.1 Theme Statements: Holistic Halls in the 1980s Fossil Hall Renewal .................... 247 4.2.2 Immersive and Singular Design Elements Conveying Time & Process ................ 250 4.2.3 Changing Tone and Storytelling ............................................................................ 255 4.3 Hall Additions and Current Halls ........................................................................................... 261 4.4 Chapter 4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 267 5. Disciplinary Dynamics: Group Imagining and Expertise .............................................. 268 5.1 First impressions and general context .................................................................................... 269 5.1.1 Modes of Communication ...................................................................................... 285 5.1.2 Belief Systems and Perceptions of Power .............................................................. 289 5.1.3 Training, Background, and Discipline ................................................................... 294 5.1.4 Roles and Documented Purveiws/Powers .............................................................. 298 5.2 The Process: A “Big Idea” and Forming Expert Teams ........................................................ 318 5.3 Defining a Shared Purpose ..................................................................................................... 323 5.4 Exhibit Meeting Friction?Complementary Discourse at 10% ............................................. 326 5.4.1 Friction in the Articulation of Roles ...................................................................... 326 5.4.2 Translating Frictions ............................................................................................. 328 5.4.3 Friction as Political Work ...................................................................................... 330 5.4.4 Complementary Group Imaginings ........................................................................ 334 vii 5.4.5 Creativity and Innovation as Complementarity ..................................................... 336 5.5 The 35% Phase: Backstage/Front Stage ................................................................................. 337 5.6 Chapter 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 339 6. Disciplinary Dynamics: The Roots of Frictions and Complementarities ..................... 340 6.1 Modernization: The Birth of Professionalized Design & Paleobiology ................................ 344 6.1.1 The First Narratives and Writers ........................................................................... 347 6.1.2 A New Internal Dynamic ........................................................................................ 348 6.1.3 Modernized Paleo Exhibits Planning .................................................................... 350 6.1.4 The Disciplining of Paleobiology .......................................................................... 352 6.2 Early Interdisciplinary Planning ............................................................................................ 355 6.2.1 Interdisciplinary Exhibits and Committees ............................................................ 357 6.2.2 Long Range Plans and a Fossil Hall Complex ...................................................... 361 6.2.3 New Liaising Expertise .......................................................................................... 365 6.2.4 The 1978 Document ............................................................................................... 371 6.2.5 The 1983 Document ............................................................................................... 377 6.2.6 Facilitating Complementarities ............................................................................. 380 6.2.7 The 1984 Document ............................................................................................... 386 6.2.6 New Expert Frictions and Complementarities by the 1970s and 1980s ................ 388 6.3 “Creating Exhibits”: New Paradigms in the 1990s ................................................................ 391 6.4 Chapter 6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 403 7. Diffusion and Increase: Institutional Contexts from Modernization to Present ......... 404 7.1 Pre-1950s Mission .................................................................................................................. 408 7.2 Increase and Diffusion 1950s-1970s ...................................................................................... 411 7.2.1 Research 1950s-1970s ........................................................................................... 412 viii 7.2.2 Public Outreach 1950s-1970s ................................................................................ 419 7.3 Increase and Diffusion 1970s-1990s ...................................................................................... 429 7.3.1 Research 1970s to 1990s ........................................................................................ 430 7.3.2 Outreach 1970s-1990s ........................................................................................... 432 7.4 Fiscal Planning and Private Fundraising ................................................................................ 440 7.5 Increase and Diffusion in the New Millennium ..................................................................... 444 7.6 Chapter 7 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 465 8. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 466 9. Coda: The Nation’s T-rex .................................................................................................. 489 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 493 Appendix A: Lists of Relevant Leadership ............................................................................. 517 Appendix B: Geologic Time Scale ........................................................................................... 519 Appendix C: Fossil Exhibits Timeline .................................................................................... 520 Appendix D: Interview Questionnaires .................................................................................. 521 D.1 Sample Team Interview Questionnaire ................................................................................. 521 D.2 Sample Oral History Interview Questionnaire ...................................................................... 526 Appendix E. List of Figure Sources ......................................................................................... 529 ix List of Tables Table P.1 Hell Creek Collecting Trip Roster ................................................................................................................. 1 Table 6.1 Director’s Committee for Exhibits at the NMNH ...................................................................................... 360 x List of Figures Figure P.1 The team at the K/T Boundary, Hell Creek Formation, July 2013. ............................................................. 2 Figure P.2 Scott Wing and Rich Barclay breaking apart a fossil leaf slab 1, July 2013. ............................................... 7 Figure P.3 Scott Wing and Rich Barclay breaking apart a fossil leaf slab 2, July 2013. ............................................... 7 Figure P.4 Kirk Johnson, Skip Lyles, Scott Wing, and Rich Barclay excavating fossil leaves, July 2013. .................. 9 Figure P.5 Scott Wing, Kirk Johnson, Skip Lyles, Kim Moeller, Nora Loughlin, and Sally Love excavating and wrapping fossil leaves, July 2013. ...................................................................................................................... 10 Figure P.6 Chiseling at Torosaurus, July 2013. ........................................................................................................... 12 Figure P.7 The team at a microfossil site, July 2013. .................................................................................................. 13 Figure P.8 The Team hikes across the badlands, July 2013. ........................................................................................ 15 Figure 1.1 Participants in the 50th Anniversary of the Paleobiology Department. Left to right: Dan Chaney, Richard (Dick) Fiske, Fran Hueber, Diana Marsh, Robert (Bob) Purdy, Ian Macintyre, Richard Bambach, Scott Wing, Kay Behrensmeyer, Alan Cutler, Thomas Waller. ............................................................................................. 30 Figure 1.2 The team at the Ceratopsian site, July 2013. .............................................................................................. 32 Figure 2.1: Stereograph of Megatherium and Glyptodon c. 1872. ............................................................................... 45 Figure 2.2: Hadrosaurus foulkii in the Smithsonian Castle c. 1874–1882. ................................................................. 46 Figure 2.3 USNM (now Arts and Industries Building) under construction 1879. ...................................................... 52 Figure 2.4 Constructing the Comparative Anatomy & Osteology Hall, National Museum 1881. .............................. 53 Figure 2.5 USNM (Arts and Industries Building) floor plan, 1925. ............................................................................ 54 Figure 2.6 Systematic Geology Hall, South West Range, Arts and Industries Building c. 1903. ............................... 54 Figure 2.7 Comparative Osteology Hall c. 1882. ......................................................................................................... 55 Figure 2.8 Comparative Osteology Hall with Basilosaurus Cast, Arts and Industries Building, 1896. ...................... 58 Figure 2.9 Papier-mâché Stegosaurus on display at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904. .................. 62 Figure 2.10 Clipping, “The Sunday Star” advertising the mounting of the world’s first Triceratops, 1905. .............. 63 Figure 2.11 Map of the Smithsonian Museum grounds c. 1911. ................................................................................. 64 Figure 2.12 Map of the Natural History Building first floor c. 1913. .......................................................................... 66 xi Figure 2.13 Current numbering for east halls 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. .......................................................................................... 67 Figure 2.14 Basilosaurus in the Hall of Vertebrate Fossils c. 1912. ............................................................................ 69 Figure 2.15 Cyanotype of the Vertebrate Fossil Hall c. 1913. ..................................................................................... 70 Figure 2.16 Fossil Crinoids, Springer Collection c. 1920. ........................................................................................... 71 Figure 2.17 Legs and pelvis of Allosaurus fragilis Marsh. .......................................................................................... 71 Figure 2.18 Top view of (top left) 1904 papier-mâché model of Stegosaurus, (bottom left) the mounted skeleton of Stegosaurus stenops, and (right) Stegosaurus stenops in death pose, known as the “roadkill” exhibited as found. .................................................................................................................................................................. 86 Figure 2.19 Diplodocus construction c. 1930. ............................................................................................................. 88 Figure 2.20 Visitors to the Smithsonian 1881–1924. ................................................................................................... 93 Figure 2.21 Sketch of the Texas Centennial Exposition display c. 1935. .................................................................. 103 Figure 2.22 Norman Boss preparing Camarsaurus at the Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936. ................... 104 Figure 2.23 Norman Boss and public onlookers at the Exposition, 1936. ................................................................. 104 Figure 2.24 Lion diorama in the Mammals Hall c 1913. ........................................................................................... 106 Figure 2.25 Anthropology Hall and diorama displays c. 1911. ................................................................................. 106 Figure 2.26 The fossil hall’s first (Jurassic) diorama, installed c.1938. .................................................................... 107 Figure 2.27 Hall in the 1940s. .................................................................................................................................... 111 Figure 2.28 Detail of Diana of the Tides, John Elliott. Installed c. 1911. .................................................................. 117 Figure 3.1 Deep Time exhibit timeline. ...................................................................................................................... 128 Figure 3.2 Deep Time content matrix 2013. ............................................................................................................... 133 Figure 3.3 The Cooper Room 2013. ........................................................................................................................... 136 Figure 3.4 Chairs of Paleobiology in the Cooper Room 2013. .................................................................................. 136 Figure 3.5 Exhibit meeting in 71A, 2013. .................................................................................................................. 138 Figure 3.6 Draft bubble diagram by Fang-Pin Lee, 2013. ......................................................................................... 139 Figure 3.7 Friction/complementarity content debates. ............................................................................................... 141 Figure 3.8 Theme 1. ................................................................................................................................................... 141 Figure 3.9 Zallinger mural at Yale’s Peabody Museum, 2013. ................................................................................. 145 Figure 3.10 “Spectrum of Exhibit Types,” drawing by Fang-Pin Lee, 2013. ............................................................ 150 xii Figure 3.11 Theme 2. ................................................................................................................................................. 155 Figure 3.12 TPS units, Richard Lewis Media Group illustration 2013. ..................................................................... 169 Figure 3.13 Theme 3. ................................................................................................................................................. 170 Figure 3.14 Team testing App Shaker 2013. .............................................................................................................. 178 Figure 3.15 Team watches kids testing the App Shaker immersive screen, April 2013. ........................................... 179 Figure 3.16 Mark Ostrander presenting media density to the team in the Cooper Room, April 2013. ..................... 184 Figure 3.17 Fang-Pin Lee drawing for the team, June 2013. ..................................................................................... 185 Figure 3.18 Theme 4. ................................................................................................................................................. 186 Figure 3.19 Citizens for a changing planet brainstorming, June 2013. ...................................................................... 191 Figure 3.20 Journey through time white board sketch, June 2013. ............................................................................ 206 Figure 3.21 Final 10% bubble diagram, April 2013. ................................................................................................. 208 Figure 3.22 Final 10% floor plan, April 2013. ........................................................................................................... 208 Figure 3.23 Final 10% sketch rendering, April 2013. ................................................................................................ 209 Figure 4.1 The fossil halls, April 2013. ...................................................................................................................... 212 Figure 4.2 Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles c. 1963. ........................................................................................... 216 Figure 4.3 Plans for the first exhibit pathway c. 1961. .............................................................................................. 219 Figure 4.4 Map of the fossil halls 1963. ..................................................................................................................... 220 Figure 4.5 Exhibit “windows” in Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles c. 1963. ....................................................... 221 Figure 4.6 Draft exhibit plan by Ann Karras c. 1960. ................................................................................................ 222 Figure 4.7 Label hierarchies marked on exhibit plans c. 1960. ................................................................................. 222 Figure 4.8 Craig drawing of Edmontosaurus and Gorgosaurus with integrated labels, 1962. .................................. 223 Figure 4.9 Craig drawing of Ceratopsian skulls with panels, label heirarchies, and textures, 1962. ......................... 223 Figure 4.10 Draft plan for “Would you like to touch a dinosaur bone?” installation c. 1961. .................................. 224 Figure 4.11 Notes on colour techniques for the 1960s halls c. 1960. ........................................................................ 225 Figure 4.12 Draft paint colours for Paint Shop c. 1962. ............................................................................................ 226 Figure 4.13 Drafts with visitor viewpoints c. 1962. ................................................................................................... 227 Figure 4.14 Draft drawing featuring visitors on proposed mezzanine c. 1962. ......................................................... 227 xiii Figure 4.15 Draft of wayfinding signage with text c. 1960. ...................................................................................... 228 Figure 4.16 Proposed hall closure mural c. 1960. ...................................................................................................... 229 Figure 4.17 Pre-modernization humerus label c. 1958. ............................................................................................. 230 Figure 4.18 Post-modernization humerus label c. 1963. ............................................................................................ 230 Figure 4.19 Proposed fossil plant graphics c. 1960. ................................................................................................... 232 Figure 4.20 Craig proposed vertebrate silhouette graphics c. 1960. .......................................................................... 233 Figure 4.21 Norman Neal Deaton Jurassic ecosystem diorama, 1963. ...................................................................... 235 Figure 4.22 Matternes mural comp drawing for Miocene Mammals on the Run, c. 1960. ....................................... 237 Figure 4.23 Completed 1961 display—Brontothere and Opportunity Knocks for the Oligocene Mural, photo by Chip Clark, late-1970s. .............................................................................................................................................. 238 Figure 4.24 Hotton approval stamp on production copy, January 1963. ................................................................... 239 Figure 4.25 Triceratops and clay model c. 1913. ....................................................................................................... 242 Figure 4.26 Moropus and model c. 1961, photo by Chip Clark, late-1970s. ............................................................. 242 Figure 4.27 Dire wolves and horse with storyboard behind c. 1967. ......................................................................... 244 Figure 4.28 Ely Kish painting Life in the Ancient Seas c. 1990. ................................................................................ 251 Figure 4.29 Marguerite Noga and Steve Pierson work on John Gurche’s Time Column, 1981, photo by Chip Clark. .......................................................................................................................................................................... 253 Figure 4.30 Top view of John Gurche’s completed Time Column painting c. 1981, photo by Chip Clark. ............ 254 Figure 4.31 “Conquest of Land” and popular appeal, 1979. ...................................................................................... 256 Figure 4.32 Hall 2 Construction in 1980, photo by Chip Clark ................................................................................. 259 Figure 4.33 Completed fossil hall, 1981, photo by Chip Clark. ................................................................................ 260 Figure 4.34 Fossil Lab draft plans c. 1986. ................................................................................................................ 263 Figure 4.35 Hall map with pathways, April 2013. ..................................................................................................... 265 Figure 4.36 The fossil hall, April 2013. ..................................................................................................................... 266 Figure 4.37 3D scanning, April 2013. ........................................................................................................................ 267 Figure 5.1 The National Museum of Natural History, September 2012. ................................................................... 270 Figure 5.2 The Exhibits hallway, May 2013. ............................................................................................................. 276 Figure 5.3 Paleobiology 3rd floor hallway, July 2013. .............................................................................................. 278 xiv Figure 5.4 The Director’s hallway, November 2013. ................................................................................................ 281 Figure 5.5 Abby Telfer, Kay Behrensmeyer, Scott Wing, and Hans Dieter Sues exchanging laughs about a fossil coprolite 2013. .................................................................................................................................................. 289 Figure 5.6 Angela Roberts Reeder describing hierarchies of exhibit text, April 2013. ............................................. 302 Figure 5.7 Exhibit team meeting including R+P, additional Exhibits staff and a guest media group, June 2013. .... 309 Figure 5.8 Exhibit staff organizational chart, June 2013. .......................................................................................... 313 Figure 5.9 Deep Time roles draft diagram, December 2013. ..................................................................................... 319 Figure 5.10 Exhibit meeting with Director Kirk Johnson, May 2013. ....................................................................... 333 Figure 6.1 Geology moves to the East Wing, 1963. .................................................................................................. 354 Figure 6.2 Memo, Macintyre to Buzas, December 1977. .......................................................................................... 363 Figure 6.3 Curatorial staff by exhibit area c. 1978. .................................................................................................... 364 Figure 6.4 Macintyre’s call for Research Associates, 1978. ...................................................................................... 366 Figure 6.4 Ken Towe, Ian Macintyre, Gene Behlen, Dan Appleman, Fran Hueber on the right, Sue Voss and Elizabeth Hilkert in the background, Richard Molinaroli at very back (here blocked by Hueber). ................. 370 Figure 7.2 Draft layout of the first floor, East Wing c 1962. ..................................................................................... 415 Figure 7.3 Virginia school children on the Mall, 1950. ............................................................................................. 421 Figure 7.4 O’Reilly’s draft drawings for a new Division of Public Programs c. 1987. ............................................. 439 Figure 7.5 Smithsonian organizational charts 1992 and 1997. .................................................................................. 448 Figure 8.1 A packed house for a panel on participatory experiences and engagement at the Museums and the Web conference, April 2014. .................................................................................................................................... 469 Figure 8.2 “The Finger of Blame” by Benjamin Lawless. ......................................................................................... 471 Figure 9.1 Entrance to the Museum from the third floor balcony, April 15, 8:50am ................................................ 490 Figure 9.2 Entrance to the Museum, April 15, 8:55 am ............................................................................................. 490 xv Lists of Abbreviations A&I—Arts and Industries ACM—Anacostia Community Museum AD—Associate Director DT—Deep Time ETE—Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems (Program) FAP—Federal Art Project FERA—Federal Emergency Relief Administration FSG—Freer Sackler Gallery FY—Fiscal Year HMSG—Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden MHT—Museum of History and Technology MNH—Museum of Natural History NASM—National Air and Space Museum and Udvar-Hazy Center NHB—Natural History Building NMAAHC—National Museum of African American History and Culture NMAfA—National Museum of African Art NMAH—National Museum of American History NMAI—National Museum of the American Indian NMHT—National Museum of History and Technology NMNH- National Museum of Natural History NPG—National Portrait Gallery NPM—National Postal Museum NZP—National Zoological Park OFEO—Office of Facilities Engineering and Operations OPS—Office of Protection Services PAEC—Professional Accomplishments Evaluation Committee R+P—Reich and Petch design firm RLMG—Richard Lewis Media Group SAAM—Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery SBV—Smithsonian Business Ventures SI—Smithsonian Institution SITES—Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math USGS—U.S. Geological Survey TPS—Temporal Positioning System WAG—Web Advisory Group WPA—Works Progress Administration xvi Glossary 10%—The first phase of exhibit planning during which a small “Core team” work to consolidate clear overall messages, themes, and a generalized floor layout for the hall resulting in a “package” of high level “visioning” documents to shape and frame all of the more detailed plans that follow. 35%—The second phase of exhibit planning during which the team works to flesh out the 10% plans with specific content areas, specimens or objects, and a basic script or narrative for the hall, resulting in a second package. 65%—The third phase of exhibit planning during which the team does actual scripting for the hall, including hierarchizing label messages and writing some preliminary label text, chooses interpretive elements and solidifies the design of each section of the hall, resulting in a third package. 95%—The fourth phase of exhibit planning during which the team begins producing the exhibit—finalizing and preparing objects, labels, and designs for implementation, resulting in a fourth and final package. Advisory Team/Extended Team—A group of additional experts the Core Team will need or wish to consult in carrying out its work at different phases, including additional scientists, educators, educators or leaders in the museum. Approval Team—Relevant leadership in the museum that comment on and sign-off on the package and associated documents produced at each stage. The Castle—The first Smithsonian building built on the Mall; the main administrative building for the Smithsonian; colloquial synonym for Smithsonian administration Core Team—The primary group of in-house staff, usually including one or more curators, an educator, a writer, a designer and a developer/manager, that plans the exhibit, meeting as a whole group as often as twice a week, or in the case of Deep Time, in two, two-day-long workshops per month, plus additional meetings with select members amongst themselves or with other staff. Move—A large design element that characterizes a space xvii Outreach—The parts, departments or professions of the NMNH organization or Smithsonian Institution that deal with the public or public-facing elements of the museum—at NMNH under the heading of the Office of Public Programs in the 1990s, today Public Engagement. The term also is specific to a subgroup of this office, Education and Outreach, such that today, outreach staff implies educators in the museum. Package—A group of design, planning, and content documents completed and approved at each phase of exhibit planning. Production—In Exhibits terminology, the process of, and part of the department involved with, creating, manufacturing, building, assembling or making exhibits. For this thesis, the term is also used to talk about total human and social processes of knowledge and exhibit creation. Professional Accomplishments Evaluation Committee (PAEC)—A peer-review committee that evaluates scientific staff every five years for their contributions to research, and to a lesser extent collections and outreach. Paleo—The science of paleontology or the Paleobiology Department at the NMNH; the first to third floors of the east wing of the NMNH building; adj. of or relating to paleontology; paleontological; characteristic of those who belong to the Paleobiology Department. Porkchops—Blocked out spaces on an exhibit floor plan denoting sections of content in floor space. Seriously Amazing—The slogan coined for Smithsonian’s first national ad campaign. xviii Acknowledgements It was both daunting and an absolute pleasure to do this research. I have many very close relationships with my ‘informants,’ such that the term sounds far too objective or clinical to describe my friends. Walking down the street, listening back through interviews I conducted on my iPod, I sometimes felt viscerally nervous, other times must have had a goofy smile plastered across my face. On occasion I burst out laughing. I worked with so many warm, generous people—generous with their knowledge, and their time. Abby Telfer, FossiLab Coordinator, once told me that Smithsonian specializes in articulate people. And indeed, this is true. They are also sincere in their work and know their own history very well. These characteristics of current and former Smithsonian staff make it intimidating and amazing to work with them. Let me begin by thanking all of those at the Smithsonian who directly supported and assisted with this research. First, I thank each of the members of the Deep Time and Temporary Exhibit Core Teams, who welcomed me as an outsider and observer into their workplace. I thank you all for your support, time and trust in undertaking this project. Thanks to: Kay Behrensmeyer, great role model and lucid thinker, for her continued support and for generously sharing her time and brain power; Amy Bolton, for her cogent thinking and many contributions to discussions of current education in this thesis; Matthew Carrano for, in my first year at the Smithsonian, many animated debates about “cultural relativism” and crucial help in navigating paleontological archival material—his friendship and intellectual challenge have continued to foster my curiosity and rigor; Exhibit Developers Sally Love and Jennifer Miller—Sally, for her creativity and historical insights; and to Jennifer, whose expertise and insights contributed to this project, for facilitating this research from its start, for formative conversations in shaping my participation in meetings, and for spending so much of her energy and time helping me to navigate many complicated Smithsonian networks; Angela Roberts Reeder, for teaching me some of the ins and outs of Exhibit Writing, and for being a wonderful listener and officemate; Hans-Dieter Sues for his openness to outsider perspectives, and assistance with early historical elements of this work, including co-authoring a blog post on Gilmore; Abby Telfer, for being a wonderful supporter and for facilitating my study of the FossiLab; finally Scott Wing—thanks xix for “casting a wide net,” taking a chance on this project, and being a wonderful mentor, institutional sponsor, and advocate. To the many others working on the Deep Time project who participated in this research—Jonathan Coddington, Pauline Dolovich, Elizabeth Duggal, Kirk Johnson, Fang-Pin Lee, Richard Lewis, Mark Ostrander, Shari Werb—I am grateful and hope I have done justice to your work, enthusiasm, and creativity. I would additionally like to thank: Kara Blond, for participating in and supporting this research; her critical thinking and comments have shaped and facilitated this project; Skip Lyles, for his time teaching me about shipping fossils and the intricacies of logbooks, and the VP Prep team—Steve Jabo, Peter Kroehler and Michelle Pinsdorf—for their enthusiasm and time in sharing your skills and knowledge. I had the pleasure to interview, correspond, and spend time with many brilliant people who generously shared their time and institutional insights with me, and thus shaped the contents of this thesis, even if when they are not cited directly. These include Richard Bambach, Mary Bird, Michael Brett-Surman, Martin Buzas, Dan Chaney, Diane Cloyd, Alan Cutler, Norman Neal Deaton, Linda Deck, Zahava Doering, Robert Emry, Richard Fiske, William Fitzhugh, Robert Gene Gibson, Fred Grady, John Gurche, Carol Hotton, Porter Kier, Jim Mahoney, Jay Matternes, William Merrill, Elizabeth Miles, Richard Molinaroli, Larry O’Reilly, Sally Parker, Andrew Pekarik, John Pojeta, Robert Purdy, Glenn Rankin, Clayton Ray, Jo Ann Sanner, Rena Selim, Robert Sullivan, Kenneth Towe, Sue Voss, and Jonathan Zastrow. There are many others at the NMNH who offered their assistance in this research: In digging up internal images and documents, Jim DiLoreto, Kristen Quarles, Scott Whittaker and Steve Jabo were invaluable in helping with the exploration and digitization of Chip Clark’s slide collections using rapid scanning equipment. In particular, I thank Jim and Kristen for their patience and help with rapid scanning and imaging procedures. I thank Ian Macintyre for very graciously lending me his personal archive of meeting notes and exhibit documents and Mary Parrish, in addition to our many conversations, for salvaging many additional documents from his office as it was cleared last year; and David Bohaska for his assistance with internal Glmore materials. I owe a special thanks to Thomas Jorstad for joining me in my quest for obscure materials and solving many mysteries in the internal Paleobiology department archives; Many additional thanks go to Raymond Rye for the many hours he spent unearthing and explaining xx historical documents with and for me, and the additional time he talked me through historical photographs, took me on walks through the building and exhibits, and corrected historical elements in early drafts of this work. Likewise I thank Linda Deck for keeping old papers, talking me through some of them over the phone, and Elizabeth Musteen for sharing those with me. In Exhibits more generally, I am grateful for emails I received from Exhibits staff helping me to identify individuals in photographs—including Sally Love, Kim Moeller, and Jonathan Zastrow. I owe special thanks many of the staff in the Exhibits Department who encouraged me with their support and friendship both in and outside the museum, and let me bounce ideas off of them throughout this project—especially Charles Chen, Junko Chinen, Natalie Gallelli, and Juliana Olssen. Many thanks to Shannon Willis for many conversations and explaining the ins and outs of design to me. Special thanks to Patrick Rey, for his brilliance and cynicism, for digitizing the CHON video, and saving me every time I had a technical need; Meg Rivers for showing me the ropes, seeming to know how everything works, and supporting my 1980s playlists; Christyna Solhan for her friendship and for being so responsive and diligent in helping me navigate scheduling and correspondence throughout this research. In Paleobiology I would like to thank David Bohaska and Jonathan Wingerath for facilitating visits from Clayton Ray and Fran Hueber; to all of the participants in the 50th anniversary kick-off event in May 2013 and ECR event in November of this year; and to Doug Erwin for important conversations on relevant histories of paleobiology and evolution for this project. I owe a great deal of thanks to Department Chairman of Paleobiology, Brian Huber, for supporting my work, and allowing me to participate in Departmental and Museum-wide events where I shared elements of this research. I am grateful to Tyler Lyson and his family for their hospitality in Marmarth, North Dakota, the whole Hell Creek team for their company and collective expertise in the field, and Kirk Johnson for inviting me to be part of that trip. I also owe a special thanks to Rebecca Blader, who worked as an intern under Scott Wing from May to August 2013. Rebecca assisted me in many facets of this research—including excellent work in the archives, in choosing, scanning and databasing images, in assistance with interviews and transcripts, and talking through ideas with me. xxi At the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I could not have done any of this historical work without the incredible help and patience of the reference staff archivists, especially Ellen Alers, who went above and beyond to help me find and access materials, and Tad Bennicoff, who in addition to that, helped me to source them properly in this thesis. Pamela Henson, Smithsonian Institution Historian, was incredibly supportive and helpful, and I especially thank her for sharing her institutional knowledge and outstanding work in oral history at the Smithsonian. Thanks are also due to many other staff at Smithsonian Institution Archives who facilitated this research, including Mary Markey for reference work, and Sarah Stauderman and Kira Cherrix in the digitization of media materials. I would also like to thank all of the staff at the Smithsonian Institution Library, and in particular, Martha Rosen, for her assistance in procuring books and guiding me through the Smithsoniana collections. At and affiliated with the Smithsonian, there are many additional colleagues who have influenced my thinking. I thank the many anthropologists who have shaped this work, especially Joshua Bell, Robert Kett, and Laura Ahearn; Catherine Nichols and Hannah Turner, friends and colleagues, for their support and ideas, and for making the completion of this thesis seem possible; and Gwyn Isaac, for her mentorship and support throughout this process, and especially in finishing this thesis and thinking through its potential relevancies. To the Valuing Our Scans (VOS) SI-Maryland Seed Grant team: I thank Robert Leopold, who has been a central role model and mentor throughout the year that I wrote this thesis. With his support and guidance, the VOS project expanded my ethnographic and professional skills; the drafting of this thesis was also energized by the opportunity to think through new theoretical and practical subjects, and to see institutional practices at many other museums. I thank Brian Butler and Ricardo Punzalan at the University of Maryland, for supporting my work by entrusting me with a part of their research project, and introducing me to many new disciplinary knowledges and practices through the VOS grant. For someone trying to understand an institutional field, the friendships and events that go on after the day’s work is done are crucial to understanding how things work. In this, the most fun part of fieldwork, I have to thank all those at the Smithsonian who have supported me in more ways than they realize: to the my many friends at or affiliated with the Smithsonian, xxii especially Caitlin Baker, Nathan Bond, Michelle Brown, Joseph Gingerich, Brendan McCormick, Shelah Morita, Matthew Oreska, Loren Petruny, Rob Pontsioen, Jennifer Renteria, Rebecca Snyder, Sarah Tweedt, and Lauren Tuzzolino. Special thanks is due to Brittany Hance for all of her amazing photographic work, and for offering to take pictures at the 50th anniversary kick-off; Sophia Roberts for her unweilding energy and ideas, and Laura Broadbeck for her conviviality and organizational skills, without which I would not have met so many people in the museum; and Katie Velazco and David Price, media gurus, who occasionally let me borrow cords or other equipment, and helped record the Paleobiology 50th Anniversary talks. David was also a great fellow documentarian in North Dakota who continues to share his knowledge with me about photography and video technology. To my Paleobotany friends—Richard Barclay, Arden Bashforth, Karl Fetter and Nathan Jud—for your friendship, some of my first field experiences, and for showing me how to crack leaf mysteries; to my 2013–2014 officemates—Piper Mullins, Liz Tunick, and Hilary-Morgan Watt—I am always energized and peer-pressured by your collective work ethics; to Edith Hirte, for her incredible friendship and support through the toughest parts of this project; and to Cordelia Frewen, for her friendship, enthusiasm for Anthropology, and the many conversations we had at the Smithsonian and in Vancouver that directly shaped this thesis. I have many others to thank for formative conversations, their overall support, and my development as a scholar. At UBC, I thank Shaylih Muelmann for formative conversations and inspiration in writing ethnography; Felice Wyndham for teaching invaluable methods; Bruce Miller for important discussions on institutional studies, the history of anthropology, and ethics; William McKellin for conversations in Vancouver and Washington, D.C. on institutional ethnography; Neil Safier for conversations on perspectives from histories of science; David Anderson for his knowledge of World’s Fairs and Visitor Studies; and Nicola Levell for insights into material culture, museums, institutional ethnography, and life. At Cambridge, I thank Liana Chua, Anita Herle, and Mark Elliott, who challenged and inspired me in my Masters work at Cambridge in museum and materiality studies, and encouraged me to continue at UBC. At Rutgers, I thank Dean Casey Coakley for her support and mentorship in my undergraduate career; Louisa Schein and Chelsea Booth, for introducing me to cultural anthropology; Jason xxiii Francisco, a powerful mentor who taught me to look at the world differently and to think critically about the power installation has on experience and meaning-making. I am grateful for the continued friendship and support of many of my peers. At UBC, for many late nights, seminar debates, and much-needed morale boosting, I thank my fellow PhD cohort—Dada Docot, Vishala Parmasad, Mascha Gugganig, Lauren Harding and Ale Spence—and many others, especially Danielle Goode, River Rye Lovec. Meredith Mantooth, Lindi Masur, Morgan Moffitt, Diana Morales, Jory Stariwat, and Sacha Wilke. In other parts of my graduate experience I thank, in particular: Adrianna Eyking, for her incredible brain and friendship—she is ever-present in my mind when postmodernists try to “wow” us all by “reaching askew;” at Cambridge, Caroline Angle, Dave Carretero, Phil Graf, Rob Lowe and Eleanor McGrath saw me through my Masters thesis; Closer to home, I especially thank Meredith Graban, Caolan Kovach-Orr, Michaela Hornstein, Kathleen McKeown, Mirat Shah, and Emily Westlake. My close friend Rachel Fee and my “adopted family”—Rebecca Fee, Thomas Fee and Laurel King—continue to support my endeavours, and saw me through my undergraduate degree. My sister, Christina has been a great help as a patient interlocutor in my moments of enthusiasm, and panic. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Dorene O’Hara and David Marsh, for their example, their unwavering support, and, of course, for reading many drafts of this work. As I prepared the final draft of this thesis for submission, I was extremely grateful to my Examining Committee—Bruce Miller, Hector Williams, and Christina Kreps—for their thoughtful questions, comments, and suggestions. In conclusion, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my committee. I thank Michael Mason, Kate Hennessy, Anthony Shelton, and my supervisor, Susan Rowley, for their theoretical contributions, time, and insights, on both the scope of this research and drafts of this thesis. Michael shared his creativity, frankness, and belief in this project, and was a continual source of inspiration and a wonderful institutional advocate. Kate offered constructive feedback and creativity in shaping this project’s pursuits, methods, and style. Anthony supplied constant energy and enthusiasm, and generously suggested many books and articles to read and think through. Susan Rowley, has been the perfect supervisor—trusting and attentive, firm and xxiv encouraging. She has been an exemplary advisor and mentor, and ensured that I completed this work with integrity and creativity … and on time. xxv Dedication To my parents, for taking me to the museum. 1 Prologue: An Exhibit Team in the Badlands Table P.1 Hell Creek Collecting Trip Roster Last Name First Name Reason for Including in Field Party NMNH Position Johnson Kirk Leader Director, NMNH Lyson Tyler Leader Post-doctoral Fellow Behrensmeyer Kay DT Temp and Permanent Hall Core Teams Curator, DT Coordinator Blond Kara DT Administrator Acting Director, Exhibits Bolton Amy DT Temp and Permanent Hall Core Teams Education Specialist Love Sally DT Temp Core Team Exhibits - DT Temp Team Manager Moeller Kim Designer, for Mike Lawrence, DTT Core Team Exhibits -Visual Information Specialist Price David Filming of field work Education Dept. – Contractor Roberts Angela DT Temp and Permanent Hall Core Teams Exhibits – Writer Olsson Juliana Will be working with DT Exhibit team Exhibits - new writer/blogger Miller Jennifer DT Temp Core Team Exhibits Developer Sues Hans-Dieter DT Temp Core Team Curator Telfer Abby DT Temp Core Team FossiLab Manager Marsh Diana Fellow in Exhibits, Archivist for Deep Time UBC Doctoral Candidate Carrano Matthew DT Permanent Hall Core Team Curator Rogers Raymond Working with Matthew Carrano Collaborator Wing Scott DT Permanent Hall Core Team Curator Barclay Richard Working with Scott Wing Post-doctoral Fellow Loughlin Nora Working with Scott Wing Intern with Kay and Scott 2 Figure P.1 The team at the K/T Boundary, Hell Creek Formation, July 2013.1 It’s July in North Dakota. Twenty people—sweaty, dusty, and carrying backpacks and Ziploc bags full of microfossils—gather in a circle between two Chevy Suburbans, just before sunset. Kirk Johnson, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) opens a cooler and begins passing out cans of cold beer. The sun, sitting low on the vast horizon, casts a warm glow on the group; the field team exchange accounts of the day and play show-and-tell. Those who have been “to the field” before recount past glories … and embarrassments. Exhausted but exhilarated, I jot down notes into my red Moleskin, and snap a few pictures, before taking a much-anticipated sip of ice-cold beer. 3 This was one evening of six I spent with a team of Smithsonian staff in North Dakota. As an anthropologist and documentarian for the trip, I tagged along on this collecting trip for the Deep Time exhibit project, the largest exhibit project in the Museum’s history. On the first day of the trip, we arrived at Dulles International airport: I grab coffee. Skip, Kim, Hans, Jennifer, Abby, Sally and Angela arrive, then Kirk. Last are Tyler, Kay, Amy and Kara. Everyone’s dressed in casual Khaki pants/shorts or denim, loose t-shirts and lightweight button ups (I’m embarrassed because my bag is so much bigger than Abby and Hans’). There’s a lot of chatter about the field from people who’ve been before—about how its so quiet you can hear yourself think (for us city slickers), how bright the stars are at night, and what the Aurora Borealis looks like. The veterans enjoy describing the field, littered with jackrabbits, and replete with mule deer, eagles, and, unfortunately, rattlesnakes. We’re all looking forward to getting out of the stifling humidity of Washington D.C… When we arrive at the Rapid City airport, we gather our things, hop into the two Suburbans that have arrived to pick us up, and after a quick Subway sandwich we head to Wal-Mart where we get all the necessary supplies—granola bars, trail mix, vanilla extract to keep the gnats away (so we’ve been told). We also pick up some whiskey (it is “the field,” after all). The whole caravan then heads north toward Marmarth. In the car we talk about Tyler’s collecting at the Marmarth Research Center. He’s been collecting since he was in grade school. He first met Kirk going to the field when he was eight… It starts to sink in that this is real and that I’m really here. (I’m not watching a PBS documentary.) 4 Abby comments that the horizon is really impressive, that she doesn’t think she’s ever seen a horizon like this before. Tyler says that when he’s on the East coast, there are so many trees, “I feel like I’m going through tunnels all the time.” After we’re all settled, later that night: … We hopped into Kirk’s van and headed to Montana for dinner. There we met up with Scott, Rich and Nora, who’d come from Wyoming. The place is lit in a mix of velvety orange light and coloured neon signs. We put together a table for all 25 of us, and order Coors and Miller lights all around. I order “gizzard fried in batter” and a “chicken shit salad” (why not?). After dinner and a lot of talk about the best plan for the next day, we head back to Marmarth. We stop at the lab for water, where we all are given two-gallon jugs. We head back to the bunkhouse; Scott, Rich, and Nora head to tents. The bunkhouse is a cozy two-story house, an old railside station or hotel probably, just at the edge of the train tracks … each of us has a bed with sheets, a thin blanket and bedspread, and a window with a fan. A far cry from roughing it. At 6am the house is mobilizing and multiple obnoxious alarm clocks are going off. I pack my things—a rock hammer, bag water bottle, work gloves, bandana, notebook and pens, headlamp, chapstick, bug spray and vanilla, and the hand lens Ray lent me. I throw on a V-neck shirt and cargo pants from Unique (my favorite thrift store), sock liners and men’s socks. We head to Tyler’s house for coffee, bagels, English muffins and cereal with a whole spread of jams and peanut butter. We talk about sleeping, or, more accurately, not sleeping. The train that came at 3:45 in the morning and woke everyone up is good common ground for breakfast chatter 5 (I thought it would come through my window). By a little after 7 we head to the lab where Kirk and Tyler sort out equipment and we pack the trucks. Barb, who works for the Marmarth research center, has packed us all lunches (I’d almost forgotten she’d come by the bar and taken orders last night). I take off with Skip (who did the driving), Tyler, Abby, Jennifer, Kim, and Angela. The lab is a simple rectangular building with high ceilings and big garage doors. The first room is a prep lab, filled with tables and boxes of fossils, and partly jacketed specimens. The next room is filled with racks (Tyler’s turtles are amazing) and collections drawers. The last room is full of equipment and large specimens. On the way to our Day 1 field site, we pass through the same vast landscape dotted with oil grasshoppers … Our first stop is the Ceratopsian site, where the vertebrate teams will be excavating and prospecting … Tyler shows the group the juvenile Ceratopsian (probably a Torosaurus), scattered across a small plateau on the butte face. Kirk moves around the side of the rock face as he speaks. He explains that the last one-half million years of the Cretaceous Period are at the top of this rock formation, a 66.5-million-year-old site. He talks about paleontologists 30, and 100 years ago, trying to figure it all out. He explains how paleontologists look for porosity (on the surface, textures of holes), changes in colouration, and also that a good way to find fossils is to look for things on the ground, and then trace them up the rock face. We then hike out about 5 minutes up and in between two ridges. Scott and Kirk have identified a fossilized palm. Scott asks the group whether it looks like something visitors would recognize, and Amy chimes in that it might be good for Q?rius, the 6 museum’s new education center. Tyler and Scott start piecing the fossil together. Scott reiterates that it’s something that could be good for the exhibit. Jennifer chimes in that it could be touchable. Amy, notes that the museum could try to have visitors piece it back together. Scott pulls out his notebook and marks GPS coordinates. The exhibit/novice crew (of which I am very much a part) then walk around and under the fence back down the road the way we came. About half an hour later after we’ve all had our fill of scampering around and taking in the views, we’re picked back up in the trucks. We head to a plant fossil site where Scott and Kirk start looking for plants about 5 feet below the K/T boundary. Kirk and Scott start hacking away at the rock face. As I soon discover, finding plant fossils is easy, if you know where to look. Plants create natural weaknesses in the rock, so if you’re in the right sedimentary layer, (where plants were quickly buried after they fell to the ground) you can use a pick ax to cut into the side of a rock face and begin to extract big flat chunks of rock. Each big rock slab is, you hope, full of more fossil leaves. So you turn the slab on its side and begin tapping with a flat-headed rock hammer at the middle of the horizontal layers of the slab listening and watching for slight hollows or cracks as they begin to form. As you encourage the crack, you turn the slab to another side and repeat. The leaves, Rich told me “ form a plane of weakness.” Suddenly, the slab opens, and, with any luck, you’re looking at two halves of a sheet of perfectly preserved 65 million year old leaves. 7 Figure P.2 Scott Wing and Rich Barclay breaking apart a fossil leaf slab 1, July 2013.2 Figure P.3 Scott Wing and Rich Barclay breaking apart a fossil leaf slab 2, July 2013.3 8 Kay reads out her GPS: “43, 43, 42, 12, 14 …” and I lose track. In one fell swoop Kirk has found a bunch of plant fossils. “Here’s the locality,” he says, excitedly. The “last forest of dinosaurs” (37) … suddenly the group is “ooh-ing and aah-ing” and Scott and Kirk are pulling out tons of leaves every time a slab comes out of the rock face. Some of these show insect damage, which is really interesting for an exhibit team interested in interrelationships between species in ancient environments. Other members of the group now think they get it, and join in splitting rocks … Kirk explains that each rock chunk with leaves will get a number following the initials “KJ”… Rich and Nora go to work wrapping fossils with industrial toilet paper and masking tape, marking each chunk of rock and leaves with a label “KJ1305” as they move through the growing pile of rocks that will soon become Smithsonian specimens… At 1:15 we head across a wide open field three feet tall with grasses … there’s a strong breeze sweeping across the grasses—an ocean of swaying yellowy grass. Here at Skunk Hill, leaves are whole on the rocks. Enough to make you “pee in happiness” Kirk says to Scott. Paleobotanists love their leaves. As Tyler said earlier, “We’re all like kids in a candy store out here.” 9 Figure P.4 Kirk Johnson, Skip Lyles, Scott Wing, and Rich Barclay excavating fossil leaves, July 2013.4 At this site the experienced paleobotanists—Kirk, Scott, and Rich—do most of the block pulling. They’re also joined by Tyler and Skip. This is more like engineering—navigating how much “overburden” there is, finding the right size and thickness that a person can carry. Others take turns bringing slabs down the hill, splitting rock, tapping carefully, never in the same place, hoping two pages of leaves will open like a book. Once things get moving, others congregate in small circles wrapping fossils in toilet paper, “TP” as everyone calls it. 10 Figure P.5 Scott Wing, Kirk Johnson, Skip Lyles, Kim Moeller, Nora Loughlin, and Sally Love excavating and wrapping fossil leaves, July 2013.5 Later that week I will spend a full day here, and we will unearth huge slabs of leaves that will be on public display in the Museum’s Temporary Exhibit come fall. On the way back to the cars, Scott jokes that his reputation will be ruined because he’s been using an SVP (Society for Vertebrate Paleontology) ruler. This was one of the interesting things I saw in the field that perhaps I would not see on most field trips in paleontology. There is a (usually playful) rivalry between different subdisciplines of paleontology. On most trips, you would not have vertebrate and plant paleontologists digging together, although that sometimes happens. Usually these expeditions 11 organized by a single researcher who assembles a team of peers, post-docs, preparators or other assistants to accompany her/him. On this trip, not only were there Paleontologists from different subfields, but a whole range of museum staff from utterly different disciplines. In all, there were 19 people—curators of Paleobiology (vertebrate, fossil plants, dinosaurian), educators, writers, designers, fellows, and the NMNH’s Director—in the Hell Creek Formation in the heart of North Dakota’s badlands. At dinner we share chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, and gravy, bread and butter. The table is noticeably quiet—everyone’s hungry. After dinner we take turns with showers. That night at the town’s only bar, the Pastime, which Kirk calls the Star Wars bar, we pick songs on the jukebox and share a beer. Scott strolls in a bit later than others looking altogether too energetic and proclaims that there is nothing more fun than finding fossils. Angela makes a groaning sound and says that, actually, there are many things she can think of that are more fun. As with any social group, the joking about shared experiences that happens during and after events is integral to forming relationships. This is part of the magic of the field. It’s fun hanging out and, as happened yesterday, people get funny and giggly/loopy in the afternoon. By 5 we’ve all faded. After eight hours on an outcrop you’re bound to not only talk about each other’s pasts and exchange stories, but also joke about odd happenings, sing, or talk in silly voices. And sometimes you come up with great real world ideas. I’m still convinced we can market l’eau de Smithsonian—a perfume of the field in a bottle: sweat, sagebrush and honeysuckle flowers. 12 On my third day in the field I’m at the Ceratopsian site. I spend most of the day prospecting. It’s stunningly beautiful out. And it’s like taking a long leisurely walk, except that it’s very sunny and very hot. We follow rocks up the slope with no luck at finding anything bigger or better articulated in the rock face. Some of the biggest bones are lichen-covered so not very good quality. After an hour and a half or so we head back to the outcrop Torosaurus site where I work on chipping away at rock matrix into the rock face with a chisel. Figure P.6 Chiseling at Torosaurus, July 2013.6 The process of excavating a fossil from rock “matrix,” as I had learned earlier in my year at Smithsonian, is long and delicate. The matrix is all of the rock material surrounding a fossilized bone. Historically it was all discarded. Now, scientists value the complex ecological 13 information embedded in the matrix. It represents the wider context and complex ecological field in which a bone fossilized. When you go prospecting, and with any luck catch a glimpse of something, either at the bottom of a hill that you trace upward or in the side of a rock face or along the ground that you decide to dig into, you begin a careful process of trying to let the fossilized bone emerge from its surrounding matrix. This is very different from microfossil site work. At a microfossil site, you might lie on your belly, squat or kneel for an hour in the same four feet diameter, looking closely with a naked eye and closer with a hand lens at the ground. The site we went to on my fourth day in the field was chock full of microfossils. Figure P.7 The team at a microfossil site, July 2013.7 14 The group enjoys the “instant gratification’ inherent in this kind of work. Hans agrees this is why he enjoys this work. Kirk makes jokes that even he could be interested in the site for half an hour (even though it’s not plants). People are eager to show each other the things they’re finding. We get to ten-minute warnings and no one wants to stop collecting … A few people use tweezers, pocketknives. Dean, who is showing us the site, has meticulous lists of everything he’s found in this 50 square foot area. There’s just so much stuff here. We bring our little Ziploc bags to Kay to check everything out. After everyone’s been yanked from the microfossil site, we walk across to the Mud Butte site, which has been reconstructed as a forest diorama at the Denver Museum where Kirk was previously Director. 15 Figure P.8 The Team hikes across the badlands, July 2013.8 Here you can see and taste the K/T boundary. That’s right, I ate the K/T boundary. Below the boundary are dinosaurs, above, the Paleocene, where you lose 30% of flora, Kirk explains. The thin layer at the K/T is filled with spherules, little marbles of hardened liquid glass that travelled thousands of miles from the 180-kilometer crater that formed when an asteroid hit the earth. The layer is also filled with iridium. You know you’re at the K/T through magnostratigraphy, palynology, iridium samples, and spherules. This is one of the best places in the world, Kirk tells us, to ask the dinosaur extinction question. Kirk explains that the asteroid theory was posed in 1980 by Alvarez and their crew. Their theory of mass extinction by asteroid, now accepted today, was considered 16 tabloid science by paleontologists at first. They were also guilty of calling paleontologists the “weak sisters” of science. They were physicists and chemists amidst the post-arms race and in competition with the Russians. The time it took to come to an agreement (until 2010) about the asteroid hypothesis shows how much personality plays into science, Kirk says. Today, he continues, it’s much more common in science to do interdisciplinary work. There are lots of “-ologies.” The idea now is to bring a whole bunch of “-ologists” in a room. In the field now, conferences bring together people of different knowledge sets to the same place. In the case of the asteroid theory, paleontologists dismissed the physicists, the physicists didn’t know geology. Multiple skill sets, he says, are key. This, Kirk says, is why we are here. Bringing together multiple skills was the purpose, the design of the trip. We all work better based on mutual respect for expertise. Building exhibits is not unlike a multidisciplinary science project; the cumulative project is made much stronger by the sum of its parts. Moreover, he notes, “in the sphere of knowledge I live in,” as he put it, there were a number of big changes in the science from when the early halls were put together to now. He says that it’s important to be very aware of this history. The salient points are: 1. The idea that continents move was only proposed in 1910 and solidified in 1960 2. Dating rocks, understanding the age of the earth, has only really been understood since the 1950s 3. Darwin—DNA, genomics, the tree of life, these are newly confirmed hypotheses 4. We’re not alone. The idea that something on earth could be so impacted by outer space is a huge shift. 17 5. Carbon is climate. The idea that carbon in the earth is correlated with cool climate (He notes that today, we see this playing out politically)—this is a relatively new idea. When the exhibit opened in 1910, we didn’t know any of these five things. The Museum and its exhibits are 100 years old. We now understand more about how the world works and how paleontology is important to telling the story. I know now that being there, with that interdisciplinary assortment of people, was not only the culmination of a year in ‘the field’ for me, but an artefact of over one hundred years of fossil exhibits production at the Smithsonian.1. Introduction … to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men. James Smithson, Last Will and Testament, October 23, 1826 ("James Smithson" 2014b) Cultures are continually co-produced in the interactions I call “friction”: the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005:4) … I have touched at numerous points on the notion of discovering and reinforcing new complementarities—between fields of specialization, between internally generated projects and the needs and perceptions of the wider society, and between the increase and the diffusion of knowledge … And it should be our goal to make the Smithsonian Institution a place where these activities not only coexist but work together to create a larger truth. Robert McCormick Adams, Eighth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Year 1984 (1985:18–19) 19 I began this project to investigate how changing institutional cultures and values impacted the negotiation of scientific knowledge for the public. In light of Bouquet’s call for more grounded anthropological work in museums (2001), I chose to conduct a grounded, ethnographic study of a museum. Following in the footsteps of Handler and Gable (1997), Raz (1999), and others, I chose to do institutional ethnography at a large-scale institution. Building on the foundational work in museum ethnography by Macdonald (2002), Shannon (2008) and Isaac (2007), I used a case study of processes at one museum as a way to address broader shifts. The last 30 years have produced a wide-ranging literature about the drastic changes undergone by museums—most notably a shift in focus toward increasing public engagement and access amidst new economic constraints. While museums are arguably democratizing and increasing access to the public, encouraging collaboration, and embracing digital technologies that expand their spatial potential, they are also heavily criticized for corporate sponsorship (Rectanus 2002), “Disneyfying” (Bryman 1999; Terrell 1991), and reverting to “blockbuster exhibitions” (Prior 2010:515) or expensive re-branding schemes (Conn 2010; Prior 2010). In recent years, museums have endeavoured to democratize (Ames 1992; Hooper-Greenhill 1994) and embrace their educational role (Hein 1998), while destabilizing didactic narratives and curatorial authority (Hooper-Greenhill 1999), embracing new ethical (Marstine 2011) collaborative (Golding and Modest 2013; Lassiter 2005; Lynch 2011a) and dialogic (Chamberlain 2011) paradigms, and broadening their understandings of constructivist (Falk and Dierking 2000; Falk, et al. 2009) or Indigenous models of knowledge (Kreps 2003; Kreps 2010; Peers and Brown 2003). Most recently, participatory models and methodologies have taken the museum world by storm (Heath and vom Lehn 2010; Lynch 2011b; Simon 2009). These new developments have fostered new attitudes toward the communication of not only of science 20 (Durant 1992), but of all subjects, while building new relationships with museum publics. These shifts have also been reflected in the development of new sub-disciplines and forms of museum expertise, evidenced by growing programs in specialties like audience research and museum education over the last thirty or so years (Boylan 2010). At the same time, museums have been negotiating rampant funding cuts, institutional restructuring and “audit cultures” (Strathern 2000), the pressure to “edutain” (Rentschler and Hede 2007:62–64) and the increased use of corporate institutional models and private funding (Alexander 1996; Falk and Sheppard 2006; Macdonald 2002; Mclean 2002; Rentschler and Hede 2007; Shelton 2006) in their attempt to become “economically self-sufficient” (Ames 1992). Much of this literature follows from the notion that, as elsewhere in society, market logic has infiltrated institutions and spaces where it ought not to (Krauss 1990). I chose to concentrate on a large-scale museum where I could see whether the grounded reality of institutional life and exhibit production corresponded to the theorization of these shifts. For, as Handler and Gable had claimed in their ethnography of Colonial Williamsburg, I thought it possible that “most research on museums has proceeded by ignoring much of what goes on in them” (Handler and Gable 1997:9). I also felt inspired by anthropologists who had adopted Laura Nader’s call for anthropologists to study “up” as well as “down and sideways,” to reject their privileging of “otherness” by studying “our own” society, and in so doing become “citizen scholars” and influence the public realm (Nader 1969). Marcus and Fischer’s formative Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), for instance, drew on precedents in anthropological work (1986:125–26)—e.g. Mauss’s The Gift (1990 [1954]), Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1954) and early work in Chicago school urban studies by Warner and others (e.g. Warner and Low 1947)—to ask 21 anthropology to “repatriate” itself, “to study home societies with as much detail and rigor as comparative ‘other’ societies” and “to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves” (1986:1). Likewise, I felt drawn to Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason, in which he analyzed the way “economic” and “utilitarian” thinking came to dominate contemporary ‘Western’ social life and institutions and the capitalist economy as a “cultural system” (Sahlins 1976:166–7, 205). In seeking to grasp the grounded workings of an institution within a shifting economy, I knew my project would follow studies such as Born’s analysis of bureacracy and avant-garde music production at IRCAM in Paris (1995), Harper’s Inside the IMF (1998), Riles’ multi-sited ethnography of government workers and NGOs (2000), and Ho’s study of the everyday lives of investment bankers in Liquidated (2009). Drawing on Dornfield’s Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture (1998) and Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1986), my project would also ethnographically investigate both creative production and the production of scientific knowledge. As is perhaps the case with many anthropology graduate students, my particular research site emerged altogether serendipitously. In the Spring of 2011, one of the many emails I sent to institutions across the U.S. and Canada elicited a series of positive responses; Elizabeth Duggal, Associate Director (AD) for Public Engagement at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), responded to say that my project seemed interesting and that I should get in touch with Dr. Scott Wing, Curator of Paleobotany, who dealt frequently with students. In his usual fashion, Scott, who I have since come to know well as a colleague, friend, and mentor, welcomed me to call him about the prospect of undertaking a project at the NMNH. That autumn, Scott graciously took time to meet me for a casual lunch, where he told me that, with any luck, a new exhibit project he was involved with was about to get started. Deep Time, a 22 massive project to re-envision the entire Fossil Hall complex, had been in the works for a number of years, and there had been some interest in having the process documented. Scott, in turn, introduced me to Dr. Michael Mason, who was then Associate Director for Exhibits, and as I soon learned, a like-minded cultural anthropologist. In Michael I found an important advocate and mentor. Indeed, the planning for Deep Time, the largest exhibit renovation project in the Museum’s history, was about to begin in earnest. Michael was interested not only in piloting an ethnographer in the exhibition process, but in innovation and experimentation in exhibits more broadly. He agreed to let me join and document the process, thanks to some of my background in Museum Studies and audience research, not only as an embedded ethnographer, but also as an advocate for public engagement in the process. The following sections outline how the research developed from its initial premise and inception, including the methods used, and the argument that is traced through this thesis. 1.1 Methods and Analysis—Institutional Archives, Oral Histories, Participant Observation & Interviews It was thus through serendipitous timing and the open-mindedness and support of NMNH staff that I came to take the production of the NMNH’s fossil halls a case study. The pattern my research took from there was largely iterative. Over the summer of 2012, I began research in the Smithsonian’s formidable archival collections of exhibits files, curatorial correspondences, blueprints, photographs, and drafts of annual reports. Knowing I would be following the creation of the NMNH’s newest version of its fossil and dinosaur halls, and that large (vertebrate) fossil mounts would be the most recognizable and iconic of the objects in the hall, I began moving through the daybooks and correspondences of the Museum’s first Curator of Vertebrate 23 Paleontology, Charles W. Gilmore. In Gilmore, I found a propitious research subject and documentarian. Meticulous in the extreme, Gilmore had kept detailed accounts of his and his assistants’ activities from 1905 until he died in 1945. These daybooks gave me a sense of his workflow—mornings on fossil preparation, afternoons on research, trips to the field, and after 1906, time spent mounting exhibits. This was an important set of details to understand. Early records and accounts of the display of fossils at Smithsonian begin as early as the 1870s in the Smithsonian Castle, after which they were moved to the first National Museum when it opened in 1881. When Gilmore arrived in 1903, the fossil displays were beginning to be transferred to their current home on the east side of the new National Museum building, where they would largely remain unchanged until 1961. Hence, this was an excellent place to begin understanding the story of fossil displays at Smithsonian and to explore the nature of exhibit development. Throughout the rest of that summer, and indeed whenever I had free time throughout the year, I continued my research at the archives. Aided by Smithsonian Institution Historian Pamela Henson and her helpful staff, I was able to construct much of the pre-1960s history recounted here. Most of this work is described in Chapter 2. Beyond that, the archives yielded a vast repository of records through the 2000s that helped to flesh out the ethnographic and oral history data I collected at the museum. I was also in the privileged position to be a second-generation oral historian following Pamela Henson’s oral history work at the Institution over the last 30 years. Her transcripts and video and audio recordings of oral history interviews became invaluable for understanding earlier generations’ reflections on changes at the Museum. Even as I ventured out of the Archives and began to meet with more people at the Museum in preparing for my official start in September, I discovered that NMNH staff have very 24 deep institutional memory; the staff longevity of the Museum as well as a ubiquitous internal interest in its history necessitate intensive study of institutional history. It quickly became apparent that my work could not merely focus on the current planning process, but needed to position that process within the context of the development of these exhibits from their first iteration at the turn of the century. I thus adopted an ethnohistorical approach that combined various elements: archival research, participant observation, current exhibit project and meeting documentation, interviews with exhibit team members and oral history collection at the institution. I was very lucky to receive access to many internal and informal archives in the institution. I also found that staff bookshelves and desk drawers stored rich repositories of institutional and exhibits history. In oral history interviews, these documents as well as the NMNH’s internal photographic collections became not only important for my overall research, but also important memory cues. In my time at the museum, I scanned thousands of internal Paleo and Exhibits documents and photographic prints on flatbed scanners and thousands of photographs from an internal archive of Chip Clark photographs (the museum’s longtime photographer) in the Imaging lab’s rapid scanner; and I selectively transcribed thousands of pages of archival and internal document texts. This research is largely represented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 as I describe historical contexts for contemporary exhibits production. A word here on this terminology: I use the term “production” in two ways in this thesis. In Exhibits terminology, “production” is both the process of creating, manufacturing, building, assembling or making exhibits and the staff who work in these areas. It is also a later phase of the overall exhibit development process. In this thesis, the term is also used to talk about total human and social processes of knowledge and exhibit creation. Another word I use often is “outreach.” In historical sections of this thesis I often use the term as a blanket term to describe 25 all of the emergent professionals and departments that are involved in public-facing museum work—education, exhibits, press, programming etc. Today, because the Education department is called “Education and Outreach,” education staff are also called “outreach” staff. I have tried to use terms like “audience advocates,” “education and exhibits staff” or “non-scientific staff” to describe broad cultural differences across roles and perspectives in the museum that divide along these lines. It was only through being grounded in the NMNH and through correspondences as I have written this thesis that I understood these distinctions. On September 13, 2012, I began a part-time position as a Research Fellow for the Deep Time project in the Office of Exhibits under Michael Mason’s supervision, initiating participant observation for the project. From September to December, I became acclimated to the place and began research on audience engagement initiatives at other museums and cultural centers for the project. I also began attending Temporary Exhibit meetings. The Temporary Exhibit planning had been initiated to maintain a “dinosaur presence” in the Museum when the halls closed for Deep Time renovations. My first day at the Museum also happened to be the first day of the Temporary Exhibit project launch. Some 20 people from around the Museum gathered in 71A, the main Exhibits Department meeting room, to discuss possibilities for the Exhibit. At this first meeting, it was decided that the Temporary Exhibit would focus on contextualizing Triceratops in its Cretaceous environment, while also talking about how exhibits are produced at NMNH. I will devote more time to explaining this process in later chapters, but for now three salient points should be made: first, that this process was ongoing simultaneously with Deep Time and shared planning team members; second, that it piloted many of Deep Time’s themes; and third, that in part, it was 26 going to be about the making of Deep Time. I attended these Temporary Exhibit meetings through March. Initiating “participant observation” in the Exhibits Department and at meetings took some negotiation, and at times was a tense process for both me and for my collaborators. During my first meetings with leaders in the Exhibits Department, there was, not surprisingly, some hesitation on the part of staff over the prospect of having an embedded ethnographer documenting the contemporary exhibit process. In particular, there was some concern about what having someone documenting the process would do to the dynamic of the group, especially when it was a newly formed team of people from disparate backgrounds and disciplines. There was also conversation about what, precisely, being an ethnographer would mean—would I always have my “ethnographer’s hat” on? Would hallway conversations be fair game? Would I be a participant at some meetings (or for parts) and an observer at others? While we joked about the possibility of my wearing a Dr. Seuss “ethnographer hat” whenever I adopted my ethnographer’s lens, the conversation overall had a serious tone. In the end the group decided that I should use differently coloured notebooks to start—I had a red “project notebook” for use when I was doing audience engagement work, and an “ethnographer notebook,” to make obvious to the Team that I had my “ethnographer’s hat” on. At first, as a kind of facetious way of easing into this, I purchased a rustic-looking Barnes & Noble notebook with recycled, beige paper to act as my “ethnographer” notebook. Soon, though, I adopted black Moleskin notebooks as a more condensed and better quality technology. There was also a good deal of discussion about whether I ought to audio record exhibit meetings. Once again, the issue of the group dynamic came up, as well as what I might do with recordings. In the end, it was decided that I take written notes in meetings. There was also, mid- 27 year, some suggestion that I try typing out notes, but the group immediately rejected my single-meeting experiment with this method because of the cold, court-transcript feel of my typed notes. From the official Deep Time launch in December, up to the following April, I attended all full-team Deep Time exhibit planning meetings (hereafter simply called Deep Time meetings), including “standing meetings” every other Tuesday afternoon for a few hours, and two-day, all-day workshops on alternating weeks. Beginning the first week of January, once consent forms were agreed upon, I entered a kind of “thick description” phase. At workshops and meetings I took detailed hand-written notes of as much as I could get down about the content of conversations and which team members were speaking. These were detailed, on-record ethnographic “scratch” notes—sometimes in the heat of discussion looking like what James Clifford calls inscription—”A participant-observer jots down a mnemonic word or phrase to fix an observation or to recall what someone has just said” (Clifford in Sanjek 1990: 95–6)–but can include much more detailed accounts of peoples’ turn of phrase or fully transcribed comments—”fuller observation or responses” (Sanjek 1990:96). These were later reviewed, paginated, indexed, and selectively transcribed. Sometimes I fleshed them out with thick descriptions of what I observed, and fuller notes on the nature of conversations. This process of translation was a form of analysis and description—”the making of a more or less coherent representation of an observed cultural reality … for later writing and interpretation aimed at the production of a finished account” (Clifford in Sanjeck 1990:97). In other cases I transcribed scratch notes directly. During this phase I also made daily, detailed audio recordings of my reflections each day. These functioned as “fieldnotes proper”—or lengthier accounts of my observations of events, meetings and other happenings as well as general observations, thoughts, ideas, and insecurities 28 (Sanjek 1990:99). I have tried in this thesis, when filling in the gaps inherent in these scratch notes to write descriptive sentences and paragraphs, to use my audio recordings and additional notes to retain the character, meaning, and intention of peoples’ contributions. This has meant, particularly for meeting conversations, quoting people in phrases and partial sentences. In this thesis, direct scratch note quotations are presented as direct quotes, cited using the last name of the speaker and the month, day and year as (Last Name, M.D.YY). As you read in the Prologue, more narrative, fleshed-out “thick descriptions” from my field notes, observations, and audio recordings are presented in italics. April was a natural cutting-off point for this level of detailed documentation. Mid-April marked the submission of what is called the 10% phase of the project, during which most of the big conceptual ordering and planning of the hall takes place. I attended the draft presentations to the Exhibits and Paleobiology Departments of the 10% package that was put together as a result of these meetings, and the final formal presentation to the “Approval Team”—made up of a number of key players at the Institution. On-record notes from all of the 10% phase meetings I attended were selectively transcribed and categorized for analysis; all of the on-record notes I transcribed from workshops were additionally coded by theme for more in-depth analysis and use in Chapter 3. During the next, or “35% phase,” I took more generalized notes to understand the overall process. The 35% phase includes the fleshing out of more specific content for each section of the exhibit, as well as the choosing of large-scale specimens and elements to be included, so as to plan the building and engineering infrastructure accordingly. During this process, I also had access to weekly audio-recorded curatorial content meetings, in which the Core curatorial team met with other relevant curators to narrow the relevant stories for each exhibit section or time 29 period. From the beginning of my fellowship until its end in September, I was also included in all email and document exchanges, and was able to consult shared documents in the team’s folders housed on shared institutional storage drives. Throughout the 10% and the 35% process to the end of June, I was thus completely immersed in the exhibit-planning process. I also had the advantage of the very gracious allotment of an office in the Exhibits Department, which meant that I was fully embedded in that department from mid-September to June. Due to the need for office space with the addition of two new writers to the Deep Time team in July, as well as the shuffling of my research toward primarily oral history and archival work, I had the additional advantage of experiencing life in the Paleobiology Department from July to the following September. Spending time rooted in very different institutional spaces became important in understanding cultural differences between the Museum’s departments. I also learned a great deal about these departmental divisions through oral history interviews with longstanding staff in Exhibits and Paleobiology. I began this phase of my research just as the 10% exhibit phase was wrapping up in April. This was necessary both because of the enormous time commitments of meetings and my work for the exhibit team, and because of the length of time it took me to be fluent enough in institutional history, “Paleo”- and Exhibits-speak to conduct interviews of any worth. With the help of the exhibit team and many members of both the Paleobiology and Exhibits Departments, I quickly assembled a long list of potential interviewees. I was fortunate to meet, speak, and work with staff and former staff who had worked anywhere from six months to more than 40 years at the Smithsonian. During oral history interviews I tried to focus on changes over time in the priorities and roles of different Departments and actors in the exhibits process, as well as overall cultural shifts in institutional 30 culture at the Museum. I also had the opportunity, in May, to plan a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Department of Paleobiology. Brian Huber, Department Chair, allowed me to help organize the program, and to present my preliminary historical research. I solicited nine participants to follow my presentation with stories about the history of the department, their experiences in it, and memories of Paleobiology exhibits at the museum. Pamela Henson generously recorded the entire event, and Brittany Hance, then an intern with the Imaging Department, photographed it. I drew great energy and oral historical material from this event, and was introduced to many new informants whom I would interview in the months afterward. Figure 1.1 Participants in the 50th Anniversary of the Paleobiology Department. Left to right: Dan Chaney, Richard (Dick) Fiske, Fran Hueber, Diana Marsh, Robert (Bob) Purdy, Ian Macintyre, Richard Bambach, Scott Wing, Kay Behrensmeyer, Alan Cutler, Thomas Waller.9 At the end of April as the 10% phase finished, I also began conducting interviews with nearly all the “Core,” “External/Advisory” and “Approval” team members of both the Deep Time and Temporary exhibit teams. In these interviews, I tried to focus attention on peoples’ 31 particular backgrounds and expertises, and their individual perspectives on the Deep Time process, so as to contextualize their contributions to exhibit meetings. For some of the team members, these interviews were also oral history interviews, as a number of members of the current team had worked at the institution for upwards of 30 years. All in all, beyond the thousands of casual conversations I had on and off-site with Smithsonian current and former staff during my research, I conducted 56 recorded interviews in the institution—23 audio-recorded interviews with Current, External, and Approval team members, 33 oral history interviews (26 audio recorded; seven written recorded)—and had formative, formal, conversations with another 16 current and former staff. Interviews were conducted in a semi-structured format. In both contemporary interviews and oral history interviews, I attempted to keep many of the questions the same for all interviewees, in part because I was interested in how different departmental and disciplinary backgrounds intersected with peoples’ viewpoints and preoccupations. All interviews were reviewed and selectively transcribed; all team interviews were transcribed for more thorough analysis. All interview source material and quotations used in this thesis are cited as in-text citations by the last name of the interviewee and the date in month, day and year of the interview as (Last Name, M.D.YY). In July, I also had the great pleasure to accompany members of the Temporary and Permanent hall exhibit teams and other Smithsonian staff to the field. We spent a week hosted by the Marmarth Research Foundation on the outcrops of the Hell Creek Formation scouting for microfossils, digging up large vertebrates, and collecting fossil plants. On the trip I kept a detailed field diary of the group’s activities and my reflections and took many thousands of photographs of the processes of scouting and collecting, and preparing fossils for shipment back 32 east. It was there, in a bunkhouse on the side of an old rail line, that I interviewed Kirk Johnson, Director of the NMNH. Figure 1.2 The team at the Ceratopsian site, July 2013.10 In total, then, the project’s methods included the following components: first, archival research at Smithsonian Institution Archives and internal (often informal) archives; second, oral history interviews with longstanding staff, primarily in the Exhibits and Paleobiology Departments, across a wide range of museum roles and expertises; and third, participant observation for a year through a collaborative research position with the Office of Exhibits that allowed me to a) fully document exhibit meetings through the first five months of planning, b) conduct semi-structured interviews with exhibit Core, Temporary and Approval/External team members, and further document the overall processes of general planning and conceptual themes at c) attend temporary exhibit meetings from September to March and d) attend 5% Deep Time meetings from May to July in addition to e) documenting a week-long field collecting trip in North Dakota. 33 1.2 The Argument I initiated this research to ask how shifts in large-scale museum institutional organization and culture can impact the negotiation of exhibit content for the public, undertaking as a contemporary case-study the formation of an upcoming exhibit at the NMNH (“Deep Time”). I asked how the presentation of academic research to the public is negotiated by increasingly diverse knowledge systems in the museum, and attempted to historically situate recent shifts in large-scale museums and the contemporary process of exhibit-making within the broader history of public museums. In some ways the very premise of my research made a lot of assumptions that anthropologists tend to make. For anthropologists, it is sometimes taken for granted that scientific truths are socially constructed, and truth-making a subjective process. In beginning this research, I admit that I began on that track. However, thanks in part to many arguments I had at the museum about cultural relativism and its limits with scientists, I came to take the stance that, as Latour has been arguing since the early 1990s (Latour 1993), it is not theoretically productive or politically sufficient to brush science and the objects of its study off as mere discourse or deconstruction. As in other anthropological projects, I have tried here to both take a critical view of the social field in which I was embedded, and to take seriously the epistemological and even ontological truths of my informants. As I found at the Smithsonian, the processes, objects, and subjectivities I observed are entangled in a long institutional history that is crucial in understanding contemporary social dynamics. As I found, changes initiated in the 1950s came to transform the values and institutional structures that shape the communication of science through exhibits. These 34 changes, initiated at both micro and macro levels of the institution, were often enacted or dramatized in the production of exhibits. Indeed as I argue, the production of exhibits offers unique insight into the workings of an institution by establishing a microcosm of the museum where values and what I have called disciplinary “frictions” and complementarities” are debated, dramatized, and performed (among a small group of increasingly interdisciplinary people). The first of these terms, I borrow from Anna Tsing, who wrote an “ethnography of global connection” (2005:ix) focusing on the “creative frictions” (2005:x) in which debates about Indonesian rainforests were embedded in the late 1980s and 1990s. She argues that cultures are co-produced through “friction,” which she defines as “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (2005:4). Importantly for thinking about exhibits production, she explores how knowledge is produced, “made and maintained,” and travels through specific instances of friction (2005:13). Collaboration, she shows, is “not a simple sharing of information” because collaborators don’t necessarily “share common goals” (2005:13). Studying the particulars of collaborations and the knowledges they produce “moves discussion beyond the eternal standoff between opposing interest groups … but not because it assumes that compromise is always imminent. Collaborations create new interests and identities, but not to everyone’s benefit” (2005:13). Moreover, she observes, collaborations obscure their own specificity and frictions: “Buoyed by axioms of unity, collaborations create convincingly agreed upon observations and facts that then appear to support generalization directly, that is, without the prior mediation of the collaboration … the facts come to ‘speak for themselves’” (2005:89). Tsing also shows how the “work of the universal” is created through frictions (2005:1–2). This is an important point when considering Deep Time and the recent history of exhibits that 35 portray the history of life on Earth. The development of these exhibits is in many ways also a universalizing project, one that tries to unify all of human history in line with a deeper history of the earth and its environment. While not a “globalized” fieldsite in the way Tsing’s was, exhibit meetings do create a space of global imagining and universal goals for a “sustainable future.” Humans (capital H) must, together, understand their impact on the Earth, and what They can do to change behaviours accordingly. Perhaps more importantly for theorizing “frictions,” exhibit development involves the butting-up of very particular cultural ways of knowing: professionalized disciplines negotiating the development of the exhibit do act as a kind of cultural diversity. I found that these spaces indeed created “zones of awkward engagement” that enacted “creative frictions” (Tsing 2005, x). While friction is, for Tsing, creative and productive, I also found that there was something more aspirational the particular frictions I encountered at the Smithsonian and in exhibits production. I came across the term “complementarities” in an Annual Report from 1984, as I was writing Chapter 5. Robert McCormick Adams, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution during some of its most fiscally stringent years noted their importance to the Smithsonian: … I have touched at numerous points on the notion of discovering and reinforcing new complementarities—between fields of specialization, between internally generated projects and the needs and perceptions of the wider society, and between the increase and the diffusion of knowledge … And it should be our goal to make the Smithsonian Institution a place where these activities not only coexist but work together to create a larger truth (1985:18-19). It struck me that this summed up the unique social field of the Smithsonian and the people who drive its activities, whose mission is to “increase and diffuse knowledge.” Both the institution and its staff so are often caught in the middle of paradoxical values, disciplines, and 36 goals, many of which have at their heart the increasingly specialized, foundational, and dual role of the institution to “increase and diffuse” knowledge. I also chose this term because it seemed to capture aspirations of literature on productive frictions, as well as of museums as fraught but productive “contact zones.” In thinking through this thesis I have also drawn on the ongoing discussion of the museum as “contact zone,” a concept first articulated in Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992) and later taken up by Clifford in Routes (1997). In this line of thinking the museum emerges, not as a destination, but as a place where different knowledges, cultural visions and community interests are negotiated, as spaces traversed by things and people. This approach to museums questions visions of global, transnational, postmodern culture which assume homogenizing, singular process, as well as top-down notions of power in museum spaces. As Canclini aptly writes in Consumers and Citizens, “any effective study of culture focuses on the intersections,” while deconstructing the “elaboration of knowledges” involves investigating “sites of tension, encounter, and conflict” (Canclini 2001:12). More specifically in museums, Shelton has argued for a turn to “critical museology” and for precisely these sorts of meetings of critical discourses in museums which might empower, forge dialogical relations and “reveal and encourage the transformation of contemporary realities rather than masking them” (Shelton 1995:6). I also follow here on Bhabha’s assertion that what is “politically crucial” and perhaps theoretically interesting is “to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences”(1994:1) In these “in-between spaces,” there are “strategies of selfhood-singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation …” (1994:1–2). While not on the scale of broad national identities or colonial relationships, I found that through the space of exhibits production, as in 37 any other cultural field, strategic subject positions and “social articulations of difference” emerge as experts from very different institutional contexts come together for the first time in “interstitial” “domains of difference” (Bhabha 1994:2). In this vein, I also take influence from Bakhtin’s discussions of novelistic discourse in the Dialogic Imagination, particularly his notion of “heteroglossia,” in which any (poetic) communication involves both fixed systems for translation and the plurality of experience—the idea that particular contexts in which “utterances” are exchanged can completely change meanings of any communication independent of that context (1981:263–4). 1.3 Chapter Outline In the chapters of this thesis, I trace emergent collaborative frictions and complementarities through the history of a specific institutional field at three levels of exhibits production. The first is at the level of exhibit content, involving the debates about how, under what scientific paradigm, and with what kinds of display technologies to portray the processes and interconnectivities of the deep history of earth in static things. The second is at the level of the increasingly interdisciplinary groups involved in producing exhibits over the last 60 years—what I am calling “group dynamics”—how group imaginings and singular roles and expertise increasingly come together in the planning of exhibits. The third is at the level of broader strategies for exhibits at the museum, the vision for what exhibits ought to be and how they ought to communicate science within the broadest vision for the institution—its mission, goals, and place in (here primarily U.S.) society. The institutionalized split between the mission of the increase and diffusion of knowledge, of today largely defined by research and outreach, creates complementary and 38 fractious modes of knowledge production and public communication. I frame my thesis with this wider context—the historical and institutional frameworks that are reflected in exhibit content and experts. Thus Chapters 2 and 7 essentially trace the shift in the Smithsonian’s mission from a narrower, scholarly notion of “increase and diffusion” to “diffusion and increase,” an era in which the institution has looked outward to reaching and understanding the broadest public. In Chapter 2, I explore early contexts for the increase and diffusion of knowledge through a detailed account of intersections between early fossil displays and the development of the Smithsonian Institution, the public museum, and paleontology as a scientific field. I describe the early contexts for fossil display, burgeoning museum expertise, and the museum’s mission to both increase and diffuse knowledge, at a much smaller scale and scope. In Chapters 3 to 6, I describe the two most grounded levels of exhibits production: content and group dynamics. I have broken both of these two arenas into contemporary and historical chapters. Thus in Chapters 3 and 4, I explore exhibit content through my grounded case study of fossil displays from the late-1950s to the present; Chapter 3 is about the contemporary planning for Deep Time and Chapter 4 traces the context for Deep Time from the late-1950s. Chapter 3 therefore uses my ethnographic research, including meeting observations, interviews, fieldnotes and reflections to describe current debates about content for Deep Time. I describe four major themes: real/interpretation, resolution/abstraction, reliability/innovation, and authority/participation. In each case, I describe two extremes of perspective (friction) and where the team came to early consensus (complementarity). Chapter 4 uses team and oral history interviews along with archival research to reconstruct the development of many early content debates for both science and its communication. There, I describe debates and solutions to 39 illustrating increasingly complex and interconnected systems with objects, augmented by increasingly sophisticated textual and audiovisual technologies. In Chapters 5 and 6, I explore group dynamics in exhibits production, where Chapter 5 describes the contemporary roles and processes for Deep Time and Chapter 6 describes the contexts for expertise. In Chapter 5 I show how dynamics among experts in exhibit planning illustrates wider divisions in the institution, where expertises are divided by disciplines and training aligned along dual missions of research and outreach. I show that inherent frictions played out in perceptions, performances and translations between scientists and “audience advocates” are also important spaces of creativity. In Chapter 6, I describe exhibits production expertise from the post-War and Modernization revolution of the mid-50s to the contemporary moment. I focus on the increasingly professionalized and interdisciplinary experts who come together to plan exhibits, and some of the shifts and debates in perspectives and compromise this entails in producing fossil displays. In Chapter 7, I return to institutional contexts, here exploring the broadest level of exhibits production—the role of exhibits in carrying-out the increasingly distinct missions to increase and diffuse knowledge among, and now even glean knowledge from, ever-widening and better-understood publics. Beyond these chapters, I have framed the thesis with my Introduction and Conclusion, which address broader theoretical and museological concerns and relevancies of the research. I have also included a Prologue and Coda to the thesis, not only to do justice to the fieldwork experiences facilitated in undertaking this research, but also to likewise frame my analysis with grounded description of the two ends of the Smithsonian’s mission. In the Prologue, I described 40 being in North Dakota. The process of excavating and prospecting for fossils did not only provide me with unique insights into changing expertise. It was also a window into the ways that Paleobiologists today conduct research and “increase knowledge.” It was a chance to see the parallel process of research and fieldwork that Paleobiologists undertake in studying their field. Moreover, there are important parallels between fossil excavation and what anthropologists do in filtering, decoding and analyzing complex social fields, a topic that I have not spent much time on in the content chapters of this thesis, but was nonetheless important to bring out in framing it. The Coda, which describes the arrival this Spring of the “Nation’s T-rex” is a window into the grounded impacts of both the world stage on which the Smithsonian now finds itself and the continued iconic power of dinosaurs. This is one instance in which I saw the grounded impacts of the expansion of the Smithsonian’s mission of “diffusion.” Exhibits production thus emerges as a political and subjective creative act rooted in particular institutional contexts and histories, that takes place at the intersection of paradoxical institutional missions and divergent disciplinary cultures. I argue that while perceptible in the early history of the museum, the three layers of complementarities/frictions I have identified, made manifest in the exhibits planning process, have their main roots in institutional and cultural changes of the 1950s. Further, I argue that these three layers of frictions/complementarities—from the micro level of content specific to the planning of the fossil hall complex, to the experts that produce exhibits, to the broadest institutional mission of the museum—have at their root a foundational and expanding dual role of the museum in outreach and research, one that is both paradoxical and productive in exhibits production. 41 2. Increase and Diffusion: Institutional Contexts From Early Fossils to Modernization This chapter sets the stage for the chapters to come. It describes how Smithsonian fossil displays materialized and grew in tandem with both the science of paleontology and the development of the modern museum. It also shows that it was not really until the beginning of the post-war period that exhibit development was increasingly defined by negotiations over dynamic technologies, differing expertises, and split missions and values. Rather, the first 80 years of each level of exhibit development—exhibit content, group dynamics, and institutional mission—functioned on a smaller scale, and often in an ad hoc and utilitarian manner, as a young scientific discipline and young museum grew. This was the earliest context for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge,” where “increase” and “diffusion” were both largely part of scholarly production. New discoveries were excavated and prepared for display in orderly ways that helped piece together the history of earth and showed off the museum’s greatest finds. Not only were modes of production fairly cohesive, and undertaken by a small group, but they were also—with the few exceptions I will point out—defined by very steady growth, interrupted by long periods of stagnancy due to world events and fiscal or spatial constraints. In these early developments—including curator Charles Gilmore’s distaste for gaudy showmanship—we see the beginnings of complementarities and frictions that would be intensified by major shifts in the late 1950s. In the area of exhibit content, up through the mid-1940s, displays of most things, but particularly fossils, were characterized by two display modes: taxonomic collections mounted in rows or groups by orders and types, and iconic displays—what were often referred to as ‘showy’ 42 specimens—singular mounts of odd, large, or impressive discoveries. These are the beginnings of a balance between affective and spectacular, and purely research-driven exhibit displays. Throughout the period a few new techniques were used to show processes and interconnectivity and the adoption of evolutionary theory, including early groupings meant to show change over time, a early illustrations and lantern slides, and small scale exhibit experiments. However, most exhibit practice through the period set out to illustrate standalone and individual objects and specimens for comparison. Language and tone remained for a scholarly public until World War II when broadened audiences of servicemen came into the halls and expressed frustration with their impenetrable language and organization for the first time. The changes they inspired, were finally enacted with the Exhibits Modernization program beginning in the 1950s. These in turn, radically altered values and understandings of science and modes and tone of display. In the area of group dynamics, early exhibit production was curatorial-driven and produced by a small group of curators and preparators, with the help of a few contracted workers, some of who are not named in records. At this time curators rarely held PhDs. They also, by necessity, had to function in many different kinds of roles in the process. In some ways they were thus less specialized than today’s curators both in their research areas and in their day-to-day work. The Smithsonian was a hierarchical place, where the chain of command was clear. Although there are no exhibit meeting documents in records, detailed annual curatorial and institutional reports lay out some of the logic around decisions for the halls. While there were no major debates within the museum about the proper tone and style of exhibitry, curatorial correspondence with other museums show these debates in the wider field. 43 In terms of institutional mission, up through the 1940s there was a steady growth in the push to diffuse knowledge to the broader public, but for the most part, the increase and diffusion of knowledge was largely about scholarship and its communication through simple displays, publications, and academic lectures. All of these activities were undertaken by individual curators. In the 1920s and again during World War II, there was a movement toward diffusion as broader public communication, and, with the exception of the depression era, visitorship increased. However it was not until major cultural and institutional changes of the 1950s that the democratizing of the institution and the expansion of the notion of the diffusion of knowledge created utterly new contexts for exhibits production. 2.1 A Fledgling Museum and Discipline: Smithsonian’s First Fossil Displays In 1829 when James Smithson left his estate to found an institution to promote the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” in the U.S., paleontology was just emerging as a field. Indeed, it had only been in 1815 that Reverend William Buckland, a Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford had discovered the “great lizard” Megalosaurus, and only in 1822 that Gideon Mantell, a physician in Sussex, England, found a tooth of what he called Iguanodon. The two were named in 1824 and 1825 respectively (Buckland 1824:391; Mantell 1825:184). A few years later in 1833, Mantell published findings on the third of what would become known as “Dinosauria”—Hylaeosaurus (Mantell 1833:238). Richard Owen coined the term to describe these giant “fearfully great lizards” in 1842 (Owen 1842:103). It was also in 1833 that Charles Lyell was beginning to describe the important geological principles of the fledgling field in his third volume of Principles of Geology. There, he described the ways that chemical, biological and physical forces shaped the earth over time and, through 44 the law of “superposition,” could be observed in layers, with older rocks on the bottom that could be compared in age across geographic locations by animals or plants found in them. His nine “ages” in time formed one of the first descriptions of the deep history of Earth (Howard 1975:125–126; Lyell 1853[1830]). Thus when James K. Polk signed an Act of Congress establishing the Smithsonian Institution in August of 1846, paleontology was also making its start. These were early years across the sciences in the U.S.; it was only in the 1840s that the term “scientist” even came into common parlance (Jaffe 2001:3). Joseph Henry, the Institution’s first Secretary, believed in acquiring natural history specimens only for study, and was not in favour of founding a broader museum or exhibition program. It was under the influence and then leadership of Spencer Fullerton Baird beginning in the 1850s and crystallizing with his appointment to Secretary in 1878 that the Institution began to focus on founding a national museum. It was in this vein that in 1871, the very earliest “showy” and “gigantic” extinct vertebrates—large, plaster casts—were placed on display in the Smithsonian’s first building on the mall, the Castle. These were a giant ground sloth, Megatherium cuvieri, a land tortoise Colossochelys atlas and South American glyptodont Schistopleurum typus (Gilmore 1942:339). 45 Figure 2.1: Stereograph of Megatherium and Glyptodon c. 1872.11 The first actual skeleton of an extinct animal placed on display was Megaceros hibernicus, a Pleistocene Irish elk, that came to the museum the following year, and whose “antlers measure nine feet form tip to tip. The restoration of this noble animal, by B. Waterhouse Hawkins, is one of the most imposing objects in the Museum” (Rhees 1884:37). The first representation of a dinosaur placed on display at the Smithsonian was a cast of Hadrosaurus foulkii, the “most extraordinary reptile yet discovered in the American cretaceous formations,” whose “bones of the hinder extremity are especially remarkable for their huge proportions”(Rhees 1884:38). This cast was one of the first vertebrate fossils to circulate to multiple museums in the U.S. Based on the original skeleton from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, it was one of four reconstructions that had been built to celebrate the American Centennial at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 (Jaffe 2001:161). 46 Figure 2.2: Hadrosaurus foulkii in the Smithsonian Castle c. 1874–1882.12 These first fossil displays on the Mall marked an important moment for both the development of paleontology and the modern museum, and hence for the Smithsonian as it is conceived today. There were thus a number of important contexts setting the scene for fossil vertebrates appearing in Washington that also mark the beginnings of the foundational frictions and complementarities characteristic of contemporary natural history museums and their exhibits—the frictions between scientific research and its communication or popularization in the public realm. First, the mid-to late-nineteenth century was a period of great expansion. The opening of the American West to new commodity flows, the claiming of lands, and the expansion of railroads also opened a new frontier for scientific exploration and museum collecting. This was essential to the flourishing of the new field of paleontology, and indeed, the collecting of fossils 47 in the American West became part of the United States’s claims to legitimacy as a nation (Jaffe 2001). Second, this period marked the golden age of World’s Fairs. Beginning with the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, fairs and expositions exploded across Europe and the United States as the nineteenth century advanced. In the United States, as illustrated particularly in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, these events were great gestures of national and economic prestige (Benedict and Dobkin 1983; Rydell 1987; Rydell 2006; Rydell, et al. 2000). It was amid these events that some of the first dinosaurs (Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and other prehistoric creatures) were displayed to a broad public. Famously, the Crystal Palace hosted Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s sculptures of dinosaurs; an account of a raucous dinner party thrown by Richard Owen inside the body of an Iguanodon sculpture caused a great splash in the Illustrated London News (Jaffe 2000). The modern museum, as a large, columned, encyclopaedic and public institution, largely emerged out of such events. It is thus interesting to note that the same places that housed and popularized the first fossil displays were also direct predecessors of the kind of museum Smithsonian would establish to house “Extinct Monsters.” It was at World’s Fairs that both the spread of paleontological research and discovery was shared across the scholarly world and the spread of dinosaurs as public spectacle grew across Great Britain and soon after, the U.S. These displays at World’s Fairs were thus not only predecessors of fossil exhibits, but also drove their foundation through specimen and scholarly exchange and broadened public interest. Third, in part as a result of these large-scale fairs and the subsequent establishment of museums in cities across the U.S., Smithsonian fossil displays emerged from a wider network of newly formed institutions. In America, the museum tradition in natural history was largely born 48 out of Charles Wilson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia which operated from 1786 to the 1850s (Alexander 1992:19). Here, Linnaean classification schemes organized exhibits “with comprehensive labels above the exhibit cases with captions in Latin, French, and English” (Alexander 1992:19). Most importantly for the development of popularized fossil display, alongside its 269 portraits of heroes of the fledgling nation, one of its most famous exhibits was its mastodon, excavated by Peale during an 1801 New York State expedition (Alexander 1992:19; Howard 1975:40–54). Along with Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences (founded later in 1812), Peale’s museum was an innovation, in that through the mid-1800s, most American museums “belonged to and were operated by very unlearned persons who installed stuffed beasts and serpents, waxwork figures, and electrical machines” and “presented farces, songs, dances, and similar vaudeville entertainment as a kind of cheap popular theatre”(Alexander 1997:13–14). Boston’s Columbian Museum, Cincinnati’s Western Museum, and (perhaps most famously) Barnum’s American Museum in New York were prime culprits. However, even Peale had his gimmicks—under his philosophy of “rational amusement,” he sought to attract the lay public to pay the bills with their 25 cent admissions, with “magic mirrors that distorted a viewer into a giant, a dwarf, or a monster with seven heads; a speaking tube mounted in a lion’s head that allowed one to shout back and forth with one’s friends in another room … a compound blowpipe to demonstrate the wonders of chemistry” (Alexander 1992:19). By the 1870s, though, American museums were becoming more serious and schematic than their curiosity-driven predecessors including, alongside the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History (1869), the Milwaukee Public Museum (1884), the Field Museum (1893), and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History 49 (1896). These were the beginnings of some of the fundamental frictions inherent in natural history displays—between sober science and spectacle; research and outreach.1 Fourth, the 1870s marked the enormous acceleration of fossil discovery and naming amidst the great “bone wars” of the Cope-Marsh fossil race, which vastly increased public interest in extinct animals. Up until Edward Drinker Cope’s death in 1897, more than 130 species were named as fossils poured in from excavation sites first on the east coast (for Cope famously in Haddonfield, New Jersey) and then out West. Importantly for the Smithsonian, Othniel Charles Marsh, Cope’s long-time rival, had been appointed the first Vertebrate Paleontologist for the United States in 1882, after which he began to collect for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) while processing his materials at his own museum at Yale (funded by his uncle, George Peabody). In 1887, he was appointed Honorary Head Curator of the U.S. National Museum’s Department of Vertebrate Fossils. Because the Organic Act required the USGS to turn specimens no longer needed for research over to the U.S. National Museum (the Smithsonian), after 1886 freight car loads of fossils poured into the Museum (four in total in 1886, 1891, 1896, and 1898). When Marsh died in 1899, just two years after Cope, another 80 tons of vertebrate fossils were brought from Yale to the U.S. National Museum in five rail cars (Brinkman 2010:3; Gilmore 1942:344). Still today, the Marsh collection is Smithsonian’s largest single collection of fossils. As part of this Cope-Marsh bone war publicity, fossil vertebrates became important cultural icons. Megatherium, for instance, became an important institutional 1 Within this new burgeoning field of museums, it is interesting to note that the “Irish Elk,” for instance, was also the first specimen to be exhibited at the British Museum (1844), the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (Gilmore 1942) The details of the disappearance of Hadrosaurus remain mysterious. It is thought that the Hadrosaurus specimen was in fact sent to the Chicago Exposition, along with other Smithsonian material (and never returned). According to Charles Schuchert writing in 1939, “This restoration of Hadrosaurus was made for the United States National Museum for the Centennial Exposition. When I joined the National Museum, Dr. Goode told me the Hadrosaurus had long stood in front of the Museum and had weathered so badly that it was destroyed a few years before my arrival in 1893” (Gilmore 1942). 50 icon for the community of scientists frequenting the Smithsonian: “In those days, the Smithsonian took on the ambience of a fraternity house, with visiting scientists actually boarding at the institution. Led by William Stimson, a Marine biologist and bon vivant, the scientists drank, caroused, and held footraces through the Smithsonian’s Great Hall. Stimpson had dubbed this group the Megatherium Club, in honor of an extinct sloth. His fellows, Cope included, renamed the federal institution the Stimpsonian” (Jaffe 2001:47). Once again, we find the early roots of the intertwining of scientific research and its affiliated popularized and public spectacles. It is clear that the early Smithsonian mission was to steer clear of such dilemmas by keeping “increase” and “diffusion” separate. In an 1866 guide to the Smithsonian, one reads that the mission to “increase” and “diffuse” knowledge were distinct elements not to be “confounded”: It will be observed that the object of the bequest is twofold—first, to increase, and, second, to diffuse, knowledge among men. These two objects are entirely separate and distinct, and to view the case understandingly the one must not be confounded with the other. The first is to enlarge the existing stock of knowledge by the addition of new truths, and the second, to disseminate knowledge thus enlarged among men. This distinction is readily acknowledged by men of science, and in Europe different classes of scientific and other societies are founded upon it. (Rhees 1866:9) Moreover, collections, “in conformity with the policy of the Institution” were not meant to build a large museum or keep a store of objects for exchange, but “to furnish the naturalists of the world with the materials for advancing the science of the natural history of North America, and of facilitating the study of its various branches by supplying museums, both in the United States and in Europe, with sets of type specimens” (Rhees 1866: 27). 51 2.2 1880s to 1910: Systematic and Iconic Fossils at the First U.S. National Museum Thus in the very early years of Smithsonian paleontology, still housed in the Castle and before the founding of the United States National Museum (USNM), there were no separate units or custodians handling fossil materials. Although the Institution accepted collections from the Wilkes Expedition in 1858, and began a tradition as a place for collections, it was not until George Brown Goode was hired under Spencer Fullerton Baird around 1872 that any attention was given to displays. It was Goode who prepared the first government displays for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, where the Smithsonian acquired its Hadrosaurus cast. It was not until Baird, who supported the idea of a national museum and its visibility, replaced Henry as Secretary, that the Smithsonian successfully solicited funds from Congress to found a National Museum. Following Goode’s philosophy, the Museum would be founded for the collection and display of important cultural and natural objects as: … a Museum of Record, in which are preserved the material foundations of an enormous amount of scientific knowledge … It is a Museum of Research, by the policy which aims to make its contents serve as fully as possible as a stimulus to and a foundation for the studies of scientific investigators … It is an Educational Museum of the broadest type, by reason of its policy of illustrating specimens of every kind of natural object and every manifestation of human thought and activity, by displaying descriptive labels adapted to the popular mind, and by its policy of distributing its publications and its named series of duplicates (Goode cited in Rhees 1884:14). When Baird took on greater administrative duties as Secretary, “Goode became the de facto head of the museum,” shaping its mission to include these three aspects (Yochelson 2003:122). 52 On March 3, 1879 Congress appropriated $250,000 for the Museum. The building was designed by Cluss and Schulz and proposed as a simple structure not unlike the exhibit building the government had sponsored at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It was built entirely from brick so as to be fireproof, as the Castle had nearly burned to the ground in 1865. Ground was broken on April 17, 1879. This new building would house the first Comparative Osteology hall, to include both modern and fossil bones for comparison and display. Figure 2.3 USNM (now Arts and Industries Building) under construction 1879.13 53 Figure 2.4 Constructing the Comparative Anatomy & Osteology Hall, National Museum 1881.14 When the U.S. National Museum, now called the Arts and Industries building, opened its 80,000 square feet of exhibition space in 1881, the first hall of Comparative Osteology displayed Smithsonian’s first fossil exhibits. From then until 1887, vertebrate fossil collections fell under the Department of Comparative Anatomy within the Department of Zoology, where osteologists and paleontologists prepared materials for exhibit in an integrated hall of ancient and modern creatures in the Southeast Court. Other materials were held in the Geology Department, and were displayed in the South West Range. After 1887, the Southeast Court also included fossil invertebrates and plants (Gilmore 1942:340). 54 Figure 2.5 USNM (Arts and Industries Building) floor plan, 1925.15 Figure 2.6 Systematic Geology Hall, South West Range, Arts and Industries Building c. 1903.16 Marsh’s appointment as Honorary Vertebrate Paleontology curator in 1887, along with other USGS collecting expeditions, had begun to yield more material for display (although much 55 remained at Yale). However, in 1890, John Bell Hatcher, later famous for collecting the first ever Triceratops assembled, was temporarily appointed as an assistant to O.C. Marsh to arrange his collections. In July of 1891, the Smithsonian received the fruits of his labor in the form of a number of iconic specimens, which resulted in the entire Southeast Court of the USNM being devoted to vertebrate fossils. This marked the first time a discrete space was devoted to fossil exhibits.2 From the arrival of new preparators in 1898 onward, “there was a slow but steady growth and improvement of the exhibition collections” (Gilmore 1942:340). Figure 2.7 Comparative Osteology Hall c. 1882.17 2 In 1899 and 1902, respectively, the museum mounted a Marsh cast of the rhinoceros-like mammal Dinoceras (a uintathere) and the skeleton of a large aquatic bird, Hesperornis regalis (first on display at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition). 56 The hiring of preparators was part of a number of complicated changes taking place in the structure of the organization, and thus the custodianship of fossil collections. By 1891, Vertebrate Paleontology was designated as a Department (Lucas 1891:223). 3 In 1894, then Assistant Secretary George Brown Goode founded the “Department of Paleontology.” Director of the USGS. Charles Doolittle Walcott, was appointed honorary curator, with Charles Schuchert as assistant curator. Schuchert was the first person to be paid for his work on the paleontology collections. In one of his earliest records, he describes that one of his most immediate tasks was to rearrange and reopen the paleontology exhibits, which were in disarray: When the Assistant Curator was appointed to take charge of the Department of Paleontology, he found the exhibition court closed to the public. The most important work consisted in the rearrangement and renovation of the entire Exhibition collection. This had progressed so far that in March the room was again opened to the public. A new and more appropriate entrance to the court was cut through the south wall and the eastern one closed. The former crowded condition of the room was relieved by removing the plants and vertebrates from the slope top cases to the wall cases, allowing eight slope top cases to be discarded. Thirty-two of these cases remain for the exhibition of invertebrate fossils. The plants and vertebrates are being arranged in the wall cases, with the four corners of the room occupied by large slabs of tracks, standing on screens. All the fossil insects in the department have been assembled and appropriately mounted with figures on tiles. (Schuchert 1895) And indeed, although his research work was based in invertebrates, he noted that little was accomplished regarding invertebrate displays due to, first, the time necessary to work on vertebrate specimens. The Zeuglodon (now called Basilosaurus) was being prepared for exhibit. Its bones were placed in cases while a cast of it spanned the entire length of the room: 3 The first report from the Department of Vertebrate Fossils appears in the Annual Report of the United States National Museum for 1891 by Frederic A. Lucas, who was then Assistant Curator 57 Nothing has been done towards a better installation of the invertebrate fossils. This is due to the fact that the Assistant Curator and Mr. Whipple gave nearly all of five months to developing the Zeuglodon material, which work is not yet completed. Another month will finish this work, when the skeleton will be placed on exhibition (Schuchert 1895). Second, he noted that the invertebrate collections were in such disarray, that no work on public displays was possible. And, despite his emphasis on systematic and orderly organization, spatial limitations prevented orderly display: Unfortunately the space, drawer room, now available for vertebrate fossils is inadequate for the proper accommodation of the specimens now in it, with the result that the drawers are overcrowded, while it is not possible to arrange the specimens systematically (Schuchert 1898). The clear emphasis on vertebrates in the early period was also part of a great push to acquire and display vertebrate specimens for their public appeal. While in the earliest 1880s guidebooks vertebrate specimens were only featured on two an a half pages—compared to some 47 pages for archaeological, historical and human objects (Rhees 1884)—by the 1890s there was a distinct push to acquire and display large fossils for display. As an annual curatorial report from 1894-1895 read: The past fiscal year has been a very good one both as to number of accessions and their scientific value. This is more particularly true of vertebrate fossils to which special attention has been given since this Museum is remarkably deficient of these animals and further on account of the great interest taken by the public in extinct monsters (Schuchert 1895[emphasis added]). 58 Figure 2.8 Comparative Osteology Hall with Basilosaurus Cast, Arts and Industries Building, 1896.18 George P. Merrill had been placed in charge of the collections—now divided into sections of vertebrate fossils, invertebrate fossils, and fossil plants—in 1904. It was Merrill who would shape the fledgling Department of Geology as its first Head Curator through the late-1920s, and who recruited three men who would go on to have long careers at the Museum. Charles W. Gilmore and James W. Gidley were hired as preparators in 1903 and 1905, respectively, with assistant preparator Norman Boss hired in 1904. Gilmore and Boss had come from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and Gidley from the American Museum in New York. The three would be the main drivers of vertebrate exhibits in the first half of the twentieth century (Gilmore 1942:315). 59 Fortunately for the vertebrate fossil collections (and for an archivist attempting to piece together their history), Charles Gilmore was a careful and meticulous fossil preparator and scientist. Gilmore’s daily work was relatively mundane, and like his arrangement of collections, systematic. He, Gidley and Boss were tasked with cleaning, organizing, cataloguing and preparing the mass of material on their hands, much of it from the Marsh collections. In order to publish findings, he often split his days between this physical work and work on papers for publication. When Gilmore arrived, the Marsh collections were being stored in rented buildings off-site in southwest Washington on the west side of 10th Street near C Street NW. The first floor of the brick building located there was being used as a paleontology laboratory for preparation work, while the upper two floors were filled with trays, crates and boxes of fossil materials. During this period the museum had three distinct collection types—the first for exhibition, the second for study—”The collections designated as study or reserve comprise those specimens that have been filed away for study, comparison, and reference purposes” (Gilmore 1942:330)—and the third for exchange with other institutions. The off-site Marsh collections would become part of all three of these. Study collections were kept in the Museum, in standardized trays (then kept on the balcony) and at the bottoms of exhibition cases. The preparators worked to reduce the bulk of the Marsh material by extracting bones from their surrounding rock matrix, and discarding “worthless material” (Gilmore 1942:322) From 1903 onward, there was a marked acceleration in the mounting and display of fossils. This began with the first dinosaur skeleton to be put on display at the Smithsonian (and in fact the second dinosaur skeleton on display in North America): the type skeleton of what was then called Trachodon annectens (afterward Claosaurus or Thespesius, now Edmontosaurus). It 60 was installed among other “outstanding” specimens on display that had been moved from the Castle, such as the Irish Elk, and new specimens acquired from recent expositions such as the large aquatic bird, Hesperornis regalis, a number of large casts, and the iconic Basilosaurus installation.4 Skulls and skeletal parts of fossil vertebrate specimens were displayed in wall and “slopetop diaphragm” cases (including limb bones and other parts of Triceratops and Apatosaurus). At this time it was thought that the overall arrangement of these displays, as with the rest of the Museum, should be systematically organized in order to better educate the public. An early guide to the Museum explained: “The museum, however, is not merely a place of deposit for scientific material, but, by means of a thorough classification and the illustration of the history of human culture, it is destined to become the most comprehensive and instructive educational exhibit in the world (Rhees 1884:11). As the Annual Report for the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology for 1905–6 read: During the month of August, with the assistance of Mr. Boss, the exhibition series was almost entirely rearranged. In so far as was practicable the specimens were grouped in their respective classes, thus rendering a comparison of the different forms less difficult. Some little attempt was also made to arrange these separate groups according to their position in the geological scale. On account of limited time, inadequate exhibition space, and lack of properly mounted and prepared specimens, this arrangement was far from being all that was desired, but it is thought that the improvement is manifest.(Gilmore 1906 [emphasis added]) Cases, some 300 made for the whole museum, were constructed out of mahogany. These sat on marble and tile flooring in plastered, tinted rooms. These cases were only built in one size so as to be interchangeable and permit rearrangement. Small specimens were “mounted in groups 4 Plaster casts included a Dinoceras, Megatherium, Dinotherium and Schistopleurum. 61 upon small tablets or in glass-covered boxes of uniform size, which can be handled with great facility” while “the objects are displayed against background which at the same time afford the greatest ease to the eye of the visitor and the greatest relief and effectiveness to the object displayed. Labels were printed on tinted paper in “large, heavy-face type” so as to be “less wearisome to the eye than the ordinary labels in black and white” (Goode cited in Rhees 1884:13). As the exhibition specimens were rearranged, they were given new descriptive labels to describe groups of animals by type (Schuchert 1898). The exception to this was with large, iconic specimens, or “more important individuals.” These were displayed as freestanding mounted skeletons wherever they could be most prominently displayed. Displays and labels for these animals “call attention to the principal, or more interesting facts which the specimens illustrate” (Schuchert 1898). Where the staff had no full skeleton, they began to present “figures of the entire skeleton.” Indeed, in the first guidebooks of the 1880s, invertebrate and paleobotanical collections on exhibit were entirely left out, and the only entries for paleontology described in some detail the large vertebrates on display. The few pages devoted to these “gigantic” and “extraordinary” fossil creatures (“the most imposing objects in the Museum” (Rhees 1884:37), labeled “Dinocerata, extinct gigantic mammals from Rocky Mountains” (Rhees 1890:86) included: The Megatherium (Megatherium cuvieri), the Irish Elk (Megaloceros hibernicus), the “gigantic” Himmalayan tortoise (Collossochelys atlas), the Hadrosaurus, or Kangaroo Lizard (Hadrosaurus Foulkii), and a Glyptodon (Schistopleurum typus). Descriptions of these displays tended to focus on the discovery and size or “extreme length” (Rhees 1884:37) of the specimen or its parts. In 1904 and 1905 a number of other iconic specimens, some of them still on display today, were added to the exhibit. Two of these included, in 1904, a life-size papier-mâché 62 restoration of Stegosaurus stenops (acquired after the St. Louis Exposition), and a skeleton of a giant moa, Dinornis. The third was the world’s first mounted Triceratops. Figure 2.9 Papier-mâché Stegosaurus on display at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904.19 While the first Smithsonian cast of Triceratops had been shown at the Buffalo Exposition in 1901, it was in 1905 that Gilmore completed Triceratops elatus, his first singular project (Gilmore 1942:341). Below (Fig. 2.10) we see the headline it made in local news. 63 Figure 2.10 Clipping, “The Sunday Star” advertising the mounting of the world’s first Triceratops, 1905.20 Meanwhile, the museum’s collections were growing rapidly, and by the turn of the century, the USNM was bursting at the seams. As early as 1895, the newly appointed Schuchert noted: All of the rooms are now occupied by the various sections in the Department of Paleontology are crowded, and while here and there small areas are available for additional cases of standard drawers, more exhibition space is required. This is mostly so in the section of vertebrate fossils, since nearly all of the organisms are large and can be best housed in the exhibition series. (Schuchert 1896) 64 In January 1903, Congress appropriated funds for the construction of a new building on the mall to house and exhibit the collections. Designed by Hornblower and Marshall, ground was broken on June 15, 1904. It was thus within only a few years after Gilmore’s arrival that the preparators were further tasked with moving the fossil collections across the mall into a new building. Figure 2.11 Map of the Smithsonian Museum grounds c. 1911.21 2.3 1910s-1920s: Systematic and Iconic Exhibits Installation in a New Building 65 It was just a year after the founding of the first professional society for American paleontology that fossils began moving into the first exhibit halls entirely devoted to their display (Sepkoski 2012: 28). The first mention of moving specimens across the mall to the new building occurs in Gilmore’s daybooks on April 26, 1909 when he “made arrangements” to move a Ceratosaurus mount (Gilmore 1909). From this date the process of moving and preparing specimens for exhibition was ongoing until the halls were completed in 1911. In August of 1909, most of the men moved into their “new quarters” at the new building; Gidley joined them at the end of September (Gilmore 1910). While spacious, the new building was not yet ideal for human occupancy. Gilmore’s entry for October 14, 1909 reads in thin, shaky ink, “Building so cold, that very little work done today” (Gilmore 1909). By March 3, 1910, Gilmore wrote that the men had “Finished moving. Everything here excepting material on exhibition” (Gilmore 1910). Thus, when the museum is said to have opened, on March 17, 1910, Gilmore lists the date as the “Grand opening of the National gallery of art” and makes no mention of the fossil displays being ready or open. In fact, Gilmore’s daybooks indicate that the paleontology hall was not opened until October 15 of 1911 (Gilmore 1912). In preparing the halls and the mounts, Gilmore called on the services of a number of craftspeople and laborers to assist with elements of exhibit installation: blacksmiths (Wade) for metalwork (iron framing for mounts), railings and steel cases, carpenters for framing specimens and paintings, repairing wood bases, mounting large specimens and objects on the wall, installing glass around cases and “slates” on the tops of cases and bases of mounts, plasterers for filling mount bases and backgrounds, painters to oil floors, occasionally do glass work, and paint bases, walls and other surfaces, artists (Weber) to create drawings, Mr. Amateis, a modeler and sculptor to cast skeletal parts, photographers to document specimens as their mounts were 66 completed, and “laborers” to move heavy things. In a very few cases, Gilmore noted that he had “coloured men helping” (November 11, 1911 Gilmore 1911b). Gilmore and Gidley were apparently also involved in heavy lifting and some of these other jobs, writing for instance on October 17, 1910: “helped Gidley move Zeuglodon up stairs to exhibition hall” and the following day “helped Gidley put up iron supports for Zeuglodon” (Gilmore 1911b). By September of 1911, Gilmore mentions there being a “carpenter shop” in the museum (Gilmore 1912). Each man was contracted for part time work and reported to a curator who oversaw their work, in most cases this being Charles Gilmore. Figure 2.12 Map of the Natural History Building first floor c. 1913.22 67 Figure 2.13 Current numbering for east halls 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.23 Once in the new building collections previously stored off-site or in bottom exhibit drawers were put together in new wooden exhibition and steel storage cases. As Gilmore wrote, “These commodious quarters permitted a more systematic arrangement of the study collections, and for the first time the preparators were provided with a well-lighted, well-equipped, roomy laboratory (27 by 77 feet). These improvements in facilities were almost immediately reflected in an improved quality as well as quantity of output.” (Gilmore 1942:322). Iconic specimens such as Triceratops and the papier-mâché Stegosaurus finally moved into the new spaces in the summer of 1910 (Gilmore 1911b). On March 28, Gilmore met with Merrill and Gidley about the exhibition spaces, and on July 16, 1910, they approved a plan for the exhibition of specimens in the new hall. On July 18, the team began arranging the specimens in the new space in earnest (Gilmore 1911b). After initial discussions in June, on July 21, 1911, Gilmore received notification that he was promoted, along with Gidley, from “Custodian” to “Assistant Curator of Fossil Reptiles.” Meanwhile, Margaret Moodey, the first woman to work for paleontology, had been hired as a secretary for the Division. By October 12, 1911, labels 68 were “placed on every specimen on exhibition,” and on October 14 Gilmore wrote that the hall was “ready for opening tomorrow” (Gilmore 1911b). However, after its opening, Gilmore’s daybooks indicate that work on arrangement and labels was ongoing (including a new label for Triceratops just over a week after opening). As George Perkins Merrill said of this early label writing process: There are few forms of literary work, it must be added, that require greater care than that of label writing. To be able to state concisely and clearly the essential facts concerning an object [57] is by no means an easy task as everyone knows who has made the attempt. If the label is too long it will not be read; if too short it is not sufficiently explicit. (Yochelson 1985:57-58) The star and centerpiece of the new hall was undoubtedly the newly mounted Zeuglodon (Basilosaurus), “being the first of its kind to be mounted in any museum of the world, its nearest approach being the grotesque Hydrachus prepared and exhibited by Koch in Germany in 1847” (Merrill 1910:49). In addition, as Gilmore wrote later, “the older specimens were renovated, most of the skeletal casts were retired, several new specimens were added, and, as a new style of case was provided, the exhibition took on a very much improved appearance… although the specimens were far too few to fill the allotted space (Gilmore 1942:341). 69 Figure 2.14 Basilosaurus in the Hall of Vertebrate Fossils c. 1912.24 70 Figure 2.15 Cyanotype of the Vertebrate Fossil Hall c. 1913.25 When the halls opened in October of 1911, the spaces were outfitted with a number of iconic mounts, on standalone platforms, and wall cases, filled with specimens organized by type, size, and geographical location. Indeed, as it was with most museums at the time, the primary organizing principle for these displays was taxonomic or classificatory—by type and size—while larger “showy” specimens were displayed prominently where there was open space. Here are two photographic examples of these two display types: 71 Figure 2.16 Fossil Crinoids, Springer Collection c. 1920.26 Figure 2.17 Legs and pelvis of Allosaurus fragilis Marsh.27 72 Exceptions to this overall framework can be seen in alterations to a few specimens for aesthetic interest or to fill space: May 2, 1911 “On exhibition material. Cut Ichthyosaurus skull in half to hang on wall” (Gilmore 1911b). Labels were printed and framed. Gilmore also made a few illustrations for cases to give specimens context, including a “map showing distribution of Ceratopsia” for the “Ceratopsia case” (Gilmore 1912). A few pieces of artwork illustrating fossils as living creatures with some environmental context were also placed on the walls. A painting of Triceratops, for instance, was first placed on display in February of 1912. Gilmore also commissioned photographs of the gallery and drawings of specimens (for a talk on Stegosaurus, for instance) for the production of lantern slides ("December 20, 1911" Gilmore 1912). Gilmore later wrote: To some extent the exhibition has been embellished by the addition of large canvases depicting the life appearance of various animals in their natural habitat. The more important of these are: A restoration (8 by 15 feet) of Triceratops by Charles R. Knight, W. K. Stone, and Joseph Gleeson; a restoration of Camarasaurus by E. Bruce Horsfall; and a restoration of Dimetrodon and other Permian reptiles by Garnet W. Jex. A diorama returned from the Dallas Exposition depicts some of the animals of the Jurassic period in their natural environment. Other illustrative materials consisting of model restorations of various animals, done by Knight, Lull, Gidley, and Gilmore, serve as an aid to visitors in visualizing the probable appearance in life of these long extinct animals. (Gilmore 1942:342). In September of that year, Gilmore also installed a mirror at the base of Stegosaurus (Gilmore 1913). However, these displays were the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, as had been the case in the previous displays in the first “New U.S. National Museum,” now Arts and Industries building, there were two kinds of emphases that shaped the paleontology (within the broader Geology) exhibits: iconic, vertebrate displays and taxonomic or systematic ones. The 73 first involved the prestige of the discipline of vertebrate paleontology at this time, which was in collecting, assembling and naming “Extinct Monsters.” Significantly, there are no records of this term being associated with the hall until well after its opening. However, the phrase was already in use by Schuchert in the 1890s, and Gilmore noted that he received a copy of the third edition of the book Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days by Chapman and Hall on November 7, 1912 (Gilmore 1913). Gilmore’s activities make this first emphasis clear. Gilmore spent his mornings preparing specimens and figuring out how they might be mounted and put on display, while his afternoons were spent working on papers about them. These papers, all with simple titles such as “Description of two new species of fossil turtles, from the Lance formation of Wyoming” (Gilmore 1916), described the details of specimens found in the field, and the probable assemblage of the bones in life. Coming out of the tradition of comparative anatomy, if you could assemble it and name it, then it would be put it on display for comparative study. With the exception of a few clay models molded by Gilmore, and a very few paintings, no real attempts were made to contextualize specimens. Gilmore wrote later in 1942: Little attempt has been made to bring about a systematic arrangement of these materials, more stress being given to displaying the larger specimens, so as to make them as well as the exhibition halls appear to the best advantage. With the acquisition of better-preserved specimens, the practice has been followed of retiring inferior materials from time to time. This has added greatly to the attractiveness of the exhibition as a whole, as well as increasing its educational value to the public. (Gilmore 1942:342). The Annual Report of 1910–1911 describing the preparation of the new vertebrate hall read as follows: Among the improvements introduced are new standard styles of pedestals for the floor and of framed enclosures for flat mounts displayed on the walls. The principal 74 preparations made for the exhibition series during the year consisted of skeletons of Zeuglodon (Basilosaurus cetoides), of the type specimen of Ceratosaurus nasicornis Marsh, and of Camptosaurus browni and Camptosaurus nanus. The two latter specimens have been grouped on the same base in a unique and attractive manner. Among large forms previously made ready for the hall are an Oreodon (Merycoidodon gracilis), a Triceratops prorsus and a Trachodon annectens. The skeletons of the large mastodon (Mammut americanum), the “Irish elk” (Alces giganteus), and a New Zealand moa (Emeus crassus), from the older collections, were entirely remounted and their appearance greatly improved… Among the lesser though interesting mounts that have been installed may be mentioned the skull and antlers of an Alces giganteus, two mammoth tusks, 10 specimens of fishes, and several turtles. Work on a complete composite skeleton of Teleoceras fossiger, a short-legged rhinoceros, is well under way (Merrill 1912:52-53). The second emphasis was on organization and encyclopaedic comprehensiveness. For the rest of the objects in the collection—fossil plants, invertebrates, and pieces or assemblages of vertebrates, the emphasis was on classifying and organizing objects by type, size, region, or collection, with some attention to the “attractiveness” of specimens. Specimens were put into categories and labeled accordingly. It is clear from the Annual Reports that the increased breadth, organization, and quality of collections afforded by the new building created the most important improvements in exhibitions. … the installations now in progress will be much more extensive and effective than those with which the public has been acquainted in the older buildings. Serving as a nucleus, these are being thoroughly weeded out, much of the old material giving place to better specimens, while the number of additions will be very great and their character such as to markedly increase the interest and educational value of the halls (1912:16). About fossil invertebrates, the Report read: The exhibition of fossil invertebrates has been planned on a much more comprehensive scale than before, and good progress was made in bringing together and preparing the 75 material. No more than two-thirds of the specimens shown in the old building will be utilized, but to this nucleus much that is new and attractive will be added, and it is hoped that the work can be completed before the end of the calendar year 1911(Merrill 1912:53). 2.3.1 Evolutionary Thinking Part of the changes in organization also had to do with a greater consensus in the scientific community about evolution. The first place I found evolution mentioned as an organizing principle for exhibit displays is in the Annual Report from Merrill for FY1910-11: In view of the early opening of the new museum building, it is first of all necessary to place all of the exhibition collections in order. As mentioned elsewhere in this report, the work on the large reptilian specimens is practically completed, but much remains to be done in preparing series of the smaller specimens to illustrate different phases of geological history and evolution of the several reptilian groups, and I would therefore urge the necessity of continuing this work which is now so well under way. (Gilmore 1911a [emphasis added]) For its first hundred years, paleontology, as it has been recently described by Sepkoski (2012), remained “agnostic” to Darwinian evolution. Darwin himself had essentially claimed that paleontology could make only “limited contributions toward understanding evolution” (Sepkoski 2012:13). With the incompleteness of the fossil record, and a movement in biology toward laboratory science, paleontology tended to focus on description—studies of stratigraphy, anatomy and morphology—regardless of whether its practitioners accepted or rejected evolutionary theory: “This did not mean rejecting Darwin or evolution; it simply meant not attempting to make any direct contribution to illuminating evolutionary patterns and processes” (Sepkoski 2012: 13). While there were attempts, even in the 19th century, to arrange fossils into 76 sequences by “structural resemblances” to “extrapolate evolutionary development across morphological and stratigraphic gaps,” the rarity and poor preservation of fossils made this difficult (2012:17). Unlike Cope, Marsh’s findings had “substantiated evolution” though he focsed on description (2012:19). While most of the work continued to be about anatomy and description, there were thus slowly movements in illustrating evolution through display “illustrat[ing] different phases of geological history and evolution of the several reptilian groups” (Gilmore 1911a). 2.3.2 Paleontological Specimens and Value In the very same report cited above, Gilmore stressed the importance of preparing Stegosaurus material for its anatomical and morphological value. Beyond freeing up much needed space—it took up some 300 boxes—there was important scientific value in assembling a large mount such as this: Upon completion of the urgent exhibition work, it is proposed to begin the preparation of all the Stegosaurus material with the idea of erecting at the earliest possible moment a skeleton of this great armored reptile… From a scientific standpoint, it will be of the greatest importance in clearing up many of the disputed points concerning the skeletal anatomy of Stegosaurus, besides contributing much to our knowledge of the Dinosauria. (Gilmore 1911a) And, in addition to the scientific importance and spatial efficiency of this specimen’s mounting, it would be a “fine specimen” for show, and once prepared, become part of “the best and most extensive series of Stegosaurus material ever assembled”(Gilmore 1911a). It is worth making a brief note here about “quality,” “importance,” or “attractiveness” of specimens—both for collecting and display. There were a few criteria for assessing the quality of 77 a specimen. The first was by its uniqueness or rarity, that is, if there were few in existence or on display at other Museums. The rarest specimens, type specimens, are the first of their kind to be named, and so serve as the primary source of study for other fossils of that type. The second was by quality of preservation. A specimen with perfectly preserved details, and shape or form was best for scientific study and comparison to other specimens. The third was by completeness, that is, if a specimen had all of its parts attached or intact. A fourth was by a specimen’s contribution to a collection of other specimens, that is, if a specimen filled a gap in a collection or group of organism. Lastly, if a specimen had a characteristic that led to a new scientific discovery about environments or behaviours, this was also valuable. Type specimens likewise fit into these last two categories for they are primary discoveries for a given time period or ecosystem and form the foundation for other comparative study. Unique to exhibition materials, specimens were also considered valuable for aesthetics alone—a showy or attractive specimen was preferred over a dull one. For vertebrates, trees, or other things that tended to be large, a “giant” specimen was preferred for exhibit over a small one. However, Gilmore expressed later in his career that casts of large things, no matter how impressive, were of no interest to him. Thus demonstrating his interest in displaying real things: “I can see no object in our ordering a cast of this specimen as our exhibition space is already crowded, and besides as I have told you before, large casts have no particular appeal to me anyhow”(Gilmore 1936a). During the move to the new building, older specimens from the previous displays were replaced wherever possible by better quality and more attractive specimens. In invertebrate fossils, for instance, notable changes to the hall included: The stratigraphic series of invertebrate fossils exhibited in the older Museum building was replaced by a new and more effective series installed in a long slope-top case 78 extending the entire length of the north wall in the south aisle, the older specimens being mainly transferred to the study series… Many fine specimens of crinoids from the collection of Mr. Frank Springer were arranged in two large upright cases, with special reference to illustrating the faunas of the lower Carboniferous rocks of the Mississippi Valley. (Merrill 1913:59-60) In Paleobotany, the last of the collections to be moved to the new building, specimens were likewise cleaned, remounted, and in many cases replaced, before being installed in the East Wing’s north aisle or place in study collections. The Report for 1911–1912 on this subject reads: … the increased space allotted to the subject made it possible to introduce many valuable specimens which had been in storage. Among the conspicuous additions were a number of sections of silicified logs, a Devonian fossil tree, and several large and showy Carboniferous plants. (Merrill 1913:60) In total, then, what was installed for opening in 1911 was a central, skylighted hall of vertebrates (Hall 2), and a south aisle and north aisle filled with cases of slope-top, flat and upright cases of invertebrates (Hall 4) and plants (Hall 5). Both of these aisles had windows on one side, for the invertebrates from the outward Mall-facing side, and for plants from the internal courtyard at the North side. The vertebrate halls featured large scale mounts as well as collections of mammal, reptile, bird, and fish remains by group, and in a few places the depiction of evolution, species growth, or a broader concept—for instance a small display illustrating evolution of the horse using limb and skull bones. The invertebrate halls featured specimens by group and type, with a few illustrative highlights: … a series of specimens illustrating the general conditions of sedimentation and fossilization in 1 case; a stratigraphic series of specimens occupying an adapted form of American case which extends uninterruptedly along the entire north wall of the hall and is accompanied by a continuous geological section across the North American continent on a scale of 2 miles to the inch; a biological series of fossils in 13 cases distributed 79 through the middle and south parts of the hall; and the I. H. Harris collection of Cincinnatian fossils in 2 cases. (Merrill 1913:62) Paleobotany featured plants arranged in stratigraphic sequence with a few larger mounted specimens on wall panels or standalone bases, with a few drawings and illustrative specimens along its south wall. In general, Merrill reported that the spaces were to give “the impression of roominess and broad passages” by keeping higher cases along walls and at right angles to increase light, and lower cases to the center. Additional space was left between high cases so that individual, large-scale objects could later be added: “By this plan,” Merrill wrote, “the visitor is enabled to comprehend the entire layout of any hall almost at a glance, and in passing down the main aisle to see all of the material in each case” (Merrill 1913:63). The team placed labels inside cases where they had formerly been outside to avoid a cluttered appearance (Merrill 1913:63). As with other galleries in the Museum, the new arrangement also brought “the public into closer relations with the objects of the Museum and to give greater popularity to its rich stores, through a more effective installation of its exhibits” (Rathbun 1916:13). As we will see, it was not until the post-War period that major conceptual and value shifts took place in exhibitry, or where specimens became valuable for their narrative or conceptual potential. Indeed, from the opening of the new spaces until the 1950s, a steady stream of new iconic vertebrate specimens were added to the halls, while invertebrate, plant, and partial vertebrate specimens were gradually replaced by increasingly “higher quality” specimens, without large-scale overhauls of their general classificatory, encyclopaedic arrangement. 2.4 1920s-1940s: Stagnant Arrangements and Small Experiments 80 There are three main logistical reasons for the halls’ stagnancy from the 1920s to the 1940s. Firstly, by the late 1920s, space in the Museum was already tight with the constant flow of acquisitions and additions to the exhibit halls. Hence, the Museum petitioned Congress to allocate money for the addition of two new wings, approved in 1930, but not realized until the late 50s and completed in the early 60s. This was compounded by the second reason, which had to do with the preparation and addition of Diplodocus to the space. The mounting of this specimen occupied extraordinary amounts of staff time and, once completed, filled a vast amount of the hall’s central area. The third reason is that for various reasons throughout the period, staff, funds, or other resources were not available for major rearrangements due to general funding arrangements and a number of world cataclysms—namely World War I. the Great Depression, and World War II. As Gilmore wrote in his later report: From 1910 up to the present time there has been a slow but steady growth of the exhibition collections, until at the close of the year1940 there were more than 50 mounted skeletons, ranging in size from the small 14-inch horned rodent Epigaulus hatcheri to the 72-foot Diplodocus longus (Gilmore 1942:341). However, the period after World War I to the end of World War II was one of fewer major additions and changes to the halls. For instance, where twenty mounts were completed between 1910 and 1920, only eight mounts were completed between 1920 and 1930, and only 11 between 1930 and 1940. Even in 1924, when the U.S. economy was doing well, Merrill wrote that, “Comparatively few changes are to be noted in the exhibits since these have now reached a point where little that is new can be secured without the expenditure of considerable sums of money” (Merrill 1924:73). Throughout the period, the curators took slow steps to replace newly acquired, discovered or better quality specimens, to add new mounts as they were completed, which 81 necessitated some shuffling of mounts and cases, to better organize by type fragments, invertebrates and plants, and to increase the “educational value” of the exhibits through organization, clarity of labeling, and a few innovative visual techniques, including photographs, maps, diagrams, drawings, models, and lantern slide projectors. In this period we also see the beginnings of a shift in public communication, through some of the aforementioned display techniques, the development of a more coherently articulated educational approach (described for the first time in Annual Reports), and the first publicly broadcast radio lectures. As we shall see, there was an ebb and flow to these developments throughout the period, as steps forward were continuously interrupted by world events. 2.4.1 Exhibits Post-installation to the First World War From 1912 to 1917, the curators continued to add new cases where possible, to swap specimens for higher quality ones, and to install new mounts as they were completed.5 By 1917, just before they were fated to close for government needs during the War, George Merrill reported that “the halls were in such condition that they could be considered of the highest educational value” (Merrill 1919:64). This was due, first, to the addition of over 500 new labels “combining scientific data with more popular information, easier of comprehension by the public, replaced the old ones with the paleobotanical exhibit” (Merrill 1919:64). It was also, in part, due to a number of interesting additions in invertebrate and paleobotanical exhibits meant to be illustrative for the public. The first of these were two “stereomotorgraphs,” lantern slide 5 Some notable specimens added during this the period not already mentioned were Diceratherium cooki, Teleoceras fossiger, Kentriodon pernix, Thescelosaurus neglectus, Epigaulus hatcheri, Gulo luscus, Aenocyon dirus, Platygonus cumberlandensis, Mastodon americanus, and Sinopa granger. 82 projectors “fitted with slides illustrating such phenomena as could not readily be shown by specimens” on the first and second floors in connection with geology exhibits (Merrill 1919:64). There is also evidence that greater amounts of illustrative materials were being added along with new specimens, particularly in invertebrate and plant collections: “an entirely new biologic series of brachiopods, installed in two large cases, contains not only the specimens, but models, photographs, and drawings, designed to show the embryology, anatomy, and evolution of this class and over 100 photographs of fossils and illustrations to accompany the stratigraphic and biological fossil series (Merrill 1919:64). A coral reef that had been installed in 1917 was given “the addition of several layers of limestone and shale, so that in this one exhibit the phenomena of stratification, change of lithology, and occurrence of fossils are illustrated,” and two cases of pre-Carboniferous plants were remodeled. A few “showy” specimens were also installed, including a large fossilized tree stump that was “placed on a permanent base and forms a very showy and instructive exhibit” (Merrill 1919:64). These exhibits were short-lived, however. By the end of the 1918 fiscal year, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance moved in to occupy many of the exhibition halls. Many cases were grouped to create extra space, “concentrating the cases in parts of each hall and protecting them by means of partitions, thereby leaving large areas available” (Ravenel 1919:15). In Geology, the halls “of systematic geology, paleobotany, and the east end of the hall set apart for vertebrate paleontology, were completely dismantled and closed to the public. The present crowded condition of the remaining halls by the temporary storage of specimens and cases, has necessarily reduced both the value and attractiveness of the exhibits” (Merrill 1919:65). The Museum also lost members of its staff to the Army or military or government work. As William deC Ravenel writes in the 1918 Annual Report: 83 During the trying conditions that have prevailed in the United States since it entered the war, the National Museum has demonstrated its value as a national asset in many ways. Members of its staff of experts, its great collections, its laboratories, and all the information in its possession, have been placed unreservedly at the service of the executive departments and other Government agencies, and have been freely used by a number of them. Some of its exhibition halls have been closed to visitors and turned into office quarters for one of the important war bureaus of the Government… (Ravenel 1919:13). In particular, Geology was called on to provide services to the Bureau of Standards, the Naval Experiment Station, the Department of Agriculture, the USGS, and the Carnegie Institution, the Sanitary Corp and Bureau of Mines, while also supplying materials for “experimental work” (Ravenel 1919:13) and doing “preliminary cutting on quartzes selected for supersonic work” (Merrill 1919:54). On July 16, 1918, the museum closed entirely to the public. Furthermore, the Annual Report for fiscal year 1919 reported that “the distractions incidental and consequential to this world-wide catastrophe naturally turned the attention of both the Museum workers and the world at large to purely utilitarian matters, and the Museum suffered as a result (Merrill 1920b:97). It was not until after the Armistice in November 1918 that these vacancies were filled (Merrill 1920b:97). When it was time for the exhibits to reopen, cases were “simply shifted back to their original positions, without attempting any serious rearrangement, the accumulation of dust removed, and displaced specimens readjusted” (Merrill 1920b:103). Cases were shifted so that they created a more “open aisle” arrangement, and the objects were “better systematized” to be “of greater value from an education standpoint” (Merrill 1920b:103). This included the more purposeful arrangement of an “educational series” of invertebrate fossils along the hall’s north side, that showed fossils and rocks of each geological period, a stratigraphic paleontological 84 exhibit at the center of the hall, and a series of tall cases on the south side of the hall showing “characteristic fossils of each group of the animal kingdom arranged in biological order” (Merrill 1920b:103). 2.4.2 Exhibit Reinstallations and Innovations Post-WWI While these may seem like minor changes, altogether, by arranging the cases this way, the hall now showed each of the “three distinct aspects of paleontology” so that, “as in the other halls, the visitor, by merely passing thought the center aisle, can gain at a glance an idea of its entire contents” (Merrill 1920b:103). Likewise, a similar arrangement was put in place in the paleobotanical hall, where “a broad, uninterrupted aisle throughout the entire length affords the open aspect. Exhibits of fossil plants of general interest are now placed along the south wall, while standard upright cases along the north side contain the stratigraphic series (Merrill 1920b:103). As a guidebook from 1919 explains: Vertebrate fossils occupy Halls 2 and 3 . . At the east end are the great dinosaur reptiles … Continuing into Hall 3 are the mammalian forms … The fossil invertebrate animals in Hall 4 are arranged (a) in a stratigraphic series in the continuous case along the north wall and (b) in a biologic series along the south side… Hall 5 is devoted to fossil plants… In the upright cases through the center of the hall are examples of fossil vegetation from each of the principal geological formations, while between these cases are petrified logs, tree stumps with roots intact, and other large objects of like nature. (1919:2 [emphasis added]) In Vertebrate Paleontology, it seems that the preparators took the opportunity of reinstallation not only to clean and replace faded labels, but to renovate a few of the exhibits and install a few new specimens, including the mount of Dimetrodon gigas (Merrill 1920b:103). 85 Thus, it was at this time that Gilmore installed his most innovative vertebrate arrangement yet—the Stegosaurus display. This display was unique in the hall for it illustrated the stages in Paleontological science—from field discovery, to mounting, to illustrative rendering. He placed in a set of three 1) a Stegosaurus stenops in a death pose, illustrating what dinosaurs looked like when they were discovered in the field, 2) a mounted, upright, and fully prepared Stegosaurus stenops, illustrating the work that preparators do to extract bones out of the ground and fill in missing parts with borrowed, cast or sculpted bones, and 3) a papier-mâché Stegosaurus restoration in full size acquired from the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, illustrating how paleontologists reconstruct what a creature would have looked like in life (Gilmore 1942:342). 86 Figure 2.18 Top view of (top left) 1904 papier-mâché model of Stegosaurus, (bottom left) the mounted skeleton of Stegosaurus stenops, and (right) Stegosaurus stenops in death pose, known as the “roadkill” exhibited as found.28 In the years following the War, the staff also continued to remove tall and large cases from the center of the halls, replacing them with lower, flat-top cases to keep an “open installation” throughout (Merrill 1920a). Other notable displays immediately following the War, and before Diplodocus dominated (vertebrate) staff time after 1923, included mounts of Brontotherium hatcheri, Tylosaurus proriger Cope, and Platygonus cumberlandensis Gidley—a male, female and young on single support. Large cases in the hall were also refitted to rearrange materials and remove specimen fragments (Merrill 1920a:109). 87 In invertebrate displays, large slabs showing fossils in their surrounding matrix were added over the next few years, “and the preparation and installation of specimens illustrating the cephalopods, echinoids, and other classes in the biological series have been continued” (Merrill 1920a:108). In Paleobotany, the staff worked on the “preparation and installation of large specimens, diagrams, and photographs illustrating the biological relationships of fossil plants” for a long wall case (Merrill 1920a:110). Another interesting development was a set of flat top cases showing early workers in geology, publications and text books “to arouse an interest, or better, to cater to an interest already existing, in the history of the progress of the science of geology and personnel” (Merrill 1920a:110). Additions such as this began to characterize slow developments in the 1920s that would come to a halt at the end of the decade. 88 2.4.3 Post-1923: Diplodocus the “Show Piece” and Educational/Outreach Experimentation Figure 2.19 Diplodocus construction c. 1930.29 From 1923 to 1931, the Vertebrate Paleontology team’s time was almost entirely devoted to the recovery, preparation, and mounting of the large Diplodocus skeleton that would come to dominate the main hall for the next 80 years. Indeed, between 1926 and 1934 it was the only major specimen added to the vertebrate exhibits. In the early 20th century there was, what a recently published book of the same name has called “the Second Jurassic dinosaur rush.” Across the major museums of the U.S. (namely Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York) there was a rush that paralleled the Cope-Marsh fossil frenzy of the late 19th century, only this time to collect not just the most but the biggest dinosaurs, Sauropods. As Brinkman writes: In many ways the second Jurassic dinosaur rush was more important than the first rush, and it had a greater and more lasting impact on science and society. The status of 89 dinosaurs soared from prehistoric relic to cultural phenomenon, from arcane scientific term to household word, in the wake of the second rush. Once an obscure group of terrible lizards named and described from fragmentary remains discovered first in Great Britain and later in continental Europe, dinosaurs became a pop-culture marvel…” (Brinkman 2010:1-2). In 1923 Gilmore received notice that a giant Sauropod had been discovered at Dinosaur National Monument. Almost immediately, he and his preparators set out for Utah to excavate the skeleton for the Smithsonian. The work took the bulk of the summer; they finally finished quarrying the bones on August 8th. Thirty-four large boxes of bones and surrounding matrix (altogether weighing 26 tons) were loaded onto rail cars and traveled across country in 150 mile increments, and over mountain ranges some 9,000 feet above sea level (Merrill 1924:81). Even before it arrived, Gilmore was dreading the daunting task of mounting the dinosaur. In a letter to a former colleague of the Carnegie Museum: September 29, 1927 Gilmore to Mr. Arthur Coggeshall, Carnegie Museum My dear Arthur: Say, old man, what are the chances of our getting the patterns for the Diplodocus mount? We are now about ready to make a start and I am anxious to have them here so that there will be no delay once the work of mounting is undertaken. I never want to look at another Sauropod once this job is off my hands, but the Lord only knows what the future may have in store for us… (Gilmore 1927) When it came to the Museum, the team continued to work tirelessly to extract the bones from its matrix and ready it for mounting on specially designed iron armature. In all, The work of collecting this specimen occupied the energies of 5 men for 4 months to quarry out, transport, box, and ship the 26 tons of rock-enclosed bones. From first to last, 2,545 working days were spent on this specimen, which, translated into Government time, means 1 man working steadily for nearly 9 years. (Gilmore 1942:342) 90 It is clear from Gilmore’s correspondences that he found the grueling process to be of little scientific value, and therefore of little interest and far too much time. July 15, 1925 Gilmore to Barnum Brown My dear Brown: … Am sorry you couldn’t find time to stop off and visit us on your return trip from the west, however, will look forward to your promises of seeing us soon. It will not take long to tell you what we are doing. A skeleton of Diplodocus from the Utah quarry has been occupying the attention of the preparators the past year and a half and it looks now as though another year would be required to finish the preparation. Then mounting the skeleton will follow with another year or so consumed. It will make a big show piece, but otherwise it is of but little interest… In order to show you that the years are beginning to tell, will say that recently I have taken up golf as a pastime, “nuff sed.” Looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to seeing you soon, I am as ever Very sincerely yours, (Gilmore 1925) It is clear that by this time Gilmore was thus finding himself split between these two different roles—that of a scientific researcher and that of a preparer of public exhibitions. Once completed and installed at the front, just off center, of the hall, Diplodocus also filled much of the hall’s space for large vertebrate fossils. Thus, as Head Curator Merrill said, “Future exhibition work here must consist largely in the replacement of inferior material for that which is new and better. The exhibits are for the most part well labeled and the halls fully supplied with guide labels, each on a separate stand” (Merrill 1924:82-3[emphasis added]). Throughout the 1920s there seemed to be a greater emphasis on educating the public through novel techniques. Annual reports from this time note that the Curator and Assistant Curators worked to prepare lectures and “motion-picture work illustrating the activities of the Museum” and a film about earth’s earliest life forms (Merrill 1920a:110). In 1921, the curators noted that for many objects on display, “The forms are often small and so inconspicuous to the 91 average visitor that in many cases enlarged photographs are now introduced with the specimens. Experience has shown that a picture calls attention to the descriptive label and thus to the fossil itself (Merrill 1921:89). More photographs were also added to the displays, as “an instructive addition in the hall devoted to systematic and physical geology is a series of large photographs, 20 in number, hung above the exhibits which they admirable supplement” (Merrill 1924:82). Beyond slight moves in instructional changes to exhibits, the Annual Reports were also slightly rearranged, and in 1922, a new section called “Cooperative Educational Work” was added. The report read that “special efforts have been made in recent years to bring the subjects within the comprehension of every one by simplification of the labels, modifying so far as possible the purely scientific terms, and by the introduction of working models, pictures, diagrams, etc.” (Ravenel 1922:23). In 1923, Merrill noted that The department is endeavoring to add to the attractiveness and educational value of its exhibits by means of graphic illustration. The method that has been employed of placing photographs in the cases showing field occurrences of the objects exhibited has not fully accomplished all that could be desired. A series of enlarged photographs, measuring 40 by 60 inches, has been prepared to hang on the walls above the cases, where they will serve to illustrate the material exhibited there. (Merrill 1923:90) In 1923, the Museum also began to participate in a public radio program with station WRC. The station had already established a series on scientific topics, and the Smithsonian established a regular 6:15p.m. Wednesday evening slot. Seven staff from the Museum participated in the first year, including Gilmore, who gave his talk, “Animal terrors of past ages—dinosaurs” on May 14, 1924 (Ravenel 1924:13-14). In 1925, “Twenty-eight talks in al were broadcast from Station WRC of the Radio Corporation of America, of which four were broadcast simultaneously by Stations WJY and WJZ in New York City” (Wetmore 1925:10); Gilmore gave a talk that year called “Fossil Tracks and Trails” (Wetmore 1925:11). 92 Alongside greater participation in public media the Annual Report included a new section on how the museum’s educational mission was expanded, stating: Public interest in the exhibits of the National Museum in its many branches is shown by the steadily growing number of visitors. Modern developments in transportation through the medium of the automobile have brought to the National Museum in the last year a greatly increased attendance, drawn from a broader area of our country than ever before. Parking spaces near the museum are crowded daily, except during the colder months, with cars that bear license tags from every State in the union (Wetmore 1925:16) (1925:16) Indeed, another newly highlighted section of the Annual Report for this period was published charts of past and present visitorship (1924:15-16). In 1925, Alexander Wetmore, the new Assistant Secretary in charge of the National Museum reported “For the first time in the history of the National Museum, the annual number of visitors to the four buildings containing the Museum exhibits exceeded one million” (Wetmore 1925:13). By 1927, when the three buildings (the Castle, Arts and Industries, and the U.S. National Museum) were open weekdays, 9am-4pm and Sunday afternoons 1:30-4:30, 1, 153,212 visitors attended, a 50,000 person increase over the year previous (Wetmore 1927a:25). 93 Figure 2.20 Visitors to the Smithsonian 1881–1924.30 This increased visitorship, the report states, was due not only to the wider public access to automobiles and motor buses, but also to a generally increasing interest in museum subjects, as evidenced by a growth in written inquiries and questions about material for identification (Wetmore 1925:16). This section also pointed out that a number of classes of students were coming to the museum to be taught in its exhibits; this “visual method of instruction,” it noted, has particular appeal in that it demonstrates successfully and forcefully many matters that when seen make a lasting impression on the mind, but that from the printed page alone seem utterly dull and uninteresting. Classes from the public schools come to the Museum halls almost daily, and it is not unusual to see such groups from near-by towns or even from a considerable distance. The motor bus is used successfully for many such parties. 94 Many informal talks are given such groups by the curators on the staff of the Museum in explanation of the exhibits (Wetmore 1927b:16-17). An excerpt the following year read: The educational work of the Museum consists in part of its exhibitions—objects so labeled that the public may be instructed as by an encyclopedia cut apart and spread out, except that its illustrations are real and material things. With advance in Museum methods, the objects on display are being grouped to a greater and greater extent to show relationships, with, whenever possible, some added indication of their source, so that at a glance the visitor may comprehend their true character and significance (Wetmore 1927a:17). Seven of that year’s radio talks were rebroadcast from WBZ in Springfield, Massachusetts. Two notable talks from Geology were: “Our Ancient Seas” by Dr. Charles E. Resser and “Birds from the Rocks” by Charles Gilmore (Wetmore 1927b:18). The following year, the Geology division was represented in four radio lectures, including Gidley twice, Gilmore, and Merrill (Wetmore 1927a:19). That year Gilmore also gave a lecture on “Extinct monsters” to “a rally of the fourth division of Washngton Boy Scouts” and the Men’s Club of Foundry Methodist Episcopal Church. In all, 700 people attended these two talks (Wetmore 1927a:22). However, throughout this time, it was noted that the Museum did not have support for lecture courses or “musical programs” due to lack of funds. The auditorium was available for rental and use by other organizations, and events there were open to the public free of charge (Wetmore 1927b:30). Once the lengthy installation of Diplodocus commenced, only relatively minor changes were made in the typological organization of cases and in cleaning or replacing shoddy material. As the report for 1925 read: “The exhibits in this division have for some time been in need of a general rearrangement and cleaning. Work to this end was begun in the spring. Cases and 95 specimens were thoroughly cleaned, the entire exhibit rearranged, much in the way of duplicates eliminated and new material incorporated. This work was carried out largely by Miss Moodey assisted by James Benn and the necessary laborers, approximately six weeks being thus occupied” while “A few choice specimens were introduced into the paleobotanical exhibits and rearrangement and cleaning of the collections also consumed a considerable amount of time” and Mongolian dinosaur eggs were installed on a pedestal, along with a carnivorous bird, Tetraornis, from the Rancho la Brea site along with photographs of “important fossil localities” on the east wall (Merrill 1925:83). A few notable installations included fossil footprints from Grand Canyon National Park and a cast skull of the horned dinosaur, Protoceratops, along with photographs of “classic fossil localities” that were hung along the east wall of the halls, between each window (Merrill 1927:89). Later in 1926, Invertebrate Paleontology added large photographs to show topographical characteristics across the U.S. above the appropriate case specimens. The Annual Report for 1926 reads, “now the student can obtain not only a conception of the characteristic rocks and fossils of each formation, but also the structural and physiographic features of the larger divisions of the country” (Merrill 1927:89). In 1926, the Division also took part in the National Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia from June to November (Wetmore 1927b:13). In the report of the following year, it was noted that public appeal and financial backing for science was growing across the United States: It may be added that in the United States to-day there is an increasing part of the population that is definitely interested in science. This is shown in the present demand for authentic scientific news on the part of the press, for photographs of interesting scientific objects for publication, and by the general attitude of the public. As our country grows 96 there develops an increasing group of those financially independent who turn to scientific researches and investigations either as recreation or with serious desire to assist in addition to human knowledge, and who find in scientific matters relaxation and inspiration, recreation and serious endeavor. This group now assists tremendously n the furtherance of scientific development and will be an increasing force in that direction in the future. These persons from their financial situation make large contributions toward the Federal income in the form of taxes, and therefore it would seem logical to make a part of this money available for support of their immediate interests in the form of increased appropriations for the National Museum (Wetmore 1927a:7). In 1927 the Institution lost the leadership of Secretary Charles Doolittle Walcott, who died that year. In the midst of economic boom and at such a pivotal moment for the Smithsonian, it is perhaps no surprise, that the Institution took this opportune moment to host a conference, held on February 11, 1927, to plan the future of the Institution and its funding sources: to which there were invited prominent Americans to advise with reference to the future policy and field of service of the Institution. As a background for this conference there was arranged in the main hall of the Smithsonian Building a special exhibition to demonstrate activities in research carried on at present under the Institution. (Wetmore 1927a:16) Temporary booths showing the researches of various Smithsonian divisions were assembled in the rotunda. Speeches and these booths aimed to show conferees the breadth and prestige of the institution, as a context for deciding whether it should be “supported by private benefactions” (1927:87). The Division of Geology showed off studies of elephants and dinosaurs to illustrate ancient vertebrates, illustrations of invertebrate fossils, and mineral displays (Wetmore 1927a:16-17). That year the only changes to exhibitions were to make room for newly acquired materials from the Sesquicentennial Exposition and exhibits prepared for the February Smithsonian conference. Indeed, through 1929, “No work other than the annual cleaning and 97 overhauling has been attempted in the exhibits in stratigraphic paleontology, including paleobotany” (Bassler 1930:94), while work on Diplodocus continued, and the vertebrate team began to move mounts in the halls to make room for the huge mount, to begin early that fall. 2.4.4 Fossils in the Depression: Display Experiments and Government Projects By the start of 1930, the Museum was already beginning to feel the shock of the stock market crash. In that fiscal year (which began on June 30, just before the crash of October 29, 1929), visitors were already down 1,894,987 compared to 1,929,625 for the previous year (Wetmore 1930:24). They would not return to normal levels until five years later. Perhaps also due to the economic downturn, the Diplodocus mount was delayed while “awaiting necessary steel castings” (Bassler 1930:98). By 1931 it was finally complete, however. Not only was it the largest installation in the space, but also its base had been designed so that visitors could walk underneath it at the shoulders and hips, basking in its height (Wetmore 1931:12). The completed installation of Diplodocus however meant that “space for the exhibition of large objects is now completely filled” (Bassler 1931:104). Perhaps to create revenue, for the first time the Museum introduced a Smithsonian-produced guidebook for sale to visitors: It is printed in conveniently small size for carrying and offers in concise form statements regarding the more important and interesting exhibits, presented in order of their location so as to be of assistance to visitors. In addition to the descriptive text the booklet is illustrated by numerous half tones that help to make it of permanent value (Wetmore 1931:12). In 1931 the previously installed stereomotorgraph was also renovated with new lantern slides showing phases of geology. It was also at this time that G. Arthur Cooper, who would go 98 on to have a long career in the department, joined the Geology Division. In his first two years, despite the economic downturn, he managed to renovate some of the paleobotany and invertebrate exhibits, particularly the biological series of Brachiopoda, since this was his specialty, and he was committed to the exhibits being up to date with current scientific data and organizational schemes (Bassler 1931:101). For all the objects: Descriptive labels accompany all these, and there is constant shift and change to keep them properly arranged and up to date. The whole serves as a compendium of reference to the student or as an attractive display to the one of more casual interest, from which all may profit according to their desires (Wetmore 1932:16). As the Depression wore on, both funding to the museum and visitor numbers dropped each year. By fiscal year 1933, appropriations were reduced by $8960, and over the course of that year the Economy Act “impounded” “certain items connected with the funds allotted for personnel and “Total amounts impounded during the year under the National Museum were $87,027.34 of which 74,031.60 came from the appropriation for preservation of collections and 12,995.74 from maintenance and operation” (Wetmore 1933:70). Salary reductions totaled $56,252, and printing and binding budgets for the Museum’s publications were decreased by $27,646. While new wing additions to the Museum had been approved by Congress in 1930, their allotment of funds for the project decreased 10% from the original $6,500,000 “ (Wetmore 1933:70). During fiscal year 1934, the Independent Offices Act aided the Museum with 5% for basic salaries to cover the return of portions salaries and the reductions in workforce. Direct appropriations were $60,327 below 1933, and additionally lessened by a $13,743 salary return (Wetmore 1935:1). Visitorship continued to decrease. In 1932, “1,630,030 visited the Museums, down over 39,000 from the previous year” (Wetmore 1932:17); it was not until fiscal year 1935 that 99 visitorship attained the levels of 1929-30 (Wetmore 1936:10). The educational section of the annual report became much shorter over these years, as activities in this area were greatly restrained. Accessions to the Museum also slowed as additions to collections were limited to gifts and purchases while “expeditions were curtailed” (Wetmore 1935:2). A few fieldwork trips continued to be financed through separate grants or “invested funds of the Smithsonian and other sources (Wetmore 1935:3). In Archaeology, a few fieldwork expeditions were undertaken as part of Civil Works Administration (C.W.A.) and Public Works Administration (P.W.A.) projects after 1934 (Wetmore 1935:3). Gazin received a grant to go to Pliocene and Pleistocene formations in southern Idaho, aided by George Sternberg, and excavated an important Plesippus quarry near Hagerman that had been previously explored by Gidley and Boss. Cooper and Resser, another invertebrate staff member, continued fieldwork through short, self-funded trips. A few local expeditions were also carried out. For instance James Benn, aid in geology, in 1934 collected a large slab from the nearby Maryland Calvert Cliffs for the exhibition series (Wetmore 1935:5). However, in 1934, Bassler remarked that “During recent years the chief acquisitions to the vertebrate fossil collections have been through field expeditions by members of the staff. The necessary curtailment of this activity during the past year considerably reduced both the quantity of material received and its scientific importance” (Bassler 1935:44-45). In Geology, Bassler took advantage of the market downturn to acquire specimens with endowment monies: The past year was notable for the quantity and value of geological material acquired, particularly in the mineralogical division, where several endowment funds were used rather freely to take advantage of favorable market conditions. In quality of specimens 100 acquired through field work and exchanges, this has been the most outstanding year in the history of the division of vertebrate paleontology. (Bassler 1933:112) In 1930, Geology received 255 accessions, some 35,555 specimens (Bassler 1933:112). Bassler purchased specimens from collectors but also from other institutions affected by the Depression, including the AMNH, the Field Museum, the Colorado Museum of Natural History, the LA Museum, the Royal Ontario Paleontological Museum and the Carnegie Museum.6 In 1935, the Museum made an exchange with the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh for “an excellent skeleton of the sauropod dinosaur Camarasaurus… It represents an animal 35 or more feet in length, lacking only a section of the tail, and is the second most perfect skeleton so far known. In its articulated state it should, when prepared, form a most striking addition to the exhibition series where previously the genus was inadequately represented” (Bassler 1936:50). Despite these advantageous acquisitions, the exhibits work over this period was slow. Not only were resources reduced, but “The crowded condition of both these exhibits prohibits expansion, and efforts are directed to replacing the poorer material with better specimens and bringing labels up to date “ (Bassler 1936:51). In addition, no major specimens were added to the vertebrate exhibits from 1931 to 1934, while preparators worked on new specimens for exhibition after the completion of Diplodocus and the economy reached its low point in 1932-33 (Wetmore 1939a:11). A few specimens, including the Hagerman horses, were installed afterwards in the years leading up to 1940.7 6 In 1933, he not only acquired a “perfect hawklike bird Oligocene, skull skeletal parts Eusmilus saber tooth cat, two skeletons Mesohippus, two Merycoidodon, one Leptomeryx and Ischyromys, 120 skulls partial skeletons,” an Equus alaskae from Alaska collected by James Ford, and a Echthyodectes hamatus from George Sternberg but exchanged for a Moropus from the Miocene of Nebraska and Gorgosaurus libratus from the Upper Cretaceous of Canada with the AMNH, a “mountable composite skeleton Equus occidentalis Rancho La Brea asphalt deposits” from the LA Museum, a Trigonias osborni from the Colorado Museum Natural History, and duck bills from the Royal Ontario Paleontological Museum including an Edmontosaurus and Prosaurolophus (Bassler 1933:112-113). In 1934 he acquired Equus andium and Nesodon imbricatus from the Field Museum (Bassler 1935). 7 Afterward, mounts completed and installed were: Hyrachus eximius, Helaletes nanus, Trigonias osborni, all in 1934, Moropus elatus and the type specimen of Platygonus pearcei in 1936, Scarritia canquelensis in 1937, 101 Collections and behind-the-scenes work, however, flourished over the Depression years, as government projects provided additional labour for cataloging, rearranging, labeling, and cleaning study collections. The reduced number of field expeditions undertaken by staff also aided this work. Bassler reported in 1934 that: The assistance furnished by the Government’s unemployment agencies was of such high grade that it was found possible, under the supervision of the regular staff, to bring up to date much work that had, because of insufficient help, fallen to arrears. As a consequence, little time of the scientific staff could be spent in research work, but with the present excellent condition of the collections this should be actively advanced during the coming year (Bassler 1935:40). Indeed, while research and exhibits work was curtailed, the reserve and study collections received attention that was long overdue. As Bassler wrote: Usually the number of specimens received annually far exceeds the ability of the regular staff to prepare them for permanent preservation, and it was here that the 14 C.W.A. workers assigned to the department were of valuable assistance. It was found possible to unpack, arrange, and file away most of the accumulations of past years, so that all specimens are now readily available (Bassler 1935:46). Extra help was also used to rearrange each of the sections’ libraries. In February of 1934, the Civil Works Administration project was ended, but the Museum made an application to the District of Columbia Government for assistance under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which was granted on November 1 of that year. Seventy-five workers came to the Museum’s relief in similar jobs for the remainder of that fiscal year. In each of these cases, Smithsonian employees would supervise the work under these projects Smithsonian monies provided resources, materials, and supplies for the work. Work continued to focus on behind-the- Plesippus shoshonensis and Plyglyphanodon sternbergi in 1938, and the additional two Plesippus shoshonensis in 1939. 102 scenes collections, organizational and library work (Wetmore 1936:9). This continued with Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) funds through the start of the Second World War. Exceptions to this included Bassler’s work on prepping and installing a biological series of fossil plants and types of geological structures, and a new “single exhibition base” for “large, showy examples of various kinds of conglomerates and glacial boulder clays,” and a few mounts (Bassler 1933:114).8 Miss J. W. Gidley also put together five models showing the evolution of the horse during the period (Bassler 1936:50). Outside of the confined space of the museum galleries, there were larger-scale experiments in exhibit communication. In 1935-36, Gilmore pioneered an exhibition experiment at the Dallas Exposition, the first exposition the museum had participated in since the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial in 1926. He decided to show preparators working live on unearthing a Camarasaurus specimen for the public, with illustrative imagery and paintings as a backdrop—a graphic element showing a silhouette of the animal’s bones, a painting showing the animal in life, and a diorama showing the animal’s wider ecological context (Bassler 1938:52). April 17, 1936 Letter from Gilmore to Dr. A. Avinoff, Director, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa. Dear Dr. Avinoff: Under separate cover, I am returning the drawing of the Camarasaurus skeleton which you so kindly loaned me. We copied this drawing with the pose slightly changed, which will be enlarged (photographically) to the natural size of the skeleton we have, and this will be placed on the back wall of our exhibit at Dallas, Texas. There will be two men actually working on the blocks of sandstone containing the specimen for the six months 8 In 1934, the vertebrate fossils were shuffled to create more space, in order to install three rhinoceroslike Hyracyus eximius from the Bridger formation of Wyoming prepared by Boss, and a composite skeleton of an Oligocene Trogonias osborni from Colorado; and “a skeleton of a large carnivorous dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Canada both mounted by Thomas Horne” (Bassler 1935:46). 103 period of the exposition. It is a new idea in the way of an exhibit for us, and I am hoping it will turn out successful. Thanking you again for the loan of the drawing, I am, as ever Sincerely yours, (Gilmore 1936b) Figure 2.21 Sketch of the Texas Centennial Exposition display c. 1935.31 104 Figure 2.22 Norman Boss preparing Camarsaurus at the Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936.32 Figure 2.23 Norman Boss and public onlookers at the Exposition, 1936.33 105 Some months later, Gilmore reported to Lou Gazin: July 1, 1936 Gilmore to Dr. C. L. Gazin, Farmington, New Mexico My dear Gilmore: I was glad to get your letter upon my return from vacation and hasten to answer… A letter from Dallas says that our exhibit proves to be the outstanding attraction of the Government building, which is very gratifying. (Gilmore 1936c) The first diorama in the fossil halls, transported back from the Dallas Exposition, was thus added in the late 1930s. The diorama as a technique had been pioneered in Great Britain and Europe as early as 1851 at the Great Exhibition, where dioramas depicted human beings from the colonies as scientific ‘curiosities.’ Growing out of a tradition of waxworks, European museums also used “life groups” as part of commercial exhibitions (Chapman 1985). In the U.S., “habitat groups” and village “encampment” scenes of people had been introduced and popularized by Franz Boas in the U.S. from the 1890s onward. By 1915 the first life-groups with “illusionistic painted backgrounds and lighting effects” were in the American Museum. While these techniques were also used in Smithsonian’s mammal and anthropology exhibits, this illustrative technology was never used in the fossil halls. Below is an image of Lions in a life scale diorama, mounted by George Turner, installed in the Mammals hall around 1913 after the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition of 1909-1910, followed by a view of the Anthropology halls of that time. 106 Figure 2.24 Lion diorama in the Mammals Hall c 1913.34 Figure 2.25 Anthropology Hall and diorama displays c. 1911.35 Moreover, where these early mammal and cultural displays at the Smithsonian, like Boas’ life-groups, were full size and “meant to be viewed from all sides” (Jacknis 1985:81), this early fossil hall diorama was a miniature to be viewed head on. 107 Figure 2.26 The fossil hall’s first (Jurassic) diorama, installed c.1938.36 These attempts at new display techniques, including a whole ecosystem diorama and painting, reflected broader shifts toward more holistic approaches to the halls, both in scientific concept and its communication. By 1937, the WPA guidebook for Washington, D.C., for instance, described the three halls together as “halls of evolution,” saying “fossils or petrified organic creatures are messengers from the dim past of time, allowing science to reconstruct the history of life on earth” (1937:417). The hall of invertebrate and plant fossils thus: “In the same hall is an exhibit of the evolution of life. In a case 120 feet long the dates of the origin of the various plant and animal forms are shown. It is to be noted that the epoch of human life is so brief as to occupy only the last foot of this exhibit” (1937:417). 108 By the late-1930s, there also seemed to be greater emphasis on illustration in the halls in general. Cooper continued work in his upkeep of the exhibits such that when and where possible, the invertebrate and paleobotanical exhibits were swapped out for “choicer specimens” and benefited from the addition of illustrations and diagrams (Bassler 1935). With the assistance of a photographer from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), new lantern slides for the exhibition displays and lecture work were created. While the FERA program ended in November of 1935, on Nov 12, 1935, the Federal Art Project began to assist the museum with personnel assigned “for the preparation of drawings, paintings, sketches, and plaster casts of various kind (Wetmore 1937:7). When a Moropus elatus and the skeletal group of the extinct peccary Platygonus were added to the vertebrate exhibits, the Platygonus was “retained in the matrix in the position found” to work as “a graphic illustration of the manner in which these animals were entombed” (Bassler 1937:49). Meanwhile, on May 18, 1936, a new Works Progress Administration project through the D.C. government was initiated that also continued collections and organizational work (Wetmore 1937:7). By the end of fiscal year 1936, “assistance furnished in the past two years by the several relief organizations has permitted the unpacking and proper arrangement of all such specimens. No material now remains in storage in the attic” (Bassler 1937:48). By fiscal year 1937, there appeared to be some slight bounce back from the Depression, with the addition of the first Smithsonian positions (five of them: two guards, one stenographer, two senior mechanics), and slowly fieldwork began to be funded internally again. The W.P.A. program of that year also increased museum staff by 66 people, which increased to 88 by the clos of the fiscal year, and 167 by the close of the 1938 fiscal year while the Federal Art Project 109 continued, and visitorship, for the first time ever, exceeded 2,000,000 (Wetmore 1938:10; Wetmore 1939a:11). Indeed, this was the first year since the Depression began that the Museum seemed to be restarting its public outreach activities in earnest. A new weekly radio program, “The World is Yours,” put together by the Smithsonian and the Office of Education of the Department of the Interior was broadcast. In conjunction with this program, for the first time a visitor register was placed at the Museum’s south entrance in order to gather information on visitors’ interest in the radio show. This register was available for 98 days from February to June. During that time, 8,505 visitors registered (5% of total visitors to the Museum), at least one from each of the then 48 States “as well as Alaska, the Canal Zone, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. Foreign countries represented included Australia, Canada, Dominica, England, France, Germany, Honduras, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Palestine, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Venezuela,” proving that the Museum held wide National and global appeal for the first time (Wetmore 1938:11). That same year, curator Foshag also added an installation of fluorescent materials allowing visitors to use a switch to view materials under electric light and ultraviolet rays (Bassler 1938:49-50). These may have been the first interactive technologies used in the fossil halls. Recall, however, that the exhibits continued to focus on order, “arranged for ready comparison by the student” (Bassler 1939a:57). By the end of this year, “It can again be stated that the vertebrate collections, both study and exhibition, are in the best ordered condition since the establishment of the division” (Bassler 1939a:57). From 1937 to 1939, for instance, Dr. C. E. Resser, Curator of Stratigraphic Paleontology, worked on the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian study 110 and exhibits series with the help of a number of W.P.A. assistants, so that the valuable Burgess shale materials were “cleaned and rearranged” (Bassler 1939b:61). This organizational work continued with the W.P.A. into 1940. In 1939 the number of WPA workers was reduced to 126, and on April 15, 1940 the program ended (Wetmore 1941:10). In 1939 the Museum also received government money, beginning with the collection of fine arts, to improve and repair the exhibition halls, which had “not been touched since that building was erected in 1911. All of them are greatly in need of repainting and in several plaster has cracked and loosened to a considerable extent” (Wetmore 1939b:2). The following year, the paleontological halls were repainted, cleaned, and moved creating a “rearrangement tending toward more simplicity greatly improved the appearance and educational value of the entire display” (Bassler 1941:54). “Less attractive” specimens were taken off display and lighting was improved to show specimens “to increased advantage” (Bassler 1941:54). Specimens taken off display made room for “a more logical and attractive arrangement of some of the larger exhibits of vertebrates and made possible an assemblage of certain groups for more convenient comparison” (Bassler 1941:54). An innovation in display was designed by preparator Thomas Horne, by putting together a “group of four horse skeletons (stallion, mare, yearling, and colt), displaying the sex and age characteristics of the Pliocene genus Plesippus” (Bassler 1941:54). This period during which attention was devoted to exhibits was short-lived, however, as the next World War began and Museum activity was again interrupted. 111 2.5 1940s-1950s: World War II and Shifting Notions of Access Figure 2.27 Hall in the 1940s.37 When the War first began in Europe, the Museum was still planning to increase its space, particularly as the value of its collections increased as “many valuable collections in foreign museums have been injured or destroyed by various instrumentalities of war” (Wetmore 1942:3). It also planned to enhance its staff as “additional personnel is another major need of the organization that should be recognized and remedied, as soon as possible. The condition is aggravated by the increasingly crowded condition of the Museum buildings both in the exhibition halls and in the officers and laboratories” (Wetmore 1942:3). Acquisitions in Geology decreased due to the conflict abroad, but fieldwork continued. Gazin, for instance acquired several Polyglyphanodon and a skeleton of Uintatherium from the Bridger Eocene in southwestern Wyoming, “probably the most complete example of this animal that has yet been 112 found” (Bassler 1942:50). Visitorship remained steady and the Museum continued to participate in outreach activities including the weekly broadcast, “The World is Yours” (Wetmore 1942:14). There was also an impetus toward “renovation and labeling in more popular form,” at least in the physical geology exhibits (Bassler 1942:56). Iconic dinosaur imageries were also flooding the public imagination. Disney’s Fantasia was released in 1940, featuring the iconic extinction of the dinosaurs in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Sinclair Petroleum’s dinosaur signs, first shown at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-1934 and again at the Dallas Exposition had become nationally known icons. Gilmore maintained his general distaste for pandering to popular iconography, brands or showmanship, even as the Museum’s outreach efforts expanded. Other museums, including the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), were beginning to collaborate with companies such as Sinclair for funding and public outreach activities. Indeed, in Gilmore’s correspondence with Barnum Brown, famed dinosaur collector and by this time Curator at the AMNH: June 5, 1941 Dear Brown: … I was very glad to have the complete set of the Sinclair stamps. They may have been good advertising for Sinclair, but they must also have been effective in arousing a wider interest in paleontology. I have always felt that you took up the wrong profession. Now I know it, you should have been a promoter. Anyhow, Brown it was a good job. (Gilmore 1941) This subtle stab at his friend Brown indicates that Gilmore saw paleontology as necessarily distinct from these marketing activities. Moreover, any developments in the realm of outreach at the NMNH stagnated when the United States’ entered the War. By fiscal year 1943, a new section, called “The Museum in 113 Wartime” was added to the annual reports (Wetmore 1943:10). While the need for more space grew ever more problematic, “The present war situation prohibits full consideration of the matter at this time, because any construction will require steel, cement, and labor now needed for the war effort” (Wetmore 1943:2). Indeed the Museum’s receipt of collections was largely unaffected, particularly as servicemen collected while abroad (Wetmore 1946:3). This was not as important for Geology, but had a great impact on other biological, zoological, and archaeological collecting. WWII also continued to increase the value of the collections as originating sources of objects were destroyed. Staff and resources were heavily impacted by the War, having “the full reaction in the operation of the Museum laboratories, halls, and galleries under the Smithsonian Institution” (Wetmore 1943:11). Where previously government assistance had aided with collections and some exhibits work, now engineers from the Public Buildings Administration were occupied in designating and building air-raid shelters and air-raid alarm gongs in all of the Smithsonian buildings (Wetmore 1943:11). Wardens and assistants were assigned to the buildings, and periodic drills took place to ready and protect staff, while “Boxes of sand and sand bags, with hand pumps and water barrels, were placed on all floors of the buildings, first-aid rooms were established…blackout screens were installed in all buildings in those rooms where 24-hour service must be maintained (Wetmore 1943:10-11). During the fiscal year 1943, “5 practice air-raid drills were held during the daytime, and 10 practice blackout drills were held at night” (Wetmore 1944:8). Objects kept on shelves, such as alcoholic specimens, were covered in lattice screens to prevent shaking from potential vibration; nitrate film was removed. In Paleontology, heavy materials were removed from the fourth floor to the first and second floor to allow “free 114 movement throughout the upper floors of the building in case of fire from incendiary bombs” and “various items of inflammable material were eliminated” (Wetmore 1943:11). Type specimens and other selected materials including many from Paleontology and amounting to more than 60 tons of material from the study series, were moved off-site until November 1944, a task that also siphoned staff time (Bassler 1943:59; Wetmore 1946:7). In 1943, the government put a ceiling on the number of employees at the museum (down to 408 from 478) and hours were cut for many employees, while the “manpower shortage” was “so present” that it was “impossible fill many positions.” It was noted even in 1943 that the “immediate rebuilding of our staff will be an urgent matter after the war, unless our work is to suffer permanently” (Wetmore 1944:2). Public Law 821 and Executive Order 9289 increased the regular work week to 48 hours through the addition of one hour per day and the elimination of Saturday “half-holidays” (Wetmore 1944:16). While a few staff from Geology were able to continue field research, “others of the department have been engaged on various defense problems, mainly in the office where they furnished information to war agencies and instructed their representatives on geological matters before they left for their field assignments” (Bassler 1943:54) and the nature of field research shifted to aid in defense projects. Thus fieldwork for exhibits came to a halt, while research geology increased, although the subject of this research was not entirely decided by staff (Bassler 1944a:48). Cooper, for instance, later joined by Foshag, carried out research associated with the war effort in Mexico, in collaboration with the Division of Cultural Cooperation within the Department of State and the Geological Institute of Mexico. Generally, expeditions were curtailed due to the “restriction in travel by rationing of gasoline and the rubber shortage” (Wetmore 1943:12). 115 At the Museum, Geological staff worked in the “preparation of analyses, assisting in selecting and grading calcite for the War Production and other Boards, editing a scientific volume for an allied country, and furnishing information of all kinds to an ever-increasing number of service men and women visiting the Museum (Wetmore 1945:8). Gazin, meanwhile, served in the US Army. When not concentrated on War efforts, work centered on “the backlog of unprepared specimens, but also the completion of several mounted skeletons of outstanding merit for the exhibition halls (Bassler 1946:47), which would not be put on display until after the war. The rationing of gasoline and the rubber shortage also reduced tourist visitorship from beyond Washington, although total visitor numbers were not greatly impacted (Wetmore 1943:12). The War led to an important change in visitorship. As the 1942 report read: “With long journeys out of the question because of lack of time and facilities the mental recreation and relief found in the exhibits maintained by the Smithsonian Institution have greater importance than ever before for the multitude of workers and residents in the crowded Washington area” (Wetmore 1943:10). Sunday hours were increased from half-days to full 9am to 4:30pm hours to allow servicemen to attend on weekend furloughs. Furthermore, by 1944, of the 1,532,765 visitors total, 40% were servicemen and women, which meant that for the first time a true cross-section of the American population, and a larger number of people of working class and only high school education were in attendance. This had a major impact on exhibits, as according to reports, these new visitors: representing a clear-cut cross section of American life, have been so frank in their questions and remarks on the exhibits that much of value for future work has been learned. Their comments have been of particular value in revealing the most appealing 116 type of exhibition label, namely, a placard explaining in several lines of rather large black type the essential features of each display case. (Bassler 1945:45) Indeed, in that year the Geology Report notes that alongside regular cleaning and movement toward a “more logical arrangement” (Bassler 1944a:55) and better specimens, ‘the preparation of more readable labels constituted the major tasks of the year” (Bassler 1945:50). In 1945, taxonomic and stratigraphic displays were unified into a single series along “the long continuous south wall case… This streamlining of the plant exhibition series permits better lighting and in other ways makes it more easily comprehended by the visitor (Bassler 1946:54). This shift also marked new strategies in public outreach more broadly. At the recommendation of the Smithsonian War Committee, a free guide service for servicemen was organized in July 1943. The United Service Organization, Inc. provided volunteers to act as hostesses for this new “docent service.” F. M. Setzler, head curator of Anthropology, coordinated the establishment of a route and script for the 45-minute tours, leaving every 14 minutes from 11am to 3:30 pm. The first tours began on October 24, 1943, and by February of 1944 the tours were so popular another hostess training class was organized. These tours lasted through July of 1944 (Wetmore 1945:7). Records indicate that this change in visitorship also triggered the first moves toward envisioning exhibits as having an illustrative or narrative pathway: The arrangement of the geological exhibit in such a way as to bring out the orderly development of life and of the earth’s mineral products has been commented upon favorably by our visiting servicemen. As the visitor enters the east hall from the rotunda, John Elliott’s striking mural “Diana of the Tides,” illustrating the various phases of geology as revealed in a modern setting, first attracts his attention. The seashore in the painting is then brought to life on the exhibition floor, where an actual fossil sea beach of far distant Cambrian time, with ripple marks and animal tracks, is displayed. From this, one can pass in review all the stages of life evolution upon the earth, from the simplest 117 plants up through the ferns, cycads, and conifers and the one-celled animals, through the shells, Crustacea, fish, and reptiles to the most developed flowering plants and the highest mammals—a real “Parade of Life.” …Should the visitor enter geology from this [the opposite] hall, he simply reviews the earth’s story in reverse order (Bassler 1945:50-51). Figure 2.28 Detail of Diana of the Tides, John Elliott. Installed c. 1911.38 Ordering was still systematic by type, collection, or location, but it is clear from this excerpt that, for the first time, the staff was imagining visitors’ experiences of walking through the halls in a deliberate way. Changes to arrangements of a “more logical position” also seemed to encompass larger stretches of space so as to create an order through an entire hall or room. Cooper, for instance, reorganized trilobites and all arthropod displays to be “in consecutive order completely filling two rooms” (Bassler 1945:52). 118 During the War, other important organizational shifts took place, one that combined the USGS and the Natural History Museum staffs. Survey collections of Carboniferous and Permian fossils, previously located at the Interior Building, were also moved to the National Museum, which consolidated “both the fossil collections and the paleontological staffs of the two institutions (Bassler 1946:47). 2.5.1 The Post-War Return to Peacetime: A New Generation of Scientists and Visitors After the war, there was a rapid acceleration of activity at the museum, spurred by the return of younger staff members. A new wave of staff were ushered in, as it was finally possible to consider new appointments, while the Civil Service Retirement act encouraged longtime staff to leave the museum (Wetmore 1947:1–2). Vertebrate Paleontology was further affected by the deaths of two foundational staff—curator Charles W. Gilmore and preparator Thomas Horne. The 1946 report reads: Genial Charles Gilmore, with his rare combination of abilities for both exhibition ad research work, will long be remembered not only for his contributions to knowledge but also because of the Museum’s hall of dinosaurs, for which he was responsible. Visitors to this hall will learn from the exhibition labels of the important part Mr. Horne had in the preparation and installation of many of the striking mounted specimens. (Bassler 1947a:50) Under the Civil Service Retirement act, 16 people retired from the Museum (Wetmore 1947:14). Gilmore was succeeded by Gazin, who returned from the Army in January of 1946. Visitorship also returned to pre-war levels, the Museum revived its greater role in outreach: “With the war’s cessation the activities of the department of geology quickly trended toward normalcy, with increasing demands on the services rendered to the public and to scientific and educational institutions” (Bassler 1947a:50). Trends that began during the war in 119 re-thinking access to Museum displays became realized as staff were able to carry out work on the exhibits. In Paleobotany, we read: The reorganization of this hall, with the restriction of the fossil plant series to a continuous wall case 130 feet long, was concluded by the head curator and James Benn, with the assistance of Miss Jessie G. Beach, who prepared 450 new labels in legible black type averaging 30 words each. (Bassler 1947a:55) However, the Annual Report section on Education, which had disappeared from reports in 1941, continued to be missing after 1945. In Vertebrate Paleontology, specimens were added where new space had been created and planned by Gilmore. The first two to be installed were the Merycoidodon culbertsoni and a massive ground sloth (Scelidotherium capellinii) (Bassler 1947a:55). Boss, Murray, and Horne also continued work on Camarasaurus for public display (Bassler 1947a:56). By 1947, the museum was receiving a huge amount of material because of resumed fieldwork, resumed global communication, and stable industry conditions. The study collections, now growing increasingly, were rearranged from a strictly biological arrangement “cutting through geologically associated assemblages” to being “sorted biologically but each kept together as a unit, i.e. Wasatch, Bridge, White River, Hagerman, Cumberland Cave, etc. (Bassler 1947b:56). New hires and promotions facilitated this work. In that year David H. Dunkle was appointed associate curator, and Bertel O. Reberholt and James H. Benn advanced to exhibit preparators (Bassler 1947b:42). To make room for the newly combined staffs of the USGS and Paleontology, part of the Geological exhibition hall space (where Merrill’s building stones had previously been displayed) was converted into an office and lab space. The staff were also brought together in a unified 120 section of the east wing of on the third floor which not only “greatly simplified the administrative control but resulted in a better liaison between both groups” (Foshag 1950:51). In the rest of the exhibition halls, the major change of the period was that Camarasaurus was moved to the exhibition hall to be mounted “horizontally in a pose nearly as discovered in the field, and should prove to be one of our striking displays” (Bassler 1947b:48). To make room for it, some additional rearranging was completed, this time also making a discrete hall of mammals out of the east hall, now “a truly Cenozoic hall” with dinosaurs and other reptiles in the central hall, “which is thus illustrative of Mesozoic vertebrate life” (Bassler 1947b:48). Other additions included a block 4 ½ by 7 feet of eight amphibian Buettneria skulls (Bassler 1949:52). 2.6 Chapter 2 Conclusion Thus, throughout the periods from the earliest fossil displays to the end of World War II, Smithsonian fossil display were organized by an overarching scheme of systematic, encyclopaedic display, coupled with large, charismatic specimens. However over the period, we see the roots of trends and frictions that would come to dominate future exhibits and institutional initiatives. First, we see the earliest ways that displays were rearranged to adapt to changing scientific thinking, including a shift in the later part of the period toward displaying objects in the halls sequentially, and balancing the aesthetics and draw of “showy” specimens with the need to show scientifically relevant materials. Second, while mostly driven by curators filling multiple 121 roles, early exhibits planning involved a wide range of part-time artisans alongside research scientists. Third, at the broadest institutional level, the early roots of debates about increase and diffusion are manifest in the very organization of collections (study, exhibition, exchange), and in the shaky balance between research and beginning to communicate with the public on a wider scale through early public outreach programming, tours and radio. Particularly at Dallas and during the War, we see changing ideas about accessibility and labeling. As the following chapters will demonstrate, in each of these three areas—the display of exhibit content, group production techniques, and the place of exhibits within the institution’s mission—new media techniques, scientific specialization, museum professionalization, and the growth of the institution’s outreach branches have intensified early museum paradoxes. 122 3. Exhibit Content: Interconnected Processes and Static Things “Museums traditionally highlight static objects, but are mastering the arts of dynamic display that permit them to portray interrelationships, change, and process with almost equal vividness and explanatory power.” Robert McCormick Adams 1990:17 In the course of the meetings I attended during the Deep Time process, there was a constant debate about how best to go about describing Earth’s shifting properties—evolution, processes, ecosystems—and peoples’ changing relationships with them—human connections and the scientific process itself—with objects. In this way, exhibits are paradoxical. They describe fluid worlds and worldviews with static things. Fossil exhibits are further complicated by the nature of the evidence they use to tell stories; both the fossil record, and scientific knowledge about it, is full of gaps. Moreover, from their very beginnings, fossil exhibits have been defined by ‘showy’ and ‘iconic’ specimens. While a strong presence in natural history museums since the turn of the century, since the mid-twentieth century dinosaurs have reached such iconic status that their presence has become ubiquitous in pop culture. Even now that the Jurassic Park/Walking with Dinosaurs/Barney, craze of the 1990s and very early millennium years seems to have subsided, new shows like Dinosaur Train and the seemingly never-ending stream of IMAX films coming to theaters “near you” ensure that, as W.T.J. Mitchell wrote in 1998, “the world is overrun with dinosaurs—or rather, with dinosaur 123 images.” Imagery of these iconic creatures has “escaped from the laboratory and the museum, cropping up in shopping malls, theme parks, movies, novels, advertisements, sitcoms, cartoons and comic books, metaphors and everyday language” (Mitchell 1998:5). When I was first sent the project proposal, it was clear that Deep Time aimed to both harness this popular energy and combat popularized, diluted renderings of past worlds with its broader, ecosystem-driven perspective. As a holistic set of research initiatives, programming, and an exhibit, Deep Time sought to both “reveal processes and consequences of past global climate change” through research, and to “use the popularity of fossils to foster appreciation for the history of life and the grand context for our own existence,” emphasizing that Earth’s history can help people collectively predict their shared future, and empowering the public to embrace their role as “planet managers.” Thus from the very beginning, Deep Time was conceived as a way to increase knowledge about past life and to “foster” new “attitudes and strategies” in the public sphere to combat urgent contemporary problems (“the Deep Time Project” 2009). From the beginning then, the Deep Time team refused to make “just another dinosaur exhibit.” While it was common to hear among curators that “you have to have the ‘D’ word” and that dinosaurs were, like the Hope Diamond, a one-stop pilgrimage for many visitors, the premise of the exhibit was that dinosaurs were to be contextualized in their ecological context. Current science, especially at NMNH where many of the paleontologists work on past environments, emphasizes processes and interconnectivity—the study of ecosystems, geological forces, evolution, communities, microfossils, and climate changes—over time. Dinosaurs, as Lead Curator Matthew Carrano has often said, are a “gateway drug to science.” More aspirationally, using a phrase first coined by Kay Behrensmeyer, the team set out to “create citizens for a changing planet” by engaging them in paleontology as a “logbook of the past.” The 124 exhibit’s main theme is: Earth’s distant past is connected to the present and shapes our future. The tone was both more aspirational and morally serious than I’d anticipated as a newcomer ready to document the formation of a new dinosaur hall. Indeed, Matthew Carrano said many times over (and his adamancy became a running joke) that “dinosaurs don’t roar,” and that under no circumstances were there to be “animatronic dinosaurs.” During the Deep Time process I observed, there were ongoing debates about how to compellingly convey interconnectivity and these broad overarching narratives with static (and sometimes iconic) things. Many of these debates centered around what kinds of technologies (defined broadly) might best augment objects—What techniques are out there? Which ones are appropriate? How detailed should the resolution of displays be? What tone should media have? What technologies have longevity? From their inception, museums have grappled with how to convey complex information, histories, and past environments using things and illustrative technologies. As we saw in the last chapter, up through the 1940s museum staff relied primarily on objects with text, maps, and the occasional painting to describe earth processes, with a few intermittent experiments. From the 1950s onward the Smithsonian joined museums around the world by experimenting with new technologies—dioramas, coloured signage, visitor pathways, and later audiovisual media such as audio guides, videos, interactive screens and buttons. That development will be described in Chapter 4. This chapter is about the contemporary debates inherent in exhibit planning based on six months of meeting and exhibit process observation. In this chapter, I describe the Deep Time project and its main themes and emphases. Then, I discuss the frictions and complementarities involved in the negotiation of Deep Time content, including debates about 1) how to describe interconnected processes and concepts with 125 things using different kinds of techniques and technologies and 2) how to connect scientifically incomplete or shifting narratives with an incomplete record of life on earth (fossils) using techniques with a spectrum of levels of resolution. I describe four main spectrums of debate that emerged in meetings: real/interpretation, resolution/abstraction, reliability/innovation, authority/participation. In each case I present arguments at each end of the four debates and then show creative and collective solutions posed at the 10% stage of exhibit development. 3.1 Deep Time 10% Development Process When I first read about Deep Time’s topic in a project proposal, it was clear that its theme had already been in development for many years. As the project proposal read: The Deep Time Project: 4.6 million years of global change Present Urgency – We live at a unique moment in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history: the point at which a single species, Homo sapiens, has the awareness and capacity to change the life support systems of the entire planet. Today, we are altering the composition and temperature of the atmosphere, the chemistry of the ocean, the distribution of ice, land and water, and the diversity of life. Geology shows that Earth is resilient, but humans have set in motion forces that are inducing a global climate that has not existed for millions of years. We are changing how our planet works, but we do not yet know enough to manage it responsibly. Two things are now required: we must learn enough about global life support systems to predict how they will change, and we must foster attitudes and strategies to avoid harmful long-term changes in those systems. Proposal – The Deep Time Project is designed to meet both of these challenges. The geological and fossil records contain examples of massive, rare events (extraterrestrial impacts), and slow, transformative processes (changes in atmospheric chemistry and the carbon cycle). The Deep Time research program will reveal processes and consequences 126 of past global change that are otherwise impossible to study. Deep Time’s outreach program will use the popularity of fossils to foster appreciation for the history of life and the grand context for our own existence, emphasize that lessons from Earth history are important for predicting our future, and empower people to embrace their role as “planet managers.("The Deep Time Project" 2009) As I would discover later, this was an outline of a successful “Big Idea” that had been chosen to move forward as a research and outreach program, including an exhibit, in 2009. The main themes were: 1. The History of Life will describe past critical intervals of explosive evolutionary diversification, rapid environmental change, and mass extinction. 2. Earth Systems will reveal the geological, biogeochemical, and ecological sources for global change – past, present, and future. 3. Lessons from Deep Time will show how Earth’s past is a powerful, necessary guide for understanding its present and its future. 4. Planet Management will use the grandeur of the history of life to inspire awe and generate involvement that will lead visitors to learn and act. These core themes would be explored and communicated through a whole Deep Time “initiative”—an exhibits renovation and a bundle of wide reaching research and outreach initiatives. This idea, which had been in fact in development since the early 2000s, had the consenus of the whole Deep Time Core Team. These emphases on interconnected earth systems and ecosystems, and the emphasis on connecting the past and present, were core principles to contemporary thinking in the field of paleontology (or “paleobiology, as the Department 127 ephasizes). As Kay Behrensmeyer, Lead Curator on the Initiative said to me later in an interview: You have to study the present in the context of all the long, evolutionary history. And you have to think of the past in terms of what you can learn from the present, the way animals and plants interact with each other, and things you can’t hope to see fossilized. So, the analogies of today are really important, and that’s … I’ve had a long-term project in looking at a modern ecosystem, and other projects looking at bones and rivers. So crossing time boundaries, that’s kind of what paleobiology is all about (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). The project’s emphasis on urgency and relevancy of science was also a key emphasis of staff in outreach and exhibits planning. As Kara Blond, Acting Assistant Director for Exhibits, later told me, “Our charge was clear because there was this big idea that was established really early that I think everybody felt very confident about” (Blond 7.1.13). Like the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, and other halls that had recently been re-done, the exhibit team had consensus around a core idea and mission for the hall. However, unlike Human Origins and other hall projects, this project was to be planned by not one, but three curators, who would be tasked with shaping the exhibit’s scientific conceptual underpinnings. As Kara Blond said, “The fact that there are several curators as opposed to one curator makes the implementation of that idea a little bit harder, takes just a little more consensus-building at every step” (Blond 7.1.13). During what is called the 10% phase, the Core Team tasked with planning the exhibit would be charged with collectively honing the elements of this broader project into themes and narratives for an exhibit hall—about 30,000 square feet of physical space in the museum. As Fang-Pin Lee, Designer for the firm Reich and Petch (R+P) said, the early stages of exhibit planning were “like opening up a Russian doll,” to “start with the big ideas and principles first” while being aware of the specifics and constraints involved. She continued: 128 And so I’ve always used that as my guiding principle when I start. Because the truth is, these projects are so overwhelming, sometimes, they have a minimum of 1,000, if not 10,000, artifacts, and sometimes we get stories which are encyclopaedically thick before we even walk through the door. And so how do you begin? And you just start by the biggest bubbles of forms you could do in terms of approach. (Lee 8.14.13) The timeline for developing the content of the hall was rigorous—the group only had until 2015 to complete their plans in order that the existing hall could be entirely dismantled, fossils conserved and prepared, a building renovation completed, and the new exhibitry installed for opening in 2019. The process of content, theme and floor plan development I observed during the 10% phase was thus quick-paced and ripe with fascinating debate. Figure 3.1 Deep Time exhibit timeline.39 Before I go into the specifics of exhibit content discussions, it is useful to outline the process in which exhibit content develops at the NMNH. Exhibits are developed in 10%, 35%, 65%, and 95% phases. At 10%, the little chunk of red in the above diagram, the primary in-house 10%$$Milestone$Deep$Time$Exhibit$Timeline$Permanent$Exhibit$Opens$in$2019$Temp.$Exhibit$Opens$Paleo.$Halls$Close$35%$Milestone$ 129 exhibits team, called the Core Team, work to consolidate clear overall messages, themes, and a generalized floor layout for the hall. These are the high level “visioning” documents that shape and act as a framework for all of the more detailed plans that follow. Over the five months that I observed this process, three representatives from the contracted Design Firm, Reich and Petch (R+P), and two representatives from the Richard Lewis Media Group (RLMG) (contracted under R+P), worked with the Core Team to shape the overall conceptual framework of the hall, distilled down into a 10% “package”—a series of documents including a write-up of basic vision, a “bubble diagram” of ordered concepts, main messages, a floor plan layout, and some preliminary renderings of the hall to give a sense of what it might look like in three dimensions. This last piece was also useful for raising further money for the project. Alongside these early bubble diagrams, basic conceptual floor plans, and visions for the halls, the team produced a finalized Concept Narrative Document, drafted by writer Angela Roberts Reeder, describing in detail the Team’s plans for each section of the hall. As the 10% package described, “The 10% phase of the project establishes the conceptual framework of the gallery. The 10% Design defines the overall spatial representation of the theme and its major content component.” This included design drawings illustrating “the spatial organization of content, visitor circulation flow, programming areas and defines large scale design elements that feature the key messages and content” as well as artistic “impressions” of the future space. Essentially, “the 10% documents provide a roadmap for the subsequent design development phases that will give specific design expression to all parts of the gallery” ("Deep Time 10% Package" 2013a:7). The process of winnowing ideas and producing these documents was structured around a series of development and package-planning workshops from December 2012 to April 2013. The 10% package for Deep Time was shared during a formal presentation to 130 the Approval Team, Director, and other Executive Staff in April 2013 (by which time the Temporary Exhibit was in its 35% Phase). At 35%, the group begins to fill in the bubble floor plan with big specimens, to script out each section of the hall, and to make decisions about what techniques and technologies, or the density of media, might be appropriate for the hall’s content. This ran from April 2013 to roughly December 2013. At 65%, the team does actual scripting for the hall, the beginnings of labels, and the design of each section of the hall. This process was still ongoing as I wrote this dissertation. At 95%, the project goes to production. For the purposes of looking at big questions around theme and content, and because of the particular part of the process I documented, I focus in this chapter on the 10% phase, with a brief discussion of the early 35% phase. 3.2 Observation Period and Early Group Work I attended both Temporary and Permanent Deep Time exhibit meetings over the course of my time at the NMNH. From September to December, before the official launch of Deep Time permanent hall workshops, I attended only Temporary Exhibit meetings. The Temporary Exhibit was planned to open just as the main Paleo halls would close in April 2014, in order to “maintain a dinosaur presence” in the museum. I continued to observe these meetings through February—this was particularly useful because the Temporary Exhibit shared many of Deep Time’s messages, and even some team members, and also was on an accelerated timeline, so that I observed a much greater swath of the process. From the launch of the 10% phase of the Deep Time Exhibit project in December of 2012 to April of 2013, I attended all Core Team exhibit meetings for the permanent hall planning, 131 including twice monthly two-day, all-day workshops with the Core Team and the R+P team (which included the RLMG), and Tuesday “standing meetings” for an hour and a half to two hours (often conference calling-in or using “Vidyo” to video conference with the design and media teams). From April to July, I attended, but only took basic play-by-play notes on the 35% process, theis was up to the beginning of meetings putting together the 35% package. The main people involved in planning the exhibit through the workshops plus “standing meetings” every other week—are: Core Development Team Kay Behrensmeyer, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Exhibition Curator, Initiative Lead Amy Bolton, Education Specialist Matthew Carrano, Curator of Dinosauria, Lead Curator for the Exhibit Mike Lawrence, Chief of Exhibit Design Angela Roberts Reeder, Exhibition Writer Jennifer Miller, Exhibit Developer/Project Manager Scott Wing, Curator of Fossil Plants, Exhibition Curator Reich and Petch Stephen Petri, Principal Fang-Pin Lee, Senior Designer Pauline Dolovich, Principal (R+P Project Manager) Richard Lewis Media Group Richard Lewis, Principal Mark Ostrander, Director of Design For the permanent hall process it was the R+P team that set the agenda. Each workshop has a set of goals, and usually the R+P team begins by describing the work they’ve done, 132 including “benchmarking”—looking at other institutions’ dinosaur halls, design or media techniques—or new drawings, which they present out to the group. At a number of workshops in-house team members were also asked to make short presentations—for instance Angela Roberts Reeder, the writer, on common exhibit label styles, or Kay Behrensmeyer, on a number of museums she visited on her own that warranted sharing with the team. A series of semi-structured discussions proceed around both the presentations and a series of topics that need working out. The Temporary Exhibit process was similar in its overall structure, but worked somewhat differently as because it was all being done in-house. For in-house exhibits, usually smaller scale and mostly temporary halls, the Exhibit Developer or Project Manager, an in-house Exhibits staff member, sets the agenda. The group then meets weekly for an hour and a half to two hours, and works iteratively between the designers, writers and curators in the same way as the permanent hall team does.] For the Temporary Exhibit, this phase resulted in a Concept Script and set of illustrations. Before I arrived at the museum, the Deep Time Team had gone on a retreat in which they began to hash out the basic themes and content “streams” to be covered in the exhibit. Three main streams of narrative content were identified that could be traced through time: evolution, ecosystems, and earth processes. In tandem with these, the team, lead by the Lead Curator Matthew Carrano, had described four additional streams with nodes of content over time: human connections, extinctions, scientific process, and the story of crocodile evolution. These were distilled into a “content matrix” for the project, made at the retreat with sharpie markers on a roll of giant paper. This matrix described the themes the team had drafted as a top, x-axis, notated by coloured lines cascading downward through time as a left-side, y-axis. Where there were 133 important events or stories to tell about a content stream at a certain point in time, the team created a “node.” This matrix was brought to a number of early meetings, and was formalized by Matthew Carrano into an Illustrator document that was printed onto large paper and sometimes posted on the walls at exhibit meetings: Figure 3.2 Deep Time content matrix 2013.40 Based on the content matrix, the four main streams were evolution, ecosystems, earth processes, and human connections with additional stories of extinction, scientific process, and the crocodile story. By the end of the 10% process, the overarching theme of the exhibit, and its main messages, had become much more communicative and aspirational: PleistoceneNeogenePaleogeneCretaceousJurassicTriassicPermianCarboniferousDevonianSilurianCambrianProterozoicArchaeanHadeantime period ecosystemsevolutionscientificprocesshumanconnectionsearthprocesses extinctions croc storySWHDSMTCAKBAKBMTCDECLBHKLSWNPDEWDfirst “modern” worldcoal forestsfirst land ecosystems coal/fossil fuelsice ages, continenalcollisionslife on landmulticellular lifediversifiesorigin of lifeoxygenation ofatmospheregeochemical cyclesclimate change/PETMice agesgrasslandsmammals diversifybirds andgiant dinosaursflowering plantsworld of wierdosherbivory andangiospermsbreakup of Pangaea K/T extinction makesway for modern mammalsflowering plants andhuman diethumans part of anancient worldbreathing oxygengardeninggreenhouse world 134 Overarching Theme: Earth’s distant past is connected to the present and shapes our future. The Overarching Theme Main Messages: -The Deep Time exhibition will inspire wonder, curiosity, and awe as visitors explore the history of life. -It will motivate visitors to think in new ways about the connections between all life and the Earth. -It will encourage visitors to see our present-day world as a product of geological forces, biological evolution, and environmental change over vast spans of time. -It will encourage people to reflect on our impact on the Earth and life as fully engaged citizens for a changing world. -They will understand that the Earth we pass on to future generations will be a product of our planet’s past and the world we are now shaping. (“Deep Time 10% Package” 2013:3) The 10% phase thus involved a great deal of new, collaborative group thinking around the exhibit’s content in order to digest ideas into a coherent story and purpose, translated into visual illustrations by the designers. 135 3.3 Meetings—the Work of Exhibit Planning These aspirational statements for the hall, formalized in the 10% package documents, are an artefact of months of collaborative work in meetings between the Design team and Core and Extended/Advisory Smithsonian teams. It is through conversations in these meetings that the exhibit’s conceptual framework, basic content, and spatial layout are debated, imagined, and formally articulated in document drafts. Typical meetings took place in either 71A, the primary Exhibits meeting room, or in the Cooper Room, a meeting room on the second floor of the East Wing (the 1960s addition) in the Paleobiology Department. It’s named after Gus Cooper, pictured in the portrait at the back, who had a great influence on the Department’s formation, as described in Chapters 2 and 7. 136 Figure 3.3 The Cooper Room 2013.41 Figure 3.4 Chairs of Paleobiology in the Cooper Room 2013.42 My notes from the second workshop I attended in early January read: Tuesday January 8th, 2013 Deep Time Workshop 2 9:30am 137 Up in the Cooper room The Cooper room is one of the few rooms “behind the scenes” that reminds you that the museum used to be a gentleman’s place. It’s unassuming and a bit worn, with a few remnants of December’s Paleo Holiday party scotch-taped to the ceiling, but it’s lined with ceiling-high bookshelves and dominated by a large oblong dark wooden table, surrounded by equally serious chairs. A large portrait of Gus Cooper overlooks the room’s happenings, and the photographic line of succession of Department Chairmen line the window-side wall. As people drift into the room just as it hits 9:30, members of the group arrange themselves around the thick table, and seat themselves on burgundy leather cushions attached with somewhat tarnished brass pegs, before shuffling the heavy chairs into comfortable positions. Unlike 71A, the closed-off, windowless and fluorescent-lit room where so many meetings happen, this room is flooded with diffuse clouded wintery light, passing through large paned windows through which leafless branches sway in warm-for-this-time-of-year breezes. It’s the second workshop of many that will take place throughout the Spring, and there’s a good amount of post-break energetic banter exchanged as everyone greets each other and takes a seat. Scott has brought a newly published fold-out map from a geologic society that has a detailed description of the latest breakdown of the Geologic Time Scale. There’s some oooh and aaah-ing and agreement that we all ought to get one. Scott describes a few of the salient points notated by the diagrams. Eventually Jennifer chimes in with her calm but assertive “OK let’s get started,” and conversations lull. Many meetings, in the morning or after lunch, and whether in 71A, the (everyone agrees) unfortunately fluorescent Exhibits meeting room or up in the Cooper Room, began this way— 138 sauntering in, some show and tell of something interesting someone came across, joking, passing around snacks or candy for the meeting. Figure 3.5 Exhibit meeting in 71A, 2013.43 Soon though, the group would be in thick and sometimes heated conversation about a broad range of topics, from engaging audiences and affect to lycopod reproduction and the ways that the deep history of earth is written on our bodies. Each of the themes outlined in the content matrix assert change and interconnectivity of life through time. At the earliest stages, an exhibit process like Deep Time is driven by these broad conceptual messages. From there, the team worked with R+P to organize this content into conceptual bubble diagrams. Early drafts for bubble diagrams variously ordered concepts in time, and by emphasis. 139 Figure 3.6 Draft bubble diagram by Fang-Pin Lee, 2013.44 In preparing a 10% Package that would include these conceptual bubble diagrams for exhibit content, a basic floor plan of the hall zoned by content areas, core messages for each of these sections, and draft drawings evocatively fleshing out areas of the hall, the team had to grapple with a number of issues to do with the tone, style, vocabulary, techniques, or overall approach the hall would take. In the following section, I describe four major areas of debate that developed in these discussions through areas of friction and where they emerged as creative complementarities manifest in early ways the group came to compromised solutions. 3.4 Complementarity and Friction in Content Development 140 Throughout 10% conversations, there was a consensus among the group that, at Smithsonian in particular, people come to see “the real thing.” There was also a strong consensus that seeing the real thing, and knowing that it was real, was more convincing and affective for visitors. At the same time, this emphasis on the real thing was caught up in knowing that moving visitors from the description of fossils to larger messages required bridging gaps with narrative or story-driven interpretation, media technologies, or participatory or affective techniques. It is impossible, for instance, to illustrate the carbon cycle using fossils alone. Likewise showing the breadth of ecological niches filled by species in an environment requires finding ways to display microfossils—for instance, very tiny mammals, reptiles or insects—in compelling ways. In essence, the group was often asking how to use (static, singular) objects, augmented by a wide range of techniques (including text, design, spatial arrangements, media, tone, and interaction) to convey: 1. Interconnectivity: What techniques can be used to show the complexity of ecosystems? And how can you compellingly illustrate tiny things or details necessary to show those complexities? 2. Processes: What techniques can be used to illustrate time, shifting climates, or evolution with objects? 3. Stories: What techniques can be used to tie together objects into broader contexts, narratives or messages? In trying to grapple with these larger questions, the group at times engaged in heated debates, while at other times came together in shared imaginings or slowly but organically reached points of consensus. In the following section, I will describe conversations around each of four main areas of debate that emerged in meetings, and where the group found cohesion and friction in 141 each case. Each of these debates involved agreeing on where, on a spectrum of extremes, the exhibit should sit in terms of contexts, levels of resolution, media augmentation and tone, and levels of visitor engagement: Figure 3.7 Friction/complementarity content debates.45 3.4.1 Not Just Another Dinosaur Exhibit: The Charismatic Real and Layers of Interpretation Figure 3.8 Theme 1.46 It became clear very early that the team would have to come to some agreement about where along the spectrum from singular displays of real things to highly artistic, contextual or media-driven the exhibit would sit. There were complex debates about authenticity wrapped up in these discussions. Part of these discussions had to do with Deep Time’s purpose. Deep Time 1) Layers of Interpretation: real/singular 2) Levels of Resolution: detail/facts3) Tone of Technologies: durable/low-tech 4) Levels of Engagement: authorityillustration/contextabstraction/narrativeexperimental participation1) Singular real fossils wholly artistic illustration, context, models, design 142 would seek to show interconnectivity and integrated processes over time. As such, part of the challenge of designing the hall was to find ways to integrate singular species into their wider ecosystems. It was also agreed that there was an importance to showing real things, or allowing real things to convey meaning. Yet as Scott Wing said in the second workshop, the stories the group were trying to tell weren’t told by mammals or other big things; focusing on time meant going into small or even invisible things, such as fossil pollen: “Big things give you the richness of what’s happening; chemistry and microfossils give you the story of ecological change through time” (Wing 1.3.13). Much of the debate about layers of interpretation had to do with this challenge—how to integrate larger, more compelling things into wider contexts; and how to highlight smaller, less spectacular things to draw peoples’ attention to their importance. Debates were also ongoing about the importance of conserving specimens or making them available to researchers (which might entail using casts, models or artistic renderings of specimens) against the importance of showing real things. Arguments for the Singular/Real In early conversations there were some areas of consensus about the importance of allowing real things to speak on their own terms: First, that real things are compelling for people. It was noted in meetings that kids, for instance, like to “get their nose right up to these things” (Behrensmeyer 1.4.13), and that people want to see “the real thing” (Wing 1.4.13)—”there’s nothing like seeing the real thing”; Second, some real things are iconic or destination specimens—certain of these real things, dinosaur mounts for instance, are particularly compelling—equal in stardom only to the Hope Diamond, and a particular pilgrimage attraction for visitors. There were also many discussions about the fact that many visitors to the fossil halls 143 are “dinomaniacs,” kids aged around 4-12 who not only love dinosaurs and want to see the real thing, but who also know more about them than their parents. Further, in discussions about spaces that were to be more about processes and interaction than specimens, the group still felt that they needed “a signature specimen” (Lee 2.26.13); Third, the Smithsonian has the real thing, and people don’t come to the Smithsonian to see plastic, fake, or wholly mediated things. At least once, the potential use of too many cast specimens was compared to Disneyland (Wing 1.4.13); Fourth, the Smithsonian has a democratic mission that aims to give the public access to the real thing; Fifth, that the real thing is evidence for the story of Deep Time—and while the team agreed they could not advocate or be truly political about changing people’s beliefs—real fossils are crucial to convincing especially those who refute evolution and climate change that they are real trends. As Vertebrate Paleontologist and Curator Hans Sues, said of the Team’s “narrative,” “we have the primary evidence to back it up sitting back here [in the collections]” (Sues 1.3.13). Others worried that without real things, the audience could think it was “all made up.” Real things “make that person have to deal with this” (Wing 1.4.13). In early discussions the designers presented the team with “benchmarking” studies showing techniques other museums were using to contextualize or augment fossil displays. Members of the team, particularly curatorial team members, felt that many other museum attempts to use illustrative techniques to display fossils were inadequate, inaccurate, or misleading in their particular uses of artistic renderings. Very early, Matthew Carrano launched a critique of exhibits that showed a “land of the living dead,” where mounted fossil bones (dead things reassembled) were contextualized in lush rainforest or swamp habitats. In other cases, museums showed mounted fossils in contemporary badland environments—environments where fossils are likely to be found today. Looking at one example, he said that many museums will 144 “take footprints cast from a real trackway,” add a dinosaur, and then assemble them in an environment that shows how “the area looks like now” so that you have “badlands behind a Tyrannosaurus” (Carrano 1.4.13). Either, he argued, was misleading if the team wanted visitors to understand creatures as living organisms in past ecosystems. Designers thereafter referred to the “land of the living dead” problem to describe this (Lee 1.4.13). There were other discussions about instances where media was used inappropriately or conveyed things that were misleading by particular combinations, juxtapositions, or relationships between artistry and the real. The group also seemed to agree that they didn’t want an “art exhibit with dinosaurs” or merely “fossils with murals” (Lee 2.5.13) because they wanted to be more intentional in their combinations of space, art, and fossil assemblages: the “physical arrangement is part of how we tell a story” (Carrano 2.5.13). In other cases, museums had used large murals to show ecological change over time—the primary example brought up with the team, and one of the earliest and most famous attempts being Rudolph Zallinger’s mural at the Yale Peabody in 1941 (Wing 2.5.13). The Age of Dinosaurs mural, 110 feet long and 30 feet high, used trees to divide historical epochs, and had been an icon for generations of aspiring Paleontologists. 145 Figure 3.9 Zallinger mural at Yale’s Peabody Museum, 2013.47 The group wondered whether changes in ecosystem, plants in particular, were too subtle for a non-expert to notice (the same is true of the current Life in the Ancient Seas mural in Hall 5, discussed later in this chapter, and which similar to the Zallinger mural tried to show three periods of time in a single mural). Arguments for Context/Illustration/Interpretation On the other end of the spectrum, there were a number of circulating arguments in favor of heavier uses of artistic rendering, contextualization, and media techniques along with real things. A number of points were made about the importance of artistic techniques were: First, that Deep Time needed artistic renderings and context to convey concepts, narratives, and 146 themes based on interconnection and processes. In the area of processes, Deep Time messages included changing earth processes, ecosystems, and evolution over time—all of which describe things and earth states in flux. These ideas would necessarily need to be brought into design with static objects through artistry because objects don’t display process well on their own. Even a fossil “assemblage” doesn’t tell a “process story” (Reeder 1.3.13). In the area of interconnectivity, Deep Time themes included intersections and interactions across ecosystems and climate conditions even within time periods, such that merely showing evolution through time of singular species was not enough. Paleontology has “this incredible archive of what climate states have been” (Wing 1.3.13) and yet it is difficult to show the complexity of in climates and ecosystems, and in plant and insect interactions. Describing “interrelations” and “connections” is inherently “hard” to do with anything visually “static” (Bolton 3.26.13). Second, design and artistic techniques combat and contextualize charismatic specimens. From the very beginning, there was a consensus that this would not be “just another dinosaur exhibit” (Behrensmeyer 1.3.13) or an exhibit that stopped at “T-rex is cool” (Pinsdorf 1.3.13). Artistic and design techniques were understood as vital in preventing visitors from “running past” just to “see the next big shiny dinosaur” (Pinsdorf 1.3.13) or another “trophy specimen” (Carrano 1.4.13). The mission and message of the hall made it fundamentally not about objects on their own. Because it was based on ecosystems, earth processes, evolution, and human connections and because it was conceived as message- and story-driven, objects were supposed to fit the exhibit and not the other way around, “otherwise its an encyclopedia of time, which is not our intention” (Lee 2.26.13). Thus “taking a different approach” to specimens, Matthew Carrano said (to the surprise of designers and others who rarely hear curators say such things) “we need to draw on collections to service the exhibit,” so that the availability or ownership of 147 large collections of certain things didn’t necessarily correlate to the space they were allotted (Carrano 3.26.13). Scott Wing echoed that “specimens are there to get the messages across” (Wing 3.26.13). Thus, while there were “iconic, beautiful specimens” it was hard to imagine the hall without, the group agreed that the specimens had to fit the stories (Wing 1.4.13). The question then became: What is “the most important story skeletons can tell?” (Lee 1.3.13). Another related argument for greater artistry and contextualization was based in a sense that many of Deep Time’s conceptual underpinnings, including complex processes and ecosystems, needed to be conveyed gradually and repeatedly throughout the hall (and therefore necessarily not only through object displays). Evolution, as a concept and theme, for instance, had to be “sprinkled” (Lawrence 1.4.13) through the hall or “everywhere” in the hall as a kind of “historical unfolding” (Wing 1.4.13). Third, many iconic fossils don’t lend themselves to conveying the exhibit’s main messages. Telling these stories of climates, ecosystems, and evolution over time becomes a difficult thing to do when many of the most famous or iconic specimens—Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, for instance, are from the Jurassic period, and the “Jurassic is not that climatically fascinating” (Carrano 1.4.13). In contrast, one of the exhibits staff proposed that perhaps a big charismatic specimen would cause higher dwell or comprehension rates and could therefore get across a story better. A few others agreed that this was often true of big specimens (3.26.13). Of course, some specimens need augmentation because they are not inherently compelling or aesthetic; certainly not all fossils are as large or famous as mounted dinosaurs, and some specimens are better off in a “place that’s not competing with dinosaurs” (Wing 2.27.13). The group had a number of discussions about how to use “things people are attracted to (Lee 1.3.13) or “sexier objects” (Lee 1.3.13) to either bring out themes or to find such objects for 148 more challenging time periods or concepts—to the point that a fascinating conversation about a part of the hall would appear to end, and then someone would interject “the challenge is specimens.” In fact, the conversation tended toward “knocking” dinosaurs or other “things with charisma” (Carrano 2.27.13). Fourth, yet another major constraint was that not all the iconic mounts could fit in the hall, even if the team had wanted them there. And in fact, paring down the number of specimens might help to focus visitors’ attentions on important stories or less commonly fawned-upon fossils. Physically, there wasn’t enough room. This is especially true when considering circulation space for the 8 million visitors attending annually, the vast majority of whom enter the hall. Specimen lists including all of the collection’s greatest hits and the 76 large fossil mounts currently on display would need “significant editing” as the process moved along (Dolovich 1.4.13). In addition many fossils, due to their condition—often their age out of the ground, high levels of turbulence or humidity in their time on display, or their original preparation or mounting technologies—would have to remain off display after dismantling and conservation. Others would need to remain off exhibit because researchers would require access to them (especially if they were type specimens and/or if their condition was not good); the details and even chemistry of type specimens and many other objects in the collections are important for ongoing scientific research by scientists at the museum and their colleagues around the world. Others, still, would need complex mounting apparatuses to remain on display, either because they were important for research access and/or because they were too physically heavy to be posed with the rest of a mount. Fifth, both the fossil record and fossilized objects are incomplete. This is an additional constraint when using “authentic,” “real” things from the fossil record. Not only is the record 149 incomplete, almost all specimens are as well. As we saw in Chapter 2, since before Gilmore’s day, large mounts were filled in to look complete using casts from other museums, reverse casts from other parts of a mount, or sculpted pieces. In this way paleobiology offers a unique context for thinking about issues of authenticity—the notion of the “replicant” as inherently inauthentic, part of a critique of industrial reproduction for art or other cultural objects, has never existed in quite the same way for paleontological objects. All fossil mounts are assemblages of real, copied, and crafted things, held together by complex metal apparatuses, various adhesives and surface treatments. This is not the case for small things or death assemblages/poses where things are taken directly out of the ground and displayed as found, but most iconic “real” things are only partially so. These processes are largely under the purview of preparators and conservators in consultation with curatorial staff. For Deep Time, the team hired a firm to do large-scale de-installation, conservation and preparatory work. Thus, almost all objects going on display would require some amount of craftsmanship or artistry to augment them. Early Solutions for Real/Contexts In trying to convey a “feeling of dynamic movements, progress, change” the team acknowledged that conveying, “change and movement … is really hard to do with two-ton specimens that are connected to steel armatures” (Blond 7.1.13). Through the 10% phase, there were a number of early solutions posed for fusing approaches. The designers worked iteratively with the team through these debates. Working in the mode of “interpretive design,” an important and pervasive movement in the design world, designers tried to find ways to explain objects and convey complex information in ways that were “digestible and accessible and interesting to the 150 public” (Lee 8.14.13). In an early and illuminating drawing, Fang-Pin Lee addressed them head on through drawings. The question of how or to what extent to interpret or contextualize real things is summed up by this drawing titled the “Spectrum of Exhibit Types”: Figure 3.10 “Spectrum of Exhibit Types,” drawing by Fang-Pin Lee, 2013.48 This drawing illustrates the spectrum of context and resolution involved in exhibits—on the one end, assemblages of standalone fossils, on the other, a fully contextualized and rendered diorama “still life” full of ecological context. In the middle are a few compromises that museum displays have made to find a good balance between these two extremes. One area where the group began to solve these issues was through the use of shared metaphors giving the group flexibility in articulating portions of the hall. One of the early ways 151 to talk about these hybrid displays was to describe them very broadly as “porkchops”—generalized shapes on the floor plan and placeholders for content that would be developed and detailed as plans developed. The porkchops would be the primary areas for objects and their surrounding displays and would be arranged by time from the front to the back of the hall. Using the term “porkchops,” first coined by the designers in a colloquial way to describe amorphous shapes on the floor plan, helped the team to talk articulately about areas where fossil mounts would be without designating specific content or approaches to display (they didn’t call them “mounts” or plinths or platforms for instance). Others included describing the exhibit as a movie (Carrano 2.26.13), a book (Lee 1.4.13), a string of pearls (Wing 1.4.13), a theater (Lee 3.26.13), a “user’s manual for the future planet” (Mason 1.3.13), a logbook, a metro map—in each case, the idea was that while time created the overall order of things, at various times the audience would experience more or less depiction of changes through time or singular objects, as well as more or less detail or narrative abstraction. Second, the most common suggestions (and where the most consensus seemed to lie) involved combinations or integrations of media and real things—hybrids that didn’t fall into traditional problematic categories. Many of these were envisioned as “assemblages” (Lee 2.5.13)—bringing together elements of “scenes,” “snapshots,” “tableaux, “ (Lee 1.3.13) mounts, photographs or paintings, textual layering, dramatic lighting, colour, and hints of context or miniature scenes of reconstructed environments. Within assemblages, specimens could be augmented by situating them next to or reconstructing them as models, drawings, 2D models, or computer graphics. In content, these assemblages would acknowledge that ecosystems, time, climate are all made up of things that evolve (Behrensmeyer 1.4.13). 152 In part these were meant to “round out” the “in between” things and “show relationships” between things and change or interconnectivity over time—to “do more than be beautiful” (Lee 2.5.13). Some of the early design assemblages included “a sculpture on one side,” a reconstructed mount on the other, “evidence” with a skeleton in its death pose underneath, next to a projection of an animal “breathing, swishing its tail,” showing just a “breath of life” and a “mural” with a transparency layer behind that showed tectonic formations as well as Jenny Holzer-esque text pieces (Lee 2.5.13). Using a “palette of techniques” that in some cases “riffed” on classic dioramas with a “gradient” of “techniques”(Petri 2.5.13)—including “layering 2D and artwork with AV” (Petri 2.26.13) and that developed “consistent language and display” (Petri 2.5.13). Another suggestion was to create mounts in unusual or unexpected combinations—for instance to pose early human fossil mounts alongside mammoth mounts within these assemblages, to show the interconnectedness of ecosystems using compelling (non-dinosaur) examples. There were other large-scale elements that were imagined as hybrids too—what became known as “the Ribbon” was a good example. The ribbon was conceived as a “continuous,” fluid, gestural piece weaving its way along the hall suspended above fossil assemblages. It was imagined as everything from a static, graphic element or mural to a three-dimensional sculptural piece using projection, “panoramic animation” (Lee 2.5.13) or LED screens to illuminate moving images or scenes. The ribbon offered a solution to juxtaposing fossil mounts and murals or diorama techniques emphasizing time, interconnection and process directly by being both independent of displays and responding to them—occasionally perhaps even arcing down toward the floor to act as a backdrop. The consensus among the group was generally to have some layered hybrid form that would be “at minimum a beautiful graphic” that would have “some 153 dimensionality”—2 ½ to 3D, and bits of integrated lighting or video that would fluctuate between active and inactive or passive modes (Lee 3.26.13). The ribbon would act in many ways like a mural, spreading time-structured narrative across physical space, “coalescing” units and “sets of units together and depicting “scenes and environments” (Carrano 3.26.13) and connecting the “porkchops” (Behrensmeyer 3.26.13). As Scott Wing said, it was one “solution to the land of the living dead problem” because “instead of putting an environment behind a skeleton” and “asking people to imagine flesh on it” it would create “an impression of an environment” at an upper level that reminded people of changes over time and how things might have looked (Wing 3.26.13). It was Scott Wing who brought up the idea’s similarity to the famous Rudolph Zallinger mural at the Peabody Museum that showed dinosaurs through time in a continuous mural: “it was every child’s dinosaur dream” (Wing 2.5.13). There was some disagreement as to whether it should be more or less supportive of the specimens in the space—in some cases it was meant to convey specific stories (such as flight, or hot and cold climate fluctuations) and in other cases to only have enough detail to support specimens on the floor (3.26.13 196-8). A second early solution for the group was to “break expectations” by showing standalone but unexpected things that would speak as singular or iconic objects. In some case the idea was to use message-bearing art pieces or gestures, in others to create a little shrine to something unexpected—a “temple to a fascinating object like the Hope Diamond” that would alert the viewer to some big idea or the underlying message in the room (Lawrence 1.4.13). One example was to make one of the entryways focus around a “vial of stardust” (Lawrence 1.3.13)—conveying the message that all of earth’s history and all human bodies are made up of the stuff of stars. Another was to use the shape of the human body as a translucent canvas for projections 154 about earth’s history, the halls themes, or other messages using poetic, theatrical or artistic lighting and images (1.4.13). In other cases, particularly for Hall 6, the hall devoted to pre-land life, members of the group suggested unusual “signature specimens” for display—for instance, a “giant eurypterid” (Behrensmeyer 2.26.13). In some cases, this was described as “isolating” one element that otherwise might function as part of a diorama, and to “treat it as an artefact itself” (Lee 2.5.13). In others, it was described as creating a large, immersive or artistic display of something to act as its own hybrid entity. One example was of what became known as the “coal mine immersive.” This was described as a kind of portal, with a detailed exterior of a fossil tree reconstruction and a cast of the inside of a coal mine where fossils are found today. A second was to show a model ice core with bubbles in it to describe how scientists use ice to look at changes in atmosphere and climate (Wing 1.3.13). A third solution was using carefully controlled viewing to highlight ordinarily overlooked things. In some cases, the proposals were to use controlled vantage points from which to see media and object interactions. One example of this was to have special viewers from an area the group began calling “the bridge” that would focus the visitor’s gaze on specific things or themes across the gallery. These “thematic viewpoints” (Lee 2.26.13) from the “veranda” (Wing 2.27.13) would allow for an interplay of objects and illustration and viewing singular things across time and environments in flux in targeted ways. Another was the idea of using modernized or hybrid periscopes, magnifying glasses, microscopes, stereographs, pinhole cameras, pepper’s ghost, or other viewing technologies to focus visitor attention as the viewed parts of the “porkchops”; to “peek into a world of the past” (Lee 2.5.13). Still another idea was to play with scale—to make tiny things large or whole vast ecosystems miniature, so that the 155 viewer was jolted into paying attention. Scale was also discussed in terms of how many people might experience these vantage points—whether they were targeted for individuals or large groups (Carrano 2.5.13). At a logistical level, still other graphic techniques were proposed to balance the constraints of real objects with the importance of having them on display. One proposal was to use graphics to show what percentage of the fossils in a mount were real (Behrensmeyer 2.5.13). Another solution was designing for each important skull, type or other research-important specimen an attractive but accessible display apparatus, so that researchers could access the object and the public could still see it. This was in reaction to many specimens in the past that had been put on display without regard for research access needs once on display. 3.4.2 An Informed Imagination: Levels of Resolution Figure 3.11 Theme 2.49 Some of these proposed solutions lead to another area of discussion. This was less about the amount of interpretation or context for real things, and more about the nature of detail and interpretation in the hall more broadly. Debates emerged about the scale of “resolution” in the hall—where along the spectrum from perfectly detailed and temporally literal to abstracted and narratively-driven the displays should be. As Matthew Carrano asked at a February meeting, “You can be accurate without being precise; how precise do we need to be? (Carrano 2.26.13). 2) highly detailed description/scenes/moments abstraction/narrative 156 As Richard Lewis said, “At what point is it not science?” (Lewis 1.3.13). Or in a subsequent interview, “in these tremendously brief opportunities that we have, to what extent are we going to deliver a pure nugget of information and to what extent are we going to deliver an experience that will suggest the information?” (Lewis 8.2.13). In part because of the nature of gaps in knowledge and the fossil record, the team debated whether to show a few perfectly detailed scenes completely fleshed out or more abstracted interpretations that communicated well. As Kay Behrensmeyer said, “We’re acting like we know everything” when there are limits to “what we can know about earth’s history… we have a tiny window over all things that have ever lived and died” (Behrensmeyer 1.4.13). Part of these discussions involved how to show changes through time—at what points to show particular detailed moments and where to use media or storytelling techniques to connect the dots. Part of this balance is finding ways to help visitors not, as Stephen Petri said, “get lost in detailed evidence” and to show “big stories through very specific small stories” (Petri 1.3.13). The discussion also dealt with how to use time as a framework, but not literal spatial arrangement in the hall. Arguments for Detail There were a number of arguments for highly “resolved” or detailed display. First, showing highlights or detailed depictions where both science and the fossil record supports it makes the content compelling and more approachable or understandable. If descriptions or displays were “too broad,” some members of the group worried it would be “hard to explain” major concepts or changes through time without “breaking them down” (Wing 1.4.13). Rather 157 than trying to depict an entire ecosystem at a moment in time, as Richard Lewis said, in many cases it might be better not to try to “represent the entire environment.” Instead, where there was a “level of confidence” the group could take “detail and honor that,” “go deeply” into it, which seemed “more attractive and accurate” (Lewis 1.3.13). In other conversations, the group referred to movie “trailer moments” (Lee 2.26.13; Carrano 2.26.13)—highlights in the story. In these areas where the science allowed for “more focused details,” there was the opportunity to show “contextualized moments in time” (Carrano 2.26.13). Overall, members of the group felt that certain areas or topics were “easier to understand” when explained “with an example” than “in generality” (Wing 2.26.13). Moreover, there was a heavy emphasis on conveying the evidence and facts to support the stories the group was trying to tell—asserting what science does know, and giving people the basics they needed to understand broader concepts and themes. While paleontologists never have “one-hundred percent of the information,” “leaving things out gives the impression that they’re missing for a reason,” which was a “different untruth” (Carrano 1.3.13). There were other areas where the group felt that burrowing down into description of important facts, objects or concepts was important to giving visitors a “toolkit” (Behrensmeyer 2//27/13) for the hall. Describing in detail, for instance, what a fossil is, is important to understanding the significance of objects in the hall or why it’s difficult to show change through time with large species mounts. Moreover, there are some parts of earth’s history where specific places, species, climates or times mattered for the exhibit story. One such example is the PETM, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period marked by rapid global warming 55 million years ago. Scott Wing’s research on fossil plants has yielded large collections illustrating the impacts of climatic changes during this time—an excellent example of how the fossil record could illuminate 158 contemporary climate issues—and so it is an important case where it would make sense to show greater detail and “fine time resolution” (Carrano 1.4.13) to tell one specific and illustrative story. Certain species were also described as particularly illustrative of ecosystem shifts or change through time—ostracods, invertebrate or microfossils for instance—that require and allow being more specific about time, and additionally would need greater numbers of fossils and richer detail in textual interpretation to be understandable (1.4.13). Likewise, the group described “innovative moments” in time where specific events or objects needed enough detail and “breathing space” to stand on their own (Petri 2.26.13). Because time was a broad framework but not spatial arrangement for the hall, there was some discussion about whether the exhibit could downplay or do away with time period names—Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous etc.—on large signage or labels in the hall. While there was some consensus that they belonged “in parentheses” since the group was trying to “deemphasize” them and not to take them “too literally” (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13), the curators were also quick to point out that “to Kirk and the Department that communicates everything,” or in other words, time period names are still important to scientists and many members of the public (Wing 2.27.13). Furthermore, as is often the case, curators in particular were worried that abstracting too much or losing too much detail could lead to oversimplification of the material; at worst, either creating factually incorrect displays or altogether “dumbing” the material down. This was one of the areas where there was some clear division along disciplinary lines—a topic I will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter. In early benchmarking presentations, the curatorial team was vocal about other museums, for instance, whose dioramas were inaccurate because they lacked attention to detail. Something could be “impressionistic in the wrong way” (Wing 1.4.13) or lack detail to accurately represent past ecosystems (plants in a diorama looking “trampled or 159 damaged” (Carrano; Behrensmeyer 1.4.13) for instance. In some cases, having an overall sense of “being immersed in the landscape” seemed to be acceptable, so long as an important theme or concept was still being conveyed. But in other cases, curators especially wanted greater levels of “depth and detail” (Wing 1.4.13). This is a classic curatorial stance—to ere on the side of more text, more detail, where exhibits staff and writers, and designers, push to pare things down, to shorten text length, and simplify language (while maintaining the integrity of the content). To accommodate the desired detail, curators also tended to argue for layering information. Matthew Carrano argued that the problem wasn’t in “too much information” or “technical detail,” but in the “delivery,” where to put it, and how to use “primary, secondary, and tertiary” information in levels: “It’s pretty hard to ruin a dinosaur exhibit with words,” he said (Carrano 2.5.13). To which Michael Mason replied, “Oh, I’m sure we could find a way” (Mason 2.5.13). Some of these arguments surrounded text and tone for imagined audiences as the exhibit process moved along—I will wait to describe these discussions in the final section on audience, authority, and participation. Arguments for Abstraction On the other end of the spectrum, the team acknowledged that because the exhibit was theme and message-based, and because the fossil record and scientific knowledge about it is inherently incomplete, that it would be important to use abstraction, time averaging, and lower levels of detail in many parts of the hall. The first area of debate was about how to adequately and convincingly describe past life changes when science can’t know everything. This is, of course, true in all of the sciences, and, as it was explained to me, the very premise of science is that you ask questions to which you 160 don’t know the answers, and make hypotheses about things you could be wrong about. At an early POETS, a Friday evening event I will describe in Chapter 5, I recalled Matthew Carrano saying that science was about finding out more and more of what’s definitely not true. Fossils are an additional burden because the record in incomplete—it is “hard,” there are “pieces missing” (Carrano 1.4.13) and in describing certain core concepts the fossil record was even described as “terrible” for showing “complete transition[s]” across time (Carrano 2.26.13). Certain historical and climatic conditions make the record unevenly distributed, too—certain systems, places, tropical ones, for instance, have a “terrible record” (Carrano 1.4.13). Scott Wing described the fossil record in a meeting once as the “top froth of a bubbling cauldron” representing only some tiny percentage of the “billions of species” that go extinct all the time (Wing 2.26.13). Moreover, dating objects is much more complicated than one might think. Radiometric dating only goes back so far, and after that paleontologists use other evidence, such as surrounding rock or plant species that contextualize or delimit the possible age of a fossil. Paleontologists use “time averaging” to estimate, describe and analyze fossil assemblages they find in the ground because rarely were deposited in an instantaneous event. In fact Kay Beherensmeyer, one of the three curators at the table, has spent much of her career on the study of taphonomy—the science of how things come to die and become fossilized. As she said of her initial interest in the subject: “[Taphonomy] connected the Geology with the Paleontology and the history of life and the history of death and biases in the fossil record, ‘cause you obviously don’t get everything that lived. So, you get a tiny sample, and how good is that sample?” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13) Thus a second kind of argument for abstraction had to do with the nature of paleontology itself. As we will see in the next chapter, the science of paleontology has become increasingly 161 centered around the analysis of interconnectivity, process, genetics, changes in past species and environments over time (as opposed to describing or naming things). This move over the past 60 or so years has changed paleontology’s perspective and view of itself. Today, paleobiologists at the NMNH pride themselves on their unique perspective on interconnected changes over time, big earth trends, the “long view of the past.” Like the argument for greater interpretation of objects, the argument for abstraction or narrative over getting “in the weeds” with detail has to do with paleobiology’s unique opportunity, its “privileged point of view” to tell huge stories that, in turn, require abstracting to “continuous storylines” from specific things, times, and places (Wing 2.27.13). The hall needed to present a “sweep” of “paleo knowledge” (Lewis 2.27.13)—a series of creatures, times, and places “digested” in a way that only paleobiology can give visitors the “long view” that Paleontologists “get all the time” (Carrano 2.27.13). With the exhibit no longer an encyclopaedic enterprise—the group was worried that going too far into detail would obscure broader stories and messages. As the designers asked, how would the team prevent visitors from getting “lost in detailed evidence?” (Petri 1.3.13) or, “reading the details” and not “the essence” of the hall (Lee 2.26.13)? In many cases it was agreed that it was more important for people to get, say, the “rise and fall” of a trend or species over the “technical detail” (Wing 2.26.13). Because processes and broader stories are resistant to description with an incomplete and partially resolved fossil record, there necessarily needs to be abstraction, generalized description, broad story-telling, “pulling out narratives” (Carrano 2.26.13) and other forms of abstracted interpretation. As Scott Wing said, it was hard to use the “specimens we have” to tell the “story we have” (Wing 2.26.13). The ongoing processual nature of evolution was “resistant” to display with objects; it was exactly the kind of thing you “can’t show with fossils” (Wing 1.4.13). This 162 was in part because the hall was not only about change through time, but about interconnectivity among species at any given moment in time.These lower level interactions are in turn impacted by broader shifts: “biotic interactions,” species radiation, evolution (Wing 1.4.13), and the ways “ecosystems are assembling and disassembling”(Carrano 2.26.13) are processes that involve ongoing interactions between things over time and space. The particulars of changes in many ecosystem, climatic, or species over time, are often either fuzzy or unknown; there’s no consensus on the causality of major shifts either. Moments are merely “finescale iterations of something over time” (Petri 2.26.13). Finally, because time was meant to be a framework and not the overriding message of the hall, there were additional needs for using abstraction or story-telling techniques to convey the exhibit’s message. While the framework was conceived in time order, messages were not (Reeder 3.26.13). Time was not meant to be “proportional” or “strictly linear” (Wing 1.3.13), but to set constraints and context for the hall’s contents—allowing the group “to create narratives in a relevant, responsible way” (Carrano 1.3.13). Early Solutions to Detail/Abstraction On the first day of the second workshop for Deep Time, there was a fairly lengthy discussion among the scientists about these issues. Kay Behrensmeyer argued that “we can’t say we’re not going to do it because we don’t have all the data” (1.3.13). Hans Sues articulated that there were “different levels of confidence” the exhibit could use—that while “everyone knows we don’t know everything,” “some dates are irrefutable and others unknown” (Sues 1.3.13). Yet, he said, the “public is curious” and who better to “give it a stab than the people in this room” (Sues 1.3.13). It was during this discussion that Kay Behrensmeyer coined a phrase picked up by 163 other curatorial staff to capture this sentiment—that what the group was aiming for was an “informed imagination” (Behrensmeyer 1.3.13). This was one of the ways that collective thinking helped to resolve debates. Throughout meetings, members of the group would use metaphors and comparisons to describe the way the group could think about seemingly incongruous issues. Those that became shared metaphors and phrases helped the group think through some of these dilemmas. Some of these metaphors included thinking of time as an order or framework as acts and scenes in a play, where the “duration of time” in a scene doesn’t matter; rather the order in which things happen allows the audience to follow a narrative (Carrano, Lawrence 1.3.13). Fang-Pin Lee pitched “life as a book” to describe ordering a narrative without aligning temporal to spatial distance (Lee 1.3.13), and Mike Lawrence similarly compared the hall to a “memoir of the earth” taking a visitor through ordered “flashbacks” (Lawrence 1.3.13). Likewise Matthew Carrano pitched the idea of thinking of the hall as a movie with a beginning, middle and end whose plot could still be described in summary or as narrative (Carrano 2.26.13). Another was to think of the hall as organized like a journey through a metro or subway map, where each “stop” was an important node of activity but the distance between stops was unimportant (1.4.13; Lee 2.5.13; Carrano, Wing 2.26.13). There was even some discussion of playing with iconography or logos to construct the actual map and signage in the hall (1.4.13). Other metaphors included the framework of the hall as a “string of beads,” or “pearls” where a visitor moved from one important moment or node to the next (Mason 1.3.13; Wing 1.4.13). Other terms used to describe general or overarching messages and themes were to think of them as “streams” or “threads” through the hall (Lee 2.27.13). Many of these metaphors and modes of describing the relationship between space, concepts, and time order were congealed into the “content bubbles” prepared for the 10% package. 164 A further set of metaphors was used to describe one design solution to the levels of resolution discussion—what became known as the “bridge.” The idea, as I’ve discussed earlier, was pitched during the workshop where the designers brought four potential hall floor plans to the group to debate. The initial idea, quickly supported by the group, was to have a kind of viewing platform in the hall allowing visitors to look out over the sweep of time. From the “bridge,” the “overlook,” the “veranda” visitors could see both the “topical streams” (Carrano 2.27.13) and narratives of the exhibit in summary and, with special viewers or other AV technology, zoom into important details at highlighted elements or moments in time. One of the ways the curators talked about this overview was that it was a “metaphor for what we do as the museum and as paleontologists” (Carrano 2.26.13). Like being a paleontologist, a view from the bridge would give a visitor a “place you go to take it all in one view … the panorama” (Wing 2.27.13). It could act both like a “synthesizer” (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13) or “nexus” and like a “stereoscope” (Wing 2.27.13). Looking through “lenses” or “eyes” (Ostrander 2.27.13), or even Empire State building-esq viewers, you could “dig into a little piece of it” (Lewis 2.27.13) or see “case studies” (Reeder 2.27.13). This view would allow seeing “thematic lenses across time” (Reeder 2.27.13) or a unique opportunity for “bringing themes into focus” (Carrano, Reeder, Lee 2.27.13). At one point Angela Roberts Reeder called it “The Deep Time Command Center: bringing themes into focus” (2.27.13); Fang-Pin Lee added that up on the bridge would be about the view, while the ground level would be about “taking your journey” (2.27.13). With the perspective of the bridge, visitors could see how themes connected across specific details or instances depicted in “porkchops.” Another solution in this vein was to use “the ribbon” not only to bridge objects and ecological and temporal context but to use it to merge specificity and thematic narrative. Where 165 the ground level story would show “change through time” (Wing 2.27.13) the upper-level ribbon could bring out the “whole sweep of time” (Behrensmeyer 2.26.13) and ever-present themes, trends or narratives, perhaps even using colour-coding or text (Wing 2.27.13). As Fang-Pin Lee described, “each moment of time” might be “highlighted in specific messages.” Imagining the “whole gallery as a theater experience,” the mural would depict “higher level messages” using visual cues and “keywords from the [message] document” (Lee 2.26.13). Rather than a “portrait of a specific ecosystem,” the ribbon would “coalesce” moments, species, and environmental details “as units and sets of units together” (Carrano 3.26.13). This was fitting for such an element, because as Richard Lewis pointed out, at ten to 12 feet up, it would be “difficult to deliver information” and the element “lends to abstraction rather than literalness” and would work as a “big kinetic impression more than didactic instrument” (Lewis 3.26.13), or, as Mark Ostrander pointed out, “pictures rather than words” (Ostrander 3.26.13). Scott Wing likewise noted that it would be better at conveying “not specific information but a sense of environment and how it changes over time” (Wing 3.26.13). A further idea was to make even the ribbon itself bridge the gap between specificity and theme by breaking it up into two streams, where the “lower band” represented themes, the upper, environments” (Behrensmeyer 3.26.13). Matthew Carrano also agreed that there needed to be multiple modes for the ribbon in terms of its function, and that one way was, as Kay Behrensmeyer had offered, to have more “detail at the bottom” and toward the top would become “increasingly gestural, summarizing, more interpreted” so that the visitor could see mural-level detail, and the farther the images got from the visitor’s view, the less detail they could see, the more it became thematic or gestural (Behrensmeyer; Carrano 3.26.13). The Media and Design teams also proposed, as we’ll see in 166 the next section, the use of multiple modes of AV and media technologies to allow it to bridge these functions. A further group strategy was to talk openly about what is and isn’t known or knowable in the science of paleobiology, and where possible, to use first person perspectives. “Told from the point of view of each person” (Wing 1.3.13) and their “ongoing science and research” (Dolovich 1.4.13), it might be easier to say “this is what we know” and what we don’t (Huber 1.3.13), and to talk about “what’s not in the record and why” (Bolton 1.4.13); these are the “areas scientists are still exploring” (Lewis 1.3.13), where scientists find gaps, challenges, or “problem(s) in their work” (Reeder 1.4.13). First person frankness about how science works, how “we know what we know,” especially while giving a “behind-the-scenes” look at science in-process, was agreed upon as a compelling way to be more honest about scientific knowledge. As Scott Wing said, “wherever possible,” it would be ideal to have depictions of a person “doing something and finding something out” because it would be not only a “good experience for the visitor” but also “allow us to be more honest about how it happens” (Wing 1.4.13). This was seen as one way to grapple with gaps in the fossil record, areas where scientists haven’t reached consensus, and areas where scientists use techniques such as time averaging or other inferences to cull together hypotheses. One major area for doing this was the FossiLab, a live preparation lab in the hall where volunteers working with scientists would prepare fossils for research, storage or display. Certainly in the current hall, “were it not for FossiLab,” bones seem to “magically … just appear.” With the live lab, the whole display would be about “the process of you all doing science” through a space illustrating “the work to make these statements, otherwise these bones just appear” (Lewis 1.4.13). 167 A further tactic for resolving the detail/abstraction approaches was to use technologies or techniques that worked in multiple modes, tying together specificity and abstraction. As with resolving the real/interpretation dilemma, fossil “assemblages were pitched as design solutions working in multiple modes—”both specifics and big ideas” (Petri 1.3.13). Another was to use a form of time averaging in the hall by being “relaxed about time” (Behrensmeyer 1.3.13) with “floating time scales” (Wing 1.3.13) and the use of time averaged “tableaux” (Behrensmeyer 1.3.13). Another was to break down big concepts into detailed components—the main things people needed to know, or the main “components” that make up “assembling and disassembling” ecosystems in the world (Carrano 2.26.13). One idea was to give visitors a “toolkit” for understanding the hall, one that would help them “navigate Deep Time,” understand the “organization of content, ideas, sequencing” and the “hierarchy of ideas” (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13). Another was to ensure that each object or element in an “assemblage” or “tableau” still had basic information including how it lived, where it was from, what it ate, a silhouette of the mount showing what portion was real, who found it etc. (Carrano 2.27.13). Amy Bolton proposed the term in education of an “advanced organizer”—a tool to help people to “Be on the lookout for major players or pieces of the system” (Bolton 1.3.13). Another solution was to use introductory panels to draw out generalities from the more detailed information and scenery visitors would see at the porkchop level. Like the actor who introduces a play (Lawrence 1.3.13), these panels were imagined both as thoughtful, “evocative and informative” but simple textual and graphic elements, showing a key message or overview of each section (Reeder 2.5.13), or as other hybrids—what, for instance, Stephen Petri had first called “Time/Space pods” (Petri 1.4.13), they could act either as “temporal reminders” or 168 “conceptual focus points” (Carrano 1.4.13) while also pulling “out the main messages” (Reeder 1.4.13). As Stephen Petri said, they could act as “primer(s) to the scene” showing “where you’re at in earth’s history,” the “conditions, time” and act as “visual markers” along the “long, central armature” that was “visible at a lower level” (Petri 1.4.13). Some of these could have nicknames to help “atomize” the exhibit (Carrano 2.26.13). Yet another early idea was to use (multilayered) “hubs” or “thresholds” to describe nodes/nexus of change or catalysts of change, to bring out important moments in time without trying to describe all of time or an entire set of elements in an ecosystem too specifically to understand the broader story. Following the idea of a metro map or other group metaphors, these transitional or sign-posted elements would allow the group to talk about the important components of earth before or after an event, or act as “intermediaries” between the heavy information on the porkchops and the broader story—they would help visitors to stop, gain their bearing, and understand “you are here in place and time” (Reeder 2.27.13) and why that was important. Each “hub” was also conceived as a “mini bridge” or as a “TPS,” a “temporal positioning system” (Lee 2.27.13). Each of these TPS hubs might “set the information standard” by setting “baseline orientation information—where you are, what geologic time it is, where the continents are” (Carrano 2.27.13), and what the “significance of the period” was (Lee 2.27.13). Through these “transition points” (Petri 2.27.13), like the “fulcrum on a seesaw” (2.27.13), there would be a chance to generalize or point out what was important—to “pull out one of the threads” (Dolovich 2.27.13) or main messages (Reeder 2.27.13), to “orient and amalgamate” (Wing 2.27.13) information. On the other hand, these “hubs” could mark specific times, places, or detailed components—to act as “time markers” (Wing 2.27.13) or “call out a specific event” (Carrano 2.27.13). 169 Figure 3.12 TPS units, Richard Lewis Media Group illustration 2013.50 While being “nested” in the exhibit hall (Behrensmeyer, Wing 2.27.13), they might also call out or mark vast changes or “register” at higher levels (Petri 2.27.13) with their own “graphic identity” (Reeder 2.27.13). Fang-Pin Lee proposed these “thresholds” as happening at major introductory points or points of massive global change—at the introduction to the exhibit, the K/T boundary, the Permian-Triassic extinction, the transition to land, the Cambrian explosion, and the beginning of life (the other entrance to the hall) (Lee 2.27.13). These TPS hubs would thus flag where and when visitors were when they encountered assemblages, thereby bridging specificity and general trends or themes. Many of these techniques were part of a larger strategy in which the entire layout of the hall was meant to bridge the gap between detail and abstraction. One way the group intended to 170 do this was to create “thematic tracks” through the hall, while also “hitting points over and over again” so that “story telling [would] span the whole exhibit” (Wing, Pinsdorf 1.3.13). On February 5, 2013, Fang-Pin Lee presented the first drafts of floor plan layouts to the group in 71A in the Exhibits department. It was one of those workshops where the Team seemed to be working with what I’ve later heard Kay Behrensmeyer call “a group brain.” Fang-Pin Lee presented four plans, and by the end of the session, it was clear there was consensus around one main plan fusing a few elements from the others. It was this third plan, then labeled plan “C” that took a “synthesized approach,” and first illustrated the idea of a ramp up to a viewing bridge, putting the “visitor right at the very center” looking out over the hall. It was the second plan, Plan “B” that stressed the importance of a “beautiful long view,” while “D” emphasized highlights and a “ribbon” of some kind, and “A” stressed the organization of a “Metro map.” While C became the main plan, these elements from each of the other plans were incorporated to create a floor plan that could be organized by both themes and time, with a narrative moving in both directions, and devote attention to both highly resolved details and overarching stories. 3.4.3 Technology with Purpose: The Tone and Density of Media Figure 3.13 Theme 3.51 3) Reliable/restrained media experiments/modularity/dense media/immersion 171 On top of the basic concern about letting objects speak for themselves versus allowing media to speak for or with them, was a debate about the overall tone of media in the exhibit. Underpinning these conversations was a concern for what the tone and density of technology should be along a spectrum from informational, educational, diagrammatic or morally serious to light-hearted, affective, immersive or spectacular. Richard Lewis often commented that by the time the exhibit opened, not a single cord we used now would be the same. In a seven-year exhibit process, and a hall with a thirty-year lifespan, planning for what kinds of media the exhibit should use is a daunting task. Moreover, at a museum that last year trumped its previous numbers with some 8 million visitors, using innovative or unknown technologies is risky business. Broken interactive displays are an eyesore, and expensive technologies that no one uses in five years are a waste of money. As Kara Blond said of using technology on such a huge stage: I mean, the numbers of people that come through here are just so mind-boggling that it explains why there’s such risk aversion here, because when you fail, you fail spectacularly. If something breaks, it’s broken in front of so many sets of eyes that you want to be pretty confident about what you’re putting out. That doesn’t mean we can’t take risks, but we need to do it in a thoughtful, tested way with clearly defined goals. (Blond 7.1.13) Not surprisingly, there were many conversations in meetings about where the balance lay between using classic technologies with guaranteed longevity and newer technology with greater capacities. With the advent of smartphones, there was a general feeling among the group that the Smithsonian couldn’t possibly keep up with communication technologies in the market world. The group therefore had a number of discussions, sometimes but not always led by Richard Lewis and Mark Ostrander, about “media techniques, approaches [and] styles” (Lewis 1.3.13). 172 Debates about media are one of the areas where opinions often split along disciplinary lines. As Richard Lewis put it, while the Deep Time group mostly did a good job of considering and respecting others’ perspectives, media is where perspectives between curators and exhibits staff sometimes clash: I think that the group in Deep Time does a much better job of thinking about each other’s perspectives while obviously mostly… being driven by their own, but certainly respect those other perspectives. And yeah, I think that that is going to be an ongoing battle and I think that the media process probably where the battle is going to play out a little bit. (Lewis 8.2.13) It was very interesting in meetings to observe debates and language about the tone of media and its uses in the exhibit. Arguments for Experimental/Modular/Dense Media As is clear from some of the team’s aspirations for elements such as the ribbon and the bridge—and some of the hybrid technologies proposed to solve issues of authenticity and resolution, there were a number of arguments in favor of media-driven exhibits. First, the team was attracted to the message-bearing affordances of technologies and their potential to do innovative things for bringing out themes or narrative content. Part of the discussion in this area had to do with the strong feeling among the group that what the Deep Time exhibit aspired to do was utterly novel and unique, and therefor necessitated new approaches to media technologies. As with encyclopaedic or time-based exhibits, the “idea of naturalistic presentation is attractive, 173 but it’s been done” (Lewis 1.3.13). Like the exhibit concept, new technologies offered new flexibilities as opposed to “fixed graphics” (Carrano 2.5.13), which fit the team’s aspirations for modularity, multi-modal display and contextual design, and hybrid techniques. Things such as “e-labels” and other online media might allow you to add layered, tiered information to solve the problem of accessibility without dumbing down, and also showing complexity and grand narratives. New media could also describe interconnectivity, movement, flux, and processes, both at particular moments in time (for instance how the light would change in a Cretaceous day) and across wide swaths of time and space (how plant populations changed and moved amidst vast climatic changes in the PETM). The ribbon, for instance, could be in a constant state of “change” and “in flux,” “shifting state to state”—a kind of “magic” (Lewis 3.26.13); as a “passive structure it doesn’t carry anything” (Carrano 3.26.13). As with media in general, new technologies promised to enhance uncharismatic things, combat the charisma of iconic things, and highlight the unexpected. There were even discussions about using new media to “animate data” “without making it boring” (Wing 1.4.13) or to show how an insect and a plant might have an interaction (Lee 1.4.13). Elements such as these would also be “updatable” to highlight new stories or research during the life of the hall (Lewis 1.3.13). The group knew that halls like this one would last some 30 years, and new technologies offered the potential for “modularity” and updatable content (Lawrence, Mason 1.3.13). Some members of the team imagined whole galleries as “completely flexible and fluid” (Lewis 1.3.13), sometimes using mechanical techniques (interactive work stations emerging out of the floors or walls when an educator wanted to start a program) but more often entailing new technology capabilities to allow objects, interfaces, or spaces to morph into different functions. For Human Origins, the RLMG had designed the media “knowing the 174 museum staff had the desire to update stuff internally” (Lewis 1.4.13), and Deep Time’s media could be the same. If the “porkchops” were “designed to change,” with enough “vocabulary” future exhibit staff or curators could re-design them (Mason 2.5.13). These techniques might allow the institution to update current scientific knowledge—there was a big desire among the team to present relevant material, and to be able to talk about “science in the news” or current research, including “live news” (Lewis 1.3.13) with scientists to talk about the people who make science tick. Again, some discussion had to do with the (relevant) lifespan of the hall. There was one moment (maybe my favorite) when the curators were diagraming time periods and important events on the white board in the Cooper Room, and one of them erased a line, saying, “maybe we should put it here [instead] … there was that paper that came out on Thursday.” To which Fang-Pin Lee replied, “we’re going to have to change the whole exhibit because of a paper that came out on Thursday?” (2.26.13). These kinds of discussions make it seem quite practical to use new media to illustrate scientific ideas, despite the fact that it is never clear who in the future will upkeep modular scientific information. New media might also allow for important modularity for programing or face-to-face interactive experiences between curators, educators or volunteers and the public. In “mediated experience[s] between a volunteer and visitors,” there could be “updatable exhibit[s]” or “design element[s]” using AV equipment (Wing 2.5.13) or “interactive volunteer spaces distributed around the space” (Mason 2.5.13). An installation might have different modes, where an installation could miraculously become a series of “tabletop activities for 25 people” and then be “reestablished in gallery mode” or “reverted to installation” in an instant (Petri 2.26.13). New technologies also promised new experience-bearing possibilities—for intimate, personalized, visceral, group, or affective experiences, including “beaming in” science from the 175 field, immersive landscapes or portals, or participatory group interactives for 10 to even hundreds of people to do together. As Richard remarked of the possibilities for media and animals, sensory technologies could ask “what am I going to feel, see, what creatures would I hear? … What’s going to eat you? Can I breath? (Lewis 1.3.13). Different “levels of experience” might offer new affective ways to reach new audiences (Mason 2.5.13). New media offered ways to enact active, rather than passive experiences (Carrano 3.26.13). Visitors’ experiences might also extend beyond the museums’ walls or the time of their visit—people could see things prior to their visit, experience something unique during their visit, and continue that experience at home later (Lewis 1.3.13). Mobile device technologies in particular were cited as ways people might interact differently with the museum—both in and outside its physical walls (Lewis 2.27.13). In part, this potential was cited as a way to intellectually and emotionally prepare people for their experience in the exhibit. Mobile apps or other technologies, social media interfaces (blogs, Facebook, YouTube or the like), or in-gallery new media apparatuses might set the tone or be the first step in visitors’ experiences. As Richard Lewis said of the time tunnel, an introductory immersive audio-visual piece for the Human Origins Hall, this could be a “brief immersive thing” that “inoculates you for the whole experience” and allows you to be “bathed in the first part of the story” as a “little preparation” (Lewis 1.3.13). Perhaps most importantly for the Deep Time message, the group had a sense that these kinds of new media technologies, with these capacities and the general public enjoyment of them, might have a higher impact for climate change “deniers”; new media could enact a kind of activism through compelling experiences or motivation (Lewis 1.3.13). 176 Arguments for Longevity/Toned Down Media Paradoxically, some of the reasons for using new media were also the reasons not to. Both using and not using new media was a risk to the longevity of the hall. While modularity would keep the hall relevant and up-to-date for longer, it would also mean that things could break sooner, or go out of fashion or out of date more quickly. With whose time or with what resources would the exhibit’s modular content be updated? There was also some divisiveness here along disciplinary lines. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, elements of tone in both media and language tend to be contested between exhibits and education staff and curators. Yet there was some consensus against certain uses of media or media for media’s sake. First, the group knew that with media practically ubiquitous, the hall couldn’t and shouldn’t compete with commercial technologies. The hall, and Smithsonian more broadly, would have to carve out a unique niche for itself that allowed it to stay relevant with the use of certain kinds of media without trying to achieve something unattainable. People “are bombarded with media,” with 3D films, Walking with Dinosaurs and the like, and Smithsonian can’t “compete with that.” With the iPhone, “I already have something better” (Sues 1.3.13). Moreover, people might already be “oversaturated” with media and other technologies (Lewis 1.3.13). Rather, Smithsonian should “create experiences and impressions that can only happen in this place” (Lewis 1.3.13). Information is free (Carrano 2.27.13). Smithsonian offers something different—real things, digested and curated information, a unique combination of perspective, expertise and collections—that “won’t happen elsewhere” (Huber 1.3.13). As Richard Lewis said in an interview: … if we’re making a linear program of some kind and it appears to be TV, then we’ve failed. Because why would someone come to the museum to watch TV? And if we’re making a piece of multimedia and it appears to be something that you could just as easily 177 see on the Internet, then we’ve failed again! Why would people come to this place if we’re just going to give them something that they can experience just as easily at home. (Lewis 8.2.13) Michael Mason noted, there was a “consensus that people don’t want to do the same thing at a museum they can do with their laptop” (Mason 2.5.13). The overuse of technology would also be ill fitted in tone for a Smithsonian hall. As Mike Lawrence said, we “don’t want Time Square” (Lawrence 3.26.13). I heard an interesting discussion, and heavy reluctance to use certain kinds of technology on the part of curators, when in one of the early meetings the designers showed the group the Royal Ontario Museum’s Ultimate Dinosaurs exhibit. The exhibit had piloted a number of new technologies, including heavy uses of augmented reality and other interactive technologies. Scott Wing commented, “this proves that a) dinosaurs were really small, and b) they coexisted with humans” and the technologies don’t “provide anything other than what you can get from television … I don’t mind entertaining, just not entertainment” (Wing 1.4.13). 178 Figure 3.14 Team testing App Shaker 2013.52 While there was somewhat more resistance to this kind of technology among curators than other members of the group, there was a strong consensus that any technology would need to fulfill an educational goal, lead to something more, or have some intrinsic ability to convey an important message for it to be worth using. As Richard Lewis said, it was alright if a technology was “purely engagement” as “long as it moves you to the next stage” (Lewis 1.4.13), but there was some skepticism, especially from curators, about whether these technologies would in fact accomplish that. After viewing a version of App Shaker, a wall-size technology depicting animals and viewers together on a large screen, the group was similarly resistant to the idea that a large-scale interactive had any inherent ability to engage people with important messages or ideas. Media needed to be fully integrated with the hall’s purpose and design. 179 Figure 3.15 Team watches kids testing the App Shaker immersive screen, April 2013.53 As Matthew Carrano said, “If it doesn’t connect, that’s a problem” (Carrano 1.4.13). As Richard Lewis later commented, “a technical solution has to follow an understanding of the common goals …[we’re] trying to come up with a vocabulary of technical solutions given what’s available” (Lewis 3.26.13). 180 The logistics of the project added complications to planning for new media in the hall; with an opening date of 2019, there was no way to plan for what technologies would be available; most “new” media would look old. Yet there needed to be infrastructural planning for big media pieces, and added future flexibilities cost money. Given eight million visitors per year, there was no guarantee that any innovative technologies would last one year, let alone the 30 years the hall might be open. Matthew Carrano liked to call the dinosaur hall the “Romper Room,” and he would reject technologies because they looked like “something a child would break” (Carrano 1.3.13). There’s nothing worse than a broken “interactive.” While Kay Behrensmeyer worried that a traditional mural would go “out of date,” Scott Wing felt that techniques such as mural painting or text panels for interpreting objects have longevity and a more “enduring style” (Wing 1.3.13). Other constraints included dust build up, and building requirements that would prohibit certain kinds of media use. The museum had good reason to worry about technologies without infrastructural, technical or labour longevity; there were examples—for instance, giant projectors that had been installed in the new Ocean Hall and were never used because the light bulbs were too expensive to replace—that were “dearly observed” (Petri 2.26.13). Exhibits staff would groan about big media pieces because they were impossible to maintain. As Richard Lewis put it: What can we do which is just going to be great? Fantastic? And yet, we’re also driven by the point that we know from working a lot at Smithsonian that we’ve got to do things that work in this very specific, very difficult setting where throughput, there are seven million people coming through here a year. And so the idea we’re going to make big, rich, deep media activities—we’ve got to really be thoughtful about the kind of activity which is going to work best for this audience, in this place, in this architectural space. I feel a little sort of conflicted that, on the one side it’s like: God, we’re doing- I’m this kid from Liverpool and I’ve somehow been plucked out of there, landed on the National 181 Mall, and been told to do the media experiences for the most significant exhibit that the National Museum of Natural History is going to have for the next 20 years, 50 years, you know? It’s like, well, let it be monumental! And then on the other hand it’s like, well, let it not break! … So that, I think, is sort of an emotional conflict that I feel: practicality against magnificence. (Lewis 8.2.13) I also heard regularly that there was a general feeling or attitude in the museum that failure was not acceptable, and that risk-taking was not part of the culture. Smithsonian has a culture that’s about getting it right. The institution was also protective of its brand; it has public trust. If you lose that, it’s almost impossible to get it back. As I often heard Michael Mason say, the Smithsonian is “committed to accuracy.” Moreover, as Kara Blond said, being in such a central Museum on the mall, on a national stage and with the vast numbers of visitors the NMNH welcomes each year make it necessarily a more conservative place: “I think this place, maybe because it’s just more in the spotlight, has been more conservative in its approach. I’m hoping we can make in-roads in that culture, try new approaches, but it just feels like a hard ship to turn here” (Blond 7.1.13). For Deep Time, there were already risks the team was taking that made it more challenging to think about expensive and experimental media. During the time I observed the planning process, the fundraising for the exhibit was incomplete—Hall 6, where the new FossiLab and much of the space for educational programming and interactive techniques would be used, didn’t have any funding. The team knew that “some schemes” for the hall were “easier to deal with if the fundraising doesn’t come through” (Petri 1.4.13). It wasn’t always worth it to risk already limited time and money on things that might not work or last long. In interviews, when I tried to ask the team who would eventually have final say on exhibit decisions, the most common answer was, albeit jokingly, Chun-Hsi Wong, the museum’s manager for facilities and operations. As Abby Telfer said: 182 It seems to me that a lot of the constraints are mechanical. They have to do with the building. I think, you know, Chun-Hsi [chuckle] is actually the person who will have the biggest impact on what happens in this exhibit. My sense is that when our proposals go upstairs, there hasn’t been a lot of pushback on anything. I think they’re just… Maybe it’s because the material going up is good. But I don’t have the sense that we’re going to be told we have to do things differently than what we had planned other than Chun-Hsi who’s going to say “I’m sorry, you can’t put that there because the floor will collapse.” (Telfer 6.27.13) Kara Blond, Acting Assistant Director for Exhibits, however, pointed out to me that even safety discussions are negotiations. Early Solutions for Media Density & Tone These tensions between aspirations and logistical constraints are inherent, as Mike Lawrence implied in an interview with me, in any exhibit design: I always think of design as problem solving, but not just in a pragmatic way. I think there is a whole range of problems or challenges that you’re given to resolve in the design an exhibit. And it might be from very practical matters, like security, and environmental protection for the objects, to more conceptual problems like, “How do I convey a sense of space?” or, “How do I create a mood?” or, “How do I direct somebody’s attention to something?” or, “How do I encourage people to engage with things?” (Lawrence 7.31.13). The group, did, of course, agree that certain kinds of media would be used. Some consensus around the topic of new media were that first, any media used would have to be in line with the hall’s messages and goals—media would have to do something beyond the novelty of technology. Richard Lewis reiterated on many occasions that the group would “have to be very thoughtful” about what media was “saying” (Lewis 1.3.13). As Scott Wing said, a “technology solution” would work if it came “with a message we want absolutely to be there.” It “need[ed] to 183 have a core purpose” (Wing 3.26.13) and couldn’t be, as Fang-Pin Lee said, “misunderstood as a decorative element” (Lee 3.26.13). One approach, posed as a possible solution was to use “techniques, approaches, and styles” (Lewis 1.3.13) that hybridized approaches or “mixed mediums” (Lee 3.26.13). Many of these were steampunk-esque hybrids—technologies with either vintage aesthetic and new media affordances or vice versa. As Fang-Pin Lee said, the group could experiment with a “painterly fusion” of “old school and new techniques.” We “don’t want it to look like a rock show,” she said, and she liked “the beauty of some older techniques” (Lee 3.26.13). Some of these included modernizing or augmenting “vintage” technologies like Roman bas-relief, periscopes, stereoscopes, mirrors, cycloramas, or pepper’s ghost. There could be “layering” of techniques, or technologies with multiple affordances or modes, much like solutions to the detail/abstraction problem. The ribbon, for instance, was conceived as a partially 3D sculptural or “bas relief” element, with painting, text, and LED lighting technologies. It could meld “still images, slideshows, digital displays, video” (Wing 2.5.13). Fossil assemblages could include “clever way[s] of lighting specimens,” screens in “morphing” backdrops, and little pepper’s ghost technologies (Wing 1.3.13). One of the techniques pitched was the example of a husband and wife team who make “painterly and digital composites” (1.4.13). If a “bulb burned out” the ribbon “still holds ideas” (Petri 2.5.13) because it would be “anchored” with “physical and AV components” (Ostrander 2.27.13). 184 Figure 3.16 Mark Ostrander presenting media density to the team in the Cooper Room, April 2013.54 Media was also considered at very early stages—the “density,” “rhythm” and techniques for media were included in the 10% package along with design drawings and content plans. In this way, the technology was planned to be integrated into the whole physical hall. Technologies pitched for the TPS, hubs, or thresholds, were also meant to incorporate technology into the hall organically. The “porkchop” displays would be networked together so that messages and themes could be communicated across them (Ostrander 2.5.13). Connected, elements of the hall could have two-way staff and visitor communication or e-labels (Ostrander 2.27.13). In the early plans, the RLMG planned 25-40 total media components, from more “modest” small video, graphic panels, “audioscapes,” “kinetic” or “electronic” pieces, and small group interactives to “very large iconic programs” (Ostrander 2.26.13) including full-scale “multiuser interfaces” and 185 immersive technologies with a “large footprint” (Ostrander 2.27.13). The “Carboniferous coal mine immersive,” a portal and interface that would show people the inside of a coal mine where carboniferous plant material is found while also reconstructing a giant carboniferous tree was also pitched in response to these debates. The group agreed on using immersive or other new technologies where they were trying to describe concepts—or ideas without much support from objects. Figure 3.17 Fang-Pin Lee drawing for the team, June 2013.55 186 4.4.4 Majestic and Inviting?: Authority to Participation Figure 3.18 Theme 4.56 There were many early discussions about engagement during the Deep Time process, largely led by Michael Mason, who even brought in a group called the Innovation Unit from the UK to help the Museum and the Deep Time team think more broadly about engaging its national and international publics. There was interest at an early stage in involving the public in the process; in fact, early on this had been pitched as one of my potential roles. Very generally, big, longstanding, and lumbering institutions like the Smithsonian have a hard time shifting paradigms and, while everyone knows this to be true, no one can really identify why there are stoppages. In meetings, though, it was clear that there were some debates about the Museum’s authority, the right tone a gallery should have, and the importance of public trust in a place like the Smithsonian. There were debates about at what level the Museum scientists were willing to give up control or authority over content in order to allow the public to “tinker,” to generate their own meanings, experiences, or even content itself. These debates also involved conversations about the Museum’s tone toward visitors, which included discussion of text. Early on, there was consensus that the group would avoid corny puns, for instance. There was also debate about to what extent it was possible to have interaction with the public—from remote field cameras or holograms of scientists to interactive lectures or a fully-staffed FossiLab. 4) Authority/didacticism participation/user-generated content/inviting tone 187 Arguments for Ceding Authority Early on the team had agreed that one of the main messages of the exhibit was “human connections”—a section of the hall became termed the “anthropocene” to reflect current discussions about human involvement with earth processes and changes. Part of this discussion was also about allowing visitors to connect the hall with their own experience. In discussions about the bridge, for instance, Matthew Carrano said: “Almost everything’s happened once already. What does it look like when we turn the temperature dial up? …What are the things we can make relevant to people?” (Carrano 1.4.13). Making the exhibit personal or about human connections was a way to make it easier to see how the science was “relevant to us” (Mason 1.3.13). Engagement in the topic was a way to be proactive about issues without being activist—if people felt ownership over the hall’s content or that the material was personally relevant to them, the exhibit would have a better chance at changing public perceptions and making a real difference. There were fascinating discussions about introductory elements in the exhibit avowing, “you are stardust,” you are “special on the planet” (Behrensmeyer 1.3.13), “Deep Time is in us” (1.4.13). The team wanted to show how humans are “tinkering with all of those systems” (Petri 1.3.13) that “everything impacts us” (Lawrence 1.3.13), and to “invite” the public into the exhibit, let them “find personal connection,” let them “discover with us” (Bolton Lee 1.3.13). The main message, “Earth’s distant past is connected to the present and shapes our future” emerged out of this desire. As Scott Wing put it, “Come with us and learn to read the logbook of the planet” (Wing 1.4.13). The group also liked the idea of starting the hall with Ice Age material because more familiar material would be more “welcoming” for them (Behrensmeyer 2.5.13). As Amy Bolton observed, the familiar served as an “entrance into 188 topics”; rather than “hit[ting] with evolution right at the beginning” they could “hit ecosystems up front” as “something they can handle … something about climate that’s familiar” (Bolton 1.4.13). Citing Falk (2009), Pekarik and others (Pekarik and Mogel 2010), Amy Bolton further advocated for stressing people’s connection to Deep Time issues. Thus part of these conversations were influenced by thinking in educational theory, informal learning, and visitor studies, namely by the idea that learning was facilitated by visitors’ ownership over content or other two-way experiences. Rewards, takeaways, and affective experiences help people learn and want to learn, and therefore can positively impact peoples’ learning experience in the hall. These discussions were also part of a larger drive to know more about audiences. While during the 10% phase there was no professional evaluator assigned or hired to evaluate the exhibit, before I arrived Exhibits had tasked George Washington University students with testing visitor understandings and interest in paleontology and Deep Time concepts. In November I was tasked with a visitor study of the FossiLab to inform the planning of the temporary and permanent exhibit FossiLab. Common visitor behaviors, such as the fact that visitors “ping pong” through the halls, and the longer they stay in a hall the more they backtrack, were also taken into consideration from previous studies (Mason 2.5.13). In the Approval Team’s review of the 10% draft, Jonathan Coddington, Associate Director for Science explicitly asked the team to show how they were drawing on literature in informal science learning. Keeping in mind the very broad audience of NMNH, and drawing on understandings of best practices developed in the field over the last 30 years, the writers would work to translate content into concise, accessible, eighth grade-level language (Reeder 3.26.13). As Michael Mason said, “we’re all technocrats; visitors are not all like that; I would love this exhibit, but I’m 189 not sure my kids would have” (Mason 2.5.13). The tone and level of language, and the appropriate length of exhibit text, is a constant point of contention between writers and curators. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, this issue sits at one of the fault lines along disciplinary and departmental divisions that are pervasive throughout the exhibit planning process. While curators and exhibits and education staff (who consider themselves “audience advocates”) disagreed about visitors’ interest and comprehension levels, in general, the group was often collectively trying to imagine what visitors’ experiences would be like, and tried to shape the hall around that. As Kara Blond expressed in a later interview: I think there is a change and I think this notion of the museum as authoritative voice is definitely less oppressive than it ever was… We’re really asking for input in a different way and we’re presenting content in a less from-the-voice-on-high tone. I feel really strongly that we want to incorporate a more casual—and I get a lot of pushback about the word “conversational”—but accessible tone to the way that we present our science and stories of science. (Blond 7.1.13) The group also agreed about making the hall “visitor-centered” (Lee 1.3.13), as we saw with the floor plan literally being centered around a space for visitors to congregate and view the hall. The group also agreed that some level of activity, interactives and participation from visitors would help them to grasp complex concepts. At the same time Deep Time was being planned, the museum was finalizing plans for its new education center, Q?RIUS. In Q?RIUS, now open, visitors can take objects out of drawers, do activities, and create their own field notebooks. There was some discussion as to whether replicating that kind of experience somewhere in the Deep Time hall was beneficial. There was some agreement around allowing visitors “tinker” with earth processes through some kind of gears, wheels, or cranks they could turn. Unlike a finished, permanent hall, Q?RIUS purposefully has an unfinished, or “in-progress” look and feel, to encourage people to experiment. As Shari Werb said: 190 We didn’t want things to feel too finished, because if things are finished then people are careful with them. But if they’re kind of unfinished, then people can play a little more. They can feel a little better about making mistakes or not being exactly perfect in the way they think about it. Because you’re modeling imperfection. (Werb 9.6.13) As with solving the detail/abstraction problem, it was also suggested for Deep Time that showing behind-the-scenes processes, how the museum does its work, and how scientists know what they know, would be more inviting for visitors and thus contribute to better learning experiences. Using real things, or “a collection to show that or aspects of that might help us to do really quality programming (Bolton 2.26.13). A live space like FossiLab would tell people “this is why you need to know this in 2021, underpinned by how science works” (Lewis 1.3.13). The group also discussed how to reach remote audiences or bring the field into the museum—capacities of museum “without walls.” Literally, the NMNH can’t have any more physical visitors in the hall, which makes thinking about increasing engagement a huge challenge. In addition, the hall will be closed during the five year construction phase, there was therefore a desire to keep the public involved and also to use engagement techniques to prevent public outrage at the hall’s closure. Through virtual experiences or “distance learning” web users could play with Deep Time concepts or ask scientists questions in the field (Bolton; Petri 1.4.13). These approaches, the group hoped, would be “affective” (Bolton 1.413) more “compelling for most people” (Petri 1.4.13) and convince them “to go out and save the world” (Carrano 1.4.13). As Matthew Carrano said, “the 20 of us in the Department aren’t going to do it. We have to make people feel like it’s their thing … [we] can’t trick them into saving the planet” (Carrano 1.4.13). This was why the exhibit was such a “big deal” (Carrano, Lewis 1.4.13). The group had incredible aspirations in this vein. In describing them at a workshop in December, Kay 191 Behrensmeyer coined the phrase, “creating citizens for a changing planet,” which became the exhibit’s mantra. Figure 3.19 Citizens for a changing planet brainstorming, June 2013.57 Arguments for Asserting Authority Some of the same arguments for adopting more participatory models, especially the seriousness of Deep Time’s topic and mission, drove arguments against them. A number of them also had to do with the nature of paleontology and science. One of the first arguments that I heard clearly was that there are no user-generated truths. Scientists agree about certain things— 192 like evolution and climate change—the argument that these aren’t objective truths is problematic in a world where many nay-sayers don’t think there’s a truth out there; scientists know better. As Matthew Carrano said, “sure, it’s a democratic process in that anyone can do it, but not that anyone can decide; there is a wrong answer” (Carrano 1.4.13). And scientists at NMNH “have a responsibility to talk about evolution pretty explicitly” (Carrano 1.4.13). The team felt a responsibility to get people past their “personal belief barriers” (Petri 1.4.13). There were certain baseline kinds of information and concepts curators in particular felt people needed to know in order to understand the exhibit at all. The exhibit team had to hold authority over facts, and to help the public “know enough to be a citizen for a changing planet” (Wing 2.26.13). As Scott Wing articulated after an engagement meeting, “an engaged citizen 1) knows that the planet and life on it has history; 2) knows that history is exemplified by processes that are ongoing; 3) understands that they and all humans are involved in and affect that process; and 4) wants to do something about it” (Wing 2.26.13). There was also a sense that too many interactives don’t in fact take people to the next level or work without knowledge of important concepts. Where Amy Bolton felt strongly that Hall 6 needed to have a “tinkering space” where visitors could “explore cause and effect” (Bolton 2.26.13), Matthew Carrano was concerned that an interactive on earth processes could end up as “just a big biochemistry set” or “tinker toys” (Carrano 2.26.13). Matthew Carrano did suggest showing the public “how to put a skeleton together, how we do mounts … how we did this”; Amy Bolton, though, wanted “the visitors to do it” themselves (Carrano; Bolton 2.26.13), which Matthew Carrano thought would be difficult, both because they would have a hard time using real objects and because people wouldn’t know enough anatomy to do it. On a broader level, with a goal of increasing scientific literacy, there were fundamental and non-negotiable 193 things people needed to know, for instance, how evolution and ecologies work (Behrensmeyer 1.4.13). All of this was also wrapped up in implications for convincing people of the seriousness of the topic, the present world, and human impact on the planet. The team felt strongly about emphasizing that “yes, climate is changing … didn’t happen in the past” (Lewis 1.3.13). As Scott Wing said, we have “impacts on the planet. We know about them. They’re not going to change” (Wing 1.3.13). The exhibit was meant to be “a handbook to the planet, to yourself, to your own organism” (Lewis 1.4.13) and visitors “need to understand that as humans we are turning the dials (Carrano 2.5.13) and “we don’t know what the implications are” (Petri 2.5.13). The seriousness with which the team took these issues was clear throughout meetings. As Kay Behrensmeyer interjected during one discussion, “I’m worried we’re not saving the world; we haven’t conveyed the message” (Behrensmeyer 2.26.13). The entire bridge section was not just visitor-centric, it was meant to represent the anthropocene, a term specifically used and championed by Scott Wing “to be inclusive, be conscious of our role in the future of everything on the planet (Wing 3.26.13). Or as Kay Behrensmeyer said, “we wouldn’t have come up with citizens for a changing planet if that wasn’t firmly in our minds, advocacy” (Behrensmeyer 3.26.13). The team therefore wanted the authority to confront visitors with our planet’s harsh realities, to have “them to think about the fact that 18,000 years ago, New York was covered with ice” (Wing 1.3.13). Further, as Matthew Carrano said, “if we’re saving the planet” the group needed to cast a wider net than just worrying about global warming, to include things such as the fact that the “low diversity of plants we all need to eat sets us up for mass extinction given what we know” (Carrano 1.4.13). 194 Part of this conversation also had to do with convincing people that paleontology is important and relevant. Or as Scott Wing noted, “this is how paleontology sees itself going forward; we’re keepers of the logbook of the planet’s history, which actually has value; we realize were steering the ship … into the shore” (Wing 2.26.13). And “only through the lens of Deep Time” could you get this unique perspective (Ostrander 1.4.13). The exhibit had to show “why anybody should care about it” why it was important (Carrano 1.4.13). Using paleobiology’s perspective, the exhibit wouldn’t have to focus only on climate change, because “the past is the gateway to the anthropocene … we’ve got people looking at the history of life on the planet; it’s such a perfect place for seeing the amazing history of change in the past, processes and how they operate” (Wing 3.26.13). All of the above conversations, for a cultural anthropologist, have a decidedly religious tone. Much of these discussions centered around converting people to science, to the truth; of the world and their place in it. And indeed, I heard more than one person joke that the group was “messianic” in their tone. There was also a sense that engaging the public would have to maintain the trust and institutional tone of the Smithsonian. Again there were disciplinary differences between curators and exhibits and education staff here. When Scott Wing described participatory games at the National Geographic museum, Matthew Carrano said, “Can we set a higher bar than that? We are the national museum; we should be majestic about something” and that the museum should have “stature,” “I don’t want to give that up” (Carrano 1.4.13), to which Amy Bolton replied, “can we be majestic and inviting?” (Bolton 1.4.13). Matthew Carrano continued, “People respect that we’re an institution. That doesn’t mean were not inviting, but we’re not pandering either.” Visitors, he thought, shouldn’t “mistake us for someone else,” and while he didn’t “want to 195 lecture people” and acknowledged that the museum was “not supposed to be a classroom” it also shouldn’t be like a “mall” or “an amusement park” (Carrano 1.4.13). NMNH’s “uniqueness” (Bolton 1.4.13) was in the “intersection of all these things.” Where an “amusement park is entertainment experience” and a “classroom is all information but not first-hand” the museums was “in contact with people doing all this stuff at the same time … we are the real thing” and “we need to decide who are we and what do we sound like” (Carrano 1.4.13). Fang-Pin Lee suggested, that the exhibit take the tone that “as Smithsonian” “who know and do this stuff, join us” (Lee 1.4.13). According to Matthew Carrano, like giving a tour, “I know what’s important to show them, but there’s a zone for dialog” (Carrano 1.4.13). Scott Wing chimed in that “I completely agree about that tone business; I bristle when I hear the term elitist.” You can respect people’s intelligence and allow them to ask questions (Wing 1.4.13). He continued that “[I] absolutely don’t want to give up” the fact “that we are people deciding what gets put up there” (Wing 1.4.13). Like differentiating arrogance and confidence, Matthew Carrano argued, there was a difference between being “elitist” and open to participation but authoritative about the science: “I know what I know” (Carrano 1.4.13). Kay Behrensmeyer took a slightly subtler tone, asserting that “another component of uniqueness is our particular sets of interests and expertises” so that “we can put our stamp on this” and it’s “what we want to do because no one else can do it” (Behrensmeyer 1.4.13). In terms of tone, Scott Wing “wonder[ed] about whether because we are on the national mall, and sort of part of the government, if sometimes what we say is treated as being slightly more authoritarian than elsewhere … treated a little bit differently (Wing 1.4.13). Stephen Petri echoed “you’re the Smithsonian, you don’t have to prove it” (Petri 1.4.13). 196 As with discussions about experimental technologies, there were also concerns that the logistical constraints of interactive technologies were potentially prohibitive. Things that people handle, touch, pull, push are also things that break. Furthermore, if “totally unguided,” any object put out for the public, even if they were “tethered” (Petri 2.26.13) could “disappear into peoples’ pockets” (Wing 2.26.13). Where Amy Bolton wanted to use collections to show aspects of difficult concepts, to use objects to “help us to do really quality programming,” curators, beyond offering up “thousands of pieces of fossil wood chips in cigar boxes we can put out” (Wing 2.26.13), knew that “if we want real stuff” that it was “difficult to cater to an activity” (Carrano 2.26.13). As discussed in relation to the real/interpretation debates, there were some volleyed jokes about whether the exhibit should have, as Matthew Carrano offered sarcastically, “3D machines people can walk in and ride” to which Angela Roberts Reeder joked, “that’ll be right next to the roaring dinosaurs” and Pauline Dolovich furthered “next to the animatronic dinosaurs” (2.27.13). As Mike Lawrence later suggested, perhaps the exhibit could include an element that “ask[s] visitors to push a button to ‘hear the dinosaurs roar’” and instead, it would be a recording of Matthew Carrano saying, “Dinosaurs don’t roar” (Lawrence 3.26.13). These jokes about tone were indicative of the dilemma of asking the public to participate or become invested in the exhibit while maintaining a certain tone, factual correctness and authority. Solutions to Authority vs. Participation As Kara Blond said in an interview, navigating the new desire to engage publics and democratize museum language and authority, “requires this breakdown of the barrier between expertise and non-expert or public or generalist, and so in some ways we want to really 197 encourage that and in other ways we want to hold tight to this thing that we feel that we are experts at. And how do you do both at the same time?” (Blond 7.1.13). There were a number of ways in which, early on, the group attempted to grapple with this problem. Some of the early ideas to bridge the desire for maintaining authority and inviting the public to participate included fluid spaces that shifted in authority and tone. The clearest consensus from the team surrounded the idea of the Bridge overlooking the exhibit that would sometimes be controlled by the visitor, sometimes by the museum. There was clear consensus on this idea when Matthew Carrano described it outrightly: “both the Museum and the visitor can be the center of attention; that’s what this building ought to be doing” (Carrano 2.5.13). My notes after this statement read: “Agreement from the whole group!” Fang-Pin Lee echoed, “Let’s give this to them; let’s make this a central space for the visitor” (Lee 2.5.13) and Kay Behrensmeyer added that there was potential for “lots of programming in there as well” (Behrensmeyer 2.5.13). As Matthew Carrano said at a later meeting, through this space narratives could be “told at visitors’ command or our command” (Carrano 2.27.13) There was some debate about how the space might be “activated” by visitors, or become “programmable,” but some areas of agreement were that it would have audiovisual components with different modes of use—some running on a sort of autopilot, others responding to input from individual visitors or to whole congregations of visitors. There, perhaps visitors “could participate in this giant show” that would take different “shapes” (Wing 2.5.13). As Kay Behrensmeyer suggested, “what an extraordinary space for performance arts” and further that “the whole space would be a theater” (Behrensmeyer 2.5.13). A number of metaphors to describe the participatory and performative function of the hybrid space emerged in this discussion in addition to the “theater” or “a stage”—most sticky for the group the idea of the “bridge,” or “the 198 bow of a ship” (Carrano 2.5.13), mission control, a control room, a “dashboard” or “climatometer” (Petri 2.27.13), a “panorama” (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13), a “portal” (Wing 2.27.13). As Mike Lawrence described, “you get the story from a distance or you’re [Captain] Kirk … you could go up and narrate a story” (Lawrence 2.5.13). The space would also function to invite people to think about their own connections to the content of the hall—it would be human-centric and embody “the anthropocene” so that a visitor could look out across the hall and view the vista of time, and then turn around to get a narrative “about the human side of it” (Carrano 2.5.13). As part of the group goal of “creating citizens for a changing planet,” people also pitched the phrase “you are Deep Time,” “we are ecosystems” (Wing 2.5.13), “we are made of the stuff of stars” (Lee 2.5.13), “you are a composite” (Wing 2.26.13), the “human body is the archive of Deep Time” (Petri; Lee 1.3.13), or ideas like using a transparent human figure or shape to tell visitors, “you are stardust” (Bolton 2.5.13)—all to use “profound, poetic ideas” (Petri 1.3.13) to connect visitors to Deep Time concepts. More light-heartedly, Scott Wing pitched producing T-shirts reading, “I am the product of 3.6 billion years of evolution” (Wing 2.5.13). The group tried to use design techniques to implicate the visitor in the narrative of Deep Time. As Fang-Pin Lee articulated in describing the Bridge, it would connect to visitors by asserting: 1. You can change the world 2. [We are part of] Coevolutionary lineages, the relationship to change and how we affect change 3. You are Deep Time (we are made of the stuff of stars) (Lee 2.26.13) 199 In what became known as the “Paleo plaza” or Deep Time “Lab” or “connections lab” (Lee 2.27.13), the group similarly envisioned a hybrid space—one that could function as a gallery or series of curated interactives or programs mediated by work stations, objects, or other mobile elements. This section would give people a sense of “agency” more than “just viewing,” and let people “play” and “explore” to show them how “humans are turning the dials” and give visitors a chance to “tinker” and “imagine how they are going to change” (Bolton 2.5.13). Yet, Amy Bolton continued, the tone would remain, “you can tinker all you want, but our perspective is this” (Bolton 2.5.13). As Scott Wing suggested, one way to think about the whole layout was that interactions and explorations with processes in the interactive parts of hall 6, the Paleo Plaza, could allow visitors to play with earth processes without connecting these experiments “to [their] own agency” and by the time they got to the Bridge, they would realize that “those really are games and you’re playing them” and “by the way, all those things you thought you were playing—they’re not games” (Wing 2.27.13). These spaces might solve the problem of uniqueness by creating singular experiences activated by visitors themselves, but also would give the team and the museum the chance to give people “information [they] can use,” to know that “not that you can change the world but that you already are or have but without perspective” and “to mak[e] a statement about this” by “literally putting that at the center is really powerful … this is a perspective we adopt and we want you to know that” (Wing 2.27.13). There was even a suggestion from Scott Wing that “We choose specific perspectives we want people to apply to thinking about the future” or the group could “pick a number of perspectives to emphasize” or “give them some structure of four to five things” that were “really salient to them” (Wing 2.27.13). Within this semi-structured and 200 flexible experience, visitors could still “direct their inquiry” (Petri 2.27.13) and make “choices” (Carrano 2.27.13). Or as Kara Blond articulated: More than anything our goal is really to train our visitors to ask really good questions and that would feel like success to me more than any specific learning that might happen in one of the halls. If they walk away understanding how to ask big, relevant questions and investigate the answers, I think we’ve succeeded. And so, coming up with strategies to teach that tool, in lots of different ways, feels like our job. (Blond 7.1.13) The space might also fulfill the group’s desire for an awe-inspiring, affective and immersive experience that both equipped visitors with fundamental concepts or perspectives, and inspired visitors to want to care and to feel invested in the exhibit’s ideas. Elements would be strategically placed throughout to remind people of the basics (their Deep Time toolkit) so that they were then free to interpret other aspects. As Richard Lewis described, the “veranda” was a “place to be introduced to those things”—”perspectives, forces, agencies”—”so when you go down and travel through these expressions” you’re “keeping the perspective” that you’ve “gained on the bridge”; in this way the bridge would act as a “primer of systems and forces you need to understand to go down into past worlds” (Lewis 2.27.13). Amy Bolton’s expertise, in particular, was drawn on to try to order things so that visitors were “equipped” with the things they needed and would encounter topics in proper “sequencing” when they were “psychologically ready” (Bolton 1.4.13). At the same time, as Kay Behrensmeyer put it, the bridge offered “the wonder of being able to stand up there and see things as humans,” the very fact of human’s ability to look at all of time being “what’s common here; its empowering just to be on this bridge as a species (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13). Visitors could both see “where you come from” and “where we’re going” as fellow “passengers on the spaceship” (Wing 2.27.13). Literally “putting humans in their place” (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13), in this space, visitors would be given agency, choice, or the 201 sense that they could make a difference, while also both metaphorically and spatially the pivot point or nexus between all of earth’s past and the future: “the connection between the past and the future is the visitor” (Carrano 2.27.13). This sense of empowerment would also help the hall to be about “stewardship” and therefore be less “depressing” (Behrensmeyer 2.27.13). As in other discussions, in this way one of the early group solutions to issues of authority and participation was to make the whole floor plan reflect the importance of visitor experience and perspectives, while guiding visitors through a heavily curated set of ideas, narratives, and messages. The whole gallery depicting the sweep of the past would spiral out in a kind of arc or French curve from the contemporary moment, the “Anthropocene,” and contemporary visitors at the nodal center. Humans were connected to past processes and spatially “in control of the drivers seat” where they could “stand and look at them all” (Behrensmeyer 2.5.13). There was “power by being in the middle of it” (Wing 2.5.13) at the same time that it was “democratic in the way it’s arranged” (Dolovich 2.26.13). With this visitor-centric floor plan, a visitor was, as Angela Roberts Reeder aptly described it, “standing in the present, looking at the theater of the past, and seeing how it shapes the future” (Reeder 2.27.13). Or as Matthew Carrano said, after negotiation about the layout, “this design reflects our deep desire to orient the hall around human perspective” (Carrano 2.27.13). The fact that Amy Bolton was also a core team member throughout the process ensured that the team was preparing spaces for the hall, and that the group was overall influenced by “what we know from research on education” (Bolton; Wing 3.26.13). The same was true for having a professional Exhibit Developer with a Masters in Museum Studies and an Exhibits Writer. As Angela Roberts Reeder said of these roles in the process when she was eyeing the job from afar: “Oh it’d be great,” she said, “to work in a place like Natural History where you’re 202 working on the exhibit from the beginning, because at OEC [the Office of Exhibits Central] we often got scripts towards the end, so you didn’t really get to mold the messages, work with development of the exhibit you’re editing at the end” (Reeder 7.31.13). Having audience advocates as team members, a condition that has been in the making for more than 30 years, drives a balance between audience-driven and expert-driven perspectives. Another more formal early solution to authority/participation dilemmas, encouraged by the Approval Team after the 10% draft presentation, was that educational programming (that would involve two-way interaction) was also integrated into the 10% design package. A few programming “ideas at a high level” (Bolton 3.26.13) were added to the final documents, to show that the group was thinking about how visitors would participate more actively in the hall. Showing science “in process,” describing “how we know what we know” and allowing the public to “discover with us,” tackled these issues as well as those of deciding levels of resolution and overall tone. For solving the authority/participation debates, showing that “we”, scientists—the Smithsonian—are implicated in the same processes as visitors was a way to avoid blaming the public: “we’re all in this together.” In one meeting, there was a discussion of using Scott Wing’s field vehicle, Dino, as a centerpiece on the Bridge, to talk about how the fossil fuels we know are negatively impacting the planet enable the very scientific research that helps us to understand that. There were also a few movements to invite the public into the Deep Time planning process, namely the initiation of a Facebook page, launched February 21, 2013. Additional writers hired over the summer of 2013 were chosen in part because of their experience with blogging and podcasts and other forms of public outreach writing. Preliminary studies of the hall by GW students in the summer of 2013 and 2014 and the FossiLab study I undertook both 203 contributed to planning the halls for visitor affect and participation. There was also lots of group thinking about these issues at an “Innovation Workshop” planned by Michael Mason in December of 2012. There, Smithsonian staff from around the institution with stakes in engagement, education, and outreach—many of whom rarely saw each other in daily interaction—were brought together to brainstorm innovative engagement techniques, to be piloted in Deep Time. It was also at this workshop that the idea of “ubiquitous engagement” was pitched at one of the group activities—a concept the group debated when discussing the “density” of experience (Mason 2.5.13) as a model, mimicking an Apple Store’s customer service model, for interacting with the public in the Deep Time hall. 3.5 The Results of Group Thinking: The Final 10% Package In each of these topics, initial frictions, both productive and ineffective, created a space for creative debate and imagining. While in some cases, debates along disciplinary lines, as will become clearer in Chapter 5, reinforce departmental or role-based stereotypes that lead to real or deeply felt power imbalances, in many ways this unique space where different perspectives and expertises are brought into contact energize conversations and generate astonishing ideas. In this safe space for argument, extremes of opinion are often aired first, in a kind of performance of expertise, before nuances and sites of agreement, and then creative ideas emerge. As Kim Moeller articulately put it: I think if everybody was on one direction or everybody was in the other direction, we’d wind up with a really horrible product, but I think the balance of those two is exactly where it needs to be. And I wouldn’t change that for a minute. So for all the arguments you get when the curator gives you a tome that’s 50 pages long and says, “I refuse to cut 204 a word of this for your panels,” and you’re coming back and saying, “Well no, we’re going to give you a hundred words a panel, because that’s all people are going to read, if that,” that creative tension right there is what creates a good exhibit. (Moeller 6.12.13) As Larry O’Reilly, former Assistant Director for Exhibits thinking on the same issue told me: “it sounds very destructive and all of that kind of stuff, but in fact, a lot of times there are solutions that are developed that improve the product in the long run. And so in the long view of history, the kind of tension that exists makes it a better exhibit” (O’Reilly 2.10.14). It is that space of difference, and the process that emerges in the “contact zone” between conflicting views that balanced creativity and ingenuity happens. Scott Wing echoed tis sentiment, saying: I think both sides have to recognize that we need to sort of fight over the balance of content and presentation and I mean that’s something that I remember Kirk saying years ago. I was talking with him about exhibits and it was maybe right after they finished Prehistoric Journey at Denver, and he said, “You can go to different museums” and I think he said, “In New York the curators won” and “in Chicago the exhibits people won, and in Denver we actually fought to a draw and that’s the best thing that could’ve happened” … and that’s what makes a better exhibit, is to not have it turned over to either side, because either one will screw it up. (Wing 8.16.13) The group thinking and preliminary consensus on the tone and approaches—including levels and kinds of context, levels of resolution, media density, and communication—as well as the overall layout and its correspondence with major themes and stories went into a draft and then finalized “package” formally vetted by the Approval Team and finalized. This extended package included: A 10% Design Package A 10% Concept Narrative document –describing concepts and messages for core content areas of the exhibit 205 A 10% Education Brief—an overview of the Core Team approach to education and outreach A FossiLab Visitor Study— An Audience Engagement Benchmarking Study— A Word document responding to comments and feedback from the March 10% draft submission By the end of the 10% process, the design package introduced the project by saying, “Faced with a world in flux, and in which humans play an increasingly dominating role, the National Museum of Natural History recognizes the critical importance of creating citizens for our changing planet” (“Deep Time 10% Package” 2013:2). The overarching theme of the exhibit was: Earth’s distant past is connected to the present and shapes our future. The description of the “Journey Through Time” was perhaps most similar to early documents about the exhibit. The finalized messages through the bulk of the “Journey through Time” in the hall for 10% were: -Life and environments are interdependent and make up dynamic ecosystems that persist and change over long periods of time. -The distant past provides us with evidence about how biological evolution, Earth cycles and processes, and ecosystems have interacted over the Earth’s history. -These Earth-life interactions affect all of us today and will continue to do so in the future. Knowing how these interactions affect our present ecosystems helps us understand our own impact and make better decisions for our future. -We learn about life’s past through the science of paleobiology. Museum researchers study and interpret the fossil evidence in this exhibition and in our collections. 206 Figure 3.20 Journey through time white board sketch, June 2013.58 However, the way that the “Overarching Theme” main messages—the whole concept for the exhibit—were described was particularly interesting in terms of tone. Where previous documents had predominantly taken a matter-of-fact, descriptive tone in laying out goals or themes, the new main messages were active and inviting in tone, while also conveying the importance of the exhibit’s content: -The Deep Time exhibition will inspire wonder, curiosity, and awe as visitors explore the history of life. -It will motivate visitors to think in new ways about the connections between all life and the Earth. -It will encourage visitors to see our present-day world as a product of geological forces, biological evolution, and environmental change over vast spans of time. 207 -It will encourage people to reflect on our impact on the Earth and life as fully engaged citizens for a changing world. -They will understand that the Earth we pass on to future generations will be a product of our planet’s past and the world we are now shaping. (“Deep Time 10% Package” 2013:3) Furthermore, the Conclusion to the Concept Narrative read: For all the grandeur and complexity of the history of life on our planet and the science we use to learn about that history, the underlying message is quite beautiful in its simplicity: The planet and the life on it share a history This history documents the processes of change. These processes still operate today. Humans are affecting these processes now and will continue to do so into the future. We must all become citizens of a changing planet. (Reeder 2013a:20) The final conceptual “bubble diagrams,” a zoned map of the proposed halls with a very basic hall layout, and a few drawings to illustrate or flesh out possible renderings of the hall with more detailed and realistic graphics were included. 208 Figure 3.21 Final 10% bubble diagram, April 2013.59 Figure 3.22 Final 10% floor plan, April 2013.60 6901 persimmon tree rd, bethesda md usa 20817 t 301 229 7999 f 301 229 7991 project number:12017project:Deep Time NMNH drawing number:drawing: SK10%-5date: 24 april 2013scale: n/a drawn by: Overall Content DiagramOVERALL CONTENT DIAGRAMWelcome WelcomeDeep Time Connections Lab Deep Time FossiLabDeep Time BridgeJourney Through Deep Time 209 Figure 3.23 Final 10% sketch rendering, April 2013.61 These were also to be used for fundraising purposes and to give people a fleshed out vision for the hall. 3.6 Beyond the 10% Package During the next phase. I attended the two-day workshops although taking off-record, generalized notes. The 35% phase was very obviously different as it was much more specific about content, so much so that new meetings were developed for the curatorial team to hash-out content after meetings got too far “into the weeds” with Paleo jargon and debates. Indeed, many of the major changes to the process at 35% had to do with the expansion of group roles, the 210 increased numbers of meetings and work happening outside the workshops, as the overall workload and specificity in content and design increased. During the 35% development phase the “specific fossil arrangements, the display systems, the media components, and the storyline began to be defined at a finer level. Through a series of intense interdisciplinary workshops, options for the exhibit elements” were pulled together in similarly iterative meetings (“Deep Time 10% Package” 2013). I will talk about this in greater depth in Chapter 5. At 65%, the team works through specific specimens, label content, and other interpretive elements for the exhibit, including parsing out the basics of textual hierarchies. The following excerpt from the draft 65% document for the Temporary Exhibit outlines these nicely: Label Hierarchy Gallery text: Introduces and orients visitors to the overall exhibition’s big idea, messages, and tone. Area text: Provides a broad overview for each area. Main text: Appears with a grouping of exhibit elements and frames the story that these elements illustrate. Subtext: Interprets a specific group of objects, specimens, and images. Image/object captions: Identifies the image, specimen, or object and may interpret why the object or image is significant. Sticky Note labels: Very short text in hand-written typeface. Represents “behind-the-scenes” notes. Other text and labels include gallery title, donor and credit panel, callouts for images, image credits, and visitor directives. (Reeder 2014:2) In addition to breaking down the categories of objects, specific objects, and the content of labels, this phase also involves beginning evaluation of graphic and sequential approaches the group plans to use for the hall. In my time at the Museum I did not have the opportunity to witness any planning for halls at the “95%” phase. This is the phase in which the exhibit script is finalized. 211 3.7 Chapter 3 Conclusion This chapter has traced the development of Deep Time content and the debates that emerged in the process, including a move from largely descriptive tone in goals and themes to a more active and inviting one, while maintaining the seriousness of the exhibit’s content. I described how four major debates—real/interpretation, resolution/abstraction, reliability/innovation, and authority/participation—moved from fractious areas of debate, often drawn along disciplinary lines, to often creative and hybrid solutions, even at these very early development stages. This is not to say that any of the problems inherent in describing processes, time or interconnectivity with objects or conveying “majesty” and “invitation” were solved. Rather, describing this process shows how these debates develop and begin to result in group or hybrid thinking. The following chapter contextualizes these debates over exhibit content by tracing how they have emerged since the 1950s alongside both changes in scientific understandings of the deep history of life on earth and the increased push to communicate more clearly with the public using media. 212 4. Exhibit Content: The Roots of Frictions and Complementarities Figure 4.1 The fossil halls, April 2013.62 Many of the characteristics of exhibits that museum professionals and publics alike take for granted—the emphasis on “narrative” or “messages,” the use of multilayered text panels, colour-coded themes, mapped visitor pathways, elaborate design schemes and artistic displays, and the whole notion of a visitor “experience”—have emerged in the last 50 years. As we saw in Chapter 2, for fossil display, almost none of these features existed through the early 1950s. This chapter traces the development of many of the debates in exhibit content planning and techniques for contending with them. I show that this period saw the expansion of technologies and debates 213 about their use alongside a greater knowledge of the complexity of change and interconnection on Earth. The 1960s saw some of the greatest changes in artistic interpretation—dioramas, large-scale ecosystem murals, colour-coded pathways, narrative fossil assemblages, and new methods of typography and graphic text design for multi-tiered and accessible information—alongside changes in the science of paleontology. In the 1970s and 80s, I describe the first uses of film in galleries, and the beginnings of holistic and themed exhibit planning—with development of the first long-term planning schemes, theme statements, and interlinked exhibit halls—that emerged in tandem with the flourishing of large-scale, in-house exhibits production. The last hall of the most recent iteration of the fossil hall complex was completed just as this epoch in exhibit development ended in 1990. The 1990s saw major changes in exhibit techniques and organization. While only reflected in a few updates to the fossil halls, in the 1990s up to the new millennium you can still see the impacts of the emergence of the first interactive and digital exhibit techniques. Alongside advancements in technology and broader educational techniques, the professionalization and specialization of exhibit development, and budget constraints, the period also saw the return to contracted artistic and design work. Throughout, exhibits began to reflect changes in scientific thinking and emphasis, albeit with a significant lag, toward interconnectivity, processes, and a focus on genetics and micro ecosystems in new evolutionary thinking. I argue that all of these shifts are part of larger trends. Since the late-1950s, there has been an increased emphasis on mediating the gap between things and ideas through the use of technologies, from pathways, colour, graphics, and murals to augmented reality. In part because the science of paleobiology since the late-50s has increasingly stressed interconnectivity and 214 complex environments, in fossil display, there has also been a strong move away from individual specimens on mounts to fossil assemblages. This, in turn, has meant an increased emphasis on using narrative to explain abstractions from concrete evidence, and a movement away from typological displays or sharply distinguished temporal sequences to narrative sequencing. All of these changes also happened in tandem with the democratization of exhibits—the increased emphasis on clear, accessible communication and most recently movements in showing the public science-in-process and inviting two-way participation. 4.1 Modernized Fossil Halls: 1960s Experimentation After WWII, priorities for scientific inquiry changed substantially. Where we left off in Chapter 2, paleontology was about to begin placing emphasis on populations, communities, and relationships. A small subset of paleontologists began moving away from the descriptive tradition of paleontology. In the wider field of evolutionary theory and study, paleontology had, through the first half of the twentieth century, remained marginalized. This new movement began “asserting the theoretical value and autonomy of paleontological analysis of the fossil record and repositioning paleontology within the larger disciplinary matrix of evolutionary biology” (Sepkoski 2012:2). This involved adopting new methods, including broader theoretical models and quantitative analysis. As part of and in advocacy of this shift, “paleontologists created a new label for their field: paleobiology” (Sepkoski 2012:3). This movement was reflected at the NMNH with changes to the departmental structures of Geology, when Gus Cooper, then Head Curator, advocated that a department of “Paleobiology” split off from Mineral Sciences to form two discrete departments, effective in the fall of 1963. As Gus Cooper would go on to say in his justification for splitting Paleontology off from Geology: 215 Paleontology, which is essentially the same as paleobiology, is now trending more to the biological side of the study of fossils rather than studying fossils mainly for their application to stratigraphical and geographical problems. Although the latter are still important functions of the paleontologist, the present vogue is in the study of fossils with a view to recreating them as living creatures and to interpret the environment in which they lived. This creative tendency embraces all the lore of modern biology that can be applied to ancient animals and the conditions under which they lived. Furthermore, the present day paleontologist is not only interested in the Past, he is examining the Present with a critical eye, applying what he sees to the interpretation of the Past. Consequently, the paleontologist has turned zoologist, or botanist, as the case may be, and soon knowledge of the Past will lead us to greater understanding of the Future. (Cooper 1963) These were trends across the sciences. By 1965, systematics was also where the money and expansion of staff lay (Stewart 1965:37). An Office of Ecology was founded July 1, 1965—”Since the systematic research produced by the professional staff has generally included ecological data, the program represents not a beginning of Institutional interest but a means to focus staff attention on the subject and to facilitate cooperation between the Smithsonian and other Federal agencies and educational organizations” (Stewart 1965:33). These new research areas sought to find “explanations of the intra- and inter-relationships of organisms” (Stewart 1965:36). This new emphasis on interconnectivity, the use of statistical methods, and new understandings of earth processes, as it would happen, developed at the same time other major institutional shifts were taking place. There was also beginning to be an increase in interdisciplinary work. With the move to the new building, three floors in the East Wing, integrating all three former Divisions and the USGS staff, such work would become ever more possible. As we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 7, there was a larger phenomenon of increasing specialization across museum disciplines as well as a new emphasis on high profile scholarship. 216 The post-war era also ushered in new ideals toward more accessible exhibits and exhibit language since the museum had welcomed broader and less formally educated visitors during wartime. As part of this new emphasis, the Institution launched a new “Exhibits Modernization” program in 1954—a comprehensive plan to revitalize all of Smithsonian’s now outdated exhibits. Shifts in the science of paleontology along with these broader shifts in the institution collided in the planning for the new “Modernized” halls of paleontology, which would be completed by 1963. Figure 4.2 Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles c. 1963.63 The new modernized fossil halls were some of the first to be planned by professional exhibit designers. Ann Karras and, later, Barbara Craig were hired for the task. This was an important shift, because for the first time each element would be intentionally designed as part of 217 a larger whole. It also meant that the halls would reflect broader changes in museums across the U.S. and the world, taking influence from the newly professionalized area of exhibit design. Karras was sent to tour natural history museum fossil exhibits across the U.S. in 1958, and in her report on the trip, described some of the design elements, concepts, and “approaches” she thought the NMNH should adopt. Karras was thus the first person to do “benchmarking” for a fossil exhibit at the Smithsonian. As we saw, although dioramas had been popular, particularly in human cultural displays from the turn of the 20th century, even at the Smithsonian, the form had only been introduced once in the fossil exhibits after the Dallas Exposition. Karras looked specifically at other museums’ dioramas, model-making, architectural and design strategies, and artists’ creativity within “complete respect for and obedience to scientific detail and technical perfection” (Karras 1958). 4.1.1 Modern Exhibit Design: New Techniques for Visitors Several drastic changes in exhibit thinking are clear from Karras’ report. The most fundamental shift was toward intentional and iterative design as a holistic, artistic endeavor, from all aspects of spatial planning—pathways, walls, and stairwells—to objects and their contextualization—text, object positioning, and colour choice. As Karras wrote, “Familiarizing one’s self with some of the other museums leads one to realize that it is not so much the type of exhibit design used—or the radical or conservative, modern or traditional approach—that is important. Rather it is thinking behind the choice and an understanding of the specimens that controls the success of the artistic endeavor” (Karras 1958). This overall approach, as a result of 218 design as a new museum profession, resulted in a number of major exhibit innovations for visitor experiences. First, Karras stressed the shift in what were becoming known as “built-in” halls—moving away from the “old ‘open hall’ approach,” many museums were beginning to build in large, open, high ceilinged spaces with additional walls, floors, ramps, and paths allowing the museum to design and direct the sequence in which a visitor would view displays. It is clear that Karras felt strongly that the NMNH exhibits should use these new techniques, as in her criticism of Chicago’s Natural History Museum (the Field), she commented their exhibits were “grossly under-designed, and the visitor left floundering by lack of story direction and coordination.” While acknowledging that there could be a risk in “building in a little too much” and “channeling visitor interest a little too completely,” she argued that if exhibits weren’t built in enough or designed with enough control over sequence or pathway, you leave the “visitor so confused by myriads of free standing cases that he is unable to focus on specific content and to grasp the story being told” (Karras 1958). 219 Figure 4.3 Plans for the first exhibit pathway c. 1961.64 Following in the footsteps of the American Museum of Natural History, Karras said, “We are following similar exhibit trends, building in winding halls, abolishing the free standing case, and dramatizing exhibits with lighting and strong colour” while also looking for some openness or “walkabout cases” so “the visitor has some choice as to how to view the exhibit,” and “adequate” colour” with “sparing and tasteful” “visitor guidance” (Karras 1958). Both Ann Karras’ and Barbara Craig’s drawings for the fossil hall modernization reflected this new emphasis on holistic design and the incorporation of graphically designed and hierarchized text, colour, sightlines along with “built-in” exhibit pathways. 220 Figure 4.4 Map of the fossil halls 1963.65 Early exhibit design was also influenced by Department store window dressing, and indeed some of the earliest exhibit designers had come from the retail world. Many of the exhibits were constructed in little windows. 221 Figure 4.5 Exhibit “windows” in Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles c. 1963.66 Thus, another important development was in the area of graphic text. For the first time, text was broken up into Area Titles, Area Main Labels, Sub-titles or Unit Titles, and Identification labels (Craig 1962). These were incorporated into drawings and notated with a colour-coded key. 222 Figure 4.6 Draft exhibit plan by Ann Karras c. 1960.67 Figure 4.7 Label hierarchies marked on exhibit plans c. 1960.68 223 It is also clear from drawings that exhibit text was designed into the aesthetic and organization of the hall, and was planned to have shape and colour within the design, as we see from these two drawings: Figure 4.8 Craig drawing of Edmontosaurus and Gorgosaurus with integrated labels, 1962.69 Figure 4.9 Craig drawing of Ceratopsian skulls with panels, label heirarchies, and textures, 1962.70 224 Where the above drawings show how text and graphic elements might work on flat walls or in wall-lined cases, below we see how the content of exhibit text was considered three-dimensionally for the center island designed for the center of Hall 2: Figure 4.10 Draft plan for “Would you like to touch a dinosaur bone?” installation c. 1961.71 225 Colour was also an important design element in its own right. Not only were labels imagined in colour, but whole walls or spatial elements were designed in colours to differentiate areas of content or time period. Figure 4.11 Notes on colour techniques for the 1960s halls c. 1960.72 226 Separate copies of these drawings were made specifically for the then operational Paint Shop, which did all of the in-house colour mixing and painting for the exhibit. Figure 4.12 Draft paint colours for Paint Shop c. 1962.73 Another important shift in holistic design was in planning sight lines and walking circulation more strategically. While related to the overall idea of “built-in” exhibits, this further move represented the start of what we might now call visitor-centric thinking—actually imagining a visitor’s vantage point or experience in a hall. It was also the precursor to designing specific viewing platforms, technologies, or designed constraints. 227 Figure 4.13 Drafts with visitor viewpoints c. 1962.74 Figure 4.14 Draft drawing featuring visitors on proposed mezzanine c. 1962.75 228 Additionally, in these designs we see the first integrated wayfinding signage. Upon the gallery’s opening, there was also a coloured map showing exhibit content and pathways. Figure 4.15 Draft of wayfinding signage with text c. 1960.76 Plans were drawn for a “Photomural” for the Rotunda with large text reading “In Preparation,” as the comp drawing below shows. This suggests a new emerging relationship with the public in which the museum was trying to communicate its work in-progress or behind-the-scenes while a major gallery was under renovation. 229 Figure 4.16 Proposed hall closure mural c. 1960.77 These exhibits were also some of the earliest to change the label tone from authoritative to inviting. In line with new imaginings of visitors, these exhibits occasionally addressed visitors directly and personally in labels. In a note about an addition to exhibit script, we see this shift in tone: Paleontology 2, Unit 18 (additions 1/11/63) (Specimen captions) Would you like to touch a dinosaur bone? This is a humerus (arm bone) of the sauropod Brachiosaurus altithorax. The position of the bone and the appearance of the animal are shown in the accompanying drawing. A close relative of Diplodocus and Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus was the bulkiest land animal that ever lived, weighing about 55 tons. Like the other sauropods, he spent most of his time in ponds, lakes, or rivers. If you want to be able to tell your friends that you touched a dinosaur bone, here is your chance. ("Paleontology 2" 1963) 230 We see below the same sign from before the Modernization and after, reading “One of the Largest Known Limb Bones” to “Would you Like to Touch a Dinosaur Bone?”: Figure 4.17 Pre-modernization humerus label c. 1958.78 Figure 4.18 Post-modernization humerus label c. 1963.79 231 It was also the first time that mass popular culture was directly referenced in exhibit labels. In label copy for the Diplodocus from November 28, 1962, the text reads: “In walking on their hind legs and having the front of their jaws formed as a toothless beak, they resembled the duckbills quite closely. They also demonstrate that all dinosaurs were not the giants depicted in advertising and motion pictures” ("Diplodocus Label Copy" 1962). 4.1.2 Modern Exhibit Design: New Techniques for Science A number of new techniques or approaches were also the result of new technologies and new thinking in science. Where, as we saw in Chapter 2, early model-makers used plaster and clay to mold imagined depictions of extinct creatures, by the 1960s new plastics allowed for much greater detail in 3D sculpture, while whole ecosystem and time period depictions simultaneously came in vogue. Other new technologies allowed for greater use of highly technical models. These allowed more complex concepts to be illustrated in the exhibits. More technically accurate models could also be used where real specimens were missing, kept aside for research, or too fragile or important to put on display. As Karras commented, other museums were producing “exquisitely detailed, technically perfect models” as part of their “conceptual exhibits”—in both plaster and plastics, and with new technologies such as the “cellulose acetate method of transferring hair to a celluloid skin for mounting purposes.” Not only did this improve the appearance and accuracy of models, but it also was a new way to ensure that “originals could be available for study purposes at all times” (Karras 1958). New mounting techniques were beginning to allow even fossils on display to be studied or dismantled more readily. As Karras described of the Nebraska State Museum, there was a new 232 “invisible method of articulating skeletons, by which the supporting rods are concealed within the bones and their absence greatly enhances the specimen’s study value. An added advantage is that skeletons articulated in this way are readily dismantled when taken from display and the required storage area is greatly reduced” (Karras 1958). Given the overall holistic approach to design, contextual illustration could suddenly become integrated into the overall layout and plan for the hall, rather than as standalone or discrete pieces of artwork. These drawings (Fig. 4.19) show ancient plants as part of a giant wall illustration up a stairwell. Figure 4.19 Proposed fossil plant graphics c. 1960.80 In one of Craig’s graphic illustrations, she experimented with showing interconnected ecosystems and change through time by showing simplified silhouettes of animals on land and marine ecosystems over time. 233 Figure 4.20 Craig proposed vertebrate silhouette graphics c. 1960.81 In the above, a 1962 drawing for “A Pictorial History of Reptiles: the rise and fall of the dinosaurs,” you can see Craig striving for graphics that would show change through time as well as interrelationships between marine and land ecosystems. Designers also experimented with some of the first contextual design elements using evocative materials—in the main dinosaur hall, using a concrete and pebble base (“fill”) for fossil specimens along the walls and in the center island of the hall. Karras had seen techniques like this at the Nebraska State Museum, where “I did note in the hall a fine use of various sands and gravels on case floors to conceal specimen bases, making removal or addition of specimens an extremely facile thing” (Karras 1958). It is clear from Karras’ critique of other museums that she felt strongly about the accuracy and detail of any illustration that would contextualize fossils. She wrote of one museum: 234 Each case has a diorama-like painted background, a semi-realistic landscape that, no matter how cleverly done and muted in colour, succeeds only in being distracting and absurdly incongruous. A ground of roughly textured plaster, occasionally built up in relief to reinforce the painted effect, only makes the background more startling and unpleasant and the skeletons more grotesque. (Karras 1958) Something “executed competently” would have made the halls “far more attractive and instructive” (Karras 1958). Thus, the designers were very selective in their choice of artists for contextual or artistic pieces in the halls. In the end, they chose Norman Neal Deaton, who had previously worked as a model-maker in the museum including as a taxidermist on the Fenykovi elephant, and who was experimenting with plastics. Jay Matternes, a meticulous painter with scientific training, was hired to complete the background to the planned dioramas as well as all of the ecosystem or contextual paintings in the halls. Dioramas offered a way to illustrate interrelationships, ecosystems, and complexity—all increasingly important in the field of paleobiology. When Karras had visited the Nebraska State Museum, she noted that the slightly smaller than “average” dioramas in their Hall of Nebraska Wildlife, “employ[ed] a harmony so different, so definitely artificial—that although they in no way try to duplicate the greyed harmonies of nature, they achieve a ‘super-realism’ far more appropriate for museum exhibition. The artist has used a fresh full-colour palette of clear blues and greens, and has created a new indoor harmony, vital and fresh” (Karras 1958). It seems that this was the impetus for asking Neal Deaton to produce miniature dioramas. Karras also seemed influenced by Dr. Alfred Bailey of the Denver Museum of Natural History, who: … broadened the diorama concept to show, not only one species of animal in its habitat, but many others as well that might be found near it, along with typical plant life, bird life 235 and insects. To this end he now has a 60’ long by 25’ deep Australian diorama under construction that is a definite geographic segment of Australia, complete with all forms of life that are found in that location. We talked with Mr. C. Waldo Love, who is presently painting the diorama. Dr. Bailey and Mr. Love agree that it is imperative for the artist to visit the locals to be portrayed, to render studies in various media and to gather photographs and actual samples of bark, grasses, etc., for reference before commencing the diorama. (Karras 1958) It seems that with these two influences—miniature and whole ecosystem dioramas—were behind the Neal Deaton commission to produce, in collaboration and photographic correspondence with Nick Hotton, three major whole ecosystem and time period dioramas—Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Matternes, once these were complete, painted the backgrounds. They were displayed on the mezzanine above hall 2. Figure 4.21 Norman Neal Deaton Jurassic ecosystem diorama, 1963.82 While not as prominent in Halls 2-5, there seemed to be another influence from Denver to construct mounts in a “diorama-like manner, with mammal skeletons grouped as they lived together in periods of tertiary time.” In the plans for the Hall of Quaternary Vertebrates, Karras 236 would go on to adopt elements of this style, while eliminating the background paintings Denver had used, because, she said, they “border[ed] on the bizarre” (Karras 1958). Matternes was commissioned to use painterly techniques for showing interrelationships, ecosystems, complexity, in entire ecosystem murals that still occupy the halls today. As Gazin later said in a talk about the Tertiary (fossil mammal) halls, Beyond doubt the most attractive feature of the hall of Tertiary mammals in the series of large mural paintings by the artist Jay H. Matternes, depicting a life scene for each of the assemblages selected to represent the epochs from Eocene to Pliocene. These are arranged so as to tie together the display of specimens in each of the areas, showing the form and something of the possible appearance of the animals in the flesh and in the interpreted floral environment. (Gazin 1963) While there were already plans in place to have 12x20 foot murals in the Tertiary mammal hall by the time of Karras’ trip, some of the influence for these commissions seemed to have stemmed from Karras’ visit to the Yale Peabody Museum, where Rudolph Zallinger’s 110 foot-long fresco of The Age of Dinosaurs had gained attention. As Karras described: The mural scientifically and imaginatively depicts the characteristic land life of the Mesozoic Era. Artistically, the rendering is beautifully and skillfully done, the colours are strong and vibrant, yet keyed to ‘stay on the wall’, and the composition is well planned … I am particularly concerned since our own hall 5 is to be dominated by four murals of about 12’ x 20’ each, that will depict four of the periods of tertiary time. It is my hope that these murals will be given the forethought and consideration that they deserve, and adequate time will be allowed for research, composition, and execution so they might become a landmark in the field. Mr. Zallinger and I discussed museum murals with Dr. Joseph T. Gregory, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology. Dr. Gregory stated that demands of a paleontological mural are far more restricting and time consuming than any other type of mural since photographs and actual locations are non-existent as source material. It is the artist’s responsibility to create—from supplied measurements, flora and fauna data, and scientific conclusions—convincing animals within a framework of a convincing 237 landscape. To do this he must have enough general knowledge of the field to reconstruct the animals factually, and then he must carry them imaginatively to a colourful conclusion. (Karras 1958) Figure 4.22 Matternes mural comp drawing for Miocene Mammals on the Run, c. 1960. 83 238 Figure 4.23 Completed 1961 display—Brontothere and Opportunity Knocks for the Oligocene Mural, photo by Chip Clark, late-1970s.84 4.1.3 Reflections of New Scientific Thinking Many of these artistic and design developments emerged in tandem with changes in scientific thinking. Throughout the process of production for both the dioramas and the murals, which would indeed become iconic pieces in the fossil halls, Nick Hotton and other scientific staff reviewed drawings and plans to ensure their accuracy (along with Lou Lomax, head of Exhibits, who was reviewing for artistic and design merit). 239 Figure 4.24 Hotton approval stamp on production copy, January 1963.85 Nicholas (Nick) Hotton became Curator in Vertebrate Paleontology in 1959, and very quickly set about making a case for the renovation of the fossil halls as part of the Exhibits Modernization program. In a budget justification that year, Hotton described some of the ways in which new scientific thinking and emphasis would shape the new halls. First, Nick Hotton argued that specimens needed to be renovated, “so that they may conform to newer exhibit techniques,” including updated postures for fossil mounts. He also stressed that to visitors they were “one of the most popular segments of the vast collections of the US National Museum,” and that “although they are truly arresting by virtue of gigantic size and often bizarre appearance,” dinosaurs needed to be used for their “educational” in addition to “aesthetic” value. Their “value” was being “obscured by the currently unsystematic and crowded manner in which they are displayed” due to “the slow accumulation of specimens over a period of about 80 years and have not been much altered in that interval” and the fact that they were not up to date scientifically (Hotton 1959). He said, “It is imperative that they be brought up to date and their scientific content made meaningful in terms of modern biological and geological 240 thought” (Hotton 1959). They needed to be conserved and updated, keeping in mind current scientific thinking about their form, their context, and their educational value. Further, Hotton emphasized the new emphasis on biology, ecosystems, and interconnectivity, claiming that the exhibit should seek to “demonstrate the subject of reptile paleontology through comprehensive patterns of evolution, adaptation to diverse natural environments, and distribution, both geographical and through geologic time” (Hotton 1959). Thus, in addition to refurbishing dinosaurs previously on display, Hotton sought to fill in the exhibited collections with collections “constitute[ing] the entire picture of reptile evolution. Representatives of lines leading to dinosaurs and birds on one hand and mammals on the other are also spectacular and educational, but are very poorly represented in the National Collections” (Hotton 1959). He also sought to have “special exhibits demonstrating adaptations for flight, for marine life, and for other specialized environments” illustrated such that the “Appearance of the animals in life will be shown by reconstructions, diagrams, and selected habitat groups” (Hotton 1959). From this description, we see how changes in scientific thinking led to a new emphasis on showing multiple species in a single “habitat group” or “reconstruction.” The Deaton dioramas thus also served a scientific purpose: “four very ambitious scale dioramas which are already under construction. The dioramas will depict dinosaurs in physio-geographic and botanical settings of the Triassic (U.S. Atlantic Coastal plain), Upper Jurassic (Western U.S.), Upper Cretaceous (Western U.S. and Canada) and Upper Cretaceous” (Western Kansas marine scene)” (Hotton 1962). The scientific emphasis on processes was also clear through the emphasis on the hall being sequenced in geologic time. Hotton wrote: 241 To view exhibits in correct sequence of geologic time one must enter the hall from the Hall of Fossil Fishes and Amphibians. The first area entered is devoted to the Permian period of geologic time and here can be seen some of the dominant animals of the period—the Pelycosaurus—mammallike reptiles such as the finbacked Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus … The next area, covering the Triassic period, marks the beginning of the Mesozoic era—the era in which the dinosaurs arose, flourished, and became extinct … The wall leading from the Triassic area into the great hall proper is devoted to a pictorial history of reptiles and shows, in chart form, illustrations of dinosaurs from the Permian period of the Paleozoic Era, and from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of the Mesozoic Era. The great hall proper encompasses the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Here are found the great fantastic creatures usually associated with the term ‘dinosaurs.’ (Hotton 1962) Hotton still emphasized the importance of showing illustrations of individual specimens next to skeletons, “Throughout the hall scale models may be seen near their skeletal counterparts showing how the dinosaurs might really have looked in life” (Hotton 1962). 242 Figure 4.25 Triceratops and clay model c. 1913.86 Figure 4.26 Moropus and model c. 1961, photo by Chip Clark, late-1970s.87 243 Once the halls were complete, there were few changes until they were entirely re-done in the 1980s, in part because the Museum was on a frantic schedule of modernizing all of its exhibits. Moreover, the Vertebrate Paleontology scientific staff and preparators were hard at work on yet another new hall—the last of the Paleo exhibits to be modernized—what was then called the Hall of Quaternary Vertebrates. 4.1.4 The Ice Age Hall: Additional 1960s Experiments Trends that began in the late-1950s hall planning continued to develop over the next decade, and their next stage can be seen in early versions of what is now called Ice Age and the Emergence of Man—then the Hall of Quaternary Vertebrates. The Hall of Quaternary Vertebrates took longer to complete than had been expected. Indeed, it is not entirely clear when, or whether, it was ever fully complete, before it was redone by a new interdisciplinary curatorial staff. What is clear from the records, is that by 1967, much of the hall was installed. Two major innovations designed by Karras were to show Ice Age mammals in fossil assemblages depicting stories, and to use piano strings instead of glass as barriers, so that the public could have a less mediated experience with fossils in the elaborate poses (Yochelson 1985:121). These two innovations are best illustrated by a LaBrea tar pit display including two dire wolves and a horse sinking into a simulated tar pit (made from what looks like crumbled asphalt). 244 Figure 4.27 Dire wolves and horse with storyboard behind c. 1967.88 Here we also see one of the first uses of a kind of storyboard to illustrate the fossil mounts. The piano strings had to be removed when visitors continuously plucked the strings as they walked by the displays. I also heard that visitors who took pictures with a flash were disappointed to arrive home with developed negatives of refractive piano strings against a black image. The hall was never completed due to tensions between Exhibits and Paleo, and when Porter Kier took up the directorship of the museum in 1973, he immediately called on a new group of interdisciplinary curators to revamp and complete the exhibit project—Robert Emry, Thomas Simkin, and William Fitzhugh. Together, the three—a Vertebrate Paleontologist, a Mineralogist, and an Anthropologist, respectively—planned a new version of the hall, one that grouped specimens together within ecosystems but also emphasized the “emergence of man.” No mounts were re-done; rather, the entire hall was shuffled around, reorganized and re-labeled. 245 The two most important changes in conceptual underpinnings for the hall were first, that the exhibit would use multidisciplinary objects to better integrate its themes and stories, and second, that it would focus on clearer evolutionary narratives: “All of these new halls will be thematically structured to convey clearly to the public concepts of evolution that are fundamental to an understanding of the natural world.” (Kier 1974:74) 4.1.5 New Thinking & Techniques for Process and Time By the 1970s changes in scientific thinking were also beginning to shape the conceptual underpinnings of the halls in more deliberate ways. In the mid-1970s, there were plans for the addition of one very telling case to demonstrate the progression of scientific ideas communicated in the hall. This was a “Systematics and Evolution” case, to my knowledge never installed, to be placed in the main fossil hall. SYSTEMATICS AND EVOLUTION CASE, GREAT HALL Systematics is the science (or art) of determining relationships among the myriads of different living things with which man shares this planet. Living things make up an essential part of man’s environment upon which he is dependent not only for the well-being and comfort but for life itself. Knowledge of the complex interrelationships among living things is therefore basic to human welfare at many different levels. An important approach to the understanding of relationships among plants and animals is to find out how they got to be the way they are, and how they change in time. This is the study of evolution. Evolution can be studied from many points of view, such as that of genetics, which deals with reproduction and heredity, or that of ecology, which deals directly with the organisms’ environment. However, evolution is a process that takes place over a span of time, and the only way the time dimension can be dealt with effectively is by paleontology, the study of life of past ages. 246 This case shows some of the evidence upon which historical principles of evolution are based … (Hotton 1975b) We see in the above passage an important new movement in science that were to be conveyed in the halls—namely the trend in looking at genetics (and heredity) and ecology within the study of evolution. Some of this new thinking, namely the emphasis on ecology, would be explored in the next addition to the halls. These were trends that, as I heard from Kay Behrensmeyer in an interview, were “gestating” from as early as the 1940s, but really took hold in the 70s ad 80s. As Kay Behrensmeyer elaborated about her area of taphonomy, which increasingly emphasized interrelationships and ecosystems: And taphonomy actually, as a term, goes back to a Russian named Efremov who coined the term, and that was in the 1940s. And there were Germans studying the processes of death and decomposition long before that. So, it wasn’t like it was new on the scene of science, but it had a long gestation period before people realized that it might be critical to figuring out how animals lived in ecosystems. So, mostly the focus was on the morphology of the animals and plants and everything and who they were related to. That’s a classic kind of Paleontology. So, it wasn’t until people started asking ecological and behavioral questions of the fossil record that taphonomy became much more essential, I think (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). By the time the next exhibit renovation began, this trend in science and new expertises in paleobiology would begin to be reflected in the fossil halls. 4.2 The 1980s & the New Hall of “Highlights” The Ice Age team became a model for exhibits planning in the museum. The early-1970s was characterized by new interdisciplinarily planned exhibits, as we’ll see in Chapter 6, and 247 these teams were the first to pilot “theme statements.” These documents began to set long-term plans and goals for a set of holistic exhibit halls, ensuring they would read as a single exhibit based on common stories and themes, despite being produced in phases. The new exhibits were also characterized by innovative methods in immersive techniques, depictions of time, and increasingly inviting and colloquial language. 4.2.1 Theme Statements: Holistic Halls in the 1980s Fossil Hall Renewal By 1977, the first Theme Statement drafted in the Museum was written by a team of curators, mostly in Paleobiology, led by Ian Macintyre. As Robert Emry said in an interview: Anyway, the first thing we did was spend, like a year developing an overall plan for four major sections, plus the balconies; it was sort of an integrated plan, so, once it was done it would sort of appear as one exhibit rather than four exhibits, jammed into one space. So we had a general plan that was approved, and then started working on the various parts of it. (Emry 4.8.13) Thus, the team developing the fossil hall complex were the first to pioneer one of these Theme Statements, a final version of which was submitted to exhibits June 28, 1978. Acknowledging that no hall could cover the entire history of the fossil record, the document explained that the statement would outline the overall structure and theme of the hall: The fundamental theme which has been developed in the context of a single all-encompassing hall is the history of the progress of life as revealed by the geological record in terms of: 1. THE GREAT PERIODS OF TIME INVOLVED IN THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE FORMS PRESERVED IN THE FOSSIL RECORD. 2. THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS (in response to changing geological processes and 248 modifications introduced by evolving life forms). 3. THE INCREASE IN DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY OF LIFE FORMS (e.g. structural organization, interrelationships, capabilities of coping with broader ranges of ecological conditions).(Macintyre, et al. 1977) The concept for the fossil halls was thus an integrated, “all-encompassing” hall showcasing life through time, including changing ecological and evolutionary processes and increasing diversity and complexity of life. The way the curatorial team attempted to do this using objects, was to take a “highlights” approach—each of the major time periods would show a fossil highlight illustrating the broader theme. One important element proposed for the new hall was called the “ribbon of life.” It was to be a mural that: … depicts the total history of the Earth, and of life on the Earth, from the origin of the planet to the present. The major events shown include: PANEL 1 (left to right) --Origin and accretion of the planet, during the formation of the solar system … (5 to 4 ½ billion yrs ago) --Formation of a solid crust and development of oceans and of a primitive, oxygen-lacking atmosphere … (4 ½ to 4 billion yrs ago) PANEL 2 (right to left) --on biologic formation of simple organic compounds in the primitive atmosphere due to the interaction of the components of the atmosphere … PANEL 3: slow evolution of simple, bacterium-like cells, to oxygen-producing blue-green algae (by 2.25 BY ago) PANEL 4: development of an oxygenic atmosphere (about 2 BY ago) and diversification of non-nucleated microorganisms. PANEL 5: continued diversification of non-nucleated microorganisms, with stromatolite-forming blue-green algae dominant, and development of the first nucleated cells (about 1.5 BY ago). 249 PANEL 6: diversification of microscopic nucleated organisms giving rise to megascopic invertebrate animals (by 680 million yrs ago) and to the first vertebrates (fishes, about 465 MY ago). PANEL 7: evolution from sea-weeds to land plants (415 MY ago) to trees (375 MY ago) to flowering plants (130 MY ago) and from fishes to amphibians (375 MY ago) to reptiles (325 MY ago) to mammals and birds (200 MY ago) to primates (50 MY ago) to man (3 MY ago). ("Ribbon of Life" 1978b) While this “ribbon” was never created, it is clear that the curatorial team were discussing new ways to create holistic depictions of time and process in the halls. Completed over the years 1978 to 1991, each of the five Phases of the fossil hall “complex” would be integrated together to show the history of life. One of the shifts that had begun to crystallize in the science of paleobiology was the integration of complex processes and ecosystems through time. As David Sepkoski writes in a recent book, 1970 to 1985 was “Paleobiology’s most distinctive era … when a ‘paleobiological revolution brought sudden visibility and notoriety to the discipline and many of its practitioners” (2012:3). In 1975, the movement to reinvent paleontology was codified in the foundation of a journal, Paleobiology which sought to publish on research integrating biology, processes and patterns in paleontological studies (Sepkoski 2012:389). In the NMNH Paleobiology Department, this movement manifested in the formation of a program called the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems, ETE. The program sought to create a multi-relational database (a still fairly new technique at the time) that would allow scientists to “explore new worlds of quantitative analysis” and “would allow you to look at ecosystems through time” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). The earliest attempts to display this integration were conveyed in both the holistic approach to the halls, and in new techniques in design and artistic rendering that would convey complex ideas through time. 250 4.2.2 Immersive and Singular Design Elements Conveying Time & Process Another innovation was to treat the entire fossil hall complex as not only interconnected and theme-driven but also immersive. While the Modernized halls had directed visitors via pathways and experimented with colours to convey meaning, the new exhibits explicitly mimicked environments or process through time by using design techniques. Wall colours were chosen to convey a sense of changing environments on land—from grays and blues of the ocean to early landscapes of orange and red and then to green and pink in the age of flowering plants. Ramps were built to false floors in the halls to convey the literal movement of creatures onto land. They also allowed visitors to walk alongside the dinosaurs on a large central walkway, while leaving the specimens on their original mounts. Life in the Ancient Seas, the last of the halls in the multi-phase exhibit project, went the furthest in attempting an “immersive” exhibit. The sense of immersion in an environment, while attempted in the first Paleo phases, was taken to a new level with Life in the Ancient Seas: The design of the exhibit will convey the idea of the marine environment by creating an “underwater” atmosphere, though lighting, a full-scale re-creation of at least one marine environment and an overhead arrangement of specimens to create the illusion that they are swimming. A visual or architectural device (e/g the use of archways) will emphasize the time divisions and major extinctions.” ("Paleo Phase V Outline" 1987b) 251 Figure 4.28 Ely Kish painting Life in the Ancient Seas c. 1990.89 Thus architectural infrastructures and artistic renderings would, for the first time, themselves convey important messages—including processes and change through time. Indeed, some of the most innovative techniques pioneered for the 1980s halls attempted to solve the problem of conveying change through time, increasingly understood in their full complexity in paleontology’s research field. John Gurche, a young scientific illustrator and painter who would go on to have a long, fruitful career in scientific artistry at the museum, was commissioned to do much of this innovative work. The first of his pieces, “Vertebrates Invade Land,” was a collaboration between in-house model-makers and Gurche, who painted the background. It depicted a lobe-finned fish crawling out of water onto a land mass. The entire display also included a small video on loop showing modern amphibians emerging from water onto land. 252 This was one of the new technologies in the 80s iteration of the hall—video. Where earlier exhibits had used still paintings, assemblages and dioramas, with newer and more durable video media, the halls could have moving images integrated into their displays. The 1980s halls had a number of these installations, including one narrated by two, then, very popular Washington D.C. area newscasters. The video, narrated by “Frank Anchorfish” and “Arthur Pod” described the processes involved with equipping a marine creature for land in detail, but using a colloquial newscast narrative. The most prominent example of innovation in describing complex change through time was the Tower of Time. The Tower, painted by John Gurche, tried to show changes through time, and the depth of time, using a giant vertical column. Originally, it was planned to have lights cascading up its core, highlighting movement through time and drawing viewers’ eyes up its length. While this never came to fruition, the Time Column did code time periods by colour, and depict all of time from the transition of life onto land to the emergence of homo sapiens in one 18 inch by 21 foot painting ascending into the giant ceiling above the hall. From a newly installed mezzanine, visitors could view the top of the column at nearly eye level. 253 Figure 4.29 Marguerite Noga and Steve Pierson work on John Gurche’s Time Column, 1981, photo by Chip Clark.90 254 Figure 4.30 Top view of John Gurche’s completed Time Column painting c. 1981, photo by Chip Clark. 91 By the time the Mammals in the Limelight hall was installed, Gurche was commissioned to paint a further exhibit installation, showing the evolution of the horse in a round small theater space. 255 4.2.3 Changing Tone and Storytelling One of the other clear shifts in the 80s hall was in the tone of the exhibit. Building on shifts in language and signage in the 1960s, as they progressed the 80s halls developed an overall framework that emphasized more inviting language. As early as 1980, exhibit label drafts began having titles using pop-cultural references and puns: “The better to eat you with, my dear,” “Dinosaur Kit: Assembly is required,” “A dinosaur for all seasons,” and “The Eleventh hour” were just a few (Voss 1980). Beginning with the fossil mammals hall, Sue Voss, the exhibits writer, began using theater metaphors to help the public relate to changes in past life. Mammals in the Limelight was directly titled in this way. The later Life in the Ancient Seas was much more comprehensive, using similar titling techniques with sub-titles and content labels through the hall. Titles were to be evocative and have popular appeal. 256 Figure 4.31 “Conquest of Land” and popular appeal, 1979.92 Meanwhile, new video technology also began to be used to illustrate new scientific concepts. The tone of the galleries was slowly shifting from more formal to more colloquial, and the content of the exhibits was geared at an increasingly diversified audience. Where the newscast video sought to describe complexity in colloquial tone, there was also a new video installed to show how dinosaurs had been conveyed in the movies. The film, “A Star is Hatched,” was produced as a mash-up of Hollywood films depicting dinosaurs, to both entertain and educate the public in the history of pop cultural representations of dinosaurs and to, as the narrator explained: 257 Ever since their discovery, dinosaurs have fascinated the public. However, many people find it difficult to see in a huge fossil skeleton what was once a living animal. We feel this series of film clips will aid visitors to the new paleontology halls to appreciate dinosaurs as the marvelous animals they were rather than mere stacks of old bones. ("A Star is Hatched Script" 1980) Predictably, the scientific staff were immediately up in arms about the video—unhappy with its tone and lack of scientific content, and claiming that it misled people into thinking that dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. It was removed very soon after these concerns were raised. By the late-1980s, the final phase, Phase V of the Paleo halls project, there was a new emphasis on what were now known as “storylines” in exhibits. This was part of a larger move to even more coherently integrate halls. For Life in the Ancient Seas, two previous “highlights,” “marine invertebrates” and “return to the sea” would be unified in a single theme. Moreover, for the first time, chronology was being utterly downplayed as a message or narrative in and of itself. As the outline for the project reads: While this chronological division serves as an organizing framework, the storyline itself focuses on the organisms represented in the fossil record, especially their diversity, their various adaptations to the marine environment, and the major extinctions of marine populations. Particular highlights are community (reef) life in the Paleozoic, the re-adaptation of land animals to the marine environment in the Mesozoic, and the rise of modern sea life in the Cenozoic. A major environment (including, for example, analysis of microfossils, and the nature of biostratigraphy). ("Paleo Phase V Outline" 1987b) The “storyline’ for the exhibit, was articulated as such in the overall plan for the hall, and subdivided by major “messages.” Major messages: 258 1. The sea was (and is) home to a rich variety of life forms, each adapted to a particular way of life. 2. Marine fossils make up the bulk of the fossil record and are the most abundant evidence of the history of life. 3. The fossil record shows continual turnover of forms through time. 4. This constant gradual change has been interrupted by extinctions. (“Paleo Phase V Outline” 1987b) The immersive mural commissioned for the exhibit would show whole underwater ecosystems in time, while the physical space would be subdivided into three main time periods sliced by major extinctions. The tone of writing for the exhibit also emphasized storylines. Newly appointed Assistant Direct, Robert Sullivan (Sully), in particular influenced the move away from curator-written text. Before Sullivan, Love said,” Their [curators] word was their word. Not a lot of them wanted to do anything with exhibits. That’s why, in the Insect Zoo, it was time … It was literally text lifted from Time-Life Book of Insects and screened onto the wall” (Love 8.7.13). Throughout the Paleo hall’s development, Sue Voss worked to “interpret what the curators said and make it palatable for people” but once Sullivan arrived that the tone of exhibit text really changed: And you can see that the one wing that opened after Sully got here is the Life in the Ancient Seas; and you can see where she really started to think outside the box and develop this big analogy of stories, life in three acts, and sort of kept that analogy going. So it was story telling rather than here’s the stuff and hear stuff about it. But it was really trying to develop a narrative, a story, and tell it well. (Love 8.7.13) Once each piece of the complex was completed, there were only a few important updates. 259 Figure 4.32 Hall 2 Construction in 1980, photo by Chip Clark93 260 Figure 4.33 Completed fossil hall, 1981, photo by Chip Clark.94 261 4.3 Hall Additions and Current Halls Perhaps the most important addition to the halls beyond their originally drafted plans was the installation of a live preparation laboratory, built where the video “A Star is Hatched” had originally played in a small theater space. What is now called the “FossiLab” was created when a large block of fossil material came to the museum in the mid-1980s. Arnie Lewis, a recently hired preparator had arranged for the block to come to the museum from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The block was apparently so large that, not fitting through any main doorways, it had to have a space built around it. Larry O’Reilly had recently become Assistant Director for Exhibits (a new position). Under his direction, the FossiLab became a space for the public to watch the block being prepared in public view. O’Reilly felt this space would, “Let the public see what went into preparing dinosaurs. A lot of people thought dinosaurs were ready-made, as if you just put them up” (O’Reilly 1.10.14). The live lab space was also a solution to the problem that the very last piece of the complex, Life in the Ancient Seas, was still under construction. With that piece of the hall still closed, and the “Star is Hatched” space defunct, O’Reilly reasoned that a live lab would help fill some of the dead space: “I was frustrated by the idea that this hall would be empty for three or four years while they were working on that project,” O’Reilly said (1.10.14). O’Reilly tasked designer Norman Ikeda with the space’s arrangement. Ikeda not only planned a space that allowed public viewing on all sides, but also allowed the public to ask preparators questions and to guide a mobile camera to zoom-in on details of the work. The XY camera was donated by Sony for the space, and was installed on a four-way grid system to move via joystick from outside the space in all directions. Alex Downs, a young preparator, was the 262 principal staff member hired by the Exhibits Department to work on the block live for the public. Every two hours or so he would stop working to answer public questions for 15-20 minutes. Millions of people, recounted O’Reilly, gathered at the windows to watch. It was the first time, he said, “people could see something behind the scenes,” and it made a “good teaching tool” and a good way for people to understand how exhibits are installed and fossils mounted (O’Reilly 1.10.14). One of the important contributions a working lab makes to the exhibits is to show science in process, and to convey the current thinking in paleobiology—that even tiny microfossils are important: What I realized in coming here and talking to people here was that Paleontology had become Paleobiology, which happened sometime in the interval when I wasn’t paying attention and that made it a lot more attractive to me. It’s more appealing to me as a science because it made it less about describing and more about interpreting. (Telfer 6.27.13) 263 Figure 4.34 Fossil Lab draft plans c. 1986.95 When the block left the space, the lab space lay fallow until it was revitalized in the mid-2000s. Today, the FossiLab is one of the few elements of the current exhibits that showcases all of the three “stools” of the Museum’s mission: research, collections and outreach. Thus in the early years of its revitalization: Anytime we applied for things within the institution we were successful because we had this incredible trifecta … We were supporting research. We were supporting collections and we were doing outreach… Kind of an unbeatable combination. (Telfer 6.27.13) Another important alteration was the construction of the Fossil Café, a small café put in place in the back of the fossil hall complex. Its installation also meant the removal of the 264 cretaceous flowering plant walk-through diorama created in 1980 (a discussion of this will appear in Chapter 6). A number of proposed projects drew on curators and staff time but never came to fruition. In the early 1990s a committee of curators and exhibits staff that worked to plan a new introduction to the Fossil Hall complex, one that would center around and contextualize the Time Column. As Kay Behrensmeyer said of this process: They were going to redo the introduction to the Paleo Halls. And so I was on the committee and at meetings, and we had lots of plans, and then there wasn’t any money, and it never happened, but that kind of got strung out over a number of years … on how to become fossils and preservation and a lot of stuff I was really interested in that wasn’t well represented. And we had great ideas about Byrd Baylor, who wrote a wonderful book called ‘If You Are a Hunter of Fossils.’ And she was going to narrate a new introduction and make it more poetic. And so I got an experience there of what people have been telling me. They said, “You’ve put in a lot of time and then nothing comes of it.” (Behrensmeyer 6.13.14) I have since heard that working on something that never comes to fruition, is part of the way things are at the museum. I have even heard this described in comparison to evolutionary processes, where every curator has to work on at least one exhibit project that goes “extinct” in their career at the museum. In the end, a panel simply describing the desired pathway through the halls and narrative content about geological time was installed below the Time Column. 265 Figure 4.35 Hall map with pathways, April 2013.96 Some projects were highly successful. In time for the new millennium, the NMNH’s Triceratops became the first mount to be 3D scanned. After scanning, a cast was re-installed, with the real skull placed in an adjacent case. A video describing the project and some of the scientists and preparators who worked on it was created as part of the display. Each of these elements contributed to new movements in conveying science-in-process and “how we know what we know” in radical ways. 266 Figure 4.36 The fossil hall, April 2013.97 The last forty years of fossil exhibits history is still on display as I write this dissertation. By the time I defend it, the halls will be half-gutted in preparation for the new Deep Time hall. As someone who loves these halls and the histories embedded in them, I am in good company with many staff at Smithsonian. Luckily for all of us, new technologies are making it ever more possible to preserve these spaces. In April of 2013, Smithsonian’s digital scanning team, often called Smithsonian’s “Laser Cowboys” scanned the existing exhibit. 267 Figure 4.37 3D scanning, April 2013.98 4.4 Chapter 4 Conclusion This chapter has presented the artistic, thematic and scientific contexts for contemporary exhibit content debates. I have shown that many of the qualities of contemporary exhibits taken for granted by both museum professionals and lay publics—storylines, hierarchized messaging and labels, colours, wayfinding and maps, elaborate design, media techniques, and a holistic experience—emerged in the post-War era. Inherent in these early shifts and technologies were also debates about their use, alongside broadening and more complex scientific knowledge. Thus, since the late-1950s, there has been a new emphasis on using specialized and expanding techniques to mediate gaps between things and increasingly complex scientific ideas. In the following two chapters, I describe how these shifts intersect with disciplinary dynamics and their parallel developments. 268 5. Disciplinary Dynamics: Group Imagining and Expertise Making exhibits is a creative act, and, like most creative acts, is best done by a small group with the passion, skills, commitment, and vision to see the project through to final completion… Exhibits and their development are human and, often, irrational and emotional acts, not given to easy prediction or regulation. Creating Exhibits (2004 [1998]) This chapter is about the experts that plan exhibits. I use grounded observation and interviews to show how exhibit projects create a unique microcosm of the museum, where ordinarily siloed disciplines and modes of communication come together. As such, exhibit planning meetings involve complementarities and frictions as experts come together in collective translation, negotiation and imagining. I discuss the contemporary process of exhibit-making at the NMNH in terms of roles. For context, I begin by describing some of my early impressions and general findings about the ways that disciplines and expertises are siloed in the museum by 1) spatial distinctness and communication channels, 2) perceived (and real) frictions and hierarchies, including some of the ways that 3) my own positionality played into this. I then describe the ways that expertise is manifested through the exhibit-planning process, namely through different modes of communication in textual production and speech/performance. I draw on Erving Goffman’s work on role performance and institutional interactions (1959), Bhabha’s work on “interstitiality” (1994) and Shannon and Holmes’ work on paraethnography (Shannon 269 2008; Holmes and Marcus 2005; 2006) to frame these discussions. Exhibits production is a unique space of complementarity that emerges from inherent frictions. In these “interstitial” spaces paradoxical missions and values also emerge as vital, imaginative and creative in exhibits production. 5.1 First impressions and general context I began my research at the Smithsonian in the middle of a sticky D.C. July in 2012. Though a native east-coaster, having come from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver I was struck by the soupy hot air; the men and women sweating their way down the open avenues in their suits and tailored dresses; the white columned monumental structures looming over the streets. It’s impossible not to notice that you are in the nation’s capital. Smithsonian’s museums sit squarely in the middle of this web of flags, national monuments, and federal offices. I felt immediately that conducting research at and about the NMNH, the third of Smithsonian’s buildings lining the National Mall, physically and spatially carried the weight of its national context. Approaching the building on my first day, jittery with butterflies, I felt an uncontrollable excitement walking across the scorched grass from the Metro, flanked by the Capitol to my right and the Washington Monument to my left. It is, after all, the Smithsonian. Even after working at the Museum for some time, and I’ve been assured by others that I’m not alone, it’s hard not to have a little glimmer of pride when approaching the iconic building or telling others where you work at a cocktail party. 270 Figure 5.1 The National Museum of Natural History, September 2012.99 The Natural History Building itself is immense. On my first day, black and green banners screaming “Titanoboa! Monster Snake,” loom large over the little popcorn vendors and line of men on bicycle carts offering rides to tourists. Up the stairs and through a security check point, you’re in the Rotunda, facing a giant elephant, an Imax ticket office just obscured behind it, a visitor services desk straight to the left, and a number of banners indicating exhibit hall contents. To my right, what I would soon know was facing east, is the entrance to the fossil halls. Amidst four marbled columns on this first floor are two giant signs in blue, one reading “Ancient Seas: Ice Age” and the other “Fossil Plants,” each with a little icon. Through the columns is a large rectangular door, labeled with an evergreen rounded sign that reads “Dinosaurs and Fossil Mammals.” The room is cool, and marbled walls and high ceilings give it a feeling of airiness, 271 although it’s swamped with visitors; their cacophonous voices fill the space with a constant reverberating drone. This isn’t where staff usually enter, however. I’m going to meet Jennifer Miller, an Exhibit Developer with whom I’ll be working at the Constitution Avenue entrance, where staff typically meet guests or each other to go out to lunch. To get there, I dodge lines of linked school children across the Rotunda and into the vast and very new Ocean Hall, where I take an escalator down to the ground floor. This area is brighter, with lower ceilings and cream-coloured marble floor and white walls. On either side of the space is a large gift shop, one for kids filled with stuffed animals, toys, knickknacks, and bouncing balls; the other with cherry blossom tea cups, eccentric ties and scarves, jewelry, and coffee-table books. Through a large opening I find the back entrance, temporarily paneled in white construction walls. After shuffling around for a bit next to the Easter Island sculpture and watching some Northwest coast dances at the base of the totem pole that protrudes up from the lobby, I see Jennifer. She takes me to the Security desk, where she signs me in with a month-long temporary badge while my paperwork is being processed. My experience with badges was, in being delayed, fairly typical. Badges are no small thing at the Smithsonian, not only because the logistics of getting one are so tedious and time consuming (try going to the Office of Protection Services at the beginning of September or January for a real treat), but because while you have one, the world seems to be your oyster. You can meander in through back entrances, around the labyrinthine back halls, through security locked doors, up and down “Staff Only” stairwells or elevators. It is a rude awakening when your 272 badge expires, as my temporary one did in October. Suddenly, because you’ve forgotten entirely what this is like, it seems an extraordinarily (if fittingly) fortified place. Badges are about institutional trust: “The Personnel Security & ID Office ensures that personnel responsible for the care of the national collections, the safety and security of visitors and employees, information systems control, and administration are trustworthy, honest, and reliable” ("Office of Protection Services" 2013c). As an intern or fellow, you are considered “Non-Critical Sensitive,” which requires a pre-appointment background check. You get fingerprinted. The Office of Personnel Management is contracted to conduct an investigation, the results of which determine whether you’ll gain a Smithsonian affiliation. Your “staff sponsor” at the Museum must then fill out and sign an ID authorization form to take back to OPS to actually issue the badge. At Natural History, when you are first issued your badge, you report to the head Security Manager, Carl Taylor, who, in his very stately office and with a very friendly demeanor, (and perhaps after offering you a Tootsie Roll) activates your badge for access to main doors in the building, depending on your security level. If you’re going to receive a stipend, you additionally report to the Office of Research and Training Services (ORTS) for more paperwork ("Internship Registration and Orientation"2014a). After all of this, once you have a badge, you are free to come and go in most places. Of course there are many areas, in Mineralogy or certain libraries, where you need special access or keys beyond normal access. Not all badges are created equal, after all, even if they seem to open the same doors. There are three kinds of badges—Blue, Purple, and Red. Blue is reserved for staff. Purple badges are given to a wide range of people—interns, researchers, fellows, volunteers, or emeritus staff (technically six: Adjunct Scientist, Research Associate, Collaborator, Student, Fellow, and 273 Intern)—most of whom are there to learn or assist with research initiatives, but others, like volunteers, who may also assist with outreach activities. Red badges are not to be trusted. Well, not really. Red badges are for contractors, and the Institution doesn’t trust them. There are running jokes about Red badges among Museum staff— “the Red badge of shame” and “the Scarlet Letter,” being my two favorites. Red badge holders are not supposed to attend events where food and beverages are funded with federal money, so they’re technically not invited to internal Christmas parties and the like. I spend the time describing this stigma because, in fact, the Smithsonian increasingly hires contractors to undertake its work. This is one of the major changes at the Institution and in exhibits development over the last forty years. It therefore seems an artefact of an earlier system but also a harsh daily reality that those charged with some of the highest budget and longest standing work in the Museum (architectural and media designers, for instance) and many involved in public outreach, are not “trusted” by the Institution’s security systems. I learned about many of these oddities at happy hours with other young interns, staff and fellows or at a weekly event called “POETS,” or “POITS” an acronym for either Piss On Everything Tomorrow’s Saturday or Piss On It Tomorrow’s Saturday, depending on who you ask. POETS is in many ways a remnant of what people sometimes call “old boys club” days, when primarily curators and scientific staff met to have drinks on a Friday. It’s had a number of iterations since it was founded in 1968, and at one point it was shut down and then reinstated by the Secretary. Currently, it happens in the Paleobiology Department’s Cooper Room, the same place where most exhibits meetings for Deep Time were held. Today POETS is one of the few times and places where you see something that approaches a cross-section of museum people— 274 in ages and disciplines. It’s a biased sample, no doubt, for it’s still heavily scientific staff and staff involved with science departments (cultural anthropologists often seem distinctly absent).9 Abby Telfer, who runs the FossiLab, invited me to attend early in my time at the Museum.10 Attending POETS became a crucial place for understanding the cultures at the museum, because it is where all sorts of stories are exchanged, some of which are integral to forging and understanding relationships, and many of which illuminate the workings of such a complex place. It is also a great place for solving problems or talking about seemingly crazy ideas you wouldn’t pitch elsewhere. It is therefore an important kind of backstage space for necessary social work. To return to the status of badges, when I first was negotiating the position I might have at the museum, it was agreed that as an ethnographer, I would be much better off with a Purple badge. But I didn’t really understand. It was at POETS that I learned many of the ins and outs of the Museum, where I sometimes heard what was really going on with projects and people, and where I first learned the hierarchy of badges. I learned quickly, and, going back through my audio-recorded field notes, I recall that it was in an early encounter at POETS that my badge was turned around—Matthew Carrano asked me, jokingly, if I was trying to conceal my Red badge. I quickly flipped it over and assured him, “No! It’s Purple!” It is, I also learned at POETS and elsewhere, very uncool to wear your badge around at social events or on the street. It’s a very amateur, Intern-y thing to do. Across Washington D.C., it’s only newbies who want to show off their new badges. I certainly wore my Purple badge in 9 The staff cafeteria is the only truly representative space in this way, for it is the only space where there are no barriers to entry (like Friday night commitments to children or spouses). 10 At the time, there was an increase in younger staff in Education and Exhibits attending. A moment to be reflexive about that—as an outgoing person, and because I wanted to be inclusive, I often asked, in person or via email, if those I knew in Exhibits or Education wanted to go to POETS with me. Particularly in January of 2013, with a surge of new interns and fellows, young people (a relative term at Natural History, no doubt) in general, began forming a critical mass at POETS, which in turn encouraged more to come along. 275 public for far too long before someone clued me in. Yet, in certain settings, when meeting new people, I would leave it on to ensure they knew who I was, and that I belonged. Now that I have a Red badge, I almost always put it away when I’m going to meet new people at events. Beyond having had two badge colours, I also had the benefit of experiencing two, and now three, different work cultures in the Museum. From September 2012 to June 2013, my office was in the Exhibits Department, on the second floor of the mezzanine, an area that used to be filled with artists’ shops. In June, two new writers were brought on to the Deep Time project, and it became clear that my floor would be crowded. In addition, Michael Mason, my staff sponsor, had just left his position as Assistant Director of Exhibits to become the new Director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Scott Wing graciously offered to co-sponsor me for the remainder of my time at the Museum, and along with the Chair of Paleobiology Brian Huber, also offered to find me desk space in Paleobiology; I was very lucky to have had an office in Paleobotany from June to September. My move from Exhibits to “Paleo,” as it’s colloquially called, also brought my own positionality to the fore. I noticed, upon moving to “Paleo,” that I felt more comfortable in that Department. Having been raised by a Professor, and having spent all of my adult life immersed in university culture, it was hard not to notice that my own background shaped my bias toward a department cluttered with old books and papers, test tubes and microscopes, fossil specimens and card catalogues … and staff that could get away with quirky t-shirts tucked into blue jeans. Despite some background and training in the visual arts, I found Exhibits a bit harder to get used to, partly because it’s such an important but intimidating mix of office and artists’ culture. Its spaces are literally divided this way. On the South side of the hallway, converted former artist’s shops have been made into ground- and mezzanine-level offices, the mezzanine 276 level a long hallway with a set of individual office doors on one side (where my office was located), the ground level an open room made into a walkway flanked by cubicles. On the other side of the hallway are the Graphic’s Lab and large shop for carpentry, model-making, printing, and other production work still completed in-house, mostly for temporary exhibits, way-finding signage and permanent gallery upkeep. Figure 5.2 The Exhibits hallway, May 2013.100 While in some ways all Exhibits staff consider themselves artists, and certainly more artistically oriented than most of the Museum’s other Departments’ staffs, there are different modes of working with artistic production in different subdisciplines. Many of the staff are Exhibit Developers and Project Managers, who act as liaisons between disparate departmental staffs and expertises across the institution to manage exhibit projects. They are often hurrying from meeting to meeting—with buildings and operations managers, artists and designers, 277 directors of varying programs and departments, and curators in of all of the museum’s seven research areas. Graphics specialists, model-makers, and lighting and audio visual (AV) specialists were variously more like experts in craftsmanship; staff in graphics, AV and the production side of Exhibits even had a kind of uniform—they were issued Smithsonian work shirts, where project developers and managers, designers and writers, tended to wear office- and meeting-appropriate attire, or comfortable clothes for getting office work done. Designers and the full-time writer in the department in some ways fuse the two kinds of work, translating ideas into textual- and aesthetic designs to then be fabricated by production staff. The office spaces in exhibits are plain—carpeted in grey downstairs and burgundy upstairs, and painted in light yellows, beiges or greens; the walls are decorated with prints from previous exhibitions and people’s personal photos, calendars, post-ited bulletin boards, and trinkets. The production spaces feel and look like work rooms—Graphics with large-scale drafting tables and tall open storage spaces for printing materials, and the “shop” open, dusty, and filled with carpentry equipment, partially-finished products, sheets of glass, etc. Everywhere, whether in the offices or labs, by being on the ground floor of the “old building,” piping and wiring is exposed along the ceiling. There is a constant non-descript rumble of generators and piping refracting through the spaces. The whole Exhibits hallway is also near the main Shipping and Receiving doors, where I entered the building most days, and so there’s lots of traffic from heavy-laden carts wheeling down cement flooring. This lends the Exhibits department a feeling of constant motion and energy. However, this is often a source of entertainment in meetings in 71A, when a set of carts or garbage cans would thunder past the doors, interrupting conversation for a time. 278 The Paleobiology Department is located in the East Wing of the museum; this part of the museum was added in the 1960s, and was designed to have collections in the center and offices on the outside of its rectangular hallway. Partly because I occupied an office there in the summer when many of the scientists are away in the field, the East Wing felt quieter, and sometimes empty. Figure 5.3 Paleobiology 3rd floor hallway, July 2013.101 This is also a result of the kinds of schedules different Departments have. The Exhibits staff, for the most part, was “on the clock.” Many of them took off every other Friday by working an extra hour each day—common practice in Washington, D.C. Many production staff, along with many other buildings and facilities staff were required to come in every day in the seven o’clock hour or earlier. Others in Exhibits came into the Museum later, but left much later accordingly. During big projects, many Exhibits staff said they would work extra double-time overnight or early morning hours. 279 Curators and research staff and students have more flexible schedules, although as with many academics, they tended to describe themselves as working or thinking about their research “all the time,” where more often, Exhibits staff described leaving work at work. The differences in thinking about schedules and workflow in the institution created tension on both sides of this divide. Curators often described feeling inundated with meetings and Outlook calendar invites. (Scott Wing and I joked that if I was going to authentically portray him, I should document him sitting at his desk on Outlook.) Exhibits staff often feel frustrated with curator’s lack of fixed schedules and reluctance to use their Outlook calendars properly, or at all. It is a distinct point of privilege not to have to keep regular hours at the museum. These divides in schedule and workflow are not just between research- and practically- oriented departments, but within research departments. In Paleobiology, there was a similar divide with the way Curators and “support staff” completed their work. Support staff include research assistants, preparators (those who assist research and collections efforts by assisting with work out in the field, and upon returning to the Museum by unwrapping, cleaning, excavating, and mounting fossil specimens), administrative assistants, information technology specialists, and collections managers. The term “support staff,” though a formal institutional term, was itself used only reluctantly, because it alludes to stratification or hierarchy among staff. A word here about Departmental terminology—I found quickly that colloquial terms such as “Paleo” and “Exhibits” mean different things in different contexts. As is common with other colloquial language about Departments, the term “Exhibits” can at different times refer to: 1) A department/organizational unit within an institutional structure: e.g. “I work in Exhibits.” 2) A physical space: 280 e.g. “I’m headed down to Exhibits,” or 3) The people who work there, either as a) a group (noun): e.g. “What do you think Exhibits will think about this?” b) or the quality of the group (adjective): e.g. “Exhibits people are more artsy.” As a newcomer, it is gratifying to begin to conquer these new expressions. As with mastering other languages or expert jargon, it’s also easy to get over-zealous and slip into using these new phrases in non-Museum conversations; my friends outside the institution will never let me live down the first time I told them I was going to miss an event to hang out with “Paleo” people. Since the end of my research period, I have held a part-time research position at the Consortium for World Cultures, and though this was a centralized Smithsonian program, I was allotted an office in the Director’s hallway at the NMNH. The “Director’s hallway” is another place entirely—it’s nicely carpeted, looks freshly painted, and it’s the sort of place where people wear pencil skirts and ties. 281 Figure 5.4 The Director’s hallway, November 2013.102 As with language describing the other departments, the Director’s hallway was often referred to as thing, space or group of people, however more often simply using the term “Upstairs.” It is not uncommon in meetings and interviews for people to express frustration with people or decisions coming from “upstairs.” These distinctions, and the fact that the building is so big and departments so siloed, both in terms of work schedules and spatial locations, are an important context for understanding the uniqueness of an exhibit project. Unlike other small organizations where you might know everyone and who does what, Smithsonian, and particularly the NMNH is a giant and heavily departmentalized place. As Angela Roberts Reeder, Exhibits Writer said: … moving here from a smaller organization, it’s like, “So who do I need to talk to to find out about that?” “Oh, this person … on the other side of the building … in the basement.” Or, “We don’t know” … figuring out the bureaucracy sometimes is crazy. I just know that, I could have 282 this job for another 20 years and still not have met everyone because the only people I know are the people that I have worked on projects with. (Reeder 7.31.13) On my very first official day at the Museum, September 13th 2012, I attended the first meeting of all the staff who would be involved with Deep Time and the Temporary Exhibit. What I did not realize, as I shakily introduced myself, was that I was meeting a room full of people who were also meeting each other for the first time. Only a few weeks into my time at the NMNH and the Temporary Exhibit process, I realized that my project was in good company with works by Holmes and Marcus, and others since, who have talked about their informants being “paraethnographers,” thus ‘ethnographizing’ themselves (Holmes and Marcus 2005; Holmes and Marcus 2006; Reichman 2011). It was also clear that throughout this process that I would find, as Jennifer Shannon had at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), that “participants in my research were at the same time cultural experts, anthropologists and bureaucrats; in other words, their knowledge practices were much like mine” (Shannon 2008:15) and that: … in choosing the exhibition to organize my field site and by focusing on knowledge production, I considered the exhibition to be a ‘third’ in the fieldwork relation. In other words, the exhibition process was something that the participants in my research could look at, reflect on, and study with me … and therefore, in reflecting on the exhibit together, we in turn were also viewing an objectified version of ourselves. (Shannon 2008:10). In this vein, as participants who shared my knowledge systems and were sometimes studying with me, I tried to pay close attention to the ways people described themselves, their roles, and the institution, and the metaphors they used. At various times I heard: a) the Museum described as a village full of small tribes, or an ecosystem where the actors changed but roles stayed the same; 283 b) exhibits planning and development as film production, “a contact sport,” baseball or hockey; the choice or development of exhibits as a process of natural selection c) the Deep Time exhibit as a theater, a string of beads, a memoir of the earth, a logbook, a timeship, a time machine, a spaceship, a book, an archive, a library, a control room, a time scrapbook, a movie (or a trailer), a time trail, a metro map, a manual for the future planet, an orchestral composition, the Piazza del Campo in Siena, that was in turn, d) viewed or at times actively controlled by the visitor through an element within the exhibit—imagined as a time machine, a veranda, a vista, a nexus, a synthesizer, a console, a portal, the bridge of a ship, a (mission) control board, a command center, a dial, dashboard, a game, a “climatometer,” a hub, a transporter room, a lens, an eye, a stereoscope, a “temporal positioning system,” and even the practice of paleontology itself Sometimes, these same metaphors were used by scientists to describe paleontology and changing ecologies through time, both in literal and metaphorical language. It was also uncanny (and very ‘meta’) when on that first day at the very first meeting about the Temporary Exhibit, one of the proposals on the table was to do an exhibit about the process of making exhibits. In the end, this portion became a subsection of the exhibit. Below is an excerpt from the 10% Concept Script, describing a proposed component on how the museum produces exhibits: Area 8: Designing the “Deep Time” Exhibition 284 Along the corridor, archival and contemporary photographs, along with updateable design sketches of the future Deep Time exhibition, give visitors a preview into the new hall and the work needed to develop such an expansive exhibition. Key Message Making an exhibition involves years of collaboration among many experts to put the dinosaurs—and other fossils—into a finished exhibit hall that will remain engaging for generations of visitors. Narratives and Components Who’s who in developing an exhibition will feature “action” shots of the team and its members with short captions about their role in the exhibit development process. Archival photos and anecdotes will highlight changes in exhibition techniques, paleobiology, and behind-the-scenes technology over the last century. Renderings of the new Deep Time exhibition that can be updated as progress is made will give visitors an insider’s view into what’s in store for the future of the Hall. An updateable timeline of the exhibit’s development will be placed in this section, as well as at the closed entrance to the Deep Time exhibition. A monitor with web camera link may display the work inside the Deep Time exhibition in real time. A mobile station for face-to-face conversations with visitors will be used for testing exhibit components and gathering visitor feedback to inform the planning of the permanent hall. An interactive evaluation kiosk will allow us to test media and online components and automate the data collection. (Reeder 2013b:8) One of the points this part of the exhibit was meant to emphasize constitutes the precise topic of this chapter. Both the Deep Time and the Temporary Exhibit Teams included a large number of experts—four Paleobiology research curators, two education specialists, an exhibits writer, two exhibit developers, three vertebrate preparators, and a number of other museum leadership and staff—all with different roles and expertises. In one meeting, Kara Blond, now 285 the Acting Assistant Director for Exhibits, noted that the way roles in the museum shift over time was not unlike species filling new ecological niches over time. The ways in which staff ethnographized themselves was interesting throughout the process. It also made it useful to talk with my participants about some of my initial observations as the process moved along. Friends I made were happy to let me bounce ideas off them about how the place worked, and differences in departmental cultures. My first major observation was that there were fascinating dynamics at Exhibits meetings. Each meeting had the feel of a seminar, and I was encouraged to treat it as such, but there were both shared loyalties and priorities for the group that had a much heavier weight than any group of people I’d ever encountered, and all sorts of political complexities and anxieties among the group. This is the very counterintuitive thing about exhibit planning meetings at NMNH. No one in the room has privileged speaking rights, and all ideas are, in theory, equally valid at the table. However, members of the group a) have different modes of communication and are b) perceived to have certain kinds of power, both of which may or may not relate to either c) the training, background, or discipline from which the person comes or d) the fact that certain people in fact have power over certain elements of any project or a certain purview based on their role or position of authority. 5.1.1 Modes of Communication It is difficult to write about this dynamic because much of this is about peoples’ personalities. From the very beginning I was interested in roles and institutional cultures, therefore I tried not to take on-record notes about, or to focus on, individual personalities. My 286 audio recordings include some reflections on these differences between my informants. Suffice it to say that, disregarding everything else, some of the dynamic of any team is dependent on the individual personalities at the table. As Abby Telfer, who runs the FossiLab and attended Temporary Exhibit meetings once told me, “Smithsonian specializes in articulate people.” This is exceedingly apparent at exhibit meetings. Some are more talkative or argumentative than others; some wait patiently and then drop a cognitive bomb on the group that steers the whole direction of the conversation or the project; some focus on coherently stating the perspective of their particular expertise; some combine these tactics; but all ideas are conveyed articulately and hold more or less sway at different moments. What is more interesting for the purposes of understanding roles are the ways that disciplinary and cultural belief systems and boundaries of practice intersect with these subjectivities. Erving Goffman, in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) offers a theory of self-performance where, as in a theater, individuals act as performers, audience members or outsiders within social “stages.” His term “impression management” is a particularly useful one for thinking about the revealing and concealing of the self in certain settings. In Frederick Bailey’s analysis, in political communications there are “normative rules” that don’t “prescribe” actions but “rather set broad limits to possible actions.” They are used to generally guide conducts and to judge them right or wrong, proper or improper. While the very broadest of these rules are certainly shared among the group (professional language, general meeting conducts), disciplinary norms differ, such that the tone or frequency of utterances might differ between, say, scientific and non-scientific staff (Bailey 1969:5). Bhabha was likewise useful in thinking through these interactions as “in-between” or “interstitial spaces.” These “moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of 287 cultural differences”(1994:1) are instances in which actors employ “strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation …” (1994: 1-2). In exhibit planning processes experts from different institutional and disciplinary contexts engage in “social articulations of difference.” (Bhabha 1994:2). In terms of communication, I came across interstitial (Bhabha 1994) and performative spaces in two ways: First, I often observed intersections between disciplinary cultures and modes of communication during meetings when individuals would assert their particular role before speaking, or in documents that circulated among the group. Second, I came across these intersections and in interviews and in casual conversations in discussions about peoples’ backgrounds or conflicts they were experiencing in the planning process. In both cases, these intersections are often made apparent when immersed among a group in shared jokes about other parts of the museum. In Word documents that circulated with track changes, it was often clear that curators were more verbose in their comments than the educators, exhibits staff, or support staff. This was immediately apparent in the Temporary Exhibit documents as it moved along at a much faster pace than Deep Time. Documents were brightly coloured with tracked changes and comments by different participants. My favorite document title was: “Putting Dinosaurs in their Place_concept script draft_130212_H DS+MMP+SJJ+DM_H_DS2+AB+AT,” where each set of capital letters indicated a commenter. The tone of each of these participants was often different, again sometimes due to personality differences, but often distinguishable by role or discipline. The stereotype is that curators are more likely to assert their opinions without as many qualifying statements, to be more long winded in their comments, to be so obsessed with facts 288 and their own area of expertise that they refuse to cut text down, and to be keen to tear apart the tone, word choice, English usage and grammar of exhibit text, even though they are not writers on the project. In Exhibits, there are lots of running jokes about curators, and the often harsh way they comment on documents is one of them. This is not an un-useful defense mechanism. My own experience came when I commented on a Temporary Exhibit script that read that dinosaurs had been on display at Smithsonian for 100 years. My comment read: “140 years? Hadrosaurus was up in 1874 and if the hall opens in 2014…” When the document returned, I couldn’t help but feel a sinking and nervous feeling when within my comment bubble, Hans Sues, curator on the project, wrote in all-caps: “THAT WAS NOT A REAL DINOSAUR EXHIBIT – THE REAL EXHIBIT IS A LITTLE MORE THAN 100 YEARS OLD (HALL OF EXTINCT MONSTERS).” Knowing Hans as I do now, I know he was distinguishing his comment using all caps, and that he is a jovial person who is committed to getting facts right, but as a new and admittedly intimidated person in the museum, it’s no wonder that these perceptions, once culturally established, hold weight. 289 Figure 5.5 Abby Telfer, Kay Behrensmeyer, Scott Wing, and Hans Dieter Sues exchanging laughs about a fossil coprolite 2013.103 5.1.2 Belief Systems and Perceptions of Power In trying to understand the cultural dynamics of the institution, I had many casual conversations with curators, educators, and staff in exhibits about their colleagues, and was included in joking about these things in casual or social settings. Hypotheses about why different experts might act differently than each other range. Intentionally melding theories here, some perspectives on documents, for instance, include: Curators, so used to editing documents in scientific circles and journals, have a harsher or more objective (depending on who you talk to) mode of editing documents. They don’t take them personally. Exhibits people and educators, on the other hand, have more artistic sensibilities. Artists put more of themselves in their work. Criticism of an exhibit writer’s work, for instance, feels more like criticism of someone’s artwork. Or maybe they’re just more “touchy-feely.” They’re trained to accept everyone’s 290 perspectives. Scientists know that there is a truth out there, and that not everyone’s opinions about it count. Scientists are constantly worried that Exhibits people are determined to “dumb down” the science, and their work. As a cultural anthropologist, I am unconcerned with the truth of any of these kinds of statements. They do, however, reveal real and entrenched power dynamics at the museum. The perceived and real power dynamics that they illustrate are important for understanding the dynamic of exhibits planning, particularly as a new group of people begins working together for the first time. And it is perceived by almost everyone in the museum, except curators, that curators are of a higher status and “caste” than everyone else in the museum. As Jonathan Coddington put it: … a big problem with privilege … is that the scientists are seen by the rest of the museum and are among the most privileged class. Some of that’s justified because they’re expensive and we limit the number, and they have unusual, even extraordinary freedom to do what they want. The only problem is they have to be the best in the world and world famous, and for a good reason, not a bad reason. There’s a lot of pressure on scientists, but they’re not the only, by any means, the only expertise in the building. I think we need to do a better job of professionalizing the other voices that add into a Natural History museum, most obvious being outreach and collections. (Coddington 9.19.13) There are thus pervasive belief systems about different roles, staff, or departments, that manifest as entrenched insecurities on the part of both outreach and research staff about power dynamics, which, in turn, are reflected in the exhibits process and discourse surrounding it. I make this outreach/research (or education & exhibits/curators) dichotomy because it is one that is ubiquitous in the Museum. More specifically than feelings about their overall status, research staff (curators) are very clearly perceived to wield more ideological or conceptual power in the Museum. In exhibits 291 planning, power over concepts is a very distinctive kind of power. It drives the process since, today, it is an idea, not a thing, that is generally being translated for the public in exhibits. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, this is a relatively recent development. Of course, curators also, along with collections managers or overseeing collections managers, control objects (here fossils). In a fossil exhibit, if you drive the ideas and you are the only person in the room who really understands and knows the fossils you might use to describe those ideas, then indeed, you have a huge amount of power. Curators also have unique kinds of prestige. All have Ph.D.’s and are experts in some niche within their fields; they are expected to publish (three articles per year) in prominent journals; they are usually recruited for their jobs from afar and go through a rigorous selection process and later, a tenure process, to keep their jobs. They are usually higher paid and there are fewer of them. Exhibits, as a Department, controls the budget on an exhibit. Large scale exhibit projects and building renovations require external fundraising. For Deep Time, David Koch’s gift of $35 million was the initial gift that allowed the project to get its start. If you follow the money, certainly the NMNH development officers who secure large gifts such as David Koch’s, and those who control that money once it comes to the museum (in Exhibits), wield huge power. Exhibits managers or developers are charged with not only overseeing the budget, but the schedule for the exhibit planning process. While research, particularly at the NMNH, is core to the primary mission, the museum now relies very heavily on its outreach and development activities to survive and remain relevant. The Deep Time Initiative was originally proposed to be a much larger set of projects that, while it included the exhibit, also contained substantial resources for research. This money has not yet materialized, though Deep Time is still conceived as a wider research initiative. Koch funded the exhibit, and so that took precedence. 292 In the exhibits process, curators throughout the museum are worried that they will become mere “fact checkers.” This is largely because, as we will see in the next chapter, new movements and leadership in the 1990s downplayed the curatorial role in the exhibits process. Perceptions about power dynamics and exhibits are still burdened with the legacy of transformations that took place in the 90s and early 2000s. Those shifts and frictions emerged out of the longer-term growth of the museum’s outreach, development, and now engagement missions in general. At the institutional level, that was a huge move away from the research-centric model of 50 years ago. There is also a strong sense among researchers and outreach staff that the other group doesn’t really understand what they do, or how important it is. There is a sentiment among particularly Exhibits staff that curators don’t respect their expertise. This is sometimes because audience advocates at the table often feel it is their responsibility to ask seemingly naïve questions, on behalf of the public. When asked what makes a good Exhibit Developer, Kara Blond said: The desire to include the visitor in the conversation. To go out and say, “Does this make any sense to you and what about you and you and you? Do you get what we’re trying to say? What questions does this raise? What information do you need to know before you can understand this?” (Blond 7.1.13) This was also true of other Exhibits staff at the meetings. Angela Roberts Reeder also felt that as audience advocates at the table, Exhibit Writers have a responsibility to ask “naïve questions.” As she articulated, “I’m asking the questions and sometimes feeling stupid so that my readers don’t” (Reeder 7.31.13). As Angela Roberts Reeder said of research scientists’ perspectives on Exhibit Writers’ work: 293 Just to paint a grossly broad brush—subject specialists, curators, scientists—They would like for visitors to actually read more than studies have shown that they do read, or the scientists will use vocabulary not realizing that most people don’t know that vocabulary. Or they think that my statement that we write for an eighth grade reading level is an insult, when really it’s not. Look at organizations like NPR, which writes at that level. You could ask, “Do you think NPR writes for an educated audience?” “Oh yes, NPR is great.” … It’s a comfortable reading level. Even if you have a graduate, or postgraduate degree, you don’t want to read at that level all the time, especially on a topic you don’t know much about. (Reeder 7.31.13) Often, commiserated Sally Love, “writers get most of the abuse” (Love 8.7.13). Moreover, as Kara Blond said in an interview, “I think there is an impression that this process of communication is not a unique set of skills and that anyone can teach, anyone can be a educator, anyone can come up with creative ways to tell stories that connect with visitors, and that the scientific training is so much more specific” (Blond 7.1.13). But these skills are based on training, research, and many years of honing methods for communicating to broad publics. This is true, also, for educators. As Shari Werb said: And so you need somebody in there to constantly be pushing people to be thinking about the various publics that come in to that space, not just one audience, because we’re so big. I think that, to me, it’s hard to be valued for that though. It’s kind of like a quiet skill, in a way. If it works… You’re asking, sort of, simple questions and you’re performing a kind of a simple role, but it’s really much more complex than that. It comes out of a lot of observation and a lot of methodology, in terms of what we’re making solutions with, but if done well, it looks really simple, what we’re trying to do. And so I’m not saying that people have to praise us or anything like that, but I just think that it’s kind of a quiet skill set, that when it works, it’s invisible. (Werb 9.6.13) Exhibits and Education staff often discuss strategies for how to better communicate their work to other museum departments, particularly scientific ones, for this reason. 294 This leads me to: 5.1.3 Training, Background, and Discipline Unlike scientific disciplines, expertise for exhibits planning and outreach, for knowing or understanding visitors, for doing audiovisual or mount-making work, for managing large projects, doesn’t often come from a Ph.D. in that area. In the last 40 years the Education and Exhibits departments have, as Jonathan Coddington put it, “come into their own as professional centers of expertise” (Coddington 1.10.14), yet in large part, this expertise draws on best practices and disciplinary standards, many years of experience and training, and the tutelage of previous experts, more than lengthy degrees. While most upper level Exhibits and Education staff had Masters degrees in a relevant field, the staff that I interviewed had incredibly varied pathways that led them to their current work. Three of the exhibit developers/managers on my floor had Masters degrees in Museum Studies. The Chief of Exhibits, Kara Blond (now Acting Assistant Director for Exhibits), and educational specialist on the project, Amy Bolton, had been journalists. Angela Roberts Reeder, the main Exhibit Writer for Deep Time, had worked for Princeton Review for many years and then ended up training at the Office of Exhibits Central (OEC) before joining the NMNH staff. Michael Lawrence, the Chief of Design, had pursued arts and education then became an architect by training before becoming an exhibit designer with a firm that had done other museum projects at NMNH. Curators have a much more predictable trajectory. The prerequisites for the job require this. When I asked how each curator became interested in what they did, they very often shared some childhood interest. Something sparked an interest, they liked science in high school, they went to college and majored in some relevant area, they had an important professorial mentor 295 who encouraged them to continue into graduate school, and did a post-doc, or two. They applied for a Smithsonian curatorial job. Today, you generally need a Ph.D. to be hired as a curator at NMNH. Ph.D.s are a huge commitment to one, very specialized, field. Of course there are different individual trajectories amongst the curators—Kay Behrensmeyer, for instance, was an art major in college—and their in-between jobs and steps, where they studied and under what theoretical paradigm, and how they got started in the field differ not inconsequentially. Nevertheless, their current jobs are a result of a lifetime career developing their training in a specialized discipline. This is not to say that exhibits work is not specialized, because it is. But Exhibits Staff in many cases never knew that jobs like the ones they have now existed. As we will see, many of their jobs in fact did not exist when they were children. Exhibit and outreach staff pride themselves on being able to work in teams. They also pride themselves on being accepting of others’ knowledge and perspectives. While much scientific work, especially today, is collaborative, at its core research is an individual enterprise. It is up to individual scientists to defend the importance (and accuracy) of their work and ideas, certainly when applying for jobs, but also when giving talks or among other scientists. As Jonathan Coddington articulated: “The whole point was that Ph.D.s are a license to think and you will thereafter become basically a self-employed intellectual entrepreneur. You’d better learn how to do it by yourself using just the resources available” (Coddington 9.19.13). It is apparent that sometimes curators misrecognize exhibit meetings as scientific seminars, or assume (wrongly) that all colleagues communicate in their way. Generally, curators speak much more often and for much longer than the other in-house team members. 296 At the same time, individuals can create reputations for themselves that transcend disciplinary stereotypes. As Amy Bolton put it: I also realized that one could have a personal reputation in the museum that superseded your department’s reputation, and that can be positive or negative … The community might have a general impression of your department, but they can hold your reputation separate to that, which I found out pretty early. (Bolton 6.26.13) In textual production, it is also true that two main roles, curators and Exhibit Writers, are experts in writing, although of very different kinds. While I did not observe the process of scripting labels for the permanent or temporary Paleo hall, I heard about the process in relation to other smaller displays (a temporary T-rex display installed in the Constitution Avenue lobby in January of 2014), and in interviews. I also reviewed many previous script drafts with curatorial edits in the archives. In addition, debates about phrasing in some early formative documents are important because many of the agreed-upon key messages later become central exhibit text. This is one of the main areas where disciplinary training and cultures clash. Both Exhibit Writers and curators are experts in communication. However, as I observed and later heard in interviews, their emphasis and tone is often starkly different. To a curator, many formative documents in the exhibits process and scripts for labels look a lot like many other manuscripts research scientists review and produce in their scholarly work. Scripts in particular, are circulated as long, double-spaced typed documents in ordinary letter size (unlike design packages, for instance). However, unlike a manuscript, text from these documents, in the end, will appear as very differently sized pieces, broken up in blocks of different colours and backgrounds: … exhibit scripts come along on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch piece of paper, often double-spaced. So, they look like a manuscript. They [scientists] will often think that every word in the exhibit script is important, but they don’t realize is that some of the exhibit script will be 297 in a smaller font, but the titles are going to be in 64-point type. And this little piece that you’re obsessing on is actually going to be in 16-point type and kind of low down, but that works both ways. (Coddington 9.19.13) Exhibit Writers are accustomed to thinking about levels of text, and how they will manifest once designers have contextualized their text. Curators often get hung up on phrasings evenly across these documents, although some portions of them will appear as giant signage and others will appear as a side block of small text. Thus even among a group of mostly graduate educated, English speaking museum professionals at a single institution, perhaps, “a cultural text or system of meaning” still “cannot be sufficient unto itself” for “the act of cultural enunciation—the place of utterance—is crossed by the différance of writing” (Bhabha 1994:36). Emails, exhibit scripts, and other circulated documents are produced and received in different cultural systems so that “meaning is never simply mimetic and transparent” (1994:36). Rather, “the production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious”(Bhabha 1994:36). Drawing on Bakhtin, another way to think about these translations is that language “utterances” and their interpretations is that while their form may be a “unitary” system, their generation and the “verbal-ideological” thoughts embedded in them are contextual and heteroglossic. In exhibit meetings and in associated documents where individuals try to creatively describe emergent ideas and physical forms, there is both a guaranteed “minimum level of comprehension in practical communication” and many instances in which language is “ideologically saturated,” or becomes “a world view, even as a concrete opinion” which is 298 “maximally” understood by people of a similar role or discipline but not universally understood, and often misunderstood, by those who share other language practices (Bakhtin 1981:270–271). 5.1.4 Roles and Documented Purveiws/Powers All of these perceptions and disciplinary differences are in addition to the fact that each person at the table does, in fact, have a role and area of expertise. For Deep Time, these were (as listed in the 10% approval package): The Core Team Roles The Core Team is made up of a small group, for the Temporary Exhibit and Deep Time, of in-house staff most central to the process. Core Team members meet as a whole group as often as twice a week, or in the case of Deep Time, in two, two-day-long workshops per month, plus meetings with select members amongst themselves or with other staff. An exhibit project is a huge time commitment from the Core Team. They collaboratively shape all of the ideas, designs, scripts, content, and other documents that lead to exhibit development. For Deep Time, the Core Team was: Kay Behrensmeyer, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Exhibition Curator, Initiative Lead Amy Bolton, Education Specialist Matthew Carrano, Curator of Dinosauria, Lead Curator for the Exhibit Mike Lawrence, Chief of Exhibit Design Angela Roberts Reeder, Exhibition Writer Jennifer Miller, Exhibit Developer/Project Manager 299 Scott Wing, Curator of Fossil Plants, Exhibition Curator Repeating this order, the roles for each person, up through the 10% phase I observed, were: Curators: In general, curators are the main experts charged with exhibit content—its overall narrative or conceptual underpinnings, the specimens used to tell its story, and its accuracy. Some projects, such as the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened in 2010, have a single curator. Others, like Deep Time and the Sant Ocean Hall, opened in 2008, have multiple curators. They act as spokespeople in development and fundraising as the process takes shape. Throughout the process, they are tasked with maintaining scholarly and factual standards of an exhibit, and for guiding negotiations with relevant experts on scientific content and concepts (particularly in early stages or where ideas or theories are contested). In the case of Deep Time, each curator has an area of expertise, but as a group they are also responsible for consulting with other curators in the Department on areas pertinent to their colleagues’ expertise. Curators shape the narrative of the exhibit and its content, working very closely with the Exhibit Writer(s) on the script, but the curators do not write the script. They do, however, volley drafts of script to colleagues and back to Exhibit Writers with comments and corrections throughout the process. During the process and after opening, curators also continue to participate as spokespeople for the exhibit. (unique to Deep Time) Lead Curator: The Lead Curator coordinates the other curators and Department participants, and is the lead on the exhibit. 300 Initiative Lead: The Initiative Lead is the lead on the broader initiative of, in this case, Deep Time, which includes its research and programmatic pieces. Education Specialist: This expert informs the exhibit with regard to interpretation, audience or visitors, accessibility, curricula or learning standards, and, as an “audience advocate,” makes sure that educational goals and standards are part of the team thinking and documents early on in the process. This includes informing the team throughout the process about visitor motivation, interest, and ability to learn the exhibit content. This is important for strategizing about how to engage different audiences in the same exhibit content or for advocating for or targeting some content to a specific audience. The Education Specialist also informs the team about visitor group dynamics and the effect those dynamics have on the visitor experience. One of the techniques for doing this is helping the team imagine different visitors by constructing potential “visitor profiles,” based on different needs and learning styles or interests. Educators are also active researchers in the galleries, and can often be found in the halls with a cart testing out strategies, concepts and language with visitors. They contribute relevant literature or theories of learning, and develop possible programming opportunities as early as during the 10% stage. They work with evaluators to craft testing instruments and methods with the public. In addition to liaising with evaluators, the Educational Specialist also liaises with the Education Department or other relevant people, both in and outside the museum, to inform public and school programming, curriculum materials, guides or other materials/programs. Chief of Exhibit Design: 301 For temporary exhibits, staff designers may be the lead designer—producing drawings and overseeing the entire in-house production of the exhibit. For larger projects, the designer is the expert involved in the exhibit contract call for proposals and review process for choosing a design team, and regularly giving input on the design process. The in-house designer also coordinates with NMNH building staff on other aspects of the building and on conservation, accessibility, safety, and maintenance issues. The designer is also charged with certain other design projects, and is also the main in-house expert in design, and therefore has purview over contracted design approval. Exhibition Writer: At early stages, the writer has the heavy task of collating all of the comments and discussion from meetings with the team, and additional meetings among curators and/or contracted designers, and distilling these down into documents to circulate to the team. These include a storyline and preliminary script, and later exhibit labels. These, in turn, receive comments from the whole team; the writer has to integrate these into the final document. The writer also shapes the tone and style of the writing, both in descriptive documents such as the Statement of Purpose or Concept Narrative and eventually in exhibit text. For Deep Time, just as I finished going to meetings, Exhibits took-on two new writers, so that the lead writer had a team of three writers to coordinate. As the exhibit and its content develops, the writer has to make sure the exhibit has a distinctive voice and clear story that is understandable and that draws people in (Reeder 7.31.13). As Angela Roberts Reeder said in an interview, she wanted “to catch people’s attention, to cause a certain feeling in them, whether that’s curiosity for science or a sense of awe …” (Reeder 302 7.31.13). They are the main translators and communicators of exhibit content, yet, as I heard her and others describe, their contributions go publicly uncredited. It is often thus a “hidden position” (7.31.13). Figure 5.6 Angela Roberts Reeder describing hierarchies of exhibit text, April 2013.104 Exhibit Developer/Project Manager The Exhibit Developer/Project Manager position is a complex one, perhaps the most complex of any of the core team positions. This person has to have expertise in scheduling, budgeting, and contracts—a huge undertaking for Deep Time—as well as a grasp on the overall arch of production and direction among the team. This includes keeping the team in line with the project’s mission, and coordinating all of the team members—their ideas, their personalities, and their schedules. Further, this role involves sharing exhibit documents and progress with the team, 303 Extended/Advisory and Approval Teams, and relevant offices/Departments, as well as liaising with all other relevant staff in the museum. In a developer capacity, this role also includes coordinating with building and technical staff and collections managers on specimen access and preservation, coordinating purchases, loans and donations for the exhibit. This includes insuring that specimens are ready for exhibit and paperwork properly processed, as well as communicating building and collections needs to the rest of the team. Exhibit developers are creative, have to have good people skills, consider themselves audience advocates, and act as liaisons among the team, as well as between the team and everyone else in the building; they have to be able to speak every disciplinary, jargon-y language at the museum. This includes becoming proficient in the topic of the exhibit. Indeed, when these two positions are combined, this person must also be the main liaison between the scientists and the rest of the exhibit team. They are also charged with verifying with scientific staff all information produced in print or audiovisual materials. In the capacity of a developer, this person must also collate relevant materials for the team, including articles, relevant literature, photographs, and other materials to be stored on a shared drive or shared online space, both for content and for team inspiration. Thus the Exhibit Developer/Project Managers tend to work as the primary in-house translators in the exhibit process. They also are primary audience advocates, in that they are responsible for including the visitor voice in meeting conversations. Further Notes on the Core Team In addition to the way I have described these roles, it is also important to note that these roles are specific to a discrete exhibit project. These titles also involve many other roles and 304 tasks required by staff in their daily work. One very noticeable example of this is that most curators in the museum rarely, if ever, work on exhibits. As Kara Blond described, Exhibits staff often feel that they: Wish that we could more effectively build on curator learning from one exhibit to the next. Gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have gone through a process, and to build rapport and communication, and then to work with the same curator to develop another exhibit? But it’s, almost always a new field of study, a new story to tell, a new curator to shape it. And we’ve tried to get curators from past projects to talk to the curators from new projects but it tends to be of limited help. Our process is complicated and until you’re in the middle of it, I don’t know if you quite get what you’re buying into. (Blond 7.1.13) Curators, particularly at Natural History, are scholars first and foremost, and their primary role is in research and publication. Their performance reviews are weighted more heavily in this area. Outreach work, while important, is not valued as deeply, and curators who take on very large scale exhibit projects need to ensure that the Associate Director for Science and their Department Chairman take into account the necessary time commitments for the exhibit when completing their annual reports and PAEC (Professional Accomplishments Evaluation Committee). For the PAEC, which evaluates a curator every five years, I often heard that it was detrimental to curators to take on exhibits projects with extended timelines, because accommodations were not available for these reviews. This has certainly been changing in the last few years. However, unlike publications, exhibits at Natural History are not academic “credit” for curators. This makes it difficult for Exhibits staff to build respect for their expertise and experience because curators don’t often take on more than one (certainly large-scale) exhibit project in their careers. As Jonathan Coddington, Associate Director for Science said: The overall trend is that you start off as a scientist here, and your reward schedules will be pretty clear. At least 50%, maybe a little more, is research quality and quantity. And then the rest of your time is devoted to collection and curatorial matters, outreach in all of 305 its myriad forms, and professional service which is both outside the museum serving on international commissions and panels, editors of journals, roles in scientific societies and also internal things, committees. Scientists generally try to avoid committees. (Coddington 9.19.13) It is clear that curators are treated and act as higher status professionals in the museum. As I mentioned earlier, they have more freedom in their schedules, they have prestigious degrees, they are recruited in highly competitive, international searches, and they have many support staff in their departments who often do work that supports their research, which they have great freedom to direct. Furthermore, it is not only writers who have “hidden positions” in these projects. Very few current halls list their producers either in the space or online once they are complete. Life in the Ancient Seas was an exception. Because curators are the main spokespeople for exhibits, it is rare that press coverage for exhibits interview or acknowledge non-curatorial Core Team members as exhibits develop and are opened. Meanwhile, despite all of these perceptions, disciplinary caricatures, and actual roles, in interviews, perhaps because the exhibit was at an early stage, it was difficult to glean whether anyone on the team had final say on any particular aspect of the exhibit. When I asked about final decisions further along in the process, Kara Blond noted that, “It’s clearly not always consensus. Most things get worked out in the process … it’s a rare argument that ends up having to get a higher level in decision making but it happens” (Blond 7.1.13). Additional Teams There is an incredible breadth of expertise beyond the Core Team that is involved in the exhibit process, especially as it moves into more developed stages. To start, there are essentially 306 two main in-house teams directly involved in the exhibit planning process: the Advisory/Extended Team and the Approval Team. Beyond that, there are many teams involved in other elements of the project. Advisory/Extended Team: This is a group of additional people the Core Team will need or wish to consult in carrying out its work, including additional scientists, educators, educators or leaders in the museum. Advisory Team members were different for different parts of the project. For the 10% Concept Narrative, they included entirely curators from Paleobiology. For the Temporary Exhibit project they included Deep Time Core Team members, Preparators and myself. Approval Team: Leadership in the museum that comment on and sign-off on the documents produced at each stage constitute the Approval Team. For both the Temporary Exhibit and Deep Time, both the ADs for Science and Public Engagement and the Assistant Directors of Education and Exhibitions were on this team, as well as the Chairman of the Paleobiology Department. It does not include the Director of the NMNH. For the Deep Time Permanent and Temporary Exhibit they were: Elizabeth Duggal, Associate Director for Public Engagement Jonathan Coddington, Associate Director for Science Brian Huber, Chair of the Department of Paleobiology Kara Blond, Acting Assistant Director for Exhibitions Shari Werb, Assistant Director for Education and Outreach In general, museum leadership, including Associate and Assistant Directors and Chairs of departments, not only set the tone and oversee its various branches or departments; they also 307 shape higher-level visioning and policy, some of which is articulated in five-year strategic planning documents. They also liaise across the Museum’s different departments and act as an interface between both the staff and the Director, and staff and other branches of the Smithsonian, including higher-level institutional leaders such as Under Secretaries, the Secretary, and the Board of Regents. As Kay Behrensmeyer described to me of her time as an Associate Director for Science: … it was great in a way because I got to know people in the other departments and appreciate what goes on up there and how they are really running interference to let the scientists do what the scientists want to do and the scientists don’t appreciate it. (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13) In their roles as interfaces up and across the institution, and in their roles as advisors or overseeing projects, ADs also a) spend almost all of their time in meetings—and hence have entirely “blue,” or full Outlook calendars—that b) differ in the extreme; as with Exhibit development/management, other managerial positions in the museum require complex knowledge across disciplines and an ability to move between contexts and departments quickly and fluently. Kay Behrensmeyer continued, saying that being a good Associate Director requires you to “change gears all the time and be quick on your feet adapting to new situations, and not getting flustered” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). I also think it is important to note here that while these positions are positions of power, many staff who take on leadership positions, and certainly those who take on Chairs or Associate Directorships from the curatorial staff, see these roles as forms of service or helping the museum, as opposed to roles that allow them to climb institutional ladders. In addition to the roles listed in the teams above, there are a number of people who are not Smithsonian staff who are contracted work on the project. Of these, only a few 308 representatives of the Design and Media firms contracted for the project attend early meetings. However there is a much broader group involved in designing, preparing and producing exhibit preparation and gallery spaces: Contracted Design & Production Team Today, for large-scale projects at NMNH, the Design team is an internationally recognized firm that wins a bid for a contract with the museum. The process for choosing a design firm to undertake Deep Time began before I started my research, and the process was not open for documentation. It is the current model for large-scale projects, that a call for proposals is issued and a number of firms submit proposals. These are reviewed, and a small number of firms are invited to an interview, after which one firm is awarded the contract. The successful Design Team works iteratively on a constant basis with the Core Team, sharing ideas, provoking discussion, gaining feedback, and then reshaping plans. In the case of Deep Time, the designers were asked to propose a media group to join from the beginning stages. This was a new way to include media and the media team’s thinking in the early process. For Deep Time, the Core or Senior team from the design firm attended the twice monthly two-day workshops in person and “standing meetings” every other week by phone or video conference. The three from R+P were Stephen Petri, the Principal overseeing the entire vision for the project on the design firm side, Fang-Pin Lee, a Senior Designer charged with drafting of most of the drawings and the vision for the overall design, and Pauline Dolovich, another Principal of the firm charged with managing the overall project management from the design firm side. R+P contracted three media firms for the project, the first of which, the Richard Lewis Media Group, acted as a kind of “key” or “umbrella” company, and two of their people—the group’s Principal, Richard Lewis, and the 309 group’s Director of Design, Mark Ostrander, ordinarily attended the workshops and standing meetings. Figure 5.7 Exhibit team meeting including R+P, additional Exhibits staff and a guest media group, June 2013.105 The contracted design firm sets the agendas for each meeting, and, for the most part, oversee the running of the meeting. There is an interesting power dynamic here because, while the designers bring ideas and drawings each week to be debated by the team, and therefore drive much of the exhibits’ development, by being contracted, their every utterance is literally owned by the Smithsonian. This became very complicated when trying to figure out whether the design contractors from R+P in fact had rights as individuals to sign my consent forms. The representatives who attend meetings from the design firm side also work with a further group of experts back at their office. The whole office includes some 35 staff, a Graphic design group of three to four people, an industrial designer, a number of technicians, junior designers, interior designers and more. At the early stages, most of the work produced by the 310 design firm is generated by a Core (senior team) group, working with a half dozen others—graphic, intermediate and junior designers. At the 10% stage, this included just a few key people in the office—one to help with technical drawings, one to keep the project organized and work on sketch-up and visualization, and a few senior graphic designers to help with renderings, visualizations, and overall graphic design thinking. This group will double in the second year of planning after the project moves past the 35% phase. During the early stages of a project, targeted “idea development” happens among the senior team. The work is incredibly focused and centers around conceptually and visually organizing ideas. The small group work tirelessly, in constant, as I heard Fang Pin-Lee and Pauline Dolovich say, “fear of the blank page.” Many dozens of sketches and concept bubbles are produced by the designers by hand and presented to the Core Team each workshop (Lee & Dolovich 8.14.13)). Once the project’s ideas, floor plan, and big specimen’s are firm enough, they can begin to be rendered by additional assistants at R+P. At this point the project, I heard a few times in my interview with Fang Pin-Lee and Pauline Dolovich, “takes on life of its own,” such that others in the firm can predict next steps (Lee and Dolovich 8.14.13). Once the project reaches 35%, there are a number of sub-contractors who sign-on to the project, made up of firms who specialize in lighting, architectural renovation work (architects and engineers), costing specialists, “image procurement experts,” security firms, and others. This is in addition to the media firms, that branch out from the key group to include additional small “hotshot” or specialist companies to help think through media for specific elements or the latest technological trends. There are thus, throughout the process, a huge number of experts on the back end of the design firm’s work that the team at Smithsonian never sees. As Pauline Dolovich and Fang Pin-Lee described: 311 Pauline: Typically, in the early stages, we keep it quite small just because the idea of development is so targeted and focused and there are only so many people who can get into the content, in the level of depth that’s needed to generate design that really works. But as soon as it’s sort of defined or there’s enough there that other people can come in and understand what we’re trying to do. So then, it’ll grow quite a bit… And then, we are primed to a whole list of sub consultants, so we have firms who have other specialties that we don’t do. So lighting, architectural renovation work, all of the engineers that we work with, costing people… The procurement people eventually. There’ll be a whole host of people that we will work with that will bring… Fang added: Yeah. Engineers, architects, costing. Yeah, lighting. Pauline: Lighting, security… Fang: Yeah, three AV firms. Pauline: Oh right, multimedia… (Lee & Dolovich 8.14.13) Pauline also described how the Deep Time project was unique in bringing a media team into the process early so that “The media can inform the design early, and they can play a key role on the team to help shape the gallery, and then that will continue to fabrication” (Dolovich 8.14.13). As the project expanded, Fang-Pin Lee continued: As Pauline was saying, at the beginning, it’s just the core senior people, and so it’s mostly speaking and planning, and generating initial ideas. Because there are not a huge volume of… It’s not hundreds of pages, but it’s dozens of pages which are much more hand sketches of the initial principles and organization of the gallery … the first while is mostly us. And the moment something is actually firm enough, we’ll do the first pass at how to make it, how to render it, how to design it. And then we will have people to assist us to help to render it and draft it. And we’re almost on the verge where the project is now becoming… It takes on a life … The more it becomes defined, it almost takes on a life of its own where there’s enough there that others could get, they could add extra conjecture what the next move would be. But the early stage is, there’s literally the fear of the blank page. And so, we three are the ones who deal with the blank page at the 312 beginning, so we have to keep the team quite small, initially. And then it literally expands exponentially as it progresses with the timeline of the gallery. (Lee 8.14.13). In-House Design & Production Team Meanwhile, the design firm, largely led by in this case Pauline Dolovich, R+P project manager, also works with the Exhibits Department on production, coordinating Exhibits work with facilities and buildings project staff. Staff include additional Project Manager/Developers, Collections Managers, Specialists, the Program Manager for Facilities and Operations (Chun-Hsi Wong), and the Associate Director for Operations (Mike McCarthy) on physical and fiscal constraints on collections and the building. It is also important to note that it is only representatives from the Design firm who attend meetings. They, in turn, are supported by a whole staff that exponentially increases at their home offices as the project progresses. The in-house production team (primarily for temporary exhibits and exhibit upkeep) is managed by a Production Project Manager, and includes staff in fabrication, graphics, modelmaking and AV/lighting. Below is a diagram showing the organization of the Exhibits Department in June 2013: 313 Figure 5.8 Exhibit staff organizational chart, June 2013.106 There are also other expertises involved in the Exhibits Department that are increasingly brought into the project. These experts and the timeline for their entry into the project vary by the specific topical, content or object requirements or their area or the project at hand. As the process went forward, Kara Blond described, “almost everybody in this department will be involved” including Developers/Managers, those charged with “conservation work and managing the process of getting 2,000 specimens prepped for new exhibit,” others “responsible for media development and implementation,” someone else on “a book and a website,” another “responsible for evaluation,” in addition to those involved in the correlated temporary exhibits. Still more staff would be, “responsible for reviewing and supporting plans for the facilities renovation” while the, “whole A/V and fabrication team will be involved in varying degrees” (Blond 7.1.13). “It really does,” she said, “touch on everything that we do.” Once the building process gets started, there will additionally be, “a whole new group of site people and electricians and plumbers and engineers and architects and construction guys and cement guys … and historic preservation people and accessibility people and safety and fire and, you know, it really starts to grow exponentially” (Blond 7.1.13). Office of Exhibits(June 2013)Fabrication Graphics Modelmaking AV/LightingCharles Noble Charles Chen Christyna Solhan Laura Donnelly-SmithStoy Popovich David Hsu Natalie Gallelli Virginia Croskey Kim Moeller Jill Johnson Elizabeth JonesWalter Skinner Lola Lancaster Kernie Harkleroad Shannon Willis Sally Love Juliana OlssonSam Yartey Patrick Rey Meg RiversJon Zastrow (detail) (Contract Support)Writing / EditingAngela Roberts-ReederJackie GubanyProduction, AV & LightingElizabeth MusteenDeep Time ProjectSiobhan StarrsActing Asst. Director for ExhibitionsKara BlondDesign and Technical ProjectsMike LawrenceExhibitDevelopmentJunko Chinen(Temporary)Production, AV & LightingDesign & TechProjectsTempExhibitDev.Deep TimeProjectWriting/EditingActing AssistantDirector forExhibitions= Staff Member 314 In the case of fossil exhibits, one of the most involved additional roles is that of the Preparator. Because the Temporary Exhibit was on an accelerated timeline, and because the working FossiLab was to be an important part of it, the vertebrate prep team was heavily involved in planning meetings. For Deep Time, the curators work extensively with preparators, although the latter rarely come to meetings. Vertebrate Preparator Generally, preparators collect in the field with research staff (curators). Preparators are thus highly trained fieldworkers, and aid in the process of fossils and surrounding rock being discovered, packed, and shipped back to the museum, after which, as their title implies, they “prepare” fossils—extracting them from their surrounding rock (matrix), cleaning them, piecing them together, repairing or conserving them, or otherwise readying them for research and storage. At Natural History, this includes, with volunteer help, making plaster jackets lined with padding to secure fossils (naturally concave or convex and very heavy) in storage, and molding and casting fossils to make copies for research and display. Importantly for exhibits, preparators also do in-house mounting of fossils, prepare fossils for exhibit display, and are instrumental to the renovation process in preparing the fossils for removal from the current exhibit, working with conservators (both in-house and, in this case, a large contracted firm) to insure that fossils are conserved or prepared for either storage or the new gallery. Particularly in the Temporary Exhibit, where it was proposed that fossils moved off display might be prepared in the hall’s live FossiLab, the preparators were quite active in early meetings and document review. 315 Collections Manager In addition, a number of experts work to oversee how specimens are maintained, removed and either put into storage or back on display. Collections Managers are responsible for caretaking and databasing of collections. A number of staff in a Department such as Paleobiology work on collections—each with a general area of focus (invertebrate, vertebrate, plants) but also some working more closely with data management. For Deep Time, there were ongoing meetings between the Exhibit Developer/Project Manager, relevant other Core Team members, and Paleobiology Collections staff to plan the removal of specimens, to assess specimen, collections, or spatial needs, and to plan the care of fossils in transition from exhibit, into collections, or out onto display. For Deep Time, this process included working to secure a large-scale conservation and preparation firm and being the main liaisons with the firm and in-house preparation and curatorial staff. There are other roles, too, that are vital to the process, but at the early stages when I observed meetings, do not attend team meetings. For instance, there are a number of people who are part of the broader Project Team, coordinated by the Deep Time Project Manager/Developer. With some overlap, the whole group from NMNH included: Deep Time Project Team Roles NMNH Deep Time Project Manager Acting Assistant Director of Exhibits Chief of Exhibit Design Lead Curator, Curator of Dinosauria Program Manager, Facilities Deep Time Initiative Lead, Curator of Fossil Mammals Preparator, FossiLab and VP Lab Liaison Museum Conservator 316 Collections Manager, Department of Paleobiology, Collections Liaison Project Manager/Developer, Office of Exhibits Program Specialist, Facilities Project Manager/Developer, Conservation COTR, Office of Exhibits At OFEO, the Office of Facilities Engineering and Operations, there is also a Project Manager tasked with coordinating a totally different team. Her role was described as: Responsible for organizing, managing, communicating, and directing necessary activities in order to complete the project on schedule and within budget; overall project coordinator and main point of contact for the capital program; primary OFEO liaison to NMNH; responsible for monitoring the coordinated progress of all projects; resolves conflicts and problems that impact schedule and budget, and secures additional funding if required; develops and refines procurement plan for design and construction services. The rest of her team included: Project Team Roles OFEO Project Manager Design Manager Construction Manager Branch Chief, North Mall Resident Engineer Zone Manager, North Mall Mechanical Engineer In addition to the Approval Team from NMNH, the OFEO side of the project requires administrative oversight. In overseeing the entire project, including the building’s management, the administrative teams included: 317 Project Administrative Teams NMNH Kirk Johnson, NMNH Director Mike McCarthy, Associate Director for Operations Elizabeth Duggal, Associate Director of Public Engagement Jonathan Coddington, Associate Director for Science OFEO Nancy Bechtol, OFEO Director Walt Ennaco, Deputy Director Debbie Nauta-Rodriguez, OPPM Acting Director Derek Ross, OEDC Director Further, beyond R+P, other big firms were contracted to work on the architectural elements of the project (restoring Beaux Arts architecture in the building) and fossil specimen removal, conservation, and re-mounting. Research Casting International (RCI) was hired for this second task. It is no small job to coordinate this mass of people who often not only have different departmental perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, but who also work in spatially and culturally detached parts of the Museum, if they work in the same building at all. The process of organizing experts around projects like Deep Time is thus a slow, iterative process, generated in multiple stages, each allowing input from relevant experts. 318 5.2 The Process: A “Big Idea” and Forming Expert Teams In the case of Deep Time, the Paleobiology Department generated initial ideas for the exhibit. This is not always the case. In fact, what is now Deep Time went through a long period of development before it manifested in its current form. When Matthew Carrano saw the job listing for the position he now has, it already made mention of a fossil hall renewal project. When he arrived, in December of 2002, meetings were already beginning to take place for this renewal. By 2004, he, Kay Behrensmeyer, Conrad Labandeira, and Scott Wing were drafting “Case Statements” for the project. Case statements were intended for fundraising and courting donors for the project. On October 7, 2005, Scott Wing presented “Deep Time” to Cristián Samper (former Director) and Larry Small (Secretary), who had shown interest in the project. However, it was not until a call for proposals in the Fall of 2008 from Samper for “Big Ideas,” research, exhibit, and outreach inititatives that the NMNH would prioritize, that Paleobiology morphed their project into a full-blown research initiative. Because of this early history of the project, the curators on Deep Time, as well as a few other curators who are not on the current exhibit team, had worked on the conceptual framing, including case statements, idea statements, early budgets, and bubble diagrams, of the project for nearly 10 years before the exhibit launch. This adds further complication to parsing out roles. This is because a) although, like all the “Big Ideas,” Deep Time was conceived as an initiative with an exhibit component, at the moment no full-fledged independent Initiative for Deep Time exists, but it has a Lead, and b) the exhibit component involves a Temporary and Permanent exhibit, and requires input from so many players. One diagram from this past year described the various pieces thus: 319 Figure 5.9 Deep Time roles draft diagram, December 2013.107 Despite these unique complexities, the process did follow along a somewhat standard model in the sense that the overall flow of the process and types of documents and roles involved are used across exhibit projects. Early documents and a presentation that was put together were not unlike standard idea statements. For the exhibits process overall, this is the most democratic part of the process in the sense that an idea statement can come from anyone. In the case of Deep Time, curators from the Paleobiology Department put it together, but in theory anyone can pull together a document that states a problem or idea, and ways of approaching it through an exhibit. The Deep Time proposal for “Big Ideas” submission was submitted by four curators from Paleobiology—Matthew Carrano (the lead scientist for the development of the exhibit), Kay Behrensmeyer, Conrad Labandeira, and Scott Wing—with input from Amy Bolton from the 320 Office of Education and Outreach, Randall Kremer from the Department of Public Affairs, and Elizabeth Musteen from Exhibits. In this case, it was presented to the NMNH Board, who voted on the proposals. Deep Time, as an exhibit and research initiative, became one of three (Deep Time, Genome, and Recovering Voices) that were selected to move forward (Wing 8.16.13). Once the “Big Idea” was chosen and had a set of core principles, the managerial and development staff needed to find a donor to make a substantial gift, enough that the museum felt comfortable moving forward with the project. In May 2012, the announcement came through that David Koch had donated $35 million for Deep Time. Once a project has secure funding, the planning can begin in earnest. The very first meeting I attended (described above) for the Temporary Exhibit planning was a good example of the kinds of discussions that take place at the beginnings of an exhibit process. The group introduced themselves, and began a discussion of the main messages, concepts, and goals for both Deep Time and the Temporary Exhibit that would be put in place during the necessary five years the main halls would be closed. It was proposed that perhaps the team could make an exhibit about making an exhibit, and that it should feature one charismatic specimen. As everyone knows, you have to have the “D” word! The group also decided there needed to be room for a temporary FossiLab—a current space where volunteers prepare fossils for research or display in the public space—in the temporary space. They also wanted to have room for testing ideas and display modes for the Deep Time exhibit incorporated into the space. The discussion did, as Michael had told me, flow like an open-forum discussion. Members of the group took turns pitching ideas, some with ubiquitous agreement, others with raised eyebrows or thoughtful looks. There was laughing, clapping, and bursts of enthusiasm throughout. This was fun. I didn’t know it yet, but this was a quintessential example of shared 321 imagining and complementary brainstorming. As with many of these early exhibit meetings, the space for pitching ideas is one of the most creative and open opportunities for group thinking. Many early conversations about exhibits and other projects at the museum begin this way. From these early conversations, in this case with an “Extended Team” of people who will influence the exhibit or have a role pertinent to its process, the Project Manager/Exhibit Developer, who for the Temporary Exhibit was Sally Love, proposes a schedule for weekly or bi-weekly meetings for a core team. When I got to the museum, the Core, Extended/Advisory, and Approval teams for both the Temporary and Deep Time exhibits had been chosen. Michael Mason, the Assistant Director for Exhibits, was charged with coordinating the members from Exhibits on the teams earlier that year; Brian Huber, Chair of Paleobiology, coordinated Temporary and Permanent Core and External/Advisory teams; Shari Werb, Assistant Director of Education and Outreach, coordinated Education’s members. Once the Core, External/Advisory, and Approval teams are in place and these early discussions with the broadest group of team members and interested parties have taken place, the process morphs into more formal (in this case weekly) Core Team meetings. For Deep Time, early meetings also involved drafting documents like an early “proof of concept,” honing big themes, goals, audiences (also potentially used for winnowing material for attracting donors) and, for Deep Time, writing a call for proposals for soliciting Design firms. While I was not privy to conversations about the choice of the Design firm, the call for proposals was released on the web, and in interviews members of R+P and the RLMG (the successful firm and media group) described some of the process to me. The call for proposals, released in May 2012 by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, was released in tandem with 322 the public announcement of the Koch $35 million donation for the exhibit. The call described the firm’s responsibilities thus: The successful firm shall provide all design services for the exhibition, including all exhibition planning, design of the exhibition and all its components (i.e. graphics, lighting, exhibition security, object mounts and multimedia/audio-visual, interactive), layout of all exhibition components, A/E services for the exhibition elements, coordination with the renovation project A/E on infrastructure requirements, project documentation, exhibition cost estimating, project management, contract administration, fabrication and installation quality assurance and coordination services, and all specifications, drawings, and associated materials necessary for the museum to proceed with the fabrication, conservation, stabilization, construction and installation of the new 24,500 square foot exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. (“New Amendment for Exhibition Design Services” 2012a) According to Angela Roberts Reeder, Exhibits Writer for the project, there was some debate at this point about whether the writing would be done in-house or contracted, and so the firms were to also show proposals with or without contracted writers. Firms were, for the first time, requested to propose a media group to work alongside them in the project. In Formal Requests for Proposals (RFPs) Firms were required to submit business and technical proposals that would be judged on “1) Plan of Accomplishment; 2) Firm’s Experience and Past Performance; 3) Management (Management Plan and Key Personnel/Subcontractors); and 4) Contract Price” ("New Amendment for Exhibition Design Services" 2012a). The project was anticipated to take 120 weeks. The team met a number of times to discuss the submitted proposals, and invited a short list of design firms to come to the Smithsonian to work with the team in short workshops. In the end, Reich and Petch, the designers who had done the Mammals and Human Origins Halls, (and had proposed the Richard Lewis Media Group, who had worked on media for Human Origins, as their media partners), were selected. 323 5.3 Defining a Shared Purpose The internal document the Core Team is tasked with drafting first is a Statement of Purpose. Because Deep Time had begun many years before I arrived, I was fortunate have been able to, instead, observe the Temporary Exhibit process from its start. I will therefore use a few examples from the Temporary Exhibit to illustrate of some of the early documents generated in an exhibits process. The Statement of Purpose guides the exhibit planning process by defining the purpose, main messages/narratives, content, space, learning outcomes, intended audiences, and design tone or approach for the proposed exhibit, named within my first week at the Museum, Putting Dinosaurs in their Place. While temporary and permanent exhibits work somewhat differently and at vastly different timescales, the basic components of the document are: The Opportunity—what the exhibit will do, why it is timely, what its overall relevance and purpose is. For the Temporary Exhibit, this section described how the fossil exhibits would be closed for renovation, and that, During those five years, potentially 35 million people will visit the Museum but not able to “see the dinosaurs.” This temporary exhibition will provide our visitors with the opportunity to see not only dinosaur and other fossils but also to “pull back the curtain” for a peek at the varied expertise that goes into making a large-scale fossil exhibition. We will also use this exhibition as a vehicle for building excitement for the new hall, prototyping approaches for the new exhibition, including communicating the main Deep Time messages, and enhance relationships with our visitors. (Reeder and Love 2012) 324 Main Messages—this section outlines the main stories the exhibit will tell. For Putting Dinosaurs in their Place, this included 1) the story of the making of an exhibition and 2) contextualizing iconic specimens within complex ecosystems. Audiences—this section outlines what the primary or target audiences are. However at Natural History, because of the huge numbers of visitors and diversity of audiences, these categories are incredibly broad. For the Temporary Exhibit, “locals” (repeat visitors) and “tourists” (single visits) were identified. Learning Outcomes—this section describes what visitors ideally gain from their experience in the exhibit. For the Temporary Exhibit, these were: -increase their understanding of the exhibition development process and the science behind the exhibits. -be excited to be a part of the development of the new Deep Time Hall. -develop an appreciation for the diversity of perspectives involved in developing a history of life/fossil exhibition. -become motivated to develop a relationship with the Museum and return to visit the new Deep Time Hall. Design and Interpretive Approach—this section describes the overall tone and design feel of the exhibit, including a few elements that might define the exhibit space. For the Temporary Exhibit, the team decided on a “behind-the-scenes” feel. Exhibit Components and Specimens—this section describes the exhibit size and space, location in the museum, as well as some of the main specimens that will be displayed. For the Temporary Exhibit, Hatcher, a cast of the Triceratops, was to be the main attraction (Reeder and Love 2012). 325 Early drafts of the Statement of Purpose are created by the writer, and sent to the Core Team by the Project Manager/Developer, and then discussed at Core Team meetings, with further revisions. The drafts circulated by email are revised and commented on via track changes. Once a draft the team likes is put together, the Writer makes a pseudo final draft for last comments from the Core Team or others with a vested interest (Myself and Kara Blond, Chief of Exhibit Development at the time were cc-ed on this). This is circulated by the Project Manager via email. Once any last comments are taken into consideration, the Project Manager sends the formal draft to the Approval Team for comments. Their comments are discussed at the next Core Team meeting; corrections and responses are put collated, and the Statement of Purpose is resubmitted. A typical Approval Team cover sheet includes the name of the project, where it will go, the proposed dates, the exhibit phase (here Statement of Purpose). It is sent to the Approval team members with a brief summary, a list of the Core and Extended or Advisory Team members, and sometimes the names of other relevant staff to the project who should receive copies. For the Temporary Exhibit, the Chief of Exhibit Development, Chief of On-site Learning, the Director, and the Curator of Dinosauria were “cc-ed” on the documents. Once approved, the team has the go ahead to take the next steps in the process. In recent years, and certainly with the advent of contracted design firms, the process works on an architectural 10%, 35%, 65%, 95% schedule. The Project Manager is responsible for coordinating this schedule with the design and architectural firm, along with buildings and management offices. For Deep Time, the final documents were sent to the Approval Team along with a few other Executive staff on April 26, 2013. It is important to note that the Director is not on the Approval Team. This is, in part, to protect the Director and the Museum should there be a major 326 controversy or question about the exhibit: “The rationale for that is, something may blow up about an exhibit, some angle of looking at it that promotes controversy or strife. And, so, you don’t want to have the person adjudicating that kind of conflict to have been compromised by, officially, approving whatever the exhibit might be” (Coddington 9.19.13). Kirk Johnson, Director, was cc-ed on exhibit packages and included in package presentations. 5.4 Exhibit Meeting Friction?Complementary Discourse at 10% There is an ebb and flow to the meetings, and also an interesting movement back and forth between shared imaginings and cohesion and the articulation of individual roles and differing perspectives. In early meetings in particular, there is thus a back and forth between translation across expertise and the slow growth of group language. Particularly at the beginning of the process, everyone knows that there is a lot of work members of the group have to do to begin to develop a shared language. 5.4.1 Friction in the Articulation of Roles There is an interesting oscillation in meetings between the implicit and explicit articulation of roles among the group, and code switching between disciplinary, group, and colloquial language. There was a fascinating phenomenon whereby discourse among the group would shift from language that implied group thinking to asserting roles or disciplinary differences. In my written meeting notes I made sure to take down when a sentence was using the plural subject “we” pertaining to the whole group, “we” pertaining to a departmental or 327 disciplinary group, or the singular “I.” The conversation very easily oscillates between these modes. Sometime the plural “we” notated group language and imagining, in other instances “we” pertained to a departmental or disciplinary expertise. The singular “I” (I think, I’m not sure that…) or possessive “my” (my thinking is that …) often also implied departmental and certainly disciplinary expertise, although more implicitly. Sometimes, it was noticeable that someone was asserting their role in the process because they jumped into a conversation having to do with a topic within their particular domain. Amy Bolton might, for instance, make it clear she wanted to speak or would jump into a conversation among curators about a scientific topic, and ask a question about visitor understanding or learning for that topic. Other times these articulations were explicit, and this usually happened in two ways. First, a role was made explicit when a member of the group might turn to a person with a specific expertise and say something like, “Well maybe, Amy, this is where you might have something to say about this.” A non-expert over a topic was gesturing or volleying to an expert over a topic. Second, roles were made explicit by the person speaking—an expert or non-expert over a topic asserting their own position or role in relation to the topic. Sometimes it came as away to generally frame a comment or discussion (“from a visitor experience perspective I would say that”), sometimes a way to humbly put forth an opinion about a topic a person had no particular expertise on (“I’m not an educator, but” or “I’m just the writer, but”), and sometimes to assert authority over a topic (“this is where vertebrate paleontology can tell us a lot about” or “as an educator I would say that”). It is clear that sometimes this shift in voice acts as a form of subtle authority—especially for Exhibits or Education staff (as an educator, I think …). In other instances it was a form of humility in a room of big personalities (I might just be the Developer 328 but …). Curators were more likely to assert this authority in plural form, saying things in reference to their field (Paleobotanists tend to think that …). There are also tensions within different roles. For instance, designers described feeling a tension between their roles as designers in the aesthetic elements of the design, their role as communicators of content and messaging, and their role in placing or displaying objects or the content itself and its specificity: “Especially in the beginning,” Fang-Pin Lee said, “they’re not together and it’s how do you play against the tension of all three elements to find that rhythm or form that will satisfy all the requirements.” (Lee 8.14.13). 5.4.2 Translating Frictions In the first meetings, translating is sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit. Suddenly after a few hours at a meeting I would notice that a term someone had used earlier, never used before that meeting, would be in common parlance among the group. In the case that translations were explicit, members of the group might ask for a definition of another team member’s expressions, or remark or joke about the act of translation. In early meetings, Fang-Pin Lee and the other designers used the term “move” a number of times, until after she said, “that would be a big move,” Scott Wing finally interjected with, “I’m sorry, but can you define move for us?” A “move,” Fang-Pin Lee explained, was a large design element that characterized a space (Lee 2.5.13). For any expert language, as Angela Roberts Reeder said in an interview, language that is built up around disciplinary expertise, while “necessary for the type of work that the experts do” isn’t always understandable or helpful to people without that expertise (Reeder 7.31.13). Much of the team’s early work necessarily involved translating across these languages. 329 Likewise, certain scientific terms, because they were aligned with areas of exhibit design, had to be defined for the group. As Richard Lewis said in an interview, one of the biggest skills for all of the non-Paleontologists at meetings is to become conversant enough with the topics that they can engage fluidly in conversations: … we want to be in a position where the people who are the most knowledgeable in the world about a particular subject can feel like they’re having a conversation with us and we’re holding up our end and we’re playing our part in that conversation. We’re able to challenge and we’re able to question. We’re never going to know as much, but we get to a level where we can be, sort of, interested and engaged participants in the whole process of telling that story. (Lewis 8.3.13) Likewise, in an interview, Kara Blond, Acting Director for Exhibits who had spent time not just as an Exhibit Developer but a whole career translating complex content for the public, said that “you need to know enough of those languages to translate across them” (Blond 7.1.13). She compared this work of translation to a previous career as a reporter where, she said, I knew enough of the language of the courts to ask good questions but I was ignorant enough to be able to say like, “That doesn’t mean anything to me.” “You’re going to have to say it in a different way.” And then to be able to say back to them, “This is what I’m hearing you say. Is that what you mean? And, that word in particular could mean thirty different things. Which of those meanings do you intend?” (Blond 7.1.13). Indeed, Kara said, “the advantage of being a generalist is that you don’t know those languages” (Blond 7.1.13). Angela Roberts Reeder similarly conveyed the importance of having non-experts in the content of the exhibit, saying, “I think that’s one of the advantages of having a writer who isn’t a subject expert. I can sit in a meeting with our curators and ask the questions that our visitors need me to ask in order to get at the essence of the story” (Reeder 7.31.13). Designers likewise noted that they had to find a balance between being “dogmatic” and “open-minded” in these early discussions (Lee 8.14.13). 330 There are other kinds of translations that take place when visitors attend meetings, and members of the core group translate terms that have become adopted as group language, like “porkchops,” for outsiders. Throughout the process, the Exhibit Developer/Project Manager in particular has the job of translating across all the different expertises, both at Team meetings, and between outside meetings they have with other institutional or external experts and the Core Team. Exhibits team members also have to translate the vast numbers of perspectives and expertises involved in other parts of the building renovation and development in a project of Deep Time’s scale. This is incredibly important because “the relationship between the facility side of the house and the museum side of the house is really the most critical relationship because it’s where the rubber meets the road” (Blond 7.1.13). 5.4.3 Friction as Political Work Clearer articulations of friction are clearly power plays in meetings. Each member of the team, particularly at the early stages, is in some ways experimenting with how best to articulate their argument, convince others of their ideas, or see their ideas come to fruition. As Richard Lewis said of entering into one of these exhibit-planning spaces for the first time and the uniqueness of Smithsonian exhibit planning: … it’s very often the case that we’ll go into there to groups and it will be clear that one single charismatic person is going to try to carry the load forward … And our relationship there will be all about how we deal with that individual. And here, as you know from sitting at the table, you have powerful different constituencies represented and needing to work together and just a very complex … It’s not that there are just a lot of people around the table because we see that a lot. But you’ve got a lot of people around the table who, each of whom does have some degree of power. Each of whom has some authority that they can actually wield. And that makes it really really interesting just to kind of be at the 331 table and try to figure out how we will work best, how we will integrate ourselves most effectively within that model. (Lewis 8.2.13) With multiple, big personalities at the table, who tend to be more vocal, it’s sometimes difficult, intimidating and frustrating for non-scientists to assert their ideas and expertise at the table. As Kara Blond said of this process, “I mean some of it is being willing to stand up for what you think is right even in the face of a pretty hot response or a lot of push back. And some of it is knowing when to fold” (Blond 7.1.13). In literature on the anthropology of politics, Fredrick Bailey writes about the ways that politics is not only about the ways in which individuals “advance themselves,” but the “tactics” employed, which work similarly “whether it is a principle or an individual which is being advanced” (Bailey 1969:5). These game tactics for certain ideological positions are certainly at play. However, as I mentioned elsewhere, normative tactics for these debates are not always shared. This was one of the biggest challenges for many audience advocates. As Angela Roberts Reeder told me, moving from OEC to NMNH: Moving here, I had a conversation I had very with Michel Mason. He said to me, “I just want you to remember, you’re the client now. And, as the writer for Natural History, you have a standard to maintain and that standard is not just about the science, it’s about how we communicate to our visitors, and you have to hold the team to that standard.” So, that’s a trickier position to hold than I had before at OEC because I really have to think about what battles are worth fighting; how to negotiate and then where to say no: “No, we will not do that in this exhibit. I will not write those words.” Or to say, “No, the label isn’t going to be that long, this is our standard. Yes, I know it seems arbitrary to you [the curator], but this is the museum’s standard.” I’m still navigating that. (Reeder 7.31.13) The other important piece to remember is that even as the group develops a rapport and set of shared expressions and ideas, new people, visitors, or guests to these meetings also, at 332 various times, come in and out of these conversations. In the second two-day workshop I attended, for instance, the entire staff from Paleobiology was invited to join the meeting from 10-noon to discuss ideas they had submitted for stories to be included in the exhibit. This is an important way that other people in the museum who also have expertise in various parts of the exhibit’s content and process feel that they are included, and support the project when their expertise is required later. For the scientific content of the project, this includes an added, ad-hoc layer of translation, where other scientists from the department might join in on a meeting to talk about a specific topic, for which they have very sophisticated language to express core ideas. At the beginning of the second workshop where Paleo staff were invited, the Exhibit Developer commented that “Scott has offered to translate.” Scott Wing replied, “Yes, I’m UN certified.” Moreover, a visiting scientist will not have been involved in the translations and imaginings that have already allowed the group cohesion and shared understanding, so the whole group has to work to help them understand how their expertise fits into ongoing conversations and ideas. Similarly, before each stage of the exhibit planning process, the team would present draft versions of the exhibit plans to the Exhibits Department, Paleobiology Department, and the Approval Team. Each case involved new kinds of translation, and often showcased how far along the group had come in its shared meanings and understandings. Meetings are thus not only about planning among the Core Team. Core Team meetings and other affiliated meetings with the exhibit can be used to strategically include other staff or important players in the process. This encouragement of “buy in” is true more broadly of meetings at the Museum. As Kay Behrensmeyer said of her time as Associate Director for 333 Science, assembling meetings becomes a “kind of creative communications design” in which actors or resources can be mobilized: I found that … Calling meetings became a kind of creative communications design, or … that you could bring people together and if you ran things in an organized way, that you could make things happen that weren’t happening otherwise. That seemed to me more like leadership and organization and then with good people, things would happen. (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). Figure 5.10 Exhibit meeting with Director Kirk Johnson, May 2013.108 One example of the kinds of political work that happens through the exhibit-planning process was exemplified by a draft presentation of the 10% package to the Museum’s Approval Team and other vested departments. In March of 2013, the Team presented a draft of the 10% package to the Paleobiology Department, Exhibits Department, and the Approval Team and a 334 number of other staff and Executive staff in three separate PowerPoint presentations, with time for questions and comments afterward. All of the groups were encouraged to provide conversational and formal feedback via email. The Approval Team presentation was the most tense, as members of the Approval Team represent administrators and others with some ability to veto group decisions or plans. Approval Team members’ questions and formal responses sent to the group required formal responses from the Core Team, discussed in subsequent meetings in which the Team worked on corrections, changes and responses based on these comments. 5.4.4 Complementary Group Imaginings It was particularly interesting to note the differences in conversations before and after breaks or lunch, because language or ideas that had been used earlier had clearly sunk in and were used regularly or, after some time away from the meeting, were contested or rejected. Once implicit or explicit translation of a topic, idea, or term had taken place, the group might adopt it. Sometimes, group imagining occurred, not when a term that needed translation was offered up, but when the group was hashing out a general topic, and everyone was throwing out ideas, using whatever creative terms they came up with to describe their thinking. Many, many, ideas and terms are tossed into the conversation—some of them are volleyed among the group, some are offered once and then never return. Of those that are volleyed, a few stick, and these become group visionings and language. Sometimes it is after a great deal of argument, other times this process seems to happen organically. My favourite of these was during an early discussion in the second workshop about to what level of detail the exhibit could illustrate past environments or seamless narratives when there are things scientists don’t know and holes in the fossil record. Kay Behrensmeyer offered the comment: “We can’t say we’re not going to do it because we 335 don’t have all the data—it’s an Informed imagination.” Minutes later, that term was echoed by two other curators in the room, one saying “Everyone knows we don’t know everything … who else can give it a stab that the people in the room. Some dates are irrefutable, others are unknown. As Kay Behrensmeyer said, it’s an ‘informed imagination’” (Behrensmeyer; Sues 1.3.13). At a more basic level, group cohesion also happens through the invention or adoption of shared terminology for specific elements in the proto exhibit design. Many of these terms were initiated by the designers or were terms in common parlance in design worlds. One such term was “porkchops,” which was used to describe placeholders in the exhibit design for content that would take up floor space (any space that was not a throughway). It became common very quickly in the design process to have elaborate conversations about what was going to be in this-or-that porkchop, or how much space the porkchops were taking up. These terms are important not only to discuss imagined spaces and things, but in the group’s shared identity though shared language and joking. Unlike “porkchops,” which denoted physical things in the exhibit, other shared language initiated by the designers related to broader conceptual framing and tone of the imagined hall. There are also parallels in thinking between some of the fields of expertise at the table. For instance, designer Fang-Pin Lee said of scientists’ practice: … the way that scientists think about the world and the way they analyze, and they debate, and try to think of hypotheses, is not too dissimilar from the way designers have been trained to think creatively, and analyze, and problem solve. So to me, that parallel way of the thinking process between designers and scientists have been to me, fascinating and wonderful. And I’m so glad that, although I … When I chose to study design, I still ended up doing science. (Lee 8.14.13) 336 These parallels, and the important interstices in which the group finds themselves at the early stages of exhibit planning, become creative and rewarding professional experiences for many staff, even as they face challenges and differences. 5.4.5 Creativity and Innovation as Complementarity Many of the discussions in meetings that aired extremes in opinion rendered highly creative and hybrid solutions to group problems, in science, tone and design. What I heard in interviews that I was not expecting, was that many people found working with other experts to be one of their most professionally exciting, creative, and rewarding experiences, despite differences of opinion and practice, and despite the many outward or gossiped-about frictions I encountered. It was at these boundaries of knowledge and perspective that many people found themselves the most inspired and driven to do good work. As Fang-Pin Lee said of working with interdisciplinary teams: I was inspired mostly probably by curators and their passion for what they do, their extreme passion for what they do. And their fascination and their relentlessness. And so, working with them directly has probably been one of my greatest pleasures in my work and going behind the scenes, interacting with them, arguing with them, celebrating with them. And then being able to touch the things and then having them open the doors to the wonder of those things for me. And I’ve always found through them, some of them, especially the scientists I’ve work with have been the most creative people I’ve met. (Lee 8.14.13) While some of this work can thus be difficult, writers and other exhibits staff do feel that having in-house scientists as resources in-house is a distinctive advantage: Having more access to the scientists and subject specialists … has been great. And the scientists that we have here want to get their message out. For the most part, they’ve all 337 been willing to work with me and it’s been really great and having those resources here” (Reeder 7.31.13). As Kim Moeller, in-house Design (and previous Graphics supervisor), said of the process: If you’ve already done it once, I think there’s a healthier respect back and forth. I think that when the science people come here they don’t know us [Exhibits], and vice versa on some level. And I think once you go through a project together, you have a much better understanding about how projects work to make it an exhibit and what people’s roles are and what their talents are and their education is, and all of those things … You come through the project and now they [scientists] know … and there’s a huge amount of respect. And that’s the nature of the beast right there. I don’t know anybody sitting around the table when we first have that meeting, and by the end of that project, whether its six months later or a year later or five years later, you get it. You all get it. (Moeller 6.12.13) Initial frictions and negotiations thus also forge important relationships and respect across disciplines that ordinarily remain siloed in the museum. 5.5 The 35% Phase: Backstage/Front Stage Over the conceptual meetings, the two-day workshops of the 35% process, I sat in on meetings. As I described in Chapter 3, the process continued among the team toward 65% over the year that I wrote this thesis. One of the most noticeable changes during the 35% phase in terms of expertise, was that in many instances, there seemed to be increasing numbers of meetings among staff outside of Core Team meetings that shaped the group’s work and relationships. Some of these meetings were institutionalized or formalized, others were tacit. In the early stages of the 10% phase, there was a strong push to invite members of the Department to meetings so that they didn’t feel left 338 out. However, during the 35% process, one of the most interesting formal developments in the realm of expertise was the introduction of curatorial content meetings. These meetings took place between the three curators and other Paleo staff where the team was trying to plan the major narratives for each section of the hall. They emerged as a way for the curatorial team and relevant members of the scientific staff to draw on each other’s expertise in honing main messages for each of the time period sections of the exhibit. Each meeting, convened by Matthew Carrano, was about a time period that would be represented in the exhibit. The group always included Kay Behrensmeyer and Scott Wing and one or two other curators who had expertise in that particular area. They would meet at a local café and record their conversations. The purpose of these meetings was to first, hash out the most important stories or ideas that needed to be conveyed in each time period, and second, relieve the Core Team of conversations that involved more jargon-laden, “in the weeds” scientific debate. After each meeting they, myself, or Angela Roberts Reeder would upload the audio recordings to a shared online space. In turn, Angela Roberts Reeder would pare the discussions down to produce a simplified document with hierarchized messages, essentially a content brief for each time period. These could then be circulated to the designers and the rest of the team. As we have seen, it is at this phase that R+P also described an exponential growth in experts at their firm, and sub-contracted through other firms. 339 5.6 Chapter 5 Conclusion This chapter has described group dynamics in exhibits development. First, I used my own experience as an entry into the ways that the museum is divided spatially and disciplinarily, and the ways in which perceptions play out along disciplinary lines. Second, I described the process for exhibit development, and the expanding roles involved in it as it moves into later phases. Third, I described the processes involved in meetings and other exchanges whereby experts of different disciplinary backgrounds, modes of communication, and professional cultures come together to exchange ideas and vie for conceptual power. Fourth, I showed that despite many of the performative elements of this process and its inherent frictions, unique spaces of complementarity emerge at these intersections, where paradoxical missions and values collide is described as sometimes professionally difficult but often important for balanced, imaginative and creative exhibits production. 340 6. Disciplinary Dynamics: The Roots of Frictions and Complementarities The current process for Deep Time is an artefact of many shifts that came before it. All of these political intricacies, group processes and roles have been shaped by a series of institutional and disciplinary changes that took place from the late-1950s onward. This chapter is about those changes—namely the steady growth of niche specializations in both the research and outreach sides of the museum and fiscal changes in the late-1980s that lead to the increased use of outside contracts for exhibits work. These, in turn, led to interdisciplinary teams producing exhibits alongside large-scale contracted design firms. I thus describe two major movements in exhibits production that set the stage for the process of exhibit making today. The first is the emergence of museum disciplines and expertises, institutionalized into distinct departments from the 1950s onward, beginning largely with the birth of exhibit design as a distinct field. The second is the process in which people speaking different disciplinary languages and practicing distinct professional cultural conventions increasingly came together to produce exhibits. The 1950s marked the introduction of exhibit design as a standalone field. Up to that time, curators, with the help of their assistants, would improve exhibits largely by cutting out things they felt were unnecessary or outdated, adding more ‘attractive’ specimens, re-ordering objects, or adding a small map, painting, piece of text, or if they were getting very fancy, lantern slides. When Gus Cooper set about renovating invertebrate exhibits, his main priority was to ensure the exhibits were up to date with current scientific data and organizational schemes (Bassler 1931:101). For all the objects: 341 Descriptive labels accompany all these, and there is constant shift and change to keep them properly arranged and up to date. The whole serves as a compendium of reference to the student or as an attractive display to the one of more casual interest, from which all may profit according to their desires (Wetmore 1932:16). Curators and their scientific aides were also the only staff tasked with working on exhibitions. On February 23, 1944, Gilmore wrote to Head R.S. Bassler that in Vertebrate Paleontology: The set-up of the organization is as follows: Curator Associate Curator (vacant for the duration) Clerk-Stenographer Chief Preparator Preparator Jr. Scientific Aide-preparator (Gilmore 1944) In another report to Bassler in 1944, Gilmore outlines the daily work of the scientific staff by percentages of time necessary. They were characterized thus: 25% Correspondence With the daily grist of official letters, some addressed personally and others referred by the division of correspondence, together with specimens upon which official examinations and reports are requested, the routine of correspondence is undertaken. The letters range from simple requests for information to quite complicated scientific problems, including often subjects that must be handled with much care and tact. Some of the letters indicate the interest of visitors in the Museum because they offer valuable suggestions. Others are on subjects showing the writer has a disturbed mind and must be treated gently. Still others which need extra special care are upon the relation of geology and religion … 35% Accessions & Preparatory Work Following the correspondence, comes the preparation of reports upon specimens sent in for identification, and Museum routine work upon accessions which have arrived … At this point the preparation of material even for preliminary study is a time-consuming item. Preparatory work on invertebrate fossils requires perhaps the most time, because 342 first they are so numerous and, next, they have to be etched out with acid, or treated with an alkali, or broken out with a hammer, or actually carefully cut out with small picks and needles … The preparation of sets for schools or educational institutions is an item which adds much to this part of the work. 10% Visitor Interactions Visitors must now be reckoned with. In ordinary times these are members of the public, teachers, etc., after some special information, or visiting university and school classes and research students with their problems needing advice and references, or material to study. Today, the war agencies occupy much time since many of the experts of the newly formed bureaus come to us for instruction as to how to set up their new offices for assembling their very confidential facts, relating to all branches of geology. 30% Reduction Backlog & Research, Miscellaneous The remaining 30% can now be spent on the reduction of the backlog and original research upon the collections, if other duties such as the care of the library, work upon the exhibition, preparation of manuscripts, reading proof, reviewing scientific articles submitted for publication, and committee meetings, special reports, and conferences do not intervene.(Bassler 1944b) Clearly, Geology is making a plea for additional staff, however the overall characterizations of the work scientific staff undertakes us important information. Collections preservation and management, public outreach and visitor services, and exhibits work were all being accomplished by staff in Geology. Moreover, Bassler then went on to describe “Workload Definitions” for these and other tasks: Supervision Operating a department and its divisions. Includes memoranda to staff; conferences with staff; requisitions for services; conferences with M. & O.; annual, quarterly, and special reports; committee meetings and reports. Current Information 343 Correspondence; visitors; identifications and reports; new accession contacts; special exhibitions; distribution of specimens; spot information by telephone, letter and conference; traveling and loan exhibitions and materials. Preservation of Collections Essential custodial work on collections. Includes cleaning, restoring, recording, storing, inspecting and treating specimens. Exhibition Planning, designing, research, and selection of exhibits. Includes also laboratory work, installing, labeling, inspecting, dismantling, and removal. Accessions Acquiring, receiving, preparing, classifying, cataloging, labeling, and distribution exhibition study or storage additions to the collections. Scientific Work Research on and identification and arrangement of collections. Explorations and field work. Preparation of manuscripts. Preparation and presentations of lectures. Special assignments. Backlog Work to be done. Includes reduction in accumulated specimens neither identified, classified, catalogued nor properly distributed; improvement of stored and study collection for a better utility; reduction in accumulated repairs and restorations of specimens; and acceleration of research programs on a basis more in keeping with the potential scientific value of the collections. J. E. Graf (Bassler 1944b) This was about to change. The post-War era saw the birth of many new specializations, including exhibit design. Professionalization of design created a dramatic shift in the role of the curator and in institutional culture at the Smithsonian. 344 6.1 Modernization: The Birth of Professionalized Design & Paleobiology A recent book on exhibits at the Smithsonian lays out some of these changes clearly (Post 2013). Post writes that, “Bauhaus-trained designers, intent upon obtaining maximum communication, began to study circulation carefully . . [and] break displays down into small units to be viewed in definite sequence” (Post 2013:178-9).11 Ideas about how visitors might encounter or learn in exhibits were changing. In a critique of a newly modernized Textile Hall, Eugene Ferguson wrote to Director Frank Taylor in 1959: A museum is something like a Sunday school in that the visitors to either are not subject to the same rules of mental discipline as they are in an ordinary school. They will carry out their part of the learning process when it is attractive to do so … the incentive provided by examinations and grades are not available to the curator, any more than they are to the Sunday school teacher.” (Eugene S. Ferguson to Frank Taylor, 15 July 1959, RU623, Box 2 cited in Post 2013:157) Suddenly, it was assumed that visitors needed to be attracted to an exhibit. Moreover, there were now critiques of exhibits that attempted “to be a text book, with illustrations and objects supporting the text” (Eugene S. Ferguson to Frank Taylor, 15 July 1959, RU623, Box 2 cited in Post 2013:157). Secretary Wetmore, now 66 and ready to continue his own research, could tell that the institution’s priorities were shifting, and resigned in 1952 (Post 2013:31). Leonard Carmichael, a psychologist by training who had just arrived at Smithsonian in 1954, was supportive of this new thinking. As we will see in the next chapter, where Wetmore had been reluctant to put funds anywhere other than in the institution’s scientific mission, Carmichael supported exhibits work. In fact, while still President of Tufts, Carmichael had almost turned down the Secretarial position because “when he inspected the exhibits they ‘looked so bad’” 11 Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, Nashville Tenn 1979, 345 (Post 2013: 32). In addition, in 1954 Congress approved a $360,000 appropriation for Exhibits Modernization—a comprehensive program to revitalize Smithsonian exhibits. With new leadership redirecting funding and the support for Exhibits Modernization, a slough of new professional staff came into Natural History to carry out this work. There were important contexts for these shifts. First, ‘immersive’ techniques based on dioramas were being pursed at a number of U.S. museums, most notably with the introduction of “period rooms” such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new American Wing (Post 2013: 26-7). Second, world’s fairs in the 1930s had popularized new, bold, aesthetics for exhibits, using bright colours, bold shapes and modern fonts. Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art were beginning to adopt these styles. In 1950, under the influence of Charles Eames, the Museum of Modern Art published a ‘Good Design’ series (Post 2013: 32). By contrast, long left unkempt in the Depression and War eras, exhibits at the National Museum were dull and dusty, and they had never been colourful. Thus the term Design, formerly reserved for furniture (Eames), architecture (Saarinen), automobiles, home and store interiors, and show windows, became adopted in museums. “Exhibit designers,” a wholly new term, were now being employed at department stores and trade shows to design windows and displays (Post 2013:29). By fiscal year 1953, the Natural History Museum had its first Exhibits Preparators, John Anglim and A. Andrews listed in the Annual Report (1954). In that same year, Franklin L. Pearce was hired as Geology’s first Exhibit Specialist, proof that individual departments were being granted staff explicitly devoted to exhibits work. By 1954, Anglim’s title was changed to “Exhibits Specialist,” and he had a staff of five Exhibits Workers (1955). In 1955, eight men were on staff as Exhibits Workers (1956). By 1956, the same year that Gus Cooper became Head Curator of Geology, Frank Taylor, the new Director who saw it as his duty to oversee exhibits, 346 promoted Anglim to “Chief Exhibits Specialist” (1957). In that role, Anglim supervised two Exhibits Specialists, Roland O. Howard and Benjamin Lawless, and the Museum’s first Exhibit Designer, William D. Crockett. The following year, William L. Brown (famous for his work on the Fenykovi elephant) was hired as chief Taxidermist, the first ever on Smithsonian staff. Thus began the first Exhibits staff and a fledgling Department. By 1959, these staff were fully devoted to Exhibits Modernization activities. That year, too, Ann Karras, the designer who would design the new fossil halls, came on board. From there, staff devoted to exhibits grew exponentially, including two assistants for the Exhibit Modernization program.12 The new Exhibits staff worked in a large fabrication shop, at the time called a “laboratory,” on 24th Street in Georgetown, supervised by Lawless (Post 2013:33). In these new spaces, exhibits staff experimented with techniques such as silk-screening, “photo-murals,” “audio-visuals,” and theatrical lighting (Post 2013:34). Designers were, for the first time, concerned with “sight lines” that directed viewers’ gaze. Design elements had an order—a beginning, middle and end—as had been the Bauhaus model. Objects were to be chosen carefully to convey important ideas. As historian Gary Kulik has written, “Once the arrangement was no longer taxonomic, the form that exhibitions took became an issue in ways that it never had before” (Kulik cited in Post 2013: 34). Very quickly, designers became experts at creating new contexts for objects (Post 2013:34). 12 In that year Roland O. Hower was appointed as Supervisor of the Renovation of Natural History Exhibits. Thomas Baker, and Peter DeAnna, Carl Alexander, an Exhibits Worker who would go on to be head of Production in the Exhibits Department, the first Production Supervisor, Bela S. Bory, hired in 1961, and a Museum of Natural History Laboratory Assistant Chief for the Office of Exhibits, A. Gilbert Wright, appointed in 1963. 347 6.1.1 The First Narratives and Writers By the 1960s, professional designers were thinking differently about text. Their hierarchized “scripts” were silk-screened onto the walls in bright colours. Labels, for the first time, “not only identified objects but might also address their meaning” (Post 2013:xi). Further, labels no longer merely described individual things, but were meant to tell a story, encountered in sequence. As Post argued about exhibits at the new Museum of History and Technology, exhibits went from collections-driven to neo-traditionalist, story-driven, and postmodern and immersive (Post 2013:xv). Alongside lighting, exhibits professionals borrowed the idea of exhibits “scripts” from theatrical models. The 1950s marked the first use of the term ‘themes,’ to describe exhibits. However it was not until the 1970s that exhibits had fully defined storylines and book-like titles. It became clear that alongside designers, Smithsonian would need to find writing professionals to produce exhibit text. Thus in 1957, Smithsonian hired its first writer-editor, George Weiner. Weiner, in a later document, reflected on the period that, as Smithsonian had begun to hire new professionals for design and production: … the labels continued to remain a problem of the first order. They were long, typographically unattractive, and frequently grammatically faulty and couched in belletristic style or in esoteric scientific and technological circumlocutions.(Weiner 1963:144) Thus from the very beginnings of Exhibits writing as a standalone field we can see the roots of still ongoing debates about resolution, detail, and tone. 348 6.1.2 A New Internal Dynamic New professionals devoted to design created new internal cultural dynamics at the Museum. Frank Taylor, the new Director of the USNM beginning in 1962, later recalled that the changes “sort of surprised, and in some cases, shocked old-line curators” as designers felt equally entitled to “a prestigious status in the Smithsonian” (Post 2013:33). In his research, Post had the opportunity to interview one of these new upstart designers, Benjamin Lawless, before he died. Lawless recalled an illuminating anecdote from the 1950s: A new designer approached Taylor, saying that a curator had brushed him off because “working with you artistic types is not in my job description.” Post quotes Lawless: Taylor jammed on his fedora (not a good sign) and walked over to this fellow’s office, followed by Jack Anglim and myself. He asked to see his job description, looked it over, and then asked the curator why he wouldn’t do the work. When he heard the same thing about it ‘not being in my job description,’ Taylor re-wrote the description on the spot, handed it back, and said, ‘Now it is.’ That got around. (Benjamin Lawless to Post, 28 September 2011, in Post 2013:33) Thus began the sometimes fractious and otherwise creative tension between curators and designers (Post 2013:33). As Post writes, “To designers, curators often seemed terminally unimaginative. Curators saw designers as touchy, irreverent, and ‘given to gimmicks’” (Post 2013:34). Moreover, as Taylor commented: “The basic problem here is that most (not all) curators consider exhibits a nuisance” (Post 2013:128). This was also the first time that textual production involved a clashing of expertise. Curators had difficulty distilling their ideas and descriptions into simpler text, and, as Post writes, “Curators with the most education often seemed to have the most difficulty with exhibit scripts” (Post 2013:128–9). As writer-editor for the museum in 1960, George Weiner, wrote to 349 Frank Taylor, “When it comes to turning out suitable labels that can appeal to our broad popular audience, most of the curators fall quite flat” (RU334, Box 114 cited in Post 2013:128–9). Weiner later reflected, though, that, after some adjustment: Although the idea of having a professional editor to rewrite labels was new to museums, curators have not resented this intrusion into what was once their domain. To be sure, it took a certain amount of diplomacy to convince a scientist that he would not be less well regarded by his colleagues if he permitted an animal “having unguligrade locomotion” simply to “walk on its hooves.” And, of course, a man with pride of authorship in a 200-word opus would not be human if he remained unperturbed when his label was whittled down, however precisely, to a seventy-five-word skeleton of its former self. But so many curators entered into the spirit of label editing so willingly that their initial submissions became shorter, more terse, and consequently less in need of severe editing. (Weiner 1963:144) The fullest manifestation of this new dynamic was at the new Museum of History and Technology, signed into being by Eisenhower in Public Law 573 with a $33.7 million appropriation in June 1956 (Post 2013:41). The new building was furnished with a cabinet shop, machine shop, and facilities for paints, plastics, and silk-screening (the beginnings of Graphics labs), and fourth- and fifth-floor offices where designers would have offices alongside curators; the first with large rooms for drawing tables, the later with big desks and bookshelves (Post 2013:42). Soon, the Natural History building was equipped with such shops, although as a much older institution, research remained the main priority. By 1958, there was a new standard procedure in place for curators to submit exhibit scripts, via the Director’s Office, to Exhibits (Cowan 1968). 350 6.1.3 Modernized Paleo Exhibits Planning For the fossil halls, as we saw in Chapter Four, the first exhibits to be produced under this new paradigm were designed by Ann Karras and, later, Barbara Craig. In 1958, Karras was sent to tour other natural history museums in the U.S. that had recently refurbished their Paleo halls. Upon her return, she reported that: Where the design was instead arrived at through an understanding of the specimens, with their enhancement above any personal preference, the completed exhibition was most successful. Familiarizing one’s self with some of the other museums leads one to realize that it is not so much the type of exhibit design used—or the radical or conservative, modern or traditional approach—that is important. Rather it is thinking behind the choice and an understanding of the specimens that controls the success of the artistic endeavor. (Karras 1958) With this philosophy of conceptual thinking guiding design and specimen choice, Karras and the Exhibits Department began planning a series of four paleontology halls: Fossil Plants & Invertebrates, Fossil Fishes & Amphibians, and Prehistoric Mammals, all opened in 1961, and Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles, opened in 1963. In total, the exhibits team to work on these new halls included 16 in-house staff—three Curators, three Designers, two Renovation Supervisors, three Renovation Assistants, an Exhibits Specialist, two Artists, a Vertebrate Paleontology Prep Lab Head and exhibits and two Vertebrate Preparators. A Work Order document from the SI Archives listed: Curators: tasked with content, script writing, object lists Invertebrates, Fossil Fishes and Amphibians, Prehistoric Mammals: David Dunkle, Lewis Gazin Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles: Nick Hotton 351 Exhibits/production staff: “Do all construction, lighting, painting, silk screen printing, plastics work, metal fabrication, specimen installation, graphics, illustration, etc. necessary to produce the following units” Designers: Ann Karras (FY1958-1963), Barbara Craig (FY1963), Chris Karras (FY1961-1963) Renovation Supervisor: Roland Hower (to FY1961), John Anglim (to FY1964) Renovation Assistants: Thomas Baker (to FY1961), Peter DeAnna (FY 1960), Julius Tetrick (FY1961 to 1964) Exhibits Specialists: A. Joseph Andrews (FY 1962, FY1963) Artists: Jay H. Matternes (Mural Paintings, Fossil Mammals), Norman Neil Deaton (Dioramas, Dinosaurs) Preparators: Paleo Lab will install the skeletons mounted on rough panels, and we will use hardware cloth and plaster to form the necessary contours and textured backgrounds to attain the effect desired by the designer. VP Exhibits Specialist (Head of the Lab): Franklin L. Pearce Preparators: Leroy Glenn, Gladwyn (Tut) Sullivan ("Master Work Order and Summary" 1961) Once the vertebrate halls were open, Lewis Gazin, reflected on these various expertises in a talk about the Dinosaur halls, saying: Concluding, I would like to commend particularly Mrs. Ann Karras, the exhibits designer who is primarily responsible for the attractiveness of the fossil mammal hall, and her several assistants who so ably carried out her plans; Mr. Chris Karras who designed the arrangement of the fossil exhibits in the rotunda; and last but not least our own laboratory crew in the division of vertebrate paleontology who under the direction of Mr. Franklin Pearce completed the preparation, restoration, and mounting, and the final installation of the many skulls and skeletons in both of the halls of vertebrate paleontology in the rotunda. (Gazin 1963) 352 6.1.4 The Disciplining of Paleobiology Not only was Exhibits a standalone expertise, but Paleobiology was growing in strength and specialty. In the wake of Sputnik, the U.S. government began pouring money into science. Across its units, Smithsonian saw a huge increase in its scientific staff and their budgets (Yochelson 2003:141). Mineralogy and Oceanography (both of which had many crossovers with paleontological science) received particularly large allocations. Invertebrate paleontology, in particular, benefited greatly from this new support. Richard Fiske, Mineralogist and later Director, described the period as a hiring “orgy” (Fiske 9.25.13). Fresh out of university, the new young staff were a tour de force in the museum, especially as the Museum lost many of its pre-War era staff. From 1950 to 1963, research curators in Paleontological disciplines nearly doubled. In this new wave of change, the scientists called together a Senate, not unlike those at universities, to represent their institutional interests. And, at long last, Congress approved funds (plans had been approved in 1930) for new wing additions to the building (now being called simply the Natural History Building, “NHB,” as new Smithsonian museums began to sprout up) (Kellogg 1959:52). This energy and space was harnessed by the (then) Head Curator of Geology, Gus Cooper. Cooper had arrived in 1930, and so had seen the Museum and its science through the Depression and a World War. By the time the war ended Cooper knew that research interests in paleontology were changing across the field. At Natural History, Cooper himself was at the forefront of these new trends and indeed, drove the sea change in the trajectory of the Department. Cooper was a taxonomist and stratigrapher, two more traditional pursuits in paleontology. However, in avidly collecting and amassing specimens from whole populations and pioneering new invertebrate research techniques, such as acid preparation, Cooper made way 353 for the shift toward studying populations, ecosystems, systematics, and taphonomy that would come to be so important for the Department. This move toward systematics and increased emphasis on statistical studies of populations was echoed in other disciplines in the museum. By 1965, systematics was also where the money and expansion of staff was (Stewart 1965:37). An Office of Ecology was founded July 1, 1965—”Since the systematic research produced by the professional staff has generally included ecological data, the program represents not a beginning of Institutional interest but a means to focus staff attention on the subject and to facilitate cooperation between the Smithsonian and other Federal agencies and educational organizations” (Stewart 1965:33). At this time both Paleontology (Invertebrate, Paleobotany and Vertebrate) were under the umbrella Department of Geology along with Mineral Sciences. In Paleontology, the emphasis was increasingly on biological populations, communities, and relationships, and its new emphasis and research needs—including the kinds of lab facilities and overall approach—were becoming clearly distinct from Mineral Sciences. This, in turn, became a difficulty for resource allocations and sharing spaces, staff, and goals for the Geology Department. Alongside these changes in scientific trends, Cooper knew that these new Wing spaces were huge opportunities for creating new departmental and research spaces. Not long before, USGS staff in Paleontology, had moved into the NHB, so that in addition to many research curators, research culture was bolstered in Geology by a large number of research staff from the USGS. In plans for the new East Wing, Cooper’s greatest triumph was to insist that his staff in Paleobiology worked in “labs,” not “offices”; when the East Wing was completed, Cooper had ensured that Paleo would have three floors, full of large labs at the perimeter, each with a soapstone sink and room for multiple desks, and collections spaces at the center. With the move to the new building, three floors in the East Wing, integrating all three former Divisions and the 354 USGS staff, new research and research culture would become ever more possible. In this fresh space, with a wave of governmental support, Cooper founded the newly named Department of Paleobiology. Figure 6.1 Geology moves to the East Wing, 1963.109 Nineteen sixty-three therefore became a landmark year for the discipline of paleobiology. Just as the last remnant of the old paradigm, the new Hall of Dinosaurs and Fossil Reptiles opened, the East Wing was completed and occupied, and Paleobiology became a discrete Department filled with increasing numbers of specialized experts in their fields. As we will see in the next chapter, this coincided with Dillon Ripley’s arrived at Smithsonian, and encouraged 355 more high-status scholarly hiring and publishing, and thus increasing the specialization of scientists at the Museum. It was in this context of increased Departmental specialization for both Paleobiology and Exhibits that the new Ice Age Hall would be renovated. 6.2 Early Interdisciplinary Planning The Paleo halls of the early 60s were some of the last to be conceived as discrete spaces directed by individual curators with the help of professional designers. A new wave of influence, in part directed by Porter Kier’s leadership as director, but in part due to changing practices in science due to increased specialization. As later Director T. Dale Stewart noted in 1965, “The trend toward specialization in science has reached the point where few museum curators can be considered broad naturalists in the sense of some of their predecessors … For this reason, and also because more money is available for research than ever before, research projects in which many people from a number of disciplines participate have become customary” (Stewart 1965:23). In fact, interdisciplinarity was already becoming the norm in the Museum. The first interdisciplinary teams to plan exhibits in fact predated the fossil halls. Halls of Botany, Osteology, and Ocean Life halls were all planned by interdisciplinary curatorial teams. For Paleo, it was not until 1964 that Richard Cowan suggested this model for the Hall 6, Ice Age Hall. He writes: 356 Memo May 27, 1964 To: Dr. Ray, through Dr. Gazin From: R.S. Cowan DEVELOPMENT OF EXHIBITS IN HALL 6 Dr. Stewart and I are convinced that there is much merit in working on exhibits on a team basis, teams composed of curators and exhibits specialists. I have met regularly for about the past year with teams developing the osteology hall, the botany hall, and revitalizing the work in the hall on ocean life, and for the most part these efforts have been successful. In some instances we have become involved too late in the exhibits process to be very helpful; loss of time and perhaps exhibit quality has usually been the result. In order to assist you in moving from basic ideas to the opened hall in the least time and with the most satisfaction, I want to begin meeting with you, other curators who may be involved in Hall 6, and with the designer and any other exhibits specialists involved. Will you call me after you return so that we can consider a schedule? CC: Dr. Stewart Dr. Gazin Mr. Lomax Mr. Anglim (Cowan 1964) Due both to changes in scientific practice and the disciplining of exhibits work in the museum, interdisciplinarity seemed both a necessary and natural direction for exhibits development from the mid-60s onwards. As I will describe in the next chapter, these frictions became even more pronounced as the divided Mission of the Smithsonian manifested functionally through increasingly professionalized disciplines in newly formed units such as the Oceanographic Research Center and the Office of Exhibits Central; curators (unlike Gilmore, for instance) now all had a PhD, and even some of the “support staff” being hired did as well. In the newly formed Office of 357 Exhibits, it was no longer just taxidermists and carpenters that were hired as skilled artisans to carry out exhibits work, but spatial and graphic designers. For Ice Age, the shift happened literally midway through the process, and, unfortunately, the shift was not necessarily a smooth one. The curator for the hall was Clayton Ray, who had been hired in late-1963. Lucius (Lou) Lomax was Head of Exhibits. The details of this are still somewhat unclear, but there seemed to be conflict between Ray and Lomax, such that Ray dropped the project entirely after many years of preparation and collection. Some of these frictions were apparent between curators and Exhibits staff nearly as soon as exhibits was professionalized, particularly when it came to exhibit text. In a correspondence from Curator Nick Hotton to Benjamin Lawless on the length of a proposed case label, Hotton wrote: It was suggested that the basic explanation for the entire case by restricted for 250 words, specimen labels being extra. The submitted material comes to 377 words, but the last two paragraphs can be used as subordinate labels of some sort, leaving a remainder of 239 words. However, I feel that concepts of systematics and evolution, as illustrated by this case, cannot be adequately expressed in fewer words than the total number used here. (Hotton 1975a) 6.2.1 Interdisciplinary Exhibits and Committees There were other important institutional shifts taking place at the time that may have lent added stress to the situation. The Office of Exhibits Central (OEC), as we will see in Chapter 7, was conceived at the institutional level to concentrate newly niche professions in Exhibits into one place to serve all of Smithsonian’s units. At the start, this meant that many of Smithsonian’s museums’ internal staffs were reorganized or disbanded to construct this new office. At Natural History, after many of its staff had already been siphoned off to work on the newer National 358 Museum of History and Technology, these staff reassignments to OEC temporarily downsized the department. Under the new leadership of Porter Kier in the 1970s at the NHB, and with little accomplished post-Exhibits Modernization, there was still some shift back towards in-museum exhibits staff with an emphasis on exhibits work. Newly hired Robert Emry (vertebrate palaeontologist) was asked by Porter Kier to take over the Ice Age project alongside Thomas Simkin (a volcanologist from Mineral Sciences) and William Fitzhugh (an archaeologist from Anthropology). They formed the first interdisciplinary curatorial team to produce an exhibit. It was also the beginning of thematically structured exhibits. While few specimens were added and the space merely rearranged, the hall had been entirely re-thought and re-ordered along new multidisciplinary, thematic lines. When it opened, Kier reported: There was a bustle of activity on the Museum’s first floor in early 1974 as carpenters, scientists, designers, and other Museum craftsmen worked to complete “Ice Age Mammals and the Emergence of Man,” the first of a series of new exhibits that will enrich considerably the Museum’s educational impact. Long-range plans call for the overhaul and rejuvenation of one permanent exhibit hall every year through 1979 … To accomplish this change the Museum has departed from its traditional practice of building an exhibit hall around a single departmental discipline. The Ice Age Hall formerly housed a paleontological exhibit devoted to Pleistocene mammals. Is replacement is multidisciplinary, blending objects from the paleontology, mineral science, and anthropology collections, into a thematic context that describes the great physical and biological events of the Ice Age, including the development of the continental glaciers, the evolution of large mammals, the extinction of many of them, and the arrival of man. (Kier 1974:74) Kier encouraged the Exhibits Committee to work more interdisciplinarily. The Ice Age Hall thus became the prototype for the exhibits to come. This entailed four major changes. The first of 359 these, initiated with Ice Age, was for the Exhibits Committee Chair to appoint an interdisciplinary subcommittee to work on specific projects. The second was that this subcommittee would draft a “Plateau Statement,” to outline the purpose and major themes of an exhibits project. The third was that the subcommittee would present the Plateau Statement to the Exhibits Committee. The fourth, perhaps most important for thinking about new expertises involved in Exhibits, was that the Exhibits Committee would invite members of other departments or other staff with relevant expertise to comment on the Plateau Statement. In FY 1969, Joan Madden joined the Museum as Volunteer Representative, doubling the number of volunteer docents (1969:52). By the mid-70s she was taking on a large role in public outreach, and was later appointed Supervisory Information and Education Specialist. There were apparently debates about including Joan in Exhibits Committee Meetings as early as 1973 during the Ice Age Hall renovation. In a meeting in December of that year, the Committee proposed that she be invited to all “Plateau” meetings: Folder: Exhibits Committee Minutes 1973 Minutes of Meeting- Exhibits Committee December 20, 1973 The following were in attendance at the meeting held on December 20 at 1:00 pm: Drs. Hickey, Mello, Zug, Simkin, Fitzhugh, Soderstrom, Duckworth, Messrs. Hart, Banks … Old Business … The Committee discussed the seating of Joan Madden on the Committee. Dr. Hickey opposed this and the Committee in general felt that it should serve as a source of professional advice for the director as well as liaison with the Exhibits office and the staff. The matter will be discussed further at the next meeting. Some committee members felt that a special interest representative could come at appropriate times—all future plateau meetings. The question was asked whether or not she should receive a 360 copy of the minutes of the meeting. The committee voted against it. ("Minutes of Meeting" 1973b) While it’s clear from the above excerpt that early audience advocates like Joan were not yet truly included in the Committee (and were not allowed to see minutes), by 1974, the group had institutionalized consultation with non-curators. The document below shows that the group now included Curatorial “Members” and non-curatorial “Associates”: Table 6.1 Director’s Committee for Exhibits at the NMNH DIRECTOR’s COMMITTEE FOR EXHIBITS- NMNH Members: Department Thomas E. Bowman Invertebrate Zoology W. Donald Duckworth (Vice Chairman) Entomology William W. Fitzhugh Anthropology Leo J. Hickey (Chairman) Paleobiology Thomas E. Simkin Mineral Sciences Thomas R. Soderstrom Botany George R. Zug Vertebrate Zoology Associates Harry T. Hart Exhibits Joan C. Madden Education James F. Mello Office of the Director Exhibits Committee Office: Robert D. Seabolt, Administrative Assistant Judy Cash, Secretary ("Exhibits Committee Minutes" 1974a) By the time the Ice Age Hall opened, the Exhibits Committee, which had previously been active as a group of curators lead by the Director since the 1950s, now included members of the newly 361 professionalized Exhibits staff. Harry T. Hart was appointed Director of Exhibits, and he and Leo Hickey worked to forge a group that would bridge the research and exhibits staff. As the FY1974 report continued: The new multidisciplinary thematic exhibits that are in the process of design and production are the result of an entirely new approach to exhibits at the Museum. An advisory committee of Museum scientists, headed by Dr. Leo J. Hickey, has been set up as a liaison between the Museum’s professional staff and its exhibits office, directed by Harry T. Hart. A close working relationship has been established that is responsible for the excellence of the new Ice Age Hall and the promise of the Museum’s Bicentennial exhibit, “Our Changing Land.” (Kier 1974:74). In reaction to these changes, a Long-Rang Planning Subcommittee was formed to think about the future of the exhibits planning process. 6.2.2 Long Range Plans and a Fossil Hall Complex This process of planning the Paleo exhibits was the prototype for new Long Range Exhibits Plans that came into policy under Richard (Dick) Fiske in the early 1980s. One of the first changes to be made in revitalizing the exhibits process was, in line with Kier’s (and the institution’s) emphasis on interdisciplinarity, to appoint not just a small subcommittee, but a large Working Group of curators to work on a large-scale exhibits project. In 1977 Porter Kier appointed Ian Macintyre as Chairman of the Working Group tasked with the Paleo Halls renovation project. Macintyre, a carbonate sedimentologist and paleontologist who specialized in studying the deep history of coral reefs, had arrived at the museum in 1970. Under the new system of integrated and interdisciplinary exhibits, he was tasked with coordinating a huge team 362 of curators to plan the halls’ renovation in a series of phases (instead of as a set of discrete halls). The original Working Group included: Ian G. Macintyre (Chairman)—Paleobiology (deep sea sedimentology) Daniel E. Appleman—Mineral Sciences (mineralogy) Robert J. Emry—Paleobiology (vertebrate [Cenozoic] mammals) Leo J. Hickey—Paleobiology (fossil plants) Nicholas Hotton—Paleobiology (vertebrates, mammal-like reptiles [by default dinosaurs]) Kenneth M. Towe—Paleobiology (mineralogy, early atmospheres) Thomas R. Waller—Paleobiology (mollusks) As discussed earlier, the second change implemented was to split the project into a series of Phases. The idea was that, in order to make all of the halls appear to be one large, interdisciplinary complex, the project would be broken down into a series of phases. Each of these would have a core group of curators working on it, while the overall Chair of the Working Group, Exhibits Committee, and Exhibits staff (including designers) remained constant. The third change was to present the Plateau Statement to the wider Department so as to draw on their broader expertise and elicit their support of the project. This was also necessary now that Departments had grown so large. After presenting the Plateau Statement to the Exhibits Committee and the Director, Ian Macintyre invited the entire Paleobiology Department to review the first Phase proposal of the halls. 363 Figure 6.2 Memo, Macintyre to Buzas, December 1977.110 The fourth practice the group pioneered was the drafting of a Theme Statement, a final version of which was submitted to exhibits June 28, 1978. Now, instead of individual Plateau Statements for each hall, the Working Group would produce one larger Statement outlining aspirations for a long term, interdisciplinary, and multi-phase renewal project. For the first time, the entire set of halls (2, 3, 4, and 5) were conceived as a single hall, imagined and planned by an interdisciplinary group of curators. And unlike the mid-1970s Ice Age Hall renovation, which had been an update after specimen preparation and much of the design had been complete in the 1960s, this project would involve group planning from the exhibits’ inception. The process would also, for the first time, involve a deep collaboration between the now very large Departments of Paleobiology and Exhibits all the way through the process. Because the halls were intended to connect all of the history of Earth, the team developed the idea of “highlights” to be showcased in each section of the exhibit. Each highlight would 364 have a scientist assigned to oversee its content. Below is a document showing each “Scientist in Charge,” often two curators, and their particular areas: Figure 6.3 Curatorial staff by exhibit area c. 1978.111 Because each curator had purview over his own subject area, not every section was planned interdisciplinarily in the manner they are today. However this was certainly the precursor to today’s model. 365 6.2.3 New Liaising Expertise There were new important players in this process that had not before been part of exhibits planning. The first of these was an Exhibits Writer. As we saw, professional writers had been brought to the Institution in the 1960s to consult on Exhibits projects, but also signage, guidebooks, and other publication materials at the Museum. The Paleo hall project marked the first exhibits project to include a devoted Exhibits Writer for the whole process. Sue Voss, was assigned to the job, and was responsible for producing all of the scripts and label text in the halls, most of which are still in place today. The second of these was a Research Associate to act as a liaison between the scientific staff and Exhibits. The Research Associate position was intended to be a two-year contract position for a person with a Ph.D. level education in Paleobiology with an interest in public outreach. This person would work jointly under Ian Macintyre in Paleo and Gene Behlen in the Exhibits Department. In 1978, Ian Macintyre released this ad for an Invertebrate Paleontologist. 366 Figure 6.4 Macintyre’s call for Research Associates, 1978.112 As Ian’s correspondence with potential candidates read, This two-year term position has been established specifically for an assistant to aid in reorganizing our paleontology exhibits … The basic responsibility of this position will be to present and explain concepts developed by museum scientists to the designers in the exhibits department. The work will therefore involve preparing theme statements, assisting designers with layout, locating specimens for exhibit, and developing text to be presented in the exhibits. This is a full-time exhibits position and provides no official time for original research. (Macintyre 1978) 367 The Research Associate was to work between the Departments on producing content briefs for relevant topics the curators had decided were to be illustrated in the exhibits, and then to work with or hand these documents off to the Exhibits Writer, who would produce exhibit text, to then be reviewed and edited by the curators. This person would also, in practice, have to navigate not only the Paleobiology and Exhibits Department at NMNH, but would have to work with the community of exhibits producers at the Office of Exhibits Central, where large-scale artistic projects were undertaken. George Stanley was the first to work in this capacity from 1978 to 1980 as an Invertebrate Research Assistant. In our interview, he described being jointly interviewed by Behlen and Macintyre, being introduced to both teams in Exhibits and Paleo, and once he started, holding offices in both the Paleo and Exhibits Departments. While 80% of his time was on Exhibits work, he was also able to devote some time to research, and was taken in by the Paleo department and along on research trips with Kier and Macintyre. He also described to me the very tedious and complex process of trying to draft scripts in consultation with curators, to circulate the drafts to the seven members of the curatorial team, who would inevitably add text and make his text more technical, to then have his drafts torn apart by the exhibits team, to then in turn try to bring a version back to the curators, who would again try to reincorporate more and more complicated text (Stanley 2.21.14). It was “a problem sometimes,” too, that exhibits staff and artists, because they were “encouraged to be original” and “think outside the box,” often had clear and fairly set ideas about what they wanted, “had their mind on certain things” and but didn’t “know the science” and “the biology wasn’t that way” (Stanley 2.21.14). 368 Jessica Harrison was hired to act in this capacity for Vertebrate Paleontology, and stayed on through the completion of the main complex in the mid-80s. She is remembered fondly by scientists and exhibits staff alike. Harrison was integral to the Paleo hall complex—in photographs of the exhibits process, Jessica is featured more than almost anyone else—in meetings, at the Office of Exhibits Central working on large scale design elements, in the halls as objects were being installed. From photographs it is also evident that Jessica played a large role in communicating scientific concepts or constraints to other exhibits producers—artists, graphic designers, designers—both in-house and out at the Office of Exhibits Central, where large-scale or particularly specialized work was carried out. Additionally, while Natural History, like Smithsonian’s other museums, now had its own exhibits department, the Office of Exhibits Central (OEC) continued to flourish off-site. Not only did it still employ script writers and editors, it was a powerhouse of production, employing experts in woodworking, model making, bracketing, taxidermy, packing and silk screening (1988:143). There, specialists in these and other artistic areas worked to support large scale projects at individual museums, as well as the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES). During the Paleo hall complex renewal, large scale modeling for objects and dioramas relied on these experts offsite to complete projects. Jessica worked closely with OEC as well as with in-house Exhibits staff. In addition, many other staff involved in construction, design, engineering, and safety took part in the process, as evidenced by this list of meeting participants from a Paleo Reconstruction meeting in 1984: 369 Contractor’s Name: ONI. I.C. Contract Number: FC-4075940000 Pre-Construction Meeting: Job Title: Paleo Hall III Reconstruction, Phase 2 Date & Time: 10:00 July 17, 1984 Place: Ofc. Of Supply Services’ Conference Room Attendance: Name (Please Print All Info.) Title: Organization/Division: 1. Joseph D. Jackson President ONI 2. John M. Baines COTR ODC 3. Mike Iverson Project Manager ODC 4. Keith J. Polasko Fire Protection Engineer OPS 5. Mel Adams Chief Crafts Branch OPLANTS 6. Joyce M. Regan Const. Prog. Coord. ODC 7. Li Baily Design MNH 8. Steve Pierson Supvy Exhibits Specialist NMNH 9. Carl A. Alexander Exhibits Programmer NMNH 10. Larry O’Reilly Asst. Director NMNH 11. James C. Norris Super. ONI 12. Michael W. Carter Project Manager ONI 13. George Zumpf Contracts Chief O.S.S.-S. I. 14. Capt. Kenneth Thomas Security Commander Prot Div. ("Meeting Roster" 1984b) Exhibits meetings often included large numbers of these various staff for the first time. This image below shows a typical meeting, curators foregrounded, in the Exhibits Department in the early 1980s. 370 Figure 6.4 Ken Towe, Ian Macintyre, Gene Behlen, Dan Appleman, Fran Hueber on the right, Sue Voss and Elizabeth Hilkert in the background, Richard Molinaroli at very back (here blocked by Hueber).113 During the Paleo Hall project these changes were put into policy through three internal documents. The first, The Exhibits Program of the National Museum of Natural History, from 1978, laid out the aspirations the Director, Exhibits Committee, and Exhibits Department had for this new wave of accelerated interdisciplinary exhibits practices (Greenberg 1978a). The second, dated July 1, 1983, was essentially a revision of the first of the same name that included a set of very telling “areas of concern” as the new plans played out in the Paleo hall revitalization process ("Exhibit Hall Planning" 1983a). The third, a further revision of the document, called “Long Range Exhibits Plans,” dated November 13, 1984, finalized the earlier documents with a few substantial changes in workflow and roles that would be adopted as the Paleo Hall complex 371 moved toward its later phases ("Long Range Exhibit Plans" 1984a). All three are foundational to the way exhibits work today, and had huge implications for roles and process. 6.2.4 The 1978 Document The Exhibits Program document was prepared for a Smithsonian Council meeting in October of 1978. It affirmed that the Director’s Office, under Porter Kier, had been exceedingly supportive of the exhibits program, seeing it through a number of changes that insured an exhibit opening every 12 months, and an active Exhibits Committee with members from each of the seven scientific departments as well as staff from Education, Exhibits, and the Director’s Office. The document went on to describe the several kinds of exhibits projects (the first time this appears in records) including: Permanent exhibits, Upgrading and maintenance of permanent exhibits, Prototype exhibits, Loan exhibitions, Research exhibits and Rotunda gallery shows. At the time, prospects for permanent halls were good, as in the five years prior, since Kier had taken on the Director’s position, one permanent hall had been completed each year. By the year 2000, they hoped to revitalize 28 halls. Importantly, the document made it clear that exhibit concepts came either from the Director or as “grassroots” proposals from curatorial staff. But it also acknowledged for the first time that, “Ideas for new exhibits may be submitted by any museum person to the Exhibits Committee.” This indicated a major shift in the generation of ideas for exhibits that would gain force under Robert Sullivan in the 1990s and early millennium. The document also institutionalized changes in the process and actors involved by outlining “Once the general content of a future hall has been established, a series of carefully prescribed steps are followed to 372 ensure that planning, design, scripting, and installation are executed in an orderly and well-reviewed way” (Greenburg 1978a:5). A new expertise described in the document that had been involved at a general museum level but not specifically on an exhibits team or working group, was that of the museum evaluator. In the archives, I came across a copy of an extensive annotated bibliography of museum educational and evaluation literature up through the mid-60s, and by the md-70s, the Institution had hired Robert Lakota, a behavioral psychologist, within the Office of Museum Programs to conduct studies in the halls. Likewise, as the Exhibits document pointed out, in 1977 the Exhibits Committee requested more advice be sought from outside exhibit evaluators. In November of 1977, three seminars were held by Robert Wolf and Barbara Tymitz from the Indiana Center for Evaluation, Ross Loomis from University of Colorado, and Chandler Screven of the University of Wisconsin (now all well established as part of a growing canon of evaluation literature). Both members of the exhibits Committee and design staff from Exhibits attended the seminars. Out of these seminars, in 1978, the Exhibits Committee and Kier invited Wolf and Tymitz to conduct a study of Ice Age Mammals. While an evaluator was not considered for membership on exhibits working groups or in the Exhibits department at NMNH, Wolf was granted a part-time appointment at a central Smithsonian office, and it is clear from the inclusion of this discussion in the 1978 document that this area of expertise was increasingly being sought and consulted for exhibits planning. One of the other major areas of change documented in the 1978 report was the incredible breadth of staff in the exhibits department at this time. Some 37 people were employed. Such a 373 huge staff allowed all exhibits to be completed in-house, with a budget, excluding salaries of $210,000.13 As Robert Emry said of the time: During that go around, all of the skeletons of fossil mammals and dinosaurs, all of the vertebrate stuff out there, was all done in-house in our vertebrate paleontology lab, and so the curator was responsible for overseeing this and the pose of the mount and making sure it was done correctly and so on and our Vertebrate Paleo lab did the actual work. And then they were moved into place when the rest of the hall was ready. And even a lot of the exhibits fabrication itself was done in-house. They had when those Paleo halls were done there were 4 or 5 designers in the Exhibits department. There were a couple writers. There were two or three graphics specialists. There were cabinet-makers who did a lot of the cases. (Emry 4.8.13) The only exceptions to this were very large design or production pieces, plastics work, and taxidermy that required the space offered by the off-site OEC. Major building modifications and electric work were contracted by outside firms in consultation with the Office of Facilities Planning and Engineering Services or in-house by the Office of Plant Services. All exhibits staff were Federal employees, with the exception of the Research Associates, such as George Stanley, who were hired on temporary contracts. As of October 1978, then, the Office of Exhibits Staff included: Administrative: Eugene Behlen, Chief; William Haases, Assistant Chief, Evelyn Hooks, Secretary; Sylvia Ouzts, Secretary, Chip Clark, Guidebook Development; David Carlin, Supply Technician Insect Zoo: Sheila Mutchler, Supervisor; Lynda Richards, Bruce Daniels 13 I should mention here that scientific departments also had their own scientific illustrators who were primarily focused on producing artwork for research purposes, and not for exhibits, while exhibits artists tended not to produce work for research purposes, unless they knew how to work with a particular material that was pertinent to certain scientific practices or equipments 374 Research Associates: Peter Haas, Evolution (Hall 10); George Stanly and (vacancy) Paleontology (Halls 2, 3, 4, and 5) Writer-Editor Sue Willis Design Steve Makovenyi, David Meyersburg, Beth Miles, Richard Molinaroli, Gail Singer, Riddick Vann Illustration, Murals: Wilma Riley Cabinet Shop: David Christie, Supervisor; Maurice Anderson, Mike Kelton, John Kosdi, Steve Pierson, John Robers, Thomas Kuckuda, and (vacancy) Graphic Production: Carl Alexander, Supervisor, Frank Braisted, Anita Levine, Marguerite Mondor, Algie Porter, Thomas Thill, Toussaint Wallace Audio Visuals Phillip Anderson, Calvin Price, Everett Wyman (Greenburg 1978a:19-20) In 1965, there were six staff listed in Exhibits for the whole of the U.S. National Museum (1966:431). By 1976 only Harry Hart, Chief of Exhibits was listed at Natural History, while there were 10 staff at OEC and another three at History and Technology, and 11 at the newly founded Air and Space Museum (1977b:512-534). By 1985, there were nearly 40 at Natural History alone (Directory of the Staff 1985). For the first time, the document also acknowledged that curatorial time, and therefore input, toward exhibits was limited, despite the fact that the curatorial staff now included some 120 specialists from diverse fields. It also explicitly stated that “the skilled personnel of the 375 Office of Exhibits are able to translate this expertise and the available specimens into exciting and innovative exhibit halls” (Greenburg 1978a:22). The first attachment to the document outlined the new process for exhibit development, which proceeded thus: Concept Development—anyone could submit an idea to the Exhibits Committee, which would select exhibits based on: (1) appropriateness of the exhibit in the context of the Long Range Exhibits Plan, (2) availability of appropriate curatorial expertise, and (3) availability of specimens from NMNH collections or via loan from other institutions. (Greenberg 1978b:5) Director’s Approval; Appointment of Working Group—based on a recommendation of the Exhibits Committee, the Director would approve or disapprove the proposed exhibit. The Director, upon approval, would select a: senior scientific advisor to chair a working group of curators from appropriate scientific departments who will oversee the planning of the hall and the acquisition of specimens for display. Also serving on the working group is the Chief, Office of Exhibits, and a Research Associate (generally a “pre-doc” or “post-doc” with the appropriate scientific background who is hired on a term appointment by the Office of Exhibits for the specific purpose of assisting with the preparation of the hall. (Greenburg 1978b:5) Schedule of Development—the Chief of the Office of Exhibits would prepare a schedule and target dates for the new hall, including design, production, and opening. Theme Statement—the working group would submit a theme statement with accompanying oral presentation stating priorities, objectives, and content for the proposed hall, including a discussion of specimen availability. First Plateau Statement—the Office of Exhibits: 376 in collaboration with the working group, prepares a scale model of the exhibit which shows the layout of the hall, the subject and specimen content of each area, and the general thematic development. Concurrently, the working group prepares a script outline for each area in the hall. The senior scientific advisor then presents the model of the hall and the script outline to the Exhibits Committee as the first plateau statement of the exhibit’s progress. The Committee reviews these materials for their content, fulfillment of theme statement objectives and other related aspects and forwards its evaluation to the Director. At this point, the First Plateau Statement is reviewed by the Assistant Secretary for Science and the Secretary. Scriptwriting—specimens are selected for exhibit after approval of the Plateau Statement, and script-writing commences. The script is drafted by the senior scientific advisor and the working group with “early editorial input” from Exhibits staff. Second Plateau Statement—A second plateau statement that shows most of the design and 2/3 of the script is presented to the Exhibits Committee, shows the hall’s progress. It is evaluated like the first plateau statement, where the Committee’s recommendations go to the Director for approval. Review of Script—the final script, written by the senior scientist and exhibits editor, is presented to the Exhibits Committee (being “placed in a central location for four days for Committee perusal”). Changes are hand written directly onto the document, discussed at a meeting and then forwarded to the Director for approval. The Director decides which changes are made. Preview of the Hall—45 days before opening, “The senior scientific advisor, exhibits research associate, designer, Chief of the Office of Exhibits, the Director, and the Exhibits Committee walk through the hall and reach a final decision as to the feasibility of completing each unfinished item and area so that they can be readied in time for the hall opening, postponed, or eliminated”. 377 Evaluation of the Hall—A month after opening, the Exhibits Committee evaluates the hall and makes recommendations to the Director for changes, based on the theme statement and long-range plans drafted at earlier stages. (Greenburg 1978b: 5-6) In all of this, it is important to note that the Exhibits Committee members consisted entirely of curatorial staff, in consultation with Exhibits or other staff, that in practice all ideas and scripts were generated by curatorial staff, and that curatorial staff were the only ones to formally evaluate the halls once opened. However, the overall process was now one intrinsically interdisciplinary, with increasing input from professionalized expertize in exhibits fields. 6.2.5 The 1983 Document Despite the enthusiasm of the 1978 document, by the early 1980s, midway through the Paleo halls, it was clear the Museum could not keep up its proposed pace, and that there were frictions involved in these new ways of working. Richard Fiske had taken over as Director, and in the Spring of 1983, he formed an ad hoc Exhibits Transition Committee to work out the kinks in the team approach to exhibits planning. Members of this Committee included curators from each of the disciplines that had been involved in hall renewals and a number of staff in Exhibits: Exhibits Transition Committee: Dan Appleman, Curator, Mineral Sciences Richard Boardman, Curator, Paleobiology William Fitzhugh, Curator, Anthropology Beth Miles, Designer, Exhibits Sheila Mutchler, Supervisor, Insect Zoo (Exhibits) Bruce D. Smith, Chairman Sue Voss, Writer, Exhibits ("Exhibit Hall Planning" 1983a:1) 378 The group met on a weekly basis from March to June, and the document they prepared for July, with revisions in October of 1983, “analyze[d] the current procedure for the development of permanent exhibit halls,” identified “problem areas” and presented in its first two sections (written as “a draft for a manual or handbook for future exhibits hall planning”) outlined a new plan, roles, goals, and a description of the new process” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983: 4). The core problem areas identified were: 1. Working Group coordination: The membership, scope, and purpose of the Working Group at the Theme Statement phase of an exhibit’s conception need [sic] to be reassessed. The basic issues of an exhibit’s content and style have to be addressed comprehensively in this early planning stage, and priorities must be placed on the relative importance of proposed themes and objects to be exhibited. Some guidelines for writing a Theme Statement exist, but they have not always been clearly stated at the outset nor consistently applied when the finished Theme Statement has been evaluated. 2. Schedules: The problem that presently plagues exhibits development is the continuing failure either to meet established productions schedules, or even to set such schedules. Exhibit halls are, as a result, subject to lengthy time and cost overruns. 3. Curatorial priorities: A major ingredient in the failure of established hall schedules appears to be the second-level priority assigned to exhibit development by curatorial staff. The NMNH needs to establish a clear and explicit policy in regard to the commitment of curatorial time to exhibits development. 4. Exhibits that don’t communicate: The present system of script production has resulted in exhibits that are frequently unsuccessful in communicating messages to the public. 5. Hall completion and corrections: Because of the frequent last-minute rush to complete an exhibit hall before the scheduled opening date, there is often not 379 adequate time to correct errors and omissions identified during the final production phase. Once the hall is open, these loose ends do not receive priority attention. 6. Chronic Finger-Pointing: Mutual fault-finding by individuals involved in the exhibits development process has been pronounced. In addition to being a problem in its own right, this fault-finding is also a symptom of an underlying absence of regular and frequent interaction among the individuals involved and of a lack of coherent, consistent task assignment and subsequent objective performance monitoring. (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:4-5) This last point is critical. It is clear that within the Paleo hall renewal process there had been frictions amongst the group brought together to plan and design the halls. Leo Hickey had clearly noticed some of this bad blood between curatorial and non-curatorial staff as early as 1979, when he wrote in a memo to the Exhibits Committee that “unnecessary comments” like “dumb” and “botanical illiteracy” that were degrading to non-science experts in the process were detrimental to the group’s work and morale (Hickey 1979). Changes in the makeup of exhibits planning groups had clearly caused new interactions between formerly non-existent or spatially or contractually separated expertises. It was out of these conflicts that the idea of a “Concept Committee” was proposed in the revised 1983 document. This committee, unlike the Working Group, that came before it, would be chaired not by a curator, but by the Assistant Director for Exhibits. It would not be made up solely of curators, but would include alongside the Director and/or Associate Director of the Museum “appropriate Department Chairmen,” curators, “including an experienced member of the Exhibits Committee,” additional members—”one or more designers, a Writer/Editor, a representative from the Office Education” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983: 7). This was a major shift in thinking about exhibit development, one that reverberates today. The description of this Concept Committee was the first group made up of the same areas of expertise included in today’s Core 380 Teams. This is also one of the first documents that describes the group that produces exhibits the “Hall Team,” asserting that there will be an interdisciplinary team mentality in hall planning from inception to completion. In this model, the Hall Team would replace the previous Working Group or Hall committee in the development of permanent exhibit halls and is drawn largely from members of the concept committee. A Hall Team consists of: Curators with expertise in the subject area(s) to be covered in the exhibits hall; Research Associate(s); Exhibits staff - Designer(s) and Writer/Editor - having the creative talents necessary to transform the subject area knowledge of the team’s Research Associate and Curators into a successful exhibit. One of the curatorial members of the Hall Team, designated “Lead Curator,” assumes many of the responsibilities previously carried by the Chairman of the Working Group. The Lead Curator has the primary responsibility for the scientific content of the Hall and for resolving issues of scientific substance that emerge during the development of an exhibit hall. Similarly, a “Lead Designer” will be designated, with overall responsibility for exhibit design decisions. (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:9) Ideally, these individuals would “come to the table as equals” with “no prior topic-area constraints” (“Exhibits Hall Planning” 1983:7). 6.2.6 Facilitating Complementarities The factioning and disciplining of people in the Museum, alongside the incredible growth of staff and Departments required more work on communicating across increasingly distinct professional practices and cultures that were supposed to come together “as equals” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:7). One of the best examples of a solution to these new frictions is illustrated by developments in the role of the Research Associate position. In the later iteration of these planning documents, the Research Associate position, while it began as a liaising role between curators and writers, took on the role of a project manager. 381 In this role, the Exhibits Research Associate was “employed primarily to assist the scientists who are working on an exhibit and to carry out the multifaceted project-manager function.” For the first time this included “maintaining the necessary framework of creative interaction among Hall Team members and shepherding them through the developmental process” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:10). This person would work with scientists on research, specimen selection, and text (for content), and also liaise between the Hall Team and Office of Exhibits production staff in the design and construction process. The Research Associate would continue to be housed within the Office of Exhibits, but also under “de facto supervision” by the Lead Curator as their primary role was to aid scientists in exhibits tasks. For this reason, the Hall Team was to hire the Research Associate in consultation with both the Office of Exhibits and relevant scientific departments, where the Lead Curator and the Designer would have heaviest weight in the process. For permanent halls such as Paleo, the Research Associate would continue to be an expert in the relevant area of content at the post-doctoral level (a.k.a. they would, like curators, have a Ph.D.). The Exhibits Transition Committee agreed that for major halls and for the expediency of the process, “Technical competence and familiarity with the subject matter are of prime importance” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:10) as this person would be the primary scientific liaison in the production stage. These Associates were not to work on their own research on Smithsonian time, but would be included in all Department activities, and would be encouraged to publish exhibits-related research. The main qualities of a Research Associate were to be: 382 (1) an orderly mind capable of organizing masses of specimens and script; (2) the absence of writers block - preliminary script must flow easily, or at least regularly; (3) (of course) the ability to get along with a wide variety of prima donnas, encouraging each to do his or her job; (4) previous museum experience. (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:11) Now so central to the process, this is the first time that anything approximating a Project Manager position is described. However, the position was stressed as important not only because projects were becoming so complex, large scale, and involving so many disciplines, but also because there were clear problems with motivating curators to do all of the scientific/content work involved in a long-term exhibits project such as the Paleo Halls. The document shows clearly that, with the increased emphasis on niche sub-disciplinary research and publication since the late 60s, curators were ever more reluctant to spend their time on exhibits work: The exhibits program in the Museum suffers from a generally held perception among curators that tine spent on exhibits work is tine lost toward career goals. New curators come from research-oriented university programs and are hired here largely for their research potential. Further, the immutable civil service standards emphasize achievement in research. As a result of this bias, new and established curators are research-oriented and consider that research is the major means of advancement. (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:14) In general, curators considered exhibits work a necessary evil or responsibility, rather than an “advantage of a curatorial position” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:15). Where a Director was able to grant individuals credit for exhibits beyond PAEC recommendations, the document noted that few curators were aware of these exceptions, and, regardless, are reluctant to become involved; “some expect never to be involved because of their research subject areas,” others just prefer to focus on their research (“Exhibit Hall Planning 1983:14). The solution to this problem 383 was to insure that a Research Associate with the relevant area of expertise could guarantee curators the needed assistance to participate in the Exhibits program while continuing their own work. Other solutions included a greater Team approach and group cohesion to “make clear that all members are vital to the success of an exhibit” and “making sure that Team members are invited to openings, where they can get a feeling of pride in participating in exhibit work, and of its importance to the Museum and the public” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:14). The document also included recommendations that exhibits work be separately evaluated from the PAEC under the direction of Department Chairmen and the Hall Team, with the promise of salary advancement, advanced raises in pay or grade. Also acknowledged was that some of the frustration for curators in the process had to do with winnowing exhibit texts and ideas. The Exhibits Transition Committee therefore advised having “cherished detail and insights,” and natural inclination to think in terms of preparing a monograph to be channelled into scholarly outlets such as books or catalogs, or even to contribute to public programs. The Research Associate could help translate material. The document also advised structural changes in curatorial work, so that, in the interest of time, research trips and research activities would be scheduled around the exhibit, such that once a schedule was established, curators would agree to constrain their other work. Some possible outlets included: Scholarly publications on areas covered by the exhibit; Elephant Press Books, Office of Exhibits publications such as guidebooks and other educational publications; reprints of relevant Smithsonian literature to the exhibit; symposia and conferences through Smithsonian Associates or smaller scientific groups, exploring ideas generated by the content of the new exhibit; and educational and public outreach, including curriculum packages, slides, and new, highly visible, programs (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:18). 384 To assist not just curators, but the whole team, in understanding these responsibilities, during the Theme Statement Production phase, the team would be provided with background materials and readings, coached through presentations on exhibit design, text and production, and would take trips to other museums to “analyze exhibits concepts, and production shops and methods” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:15). The Hall Team, now fully interdisciplinary with the inclusion of a Lead Designer, other designers, and a Writer/Editor from the beginning, was also expected to participate in the process from start to finish: “the entire Team must remain actively involved at every stage, even during production, final writing, etc.” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:9). Moreover, the document made it clear that a diverse Concept Committee would not only enlist the support of Departments but also provide “key principles” for the intergroup workings of the Hall Team: First and foremost, Committee members (and by implication Hall Team members) come to the table as equals, with no prior topic-area constraints (e.g. science vs. design) on the participation of Committee members. Through direction of the Committee’s discussions, and solicitation of opinions (e.g., what a designer thinks of the exhibit potential of various proposed Science topics), the Assistant Director for Exhibits effectively sets the stage for the smooth exchange of ideas and critical appraisal of exhibit topics by the Committee and subsequent Hall Team. (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:7) In addition, the document asserted that the Committee would ensure the Hall Team had support, and was not working in isolation. Part of this new arrangement would therefore involve the Director and Assistant Director for Exhibits equally scrutinizing exhibits for their scientific, design, and educational merits. This new process would include consulting members of the Office of Education and Museum Docents to assess the proposed exhibit plans. The Committee would also invite more Hall Team members than would make up the final group, to vet participants and evaluate their “potential contributions” to the creative process. 385 The process changed substantially, not only because the Hall Team make-up was so different, but also because new role responsibilities changed the workflow of production, particularly in the area of textual production. In the new model, the Hall Team was “Author, creating the background and basic storyline,” the “Exhibits Committee acts as Technical Editor, advising on the accuracy and effectiveness of the material,” and the “Writer/Editor acts as both Stylist and Copy Editor, transforming the preliminary text into finished exhibit script” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:12). Thus the whole Hall Team, including the Writer/Editor and Designer, would have, for the first time, input into the overall concept and storyline of an exhibit. The text, however, would still be drafted by the Curator of the relevant content area with the Research Associate. The Research Associate would work with the Curator to insure that the text was produced in a timely and scientifically accurate manner. The Writer/Editor, having not commented on the first draft of script, would then edit the text, and prevent it from appearing to be “written by committee” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:12). The Exhibits Committee would then, after an oral and visual presentation of plans from the Lead Curator and Designer, edit for scientific or technical content. Lastly, the Writer/Editor would prepare the script for the public, consulting with the whole Hall Team in the best way to organize and present material, but having the final say in the “style and tone of the script.” The Writer/Editor would also do final copy editing before a last review by the Hall Team to ensure that “stylistic reworking has not altered scientific meaning” (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:13). After approval by the Hall Team, Assistant Director for Exhibits, and Director, the script was sent for typesetting. For the first time, the public outreach part of the process was articulated clearly. The document outlined more coherent guidelines for press, publicity and public outreach, including requirements for banners, press releases, press previews, public service announcements on TV 386 and other media, opening receptions, paid advertising in radio, TV, and print media, solicitation of magazine articles, educational programming like film showings, lectures, and demonstrations, and the introduction of appropriate merchandising in the Museum Shop (“Exhibit Hall Planning” 1983:18–19). 6.2.7 The 1984 Document By the following year, much of the emphasis on revitalizing the exhibits therefore had to do not only with the new emphasis on interdisciplinarity, shifting roles and process, but the realization that, at the current rate of exhibit development, most halls would soon be more than 15 years old, even in an era in which exhibits approaches were rapidly changing. Both scientific concepts and exhibits techniques became outdated in 15 years, the committee argued, and in the post-Exhibits Modernization period, very few halls had been redone. As a result, most halls were outdated. Out of some 30 halls, only seven were less than 15 years old, although 30 halls had been completed in 31 years. The Long Range Plan document from 1984 reads as follows: All exhibits must be made as entertaining and as understandable to visitors as possible … The exhibits committee is deeply concerned with the growing obsolescence of our exhibits. We develop the scope of this problem more carefully in the attached statement, but it is clear that the exhibits in at least two thirds of our halls will always be out of date unless major new initiatives are made to accelerate their replacement. The present rate of less than one new exhibit hall per year, however, is simply inadequate to maintain an effective exhibits program. In order to insure that NMNH exhibits halls are no older than 15 years we need to replace the exhibits in two halls each year. To do this will require a major increase in funding for the NMNH Exhibits Office. Both additional federal funds and more aggressive pursuit of private resources will be needed to achieve this goal. (“Long Range Exhibits Plans” 1984:1) 387 For the first time, it was acknowledged outright, that “the Museum’s exhibits are the main impetus for the public support received for all of our activities” (“Long Range Exhibits Plans” 1984:2). The document illustrated major shifts in expertise and disciplinarity in two ways. First, it showed that the Museum was developing a set of best practices in exhibit making that had grown out of the professionalization of exhibits production in the 20 years prior. Findings from literature on museum exhibit philosophy was compiled into a document called “The Curator’s Digest of Cosmic Laws for Planning Museum Exhibits.” The Exhibits Committee, based on a review of literature on this topic and a review of its own previous practices, compiled its own set of internal best practices. Moreover, the document recommended having research staff on the Exhibits Committee and Exhibits staff take trips to observe other museums’ processes, procedures and outcomes. Second, based on this shift in self-analysis, the Committee recommended major changes in the process and arrangement of expertise in exhibit planning. These changes included, 1) using temporary exhibits to test ideas for permanent ones, 2) increasing professional Exhibits staff: Discussions are underway on increasing the efficiency of curators’ time in the planning and production process. Possibly the increased use of professional writers and other creative people from the Office of Exhibits earlier in the planning for a hall will reduce curator time without losing quality or effectiveness. (“Long Range Exhibits Plans” 1984:4) For the first time, it would become institutional practice to include writers and other exhibits staff at earlier stages of planning, and writers would become the main producers of exhibit text. 3) The Committee advised that a new head of the Office of Exhibits be hired with “progressive philosophy and procedures, “ and that increasingly the Office of Exhibits staff “will have an extremely complex and demanding role to play in a larger and more effective exhibits effort.” 388 Thus, this document was a major landmark in the history of NMNH exhibits: it recommended a slough of changes with significant impacts in terms of expertise, workflow and the process of exhibit-making (“Long Range Exhibits Plans” 1984:3–4). 6.2.6 New Expert Frictions and Complementarities by the 1970s and 1980s Important productive and counterproductive frictions were caused by these changes. On the one hand, the incredible capacity for in-house production was an amazing asset to the museum and to collaboration between exhibits staff and scientific staff. This time was described over and over by people, both on scientific and exhibits staffs, as a time of collegiality. Now of course, some of the characterizations of the period are probably romanticized and nostalgic. Yet, there’s a certain aura about the time that people seem to agree on. The community felt small, tight-knit. There were pranks. There were parties, lots of them. Exhibit openings were massive, Christmas parties were raucous. If you needed something, you could ask the guy (or very occasionally woman) who knew about that sort of thing and they would help you out. The next time they asked you a favor, you’d deliver. If a scientist needed a metal part fixed, he simply went down and asked. If an artist needed input into his work, the curator or appropriate scientific person would head down to the shops and advise them. In Exhibits, things were, as Sally Love, an Exhibit Developer who’s worked in the Museum for over 30 years said, “home made” (Love 8.7.13) In everyday scientific work, large staffs were complimented by and collaborated with people who knew how to make, illustrate, and fix things. As Scott Wing described it: And certainly when I first got here there were a lot of people in Exhibits. I mean, Exhibits was big. You know, and lots of machines: lathes and saws and giant matt cutters. I mean all the stuff you would need to fabricate exhibits. And that wasn’t even including, I don’t know what Exhibits Central was like. (Wing 8.16.13) 389 There were also practical tensions between these newly formed expertises with which some of these documents grappled. With the increased professionalization of designers as experts over the space, preparators, exhibits staff and curators alike were held to some of their design decisions that turned out to be impractical for scientific researchers who needed to be able to examine specimens that were on display and for the people responsible for the upkeep of the space. There were a few examples I heard many times. The first (and many on the Exhibits side agree with this) was the use of sand in the island of Hall 2. Sand was supposed to help evoke the environment. In practice, any living being that crossed the space left tracks, whether a scientific researcher trying to traverse the space to get a close look at a specimen, or mice that liked to run across the island at night. The designers came up with the idea of building an elevated walkway so that visitors could walk alongside the dinosaurs, at their level, in their footsteps. This probably wasn’t the designer’s fault, but the plywood they used turned out to be faulty, and it became a huge problem for exhibits staff who had to replace the flooring. In the Life in the Ancient Seas Hall, a false papier-mâché sea floor was installed beneath the fossil mounts that hung in front of Ely Kish’s massive mural of ancient sea environments at three time periods. Unfortunately, if a researcher wanted to examine a specimen up close, they risked either stepping through this false sea bottom, or falling over as they leaned over the protective railing. Throughout the period, and certainly as the fossil hall complex project developed, the professionalization of the Museum and the building up of its staff facilitated amazing in-house development and collaborations. This was the first time, it seems, that textual production became such a difficult process, in part because exhibit writing was also becoming a professionalized discipline, and in part because of an important role reversal in the process. Where a single curator had produced text to be reviewed by colleagues, now a young, post-doctoral researcher 390 produced briefs to aid an exhibits writer in producing text, to then be reviewed by the relevant curators with expertise over that particular content area, to then be sent back to the exhibits Writer to edit. The exhibits Writer became the primary expert over exhibit text production, and curators were responsible for generating the ideas and important areas of content to be covered, then to proof exhibit script for its factual content and, they clearly insisted from the edits on these documents, tonal and grammatical style. It is on this last point that there were disputes. The tone and style of exhibit text was now the purview of a person who had expertise in text production specific to museum exhibits, where previously this was the purview of a standalone curator. Moreover, by the 1980s professional best practices for exhibit label-writing were developed based on another emerging field, Visitor Studies. Stephen Bitgood, in particular, spearheaded research on visitor perceptions and understandings of labels. In the world of Exhibits, labels that were too long were known to be inaccessible, too intimidating, or simply would not hold people’s attention (Bitgood 1989; Bitgood 1990). In the world of Museum curators, labels were to be as long as the content, its description and its import, dictated. To cut was to simplify. This is the constant battle that rages on in the Museum today. Another example of new tensions between the acceptable tone of the exhibit between Exhibits and Curatorial staff was made manifest in the failed experiment to show a filmic montage of dinosaurs in the movies in the gallery. The film, called “A Star is Hatched,” pulled together clips from The Lost World, Godzilla, and The Land of the Lost, among others. One of the staff in exhibits proposed the idea to a number of Hollywood producers of granting the rights for clips for the film to be shown in the fossil halls, with the idea that it would help to show dinosaurs’ importance in pop culture and to remind visitors that these creatures weren’t “just a pile of old bones”("A Star is Hatched" 1980). 391 A number of the scientific staff were outraged by the film when it was installed, and, although, as far as I have understood no formal study was undertaken, the film apparently gave visitors the false impression that dinosaurs and people had lived simultaneously. It was removed soon after. A few scientific staff remember the film fondly. Dan Chaney, a longtime preparator and museum technician remembers his daughter, at four years old, making a bee-line for the thing whenever they went to the Museum. When I first found the film and the staff at SI archives first digitized it for me, he asked if he could have a copy to give to his daughter for Christmas. 6.3 “Creating Exhibits”: New Paradigms in the 1990s Just as Life in the Ancient Seas was being completed, exhibits production changed forever at the NMNH, as new leadership and new models for exhibit development were again implemented. Geology Gems and Minerals would become the first fully contracted exhibit. Under increasingly tight budgets, and in the new atmosphere of private funding, the new hall would be created in collaboration with a new group of experts—designers and architects from a private firm. With complicated contracts and expertise distributed far outside the Museum’s walls, the Project Management part of the Research Associate role would necessarily become an expertise in its own right. A change in leadership in Exhibits changed the tone and goals of the Department. Robert Sullivan had been trained in Anthropology, and believed firmly in the importance of team dynamics and culturally contextual knowledge in museums as experiences, while despising 392 institutionalized hierarchies. At the same time, Sullivan ushered in a new era in which a new Associate Director was added to the Museum’s administrative team. It was a time of big changes in museums. Along with postmodern critiques and, in anthropology certainly, a reflexive turn in museums, curatorial hierarchies, authority and historical elitism were being questioned in museum literature and institutions. Sullivan, coming out of an anthropological training, seemed to align with this movement. He also ruffled feathers by calling scientific knowledge “cultural” and encouraging exhibits on topics such as baseball at the museum. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this was also a time of incredible financial strain for the institution, and the money for in-house exhibits was dwindling. As was the norm at other museums, Sullivan advocated for contracting out exhibits work, to be more efficient and theoretically cheaper. Sullivan stressed that curators were not the lead voices in exhibit development, aiming for a more democratic team approach. He said in an interview: So when I first got there … if you look at the Unity of All Creation which was the Vision Statement I sent down before I arrived to prepare them for my coming…One of the initial pieces that I was looking at was the hierarchy of power in the institution. And the first meeting I had in the Baird auditorium with all the scientists and staff there, what I said to them was the power balances in this organization are not correct, and we’re going to take power from the science and give it to the education side of the organization. So that one of my first goals is to shift power away from the scientists … so there’s more balance between the scientific mandate to get the science correct and right and the educational mandate to communicate the science well and effectively … that set-up early lines of resistance (Sullivan 2.18.14) He canonized his new approach through a new document, called “Creating Exhibits” (2004 [1998]). In my interview with Sullivan, he acknowledged that the prior documents I’ve just discussed were not on his radar when he put together the “Creating Exhibits” document (Sullivan 393 2.18.14). However, some of the changes instituted through this document do follow trends developed in earlier documents, while making a clear break in other areas. Still today, this document is cited as the document that most closely represents how exhibits processes work at the museum, although everyone acknowledges that each project is different, and that often projects stray far from it. One of its most long-lasting changes was the institutionalization of Exhibit Developers as leadership roles in the exhibits process. In part this had to do with the realities of increasing contracts in the process, but it also illustrated Sullivan’s emphasis on collaborative projects that, in turn, needed a creative leader to unite the different players: We believe that the kind of exhibits we want--thoughtfully researched and designed and passionately presented with visitors in mind--are best developed by small planning teams, backed by larger teams of specialists available for consultation on scientific content and communication and educational techniques. The members of a “core” planning team will perform several critical functions: conceptualization, creative writing, design, and subject-matter development. The core team’s small size makes it possible to originate and sustain an exciting, personal vision for an exhibit. While the specific roles and functions of team members will be elaborated in Policies, it is important to record some general beliefs about staff here. The staff that develop and produce exhibits must be highly motivated by the Museum’s mission. All participants in the process must be treated as professional colleagues with mutual respect, trust, and confidence characterizing communications in the team. Interactions throughout the exhibit development process should be good-willed, objective, empathetic, and courteous. Team participation from both the science and public programs sides should be encouraged and rewarded. (“Creating Exhibits” 2004[1990]) In general, the document also re-ordered, or at least de-emphasized, the traditional pecking order of exhibits roles and hierarchies. For the first time, curators were not listed first in the line-up of exhibits team members. In this new document, the “project manager and/or exhibit developer” 394 was listed first among the exhibit players. Sullivan liked to use this term to conjure the metaphor of baseball for cooperative exhibit teams (Sullivan 2.18.14). Next came the designer, then the writer, then the “curator/ scientist,” then the educator, and lastly the “Museum Evaluator.” This final role was utterly new in the museum, for although Smithsonian had hired such experts as early as the 1970s, never had there been any impetus to put them on exhibit development teams. Although this turned out not to be sustainable, this role remains listed in current versions of the document (2004) that are still circulated in the museum. Ideally, by bringing each of these experts together on a level playing field, moderated by an Exhibit Developer/Project Manager, “creative exhibits can be nurtured by a supporting environment where error is allowed, risk-taking encouraged, authority well defined and distributed, and conflict resolved quickly without compromising the quality of the product” (“Creating Exhibits” 2004[1998]). Sullivan shifted the whole paradigm: So he was important, I think crucial, in Natural History’s evolution from taking that responsibility away from them, of really pushing his whole team concept in small core teams, collaboration, respect. He really demanded that curators respected the work that the writers do, the work that the designers do, the work that the exhibit developer does. And he was a very smart person. Pissed a lot of people off. But he was probably the one for the job at that time who could have made that transition. Because it really was a complete paradigm shift in the way we did exhibits. (Love 8.7.13) Unfortunately, his approach caused intense polarization of the research and non-research staff in the museum. As Elizabeth Duggal articulated of, Sullivan: “I think that my predecessor was really a great design visionary, but … I think that the scientists are also very strong personalities, as you know, and I’m not sure he was as inclusive or transparent as he could have been. He had his own agendas, too.” (Duggal 12.4.13) 395 Scott Wing, describing the “poisonous” relationship between curators and Exhibits at the time said: It was terrible. Nobody wanted to work with Exhibits because they felt they would get burned. That was just sort of the word on the street, I mean, “don’t bother, because you’ll either get sucked into something that you have no control over and you’ll just get used or you’ll bash your head against a brick wall and nothing will ever happen.” So basically it’s either a waste of time or you’re just working for somebody else’s goals and not for anything that has to do with the kind of public outreach you want to do. So yeah it was flat-out poisonous as far as I could tell. (Wing 8.16.13) As Kay Behrensmeyer said of the general feeling when she arrived, “… when I came, it seemed like there was this big, ‘Don’t get involved in exhibits! It’ll suck away all your time, and it never leads to anything,’ which is kind of a culture of the scientists, that there is this divide” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). Curators refused to participate in exhibits because they felt their ideas and expertise would be coopted. The Mammals hall, for instance, completed in 2004, at one point had no curators working on the project. Curators were “offended” by the source of the gift, Kenneth Behring, who wanted to “have his ‘trophies’ displayed in a prominent location and I think a lot of the mammal curators were really offended by that” (Wing 8.16.13). But, “Sully knew that that was a way of getting it renovated because the guy had enough money to endow the hall, or to pay for it” (Wing 8.16.13). Kay Behrensmeyer and another research scientist from zoology, Robert Hoffman, came in to better represent current science in the project. As Kay Behernsmeyer said of curators who jumped in: When we heard what was going on with the Mammal Hall, and that they were following very traditional kind of plans. And I think it must have been 10%, it might have even been close to 35%. And we proposed a whole different layout that was more phylogenetic, that have more linkages among species and lineages rather than just “This 396 is North America and here’s what lives here, and this is…” So we presented this as a plan. We drew it up and presented it to Bob Fri, who was the director at the time. And the net result of that was that I got put on the committee, and he said … And ultimately it did have the sort of layout ‘cause they said, “Well, people want to be comfortable when they come into a space and Africa is a good centerpiece and …” But the only other scientist on there was Robert Hoffmann. And nobody else in vertebrate zoology would touch it. They just didn’t want to be involved, the mammal people did not want to be involved in it. (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13) The dismantling of cretaceous plant displays at the back of the Paleo exhibits for the implementation of the profit-making Fossil café was another sore point among curators. Sullivan assured staff that the area had proven low visitorship. Meanwhile, the Museum had gotten itself into debt on its installation of the IMAX theater, such that profits from its shops were paying for the theater, instead of generating revenue for the museum. Profit from a café or shop within an exhibit on the other hand, would make money for the NMNH. Curators in Paleo, perhaps not surprisingly, continue to feel bitter about this decision. There were also temporary exhibits brought into the museum that curators felt were scientifically inappropriate or factually problematic. As Kay Behrensmeyer said, … one of the threats to the whole process was the outsourcing and he, I guess in part to raise money and to get parts of the halls renovated would take in these traveling exhibits and then they would have components that were not right or that put us on the spot as a museum and then the curators if it was something that they knew about, they would get calls from the press like, “What are you doing putting this on exhibit?” I can’t think of a specific example, but it was clear to us that we were being put on the spot, because we were not involved in vetting these exhibits that were coming in” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13) To this day, curators, and many others in the museum, feel that Sullivan, or “Sully” as he is better known, was a polarizing figure. In pushing so far away from scientific input, he created additional strife in an already politically tense set of relationships. Many curators today describe 397 moving away from the “divisive” period under Sullivan’s leadership. As Kay Behrensmeyer put it, “Robert Sullivan was trying to organize things and manipulate or not manipulate various parts of the process and he alienated a lot of the scientists even more than they had been previously” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). On the other hand, people in exhibits today still appreciate the work he did to build respect for exhibits as a group of professionals. Before he arrived, Sally Love said, “curators basically wrote the text that went on the exhibit walls, and it was like a book on a wall” (Love 8.7.13). He also went to bat for Exhibits staff. Sally continued: “I wish that he was around also to talk to the curators a little bit and say, ‘these people do deserve your respect. What they do is valid. And you don’t know everything. You think you do, but you really don’t.’” (Love 8.7.13). One of the problems seems to have been the fact that Sullivan’s model for exhibit development, where each member of a team and each group of staff from a department were treated like experts, preempted the reality of expertise in the institution. As Sullivan said himself to me in an interview, he wanted to create an environment or culture in which all staff were treated as equal experts; in fact, many of the staff on the outreach side had very little training as professionals in their department’s area. Many staff were still trained on the job, and many had been shuffled from position to position in the institution over time through promotions, without having received real training in their areas of responsibility. As Amy Bolton said of this time in Education: “So there were some people who were good at it and others who were not. But the education department only had, I think, one person with a degree in education. So I think that makes a difference in being seen as an expert in learning.” (Bolton 6.26.13). While elsewhere in the museum world, for instance, most museum educators had some professional training or degree in education, or even Museum Education (a still new field), many 398 staff at the NMNH had very little formal training. This made it difficult to claim their expertise as equal among research scientists, and to make major cultural and perceptual changes in the institution, especially among scientific staff. Sullivan was also a driver in the move from in-house to contracted staff in Exhibits. Under tighter financial constraints, contracted people had more specific and sometimes more technical expertise, and were cheaper in the long term. At one point, there was concern that scientific expertise would also be contracted out. As Kay Behrensmeyer said of this period: And the exhibit department had a pretty big staff and then those went away, reduced staff, so then they were contracting out a lot of the design and other components. And then they were starting to contract out the scientific component, and it looked like this was the way things were going to go, so that the museum would have this wonderful scientific base and yet we’re not connected to what was being shown in the Exhibit Halls. That was one of the reasons that I, with my two colleagues sort of rose up in arms about the Mammal Hall, because … Since no one in mammals would agree to be involved except Bob [Robert] Hoffman. It just looked like they were going to start getting external people to be involved and that this would set a precedent for future halls. And I think after that, it turned back to depending on the scientists in the museum. That’s the driving force for the content, but I think there was a critical juncture there where not enough people realized what was going on with the outsourcing. (Behrensmeyer 6.13.13) And indeed the audience research or the role of an evaluator, which Sullivan had advocated for, is still contracted out either to an outside firm or to staff from the Office of Policy and Analysis, a separate Smithsonian unit. Permanent hall exhibits, and certainly renovations, are almost entirely outsourced. Still today, many staff in Exhibits lament the shift from in-house to contracted exhibits work. As Angela Roberts Reeder said when she first heard about exhibit writing at NMNH in the early 2000s, there were four full-time in-house writers, “which to me was like a dream” (Reeder 399 7.31.13). While internal dynamics in producing exhibits, especially in terms of the play between expertises, has not changed much, the process and internal departmental dynamics are very different. The Exhibits staff is much smaller than it was. People are stretched thinner, with less time and more projects. This makes it difficult to be creative and flexible, and to encourage camaraderie or outside relationships among staff. This is also one of the reasons that the Exhibit Developer/Project Manager position is so difficult. It was after this departmental downsizing that the two positions, “Exhibit Developer” and “Project Manager,” were fused into one position. When I came down here, I was strictly an exhibit developer. We had people to project manage. And then suddenly, it’s just like, “Oh no. Now you have to do both.” It is having two different hats, it’s like different functions of the brain because you’re trying to think conceptually and creatively and collegially. And then you have to enforce budgets and schedules and do contracts and get these outside contractors on. It’s very different left brain, right brain kind of skills. Some people can do both of them really well, other people sort of lean one towards the other. (Love 8.7.13) The shift has also affected group ownership over exhibits work. As Kara Blond said of this shift: I wasn’t here when the staff was much bigger. So I haven’t really seen that shift, but my understanding is that even in five or six years we’ve gone from 48 to 28 exhibits staff, which is absurd, and everybody’s stretched and doesn’t have enough time to respond and can’t be as flexible as they might want to or otherwise be. I think contractors bring a strong outside perspective and context to the work of the in-house team, but I’d prefer to shift the balance back to an emphasis on in-house work—if nothing else, for the pride and respect of having authored the effort (Blond 7.1.13). There is a lingering fear of too much outsourcing in the museum now that most work is contracted out. On the other hand, as Jonathan Coddington said, there are distinct advantages to outsourcing exhibits work: “I think that the outside designers have a broader base of experience, more diverse points of view, and they’re pros, too. They deliver, more or less, on time and on budget.” While 400 it is still considered important “for us to have a designer who knows our own interest and culture,” large-scale exhibits work is considered best accomplished through outside expertise (Coddington 9.19.13). In the end, Exhibits work thus remained contracted while scientific input to exhibits did not. When Cristián Samper became Director in 2003, he, much like Dillon Ripley, seemed to be able to again turn the focus of the museum and its exhibits to research, while also making other professionals and departments feel respected and valued. His use of the “Big Ideas” was a way to present a democratic call to the whole museum to shape the NMNH’s next Strategic Plan. As Elizabeth Duggal articulated: He did a call across the museum community for big ideas moving forward. They did presentations, and those were whittled down to X amount, that were then presented to our board, to vote on which ones they wanted. Cristián [Samper] was very good at engaging the multiple stakeholders of the Museum. I would say, if I learned anything from him it was to over-include, over-communicate, to insure everyone was on the same page. (Duggal 12.4.13). It was through this process that Deep Time was chosen as a museum priority. There has been a distinctive shift back toward involving curatorial staff heavily in the exhibits process. The overall management approach has been one that tries to encourage more mutual respect and a teamwork approach. As Elizabeth Duggal, Associate Director for Public Engagement told me of teamwork and “checks and balances” in the overall management structure: It’s like a symphony. Everybody has to be able to play the same song. They have their different role and then there’s the conductor, which is like the director here. I think it starts at the top. The right director with vision and leadership skills, then a strong management team underneath to implement. This will trickle down through the organization—ensuring that the vision, with the right leadership and execution in place, as well as all the different processes for checks and balances. We do a lot of teamwork 401 here, as you’ve noticed. There’s a lot of what I call matrix management or matrix processes (Duggal 12.4.13). Today, there is more integration among these teams, and Educators are, as much as possible, also assigned as Core Team members along with curator(s), a writer, an exhibit developer and a designer. On the other hand, as Jonathan Coddington, Associate Director for Science told me, the team approach still has its difficulties for prioritizing content and articulating a clear vision: Now, it’s a team approach so that content, design, writing, education, goals are all relatively coequal. The problem with that is that you get something that’s massaged by a committee, and there’s … So, like any art, if the question of who has creative control, and I think that the best art comes from a single, strong, creative vision whether you’re a painter, or a composer or a musician or a movie maker. That’s what makes the thing tick … Our exhibits now are designed by a committee” (Coddington 9.19.13). And from the scientific perspective, important content can be outvoted by a group made up of greater numbers of non-scientists: I would say that content now, the content expert is often overruled, and you’ll have some people whose background is graphic design saying whether or not they think a story about Nemertean worms is what we should be saying … and by and large, the exhibits and education staff underestimate the public, producing language that is often bland, perhaps even obvious (Coddington 9.19.13). Meanwhile, Coddington said, “I think, and all of us here as scientists, do a lot of outreach … as content experts, I think that scientists know a lot about how to get a message across. So, I don’t think they should be shy about setting the bar for what the content of exhibits is … said Jon challengingly.” (Coddington 9.19.13). And indeed, new curatorial hires are also increasingly expected to participate in outreach work on a broader scale and to be more attuned to educational and outreach needs. As Kay Behrensmeyer said, “in general, it’s clear that we were moving into much more of a need for getting curators that could talk to the public, and that was going to be more important than their 402 performance plans … And they … Interactions with the exhibits … Certainly from the very beginning, the Deep Time process has done that” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). Hans Sues noted of the changing organizational culture and the modern curatorial position: … the organizational culture is one that stresses lifelong learning, that stresses being interactive not like in the past. I know that we used to be a joke among academic researchers that if you were really mildly sociopathic, you would go to a museum because it didn’t have to deal with people; where you just sort of set them in the collection and do this thing and keep off the streets basically whereas the more outgoing academics would go and become university and college teachers. But I think that has really changed (Sues 6.24.13). Today, Hans said: The museum curator is somebody who does research, yes, but is also an educator at various levels. This ranges from teaching courses at universities, to talking to museum audiences about science, both in area of immediate research interest but also more general topics, work on exhibits, nowadays, through multimedia stuff, write blogs, write popular articles, help develop products for museums, all those kinds of things. (Sues 6.24.13) As Shari Werb, Assistant Director for Education and Outreach, commented, this emphasis is important for engaging the public in educational programing and with scientific research, “to engage a whole variety of kinds of learners in science learning” (Werb 9.6.13). In her work as Assistant Director, she has encouraged scientists to “be publicly focused” and be “present as people for the public” to help “humanize science” (Werb 9.6.13). Kay Behrensmeyer also pointed out that, “There’s very healthy movement toward more talking and more integration, and not just around the table at meetings, but in general” while even the Senate of Scientists, traditionally reserved for curatorial staff, now have “associate memberships” for other museum staff. Kay Behrensmeyer said, “That’s also symptomatic of a 403 desire to form a more integrated community with these different components” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). Leaders in the museum since Sullivan have tried to harness some of his vision while also creating “a new tone and tenor.” “I’m sure you’ll hear some people you’ve met say that they feel they’re second class citizens,” Duggal said, “but I think we’ve tried to create a better mutual respect. Does it work all the time? No.” (Duggal 12.4.13). 6.4 Chapter 6 Conclusion This chapter has described the disciplinary and professional contexts for current dynamics among experts who plan exhibits. The late-50s onward has seen the development of entirely new disciplines in the realm of outreach, while since the 1960s both research and outreach positions—scientific and audience advocate specialties—have grown and specialized. In new disciplinary contexts, exhibits were planned by increasingly diverse teams. I also describe intersections between these professionalizations and some of the broader cultural and financial shifts that began to take place alongside these shifts. fiscal changes in the late 80s that lead to the increased use of outside contracts for exhibits work. As a counterpoint to Chapter 2, the following chapter explores the intersections between exhibits production and institutional mission by describing these broader institutional and cultural shifts in greater detail. 404 7. Diffusion and Increase: Institutional Contexts from Modernization to Present The changes described in the previous chapters have a broad institutional context that likewise involves frictions and complementarities. From the institution’s very beginnings, it was tasked with the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” This phrase, included in the will of James Smithson, was adopted as the primary mission of Smithsonian at its founding, and has become ubiquitous in institutional speeches, reports, publications, public media, and, indeed, everyday conversation. It is the institution, and its staff’s, raison d’être. My mentor Michael Mason, like so many others I worked with, often commented that he could think of few better ways to spend his life than in pursuing this mission. However within this phrase are embedded two equal but fundamentally distinct goals of the institution. The first, increase, has to do with research and knowledge production (often, as a museum complex, surrounding objects). Within the mission of “increasing knowledge” is included research, collecting, describing and/or identifying things in the world, finding out how things relate to other things, and (depending on how “diffusion” is defined) exchanging this information with other scholarly communities or experts. Within the mission of “diffusing knowledge” is included sharing information generated by research, collecting, and analyzing things in the world with wider audiences—publishing, communicating, and exhibiting research and scientific truths to broader scientific communities and the broader public. It is perhaps in this second realm that the museum has changed most noticeably. While this is in part because many elements of research and collecting practice and culture haven’t changed much over the last 150 405 years, it is primarily because notions of the public and technologies for communication have undergone such fundamental changes over the institution’s history. To make things more complicated, this dual institutional mission, most often cited in Smithsonian publications and reiterated colloquially, in fact reflects three functions or roles of the Museum, initiated by G. Brown Goode in the 1890s, that are often referred to as the legs of a three-legged stool—collections, research, and outreach. It is important to distinguish here the difference between broad Smithsonian mission—an aspirational, pan-Institutional goal—and the Museum’s function or role—specific to the (then) U.S. National Museum and referring to the actual workings of the place, what it actually does, and the people and things it contains. As the 1951 Annual Report of the period summed it up: For the infant museum, G. Brown Goode, then its assistant director, farsightedly set the goal of serving the Nation in three principal ways: As a museum of record—in which was to be housed the national treasures, scientific and historic; as a museum of research—in which a staff of specialists and scientists were to study, classify, and document these materials; and as a museum of education—to which the public could turn for self-improvement and study. (Kellogg 1951:1) In fact, in aligning these roles to Smithsonian’s broad Mission, it is apparent that “increasing knowledge” at the Museum generally means using the Museum-as-record to conduct research, although this has shifted as fewer researches necessarily depend on collections. “Diffusing knowledge,” while primarily defined by publications in the first hundred years of the Institution has progressively meant education, conceived broadly, to include not only educational programming, but also public outreach and communication, exhibits (temporary, permanent, or travelling), and the ability of the institution to attract new visitors, which entails branding and marketing initiatives as well as discrete programs. 406 At NMNH, a Smithsonian museum for which pure research is in its “guts” (as I heard Under Secretary Richard Kurin once say), exhibits are nestled at a somewhat conflicted crux of the Museum’s three legs and the institution’s dual mission. They use objects (collections), contextualized or enhanced by media or architectural technologies, to communicate (outreach) scientific ideas (research). In the Museum’s early years, exhibitions served as perhaps the only mode of diffusion for the general public. Up to that time, as we saw in Chapter 2, curators and their staff (in the case of paleontology, usually preparators), working together in a single department, were held responsible for all of these functions and for carrying out the institution’s mission. Exhibits embodied elements of the institution’s mission by aspiring to educate the public (diffusion) through the most encyclopaedic and up-to-date (increase) scientific ideas and objects (knowledge). However, notions of both the public and of education, while expanding throughout the period, where highly limited. The process necessarily involved varied expertises responsible for many physical aspects of diffusion in the production of exhibits (carpenters, blacksmiths, glassworkers, sculptors, artists), however experts in these areas were hired-on temporarily, and were never permanently staffed in the Museum. Moreover these areas were not yet standalone museum disciplines. Major changes in the post-War era created functional, organizational and ideological rifts between these two aspects of Smithsonian’s mission. In the realm of the increase of knowledge, amidst vast national cultural changes and increased government support for science, the institution attempted to expand its scientific work and raise its academic profile. Scientists, for the first time required to have Ph.D.s in their areas, became increasingly specialized and devoted to niche research. A new set of professional and cultural norms were also instituted as the research-side of the museum aspired to compete in academics with universities. New fields such 407 as collections management removed sole curatorial responsibility for care of collections and other tasks previously under the purview of curators, which in turn freed up energies for research initiatives. In the realm of outward communication, the definition of “diffusion” was steadily broadened by a widened and differentiated understanding of the public, and the expansion of exhibit-making, communication, and outreach activities. While publications continued to be an important part of the Museum’s activities, diffusion thus became much more broadly defined and began to be defined as separate from academic or scientific cultures. With the professionalization and expansion of new Museum professions, “diffusion” came to involve distinctive experts situated within new disciplines and museum offices or departments. Exhibits, in turn, came to involve the expertise of those who primarily work in the realm of research and those who share or interpret it. Those involved in producing knowledge thus include research scientists, but also many of the staff who support the work of their scientific departments, including caretakers of collections and databases, technicians, and in the case of Paleobiology preparators. Increasingly, those who diffuse it, many of whom define themselves as audience advocates, include exhibit staff in AV, model-making, or graphics, commissioned artists, exhibit designers and architects, media designers, exhibit managers, museum educators, writers, and so on. Of course, with increased professionalization in fields such as Museum Education and Visitor Studies, more experts in the realm of outreach are also grounded in research; likewise, it is increasingly the case that “support staff” have high-level professional degrees. Curators are also now expected to do more for the public—those whose labs have active Twitter feeds and Facebook followings get colloquial praise, whether or not it’s reflected in their five-year PAEC evaluation. 408 From the mid-50s onward, with changes in institutional culture and structural shifts, the professionalization and departmentalization of museum fields, and the expansion of the institution and its museum staffs, “increase” and “diffusion” began to be defined by distinct initiatives, carried-out in differentiated organizational cultures and siloed departments. In this chapter, I analyze how the place of exhibitions within the Smithsonian Mission has shifted through the major time periods of fossil exhibit development--the late 50s to early 60s, the late 70s to early 90s, and during the current Deep Time project. Over these periods, I found that “increase and diffusion” (and I will order them oppositely to highlight my argument) became increasingly distinct and separate facets of institutional culture that shifted in tandem with national and fiscal contexts and different secretarial leadership at the pan-Institutional level. These movements were in turn reflected, albeit unevenly, in the valuation of exhibitions at NMNH. I then demonstrate how, in the current fiscal and cultural climate, particularly with the advent of digital media, the contemporary moment has come to be largely defined by not only diffusion, but also “inside-out” diffusion, which has implications for contemporary exhibit development and valuation. 7.1 Pre-1950s Mission At the 1927 Conference on the Future of Smithsonian, Regent Fredrick Delano summed up the institution’s activities, citing Joseph Henry: Henry, he remarked, “interpreted the phrase ‘increase of knowledge’ as implying study, investigation, research, into the realms of the unknown. The phrase ‘diffusion of knowledge’ he interpreted as the freest possible distribution of the knowledge to the waiting world (1927). At that same conference, Secretary Abbot concisely put (and ordered) the mission thus: 409 Smithsonian’s Opportunity 1. Research 2. Diffusion of Knowledge (Abbott in “Proceedings” 1928:28). When Abbot went on to talk about what he meant by “diffusion,” he made it clear that he was primarily referring to publications: The increase of knowledge is only half of the Smithsonian’s purpose. The diffusion of it is of equal importance, and has been a main source of the Smithsonian’s greatness … Smithsonian publications are now standard works of reference throughout the world, and scientific men everywhere look to it to publish those indispensable monographs which cannot be undertaken by private publishing firms … (Abbot in “Proceedings” 1927:34). Thus “Diffusion” had primarily meant distribution of publications, the growing library system, news releases, public talks, and exhibitions, including participation in expositions such as Chicago in 1893, Buffalo in 1901, St. Louis in 1904, Philadelphia in 1926 and Dallas in 1937 (True 1946:55). Throughout curator’s careers, they corresponded with other paleontologists and preparators across the U.S., but also in London, Paris, Frankfort, Brussels, and so on. Through the Smithsonian International Exchange Service, the U.S. National Museum was able to share publications with other institutions across the world (True 1946:53). Webster True, Chief of the Smithsonian Editorial Division in the mid-1940s wrote in The First Hundred Years of the Smithsonian Institution, “In 1939, the last normal year before World War II, the Service handled 714,877 packages of such material, weighing a total of 719,694 pounds. This global exchange of literature, initiated by the Smithsonian Institution, has been a potent factor in the rapid growth of science through facilitating the international exchange of ideas. It constitutes, in the best sense, an agency for the diffusion of knowledge (True 1946:54). 410 True and others throughout the early years reiterated: “The most obvious means of diffusing knowledge is by the printed word, and this is indeed the chief means employed by the Institution … (True 1946:49). He went on to restate that scientific work was the heart of the institution: To the visitor, the public exhibits seem to be the important part of a museum, but the members of the scientific staff know that the soul of the museum resides in the systematically arranged study collections, where fundamental discoveries of new knowledge are constantly being made. (True 1946:13) From these and other institutional publications up through the 1940s, it is clear that “increase and diffusion” was primarily aimed at the national and global scientific community. There were a few exceptions over the period to this generalization. In the 1930s and again during WWII, research and its diffusion also necessarily served the United States broad interests. Research during these periods necessarily became more utilitarian and less research for research’s sake. Moreover, up through the 1940s the “increase and diffusion” of knowledge had been carried out through an integrated set of museum practices--fieldwork, collecting, specimen preparation, and analysis for publication, talks and exhibitions—generally driven by staff curators, “The responsibility of the scientific staff is twofold: each curator must care for and arrange the collections in his division, prepare some of them as appropriate public exhibits, and also conduct original researches on the much larger portion that constitutes the study collection” (True 1946:13). In the 20s and again in the 40s participation in public radio began to change ideas about diffusion. Up to WWI, “the public,” as we saw in Chapter 2, was fairly narrowly defined. Most visitors were middle to upper class (white) men, sometimes accompanied by their families. In the late-1920s the paleontologists began hosting boy scouts and more local school groups. By 1944, 411 this definition was changing, as increased numbers of service men and women visiting the museum from more diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds made clear the museum’s failings in communication. Recall: “Finally, the many visiting servicemen, representing a clear-cut cross section of American life, have been so frank in their questions and remarks on the exhibits that much of value for future work has been learned” (Bassler 1945:45). 7.2 Increase and Diffusion 1950s-1970s The post-war era was a time of vast cultural and institutional changes for Smithsonian. After the War, and therefore many years of stagnancy, the Institution was ready for restructuring and rethinking of its staffing and its exhibits. What happened in the ten years following were formative for the contemporary institution’s increasingly divergent mission of “increase” and “diffusion.” First, research life for scientific staff went from being defined by bureaucracy to a university-like culture, while research went from being practically oriented to theoretically rigorous and prestigious. At the same time, changing conceptions of public needs and a broader definition of “diffusion” was mobilized through the Exhibits Modernization program and new personnel devoted to exhibits and outreach work. This distinctive split continues to define the Museum through the present period. 412 7.2.1 Research 1950s-1970s From the 1950s to the 1970s, there were distinctive changes in thinking about institutional mission that were reflected at Natural History with important implications for exhibits production. In the realm of research (“increase of knowledge”), the War had meant that research had to be practical. The 1951 Annual Report is telling in this area. It notes that collections become valuable only as scientific staff take their vast numbers, orderly arrangement, and factual documentation together to create what it calls “useful knowledge”: “The value of collections, in fact, derives from all these attributes taken together as they are brought into focus by the skill and knowledge of the scientific staff … who make a useful, living organization out of what otherwise would be a sterile warehouse of inanimate things (Kellogg 1951:3). The report claims: The proposition that knowledge, of itself, is a good thing, and that therefore the seeking of it is worthwhile, is a fundamental part of the philosophy of democracy. Today we affirm the truth of this proposition, yet, since we must live in a workaday world, we tend to value most highly that knowledge which is most practical. Scientists and specialists the world over find museum research essential and rely heavily on the National Museum for the kinds of information it is uniquely fitted to develop. The knowledge arising from this research serves as a basis for other work with immediate practical applications (Kellogg 1951:4). Alexander Wetmore had served as Assistant Secretary in charge of the U.S. National Museum from 1925 to 1945, through the Depression and War years, after which he was promoted to Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. When Leonard Carmichael succeeded Wetmore as Secretary in 1954, he was tasked with modernizing the institution, and this included both exhibits and outreach work and the scientific side of the museum. Almost immediately, he set about strengthening the Smithsonian’ research 413 profile. For the first time, hiring was based on the candidate’s publication record, and Carmichael personally interviewed every candidate for a research position. Apparently these interviews were worse than a Ph.D. oral exam. Many scientists described his leadership as hierarchical and top-down. Regulations for research and workflow were more stringent, which in turn did not allow research publications and scientific prestige to reach the level of their counterparts at universities. Scientific staff who were at the Museum in the 50s characterize this time, “the Carmichael years,” as ultra-bureaucratic and lacking “academic freedom.” Porter Kier, later Director of the NMNH, recalled: When I came here it was thoroughly bureaucratic. You can’t imagine, it was so bureaucratic. I come out of the army and I hated that. Oh, God, I hated it … We had, once a month, we had to send a memo up through the director over across the mall in which we noted how many telephone calls we’d gotten, how many ENR—those were question and answers—we’d gotten. When I became director I went over, first day on the job, I said ‘I’d like to see those records from last year.’ They’d all been thrown away- nobody ever looked at them. 30 years of this has gone on and nobody looked at them. That’s the old way.” (Kier 5.17.13) Throughout interviews with staff who recalled institutional life in the 1950s and early 1960s (both that I conducted and that Pam Henson had conducted before me), people commented that in “the old days” everyone at the museum had a standard 8:45 to 5:15 schedule with a half hour break for lunch. At the time, the Head Curator system was still in place, in which an appointed person ran a department until they retired, and promotions (and parking!) were based solely on seniority. There were no graduate students, interns, or official volunteers supported at the Museum. The Director of the NMNH at the time, Remington Kellogg, stuck to the rules so well that he was known as the “abominable no-man.” 414 A number of critical changes altered the research scene at the Museum. First, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 October 4, 1957, the U.S. government began pouring money into science research and education. For Smithsonian, this meant hugely increased budgets for research and staff, particularly in mineralogy and oceanography (of which invertebrate paleontologists were able to claim a part), two disciplines that could inform innovations in the space race.14 Second, as mentioned elsewhere, due both to the healing post-War economy and post-Sputnik government support, huge numbers of new staff were hired into the museum. These new, young scientific staff were fresh out of university, and were unused to government bureaucracy affecting their academic work. In Paleobiology alone, between 1950 and 1963, curatorial staff increased from eight to 15. This, in turn, meant huge cultural changes for the research-side of the Museum. In 1963, in the spirit of university faculty senates, scientists at Natural History came together to form a Senate of Scientists, which would serve to represent their interests to Museum and SI administrations (Henson 1975:1). This harnessed the collective power of researchers at the Museum. Third, given the longtime growth of collections, the need for new research technologies and spaces, and the newly growing staff, Smithsonian spatial expansion was long overdue. At Natural History, the Museum finally began construction on the wings (formerly approved in 1930). Working drawings for these new spaces were approved in 1959 (General Report 1959:52). These spaces could be devoted entirely to collections and research. By creating cohesive departmental spaces for exponentially growing research and support staff, they in turn fostered new communities of research never before possible on the same scale. Gus Cooper’s 14 Smithsonian founded an Oceanographic Sorting Center in January 1963. 415 greatest institutional feat/strategy was to insist that his staff in Paleobiology worked in “labs,” not “offices.” When the East Wing was completed, Cooper had ensured three floors of labs, each with a soapstone sink and room for multiple desks. This new space became important in cultivating a united departmental culture. Figure 7.2 Draft layout of the first floor, East Wing c 1962.114 Fourth, S. Dillon Ripley, a young ornithologist with radical ideas for the Institution, was appointed Secretary in 1965. Ripley didn’t just respond to the changes already taking place at the museum. In fact he made the new young curators look conservative. This involved the public outreach side of the institution as well as its research. However Ripley and other leaders at the 416 Institution made it clear outreach activities were to emerge from the research initiatives of the Institution. Just after Ripley’s arrival, Taylor, Director of the USNM wrote: The annual reporting procedures of the U.S. National Museum have been changed to take cognizance of the broadening scholarly horizons of the Smithsonian Institution and of the enlarged scope of the Museum of History and Technology resulting from the move to its new building … the contents of each report are rearranged to emphasize the fact that research and publication are the foundations from which arise the other activities and services of the Museum. (Taylor 1965:19[emphasis added] ) The reports also included publications after each departmental report within each museum. Not only was the emphasis on publication growing (as had been initiated by Carmichael some years earlier), but also articles were to be published in more visible journals, and to respond to broader theoretical or scientific problems. This was a far cry from the emphasis on applied scientific research during the War years. Ripley was clear that he wanted the Smithsonian to be at the forefront of academic, and not merely “applied” science, pushing the “increase of knowledge” as his main agenda. In the first newly organized Smithsonian Year, he wrote: In presenting this report in the year 1965, which marks the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Smithson, it is appropriate to turn back to some of the thoughts of Joseph Henry, the first Secretary, who labored to make the Institution truly a center for “enlarging the bounds of human thought.” This year it has been my privilege, representing the Institution, to testify before a Congressional Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development on the subject of the National Science Foundation. One of the topics of that testimony was increasing need for supporting basic rather than applied research. In 1854 Professor Henry was much concerned about the state of the increase of knowledge in America, one of the foundation stones of James Smithson’s famous will. Joseph Henry felt that comparatively little encouragement was being given to the “increase” of knowledge (Ripley 1965:1). The following year, he reiterated that with the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Smithson, the Institution had “re-endorsed” its “essential role” in research (Ripley 1966:1). 417 Ripley wanted curators to be at the forefront of theoretical movements in their field—conducting innovative research and publishing in prestigious journals on their own terms. Often. He wanted scholars at Smithsonian to have the same academic freedom to undertake innovative research as their peers at universities. They were not to be slaves to dusty collections. Marty Buzas said of this shift: … Ripley helped the atmosphere. He made it very clear when he came—when, in ‘64, guess … when I first came here, when you published a paper, there was a little footnote which said, “Published by permission of the Secretary.” Your paper went from myself to my next superior. At that time you even had divisions in the museum and the division chief at that time was Richard [S.] Boardman and he had to sign it. Then it used to go to Gus [Arthur] Cooper, who was chairman of this department, and he’d sign it. Then it went up to the director’s office and he’d sign it. Then it would go over to the Secretary’s office and he’d sign it. Every paper went through this chain of command … Ripley said, “No more of this.” … Ripley came in and said, “Okay, we’re going to make this like a university.”(Buzas 1976:15–16) Not only did Ripley streamline the publication process, he advocated for scientists sending their papers to journals that were highly regarded and appropriate, the way that scholars at universities did. And indeed, Ripley often referred to the Mall as a “campus” (Buzas 1976:15). In addition to changing the publication requirements, Ripley encouraged a scholarly culture. Hours for scientists no longer complied with an 8:45 to 5:15 schedule. As Buzas said: “… if you’re writing a paper and you don’t want to come in, you can work at home, make your own hours … Most of the scientists preferred to come and go, you know, and so that many weren’t worried about this forty hour business” (Buzas 1976:16). The newly formed Senate of Scientists, modeled after similar groups at universities, also pioneered the PAEC [Professional Accomplishments Evaluation Committee], a peer review board for scientists’ work at the museums where previously, “The decisions were made by your chairman and the director, not by 418 a group of peers who looked and said, “How do you stand in the scientific community?” (Buzas 1976:15–16) Thus it was at this time that the PAEC was instituted, which in turn disseminated the now ubiquitously groaned-about rule that curators should publish at least three papers per year. This was about academic integrity, scholars collectively judging other scholars. Furthermore, in a single memo, Ripley did away with the previous, hierarchical Head Curator system. Now Department Chairmen would be elected by staff and serve limited terms. Another of these young upstarts, and later Director of the Museum, Porter Kier, said of Ripley’s influence: But [Ripley] came along with these wild ideas about academic freedom and we were, oh we thought this was ridiculous. You know, absolutely absurd. And that’s when all the chairmen were fired and the departments were told to elect their own chairmen. That’s when we got what we call the PAEC committee in which everybody was reviewed every once in a while by his colleagues and external sources. Never had that before. Never had that. Seniority- promotion was based on seniority. It was lousy. So [Ripley] did it all. He changed the whole world, and we hated him most of the way. (Kier 5.17.13) Ripley also brought more students and researchers into the Smithsonian. On July 1 1965, he established to Office of Education and Training, headed by Director Dr. Charles Blitzer: “The objective of this new division is to bring about the fullest use of the Institution’s resources—both its collections and its distinguished staff of scientists and scholars—and to make these resources available to the scientific and scholarly community at large (Ripley 1965:14). Programs within this office initiated relationships between universities and the Smithsonian to allow Ph.D. Candidates to conduct research at the institution under the supervision of Smithsonian staff. They also brought some of the first undergraduate programs to the institution, and began to raise funds for visiting research associate programs. One program even brought local teachers to the Museum to train them in using museums as teaching facilities and educational resources. 419 Taken together, these changes led to radical shifts in the culture and staffing of the research side of the Museum from the 60s onward. 7.2.2 Public Outreach 1950s-1970s In the immediate post-War era of the 1950s, marked largely by the shift in secretarial leadership from Wetmore to Leonard Carmichael, emphasis was primarily on broadening the Institution’s modes of “diffusion.” This included, most importantly, the Exhibits Modernization program, launched in 1954, which set out to comprehensively renew and redesign all of the U.S. National Museum’s exhibits. The period was also influenced by trends begun in the 40s in thinking more broadly about the public and the museum as an educational space. The post-War era was the beginning of a new understanding of the Museum’s purpose. As we saw in Chapter 2, WWII had encouraged greater numbers of local, working-class visitors into the Museum, who in turn, inspired changes in thinking about access and outreach in the post-War era. This was also a major period of cultural change in American society, and suddenly, the Smithsonian was able to adapt. Throughout the 1950s, alongside the building up of staff and revitalized research initiatives, the Museum began a new set of initiatives in communication and outreach strategy. This emphasis was clear in Remington Kellogg’s U.S. National Museum reports. Kellogg served as Director of the U.S. National Museum from 1948 to 1962, and so reading the development of these reports shows major changes over the period. As much as research was important, the 1951 Annual Report, for instance, clearly delineates public communication through exhibitry as an equal function of the museum: 420 Today more than ever the citizen needs the service the Museum can render through its exhibits. For through effective exhibits it supplements the citizen’s personal experience and adds measurably to his understanding of the world he inhabits. Through its exhibits the Museum can clarify the facts of nature and science, can point up the significance of trends in technology, can explain developments in industrial techniques, can furnish with authentic mementos the remembrance of notable moments in natural history, can give to the problems of today a historical perspective in the mirrored hallway of other civilizations—present and past. Both the museum’s functions, which he described as “reference and exhibits” should be considered important and “support and supplement the other” so that the overall goal of the Museum would be to “balance its exercise of the functions of reference service and exhibition so that all will be served (Kellogg 1951:7–8). This new philosophy was applied when in 1951, Smithsonian established its Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES), to bring Smithsonian exhibits to institutions around the world. A few years afterward, Smithsonian’s new emphasis was fully articulated and institutionalized just a few years later, largely under the new leadership of Leonard Carmichael, who took Wetmore’s place as Secretary in 1953. Leonard Carmichael was an important leader for the Museum at this time. He was successful at communicating the need for improved public outreach and exhibits work to Congress. Indeed, while he worked to improve the quality of staff by interviewing each candidate and prioritizing staff with a publication record for the first time, he was viewed by scientists at the time as someone who privileged the exhibits and public face of the museum over research and scientific activities. As Erle Kauffman, longstanding Paleontologist and founder of the Senate later remarked: Although Carmichael was highly respected for what he had done in terms of really impressing Congress and getting an awful lot of money for the museum, especially for 421 the exhibit facility and for the building of new museums, the educational aspect of it; but not in terms of his understanding of research and the support of basic science. (Kauffman 1975:4) From 1952 to 1953 there is a major shift in the way the Annual Report reads and is structured, that shows the rethinking of the museum’s purpose. From before the War up to 1952, the report is short and places its emphasis on collections, research, “orderly inquiry” (Kellogg 1952:1), and funds, followed by Departmental reports. Afterwards, the reports begin with a lengthy introduction about the public needs of a museum, with Exhibits as its first section. Figure 7.3 Virginia school children on the Mall, 1950.115 422 In the 1953 Report, Kellogg notes major shifts in what it terms “the cultural needs and tastes” of the public (Kellogg 1953:3). Where at the turn of the century, visitors to expositions and museums were the only place to see “novelties and oddities and interesting devices from all over the world,” many newly explored, invented, or discovered by the West, now travel was more commonplace, and access to the world through mass media and radio and television in the home, coupled with developments in mass transit made museums less novel: The average museum visitor today is likely to be far more discriminating and much less naïve than his parents were. His attitude toward what he sees, moreover, is conditioned by his contact with modern techniques of presenting information and with educational methods that have radically improved through the influence of applied psychology and modern advertising … His intellectual curiosity can no longer be completely satisfied with rows of stuffed mammals or birds, with cases of rocks that all look very much alike and have little to identify them but hard-to-pronounce scientific names, with displays of arrowheads or shells in geometric patterns, with garments and personal effects of famous people laid out in rows, or with shelves of primitive artefacts and implements whose appearance gives few hints of their use or effectiveness or significance. (Kellogg 1953:3) In this new cultural milieu, greater numbers of more savvy visitors would need to see museum collections “in a different and better way,” expounding on wider varieties of topics for more varied interests. Rather than showing more objects, more effective displays would “show fewer, but with greater attention to their selection and arrangement” (Kellogg 1953:3). That year Congress clearly received the message, and approved funds for perhaps the biggest shift Smithsonian underwent in its exhibits history: the Exhibits Modernization program. Launched in 1954, this program sought to comprehensively renovate all of the long-forgotten exhibits across its museums, now including the U.S. National Museum, the National Air Museum, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the National Gallery of Art: 423 The most modern of these structures, the Natural History building, was designed in 1902 when the electric light had just come into general use—and when it was still the custom for a museum to place the greater part of its collections shelf-on-shelf in glass cases set in rows on the exhibition floor. The modest storage and working facilities through adequate by the designers were overloaded less than a dozen years after the building was occupied in 1912 … The Congress has made possible a long forward step toward solving the problem by providing funds of renovating and modernizing exhibits that it has not been possible to change for 40 years and more. From this the public will soon begin to reap the benefit … Modernization and expansion of the working parts of the Natural History building will complete the program by which the National Museum is in process of rehabilitating its physical plant. (Kellogg 1954:3-4) From 1954 when the program began, to 1959, 17 galleries were re-done across the institution, some 80,000 square feet of exhibition feet and 673 separate “exhibit units … fully reorganized and modernized for the benefit and education of the public” (Carmichael 1959:3). Under Carmichael’s leadership, as he outlined in 1959, while the “increase of knowledge” held strong, there was a major push to expand the diffusion of knowledge through not only scholarly but also through “semipopular works” and “museum exhibits and the educational and inspirational opportunity that these displays give to millions of visitors each year.” … real progress has been made in the past few years in transforming the old, outmoded museum displays of the Smithsonian into modern, effective, teaching exhibits. The visitors who now come to the Smithsonian Institution are deeply grateful that Congress has made it possible to bring about this gradual transformation of Smithsonian exhibition halls from what in too many respects was until recently an old-fashioned place for ‘visual storage.’ (Carmichael 1959:3). In Paleontology, new exhibits would work to illustrate man’s relationship to the world “his environment,” earth and geologic processes, and ecological associations (Kellogg 1954: 5). 424 Through the Exhibits Modernization program, it is evident that the Museum’s practices of diffusion were radically shifting. Years later, Carmichael noted that after the War, there was “a new recognition of the role of the museum as a public information center. More and more museums are seen as places needed to inspire each new generation with the kind of patriotism that is based on a valid understanding of the factors that have led to national growth … This new museum philosophy has been wholeheartedly accepted and adopted at the Smithsonian” (Carmichael 1959: 2). There were other changes at the Museum effecting exhibits, but separate from the Exhibits Modernization program. The public face of the Museum was altering as the Museum made clearer decisions to split its collecting programs more clearly. Mineral Sciences, then still under the same “Department of Geology” umbrella as Paleontology, was a clear example. Previously, “showy” specimens had been collected alongside research specimens, but by the same scientists on the same research field trips. A specimen’s exhibition quality was, for the most part, a lucky find in the midst of a scientifically-oriented field trip. However, in the late 1950s, particularly in the Mineralogical side of the Geology Department, there was a split in acquisition criteria. As NASA was founded and interest began to build in meteorites (the only things on earth already known to fly through space), and as scientific, not practical, research began again in Mineral Science, the Museum also acquired the Hope Diamond, launching a gem-collecting campaign at the Museum. George Switzer spearheaded this split in collecting philosophy (Bambach 5.6.13). The arrival of the Hope Diamond at Smithsonian in 1959, amidst the remodeled, modernized, Mineral Sciences halls, marked a new phase in exhibition acquisition and display. Suddenly, Smithsonian made a concerted effort to collect aesthetic and charismatic things. In 425 that same year, the Fenykovi elephant was unveiled on March 6. At 13 feet 2 inches, and “the largest land mammal ever to be placed on display,” it dominated the rotunda. This was the beginning of exhibit blockbusters (a term not used in earnest until the 1980s). The Smithsonian institutionalized its new emphasis on communication through the establishment of the Smithsonian Museum Service on October 21, 1958. G. Carroll Lindsay was appointed acting curator of this unit. The Museum Service was supposed “to coordinate the extension of the museum activities of the Institution … The activity of the Museum Service includes the administration of Smithsonian cooperation with the volunteer docents of the Junior League of Washington, D.C.” It not only acted as the main office for coordinating newly established volunteer programs, but also served to provide “assistance to professional and subprofessional individuals and groups visiting the museums of the Institution” and to coordinate events including lectures and hall openings through an Institution-wide Calendar of Events (Annual Report 1959:232). By the following year, the Service had its own section in the Smithsonian Annual Report and its role had expanded: The Service, “through appropriate educational media, interprets to museum visitors and to the general public, the objects, specimens, and exhibits of the several Smithsonian museums and developments educational programs for interpreting the work of the Institution in the fields of science, natural history, art, and history” (Annual Report 1960:212). In that year that office took on the first “long range project to orient visitors to the various museums and exhibits of the Institution through the installation and operation of an electronically controlled, automatic slide lecture device in the Great Hall of the Smithsonian Building” (Annual Report 1960:212). 426 In addition to its new interest in visitors and public communication, the increased emphasis on diffusion as a newly institutionalized and professionalized set of practices can be seen in the exponential growth of personnel in exhibits activities, leading up to the foundation of a discrete Exhibits Department at NMNH in 1973. In 1957 the NMNH had formed the first Exhibits Committee, chaired by Herbert Friedman. By 1963, Richard Cowan became Assistant Director of the NMNH and simultaneously was appointed as what is listed in the Annual Report as “Coordinator Curators/Exhibits.” This is particularly interesting as a new position because it indicates enough of a growing gap between curators and staff involved with exhibits to necessitate a museum position to liaise between the two groups. For the first time, the museum was not only meant to show objects clearly, but also to convey complex ideas and ideologies. Museums needed “to explain how and why the particular items selected for display are intellectually significant” (Carmichael 1959:2) and to illustrate “great ideas” (3). Moreover, Carmichael noted that after the War, there was “a new recognition of the role of the museum as a public information center. More and more museums are seen as places needed to inspire each new generation with the kind of patriotism that is based on a valid understanding of the factors that have led to national growth” (Carmichael 1959: 2). In order to accomplish this “new museum philosophy” there was, for the first time, an emphasis placed on design and other exhibits activities as professional disciplines. The first Office of Exhibits was formed pan-Institutionally in 1961 (the previous year Exhibits was listed as a category for the USNM but with only one employee, William L. Brown, a taxidermist). Exhibit design was becoming a full-fledged field, with its own community of professional practitioners. 427 Smithsonian was also moving, both in its organization and its public mission (and therefore its public identity) from a universalist museum to a particularist and topically-specific museum complex (Walker 2013). In 1957, the same year as the Sputnik launch, the U.S. National Museum split into the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of History and Technology, so that the building, its staff and collections became entirely devoted to humans and their natural world (still bound by definitions that were already shifting in academia, “anthropological” or “ethnographic” objects, or non-Western objects, remained at Natural History, while “relics,” “historical objects,” and material culture of the settler U.S. were removed.) This was part of a new philosophy that would be strengthened and broadened under Ripley, that institutions grew by breaking apart, much like cells. In addition to the drive for a museum showcasing historical and technological innovation, the U.S. National Museum had also grown too big to exist under one administration, within a singular identity, and in one space. The 1950s thus solidified the trend toward each museum having a discrete mission and public identity; each would, in turn, choose different modes of communication and display, and eventually target different audiences. By 1966, Dillon Ripley advocated for catering to increasingly diverse visitors outright, when in his annual report on education he said “In the coming year we hope to extend our work with students and specialists into a study of exhibit techniques and audience responses which may prove to be of direct benefit to the cause of education and its relation to the state of learning in our country” (Ripley 1966:15). And indeed, these audiences were vastly growing. From the beginning of Exhibits Modernization program in 1954 to 1959 visitor attendance jumped from 3,658,000 to 6,351,000 across the Smithsonian (Carmichael 1959:3). 428 In 1966, the institution also formed its first Smithsonian Society of Associates, soon after the Smithsonian Associates, which sought to formally recognize Smithsonian’s donors across the U.S. and the world, as part of a large-scale endowment campaign (begun in the 20s by Walcott but abandoned after his death in 1927 in the wake of the Depression). Members paid annual dues to support the institution in the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men (Smithsonian Year 1966:39). In its first year, Associates in the D.C. area were taken on tours of exhibits production, where they say silk screening and model-making techniques. Thus when S. Dillon Ripley became Secretary, he institutionalized and encouraged trends already in motion. Dillon Ripley solidified and intensified changes in the public face of the museum already taking place at Smithsonian. He actively campaigned to beautify and enliven the Mall. In his 1966 report he wrote: The Smithsonian is deeply committed to supporting and encouraging all those concerned with the Mall in their plans for keeping it as an inspiring and enlivening heartland for the American people. Let it never be sterile and dull. Let it always be lively, vigorous, restful, varied, and above all, beautiful. (Ripley 1966:11) Ripley built a carousel on the Mall. He also ensured that new building spaces were created for the public. Under his leadership, in 1966 Congress authorized a new National Air and Space Museum building for the unit that had been created in 1946 (Ripley 1966:13). In 1966 he also established a Public Information Office. This office served to pull together activities of former press and other distributed offices to insure that Smithsonian clearly and centrally communicated its work to the public (Ripley 1966:16). Ripley created a new Annual Report format, now called “Smithsonian Year,” which for the first time integrated all of the growing Smithsonian units together. This new Annual Report was also for the first time written to “reach a wider audience” (Taylor 1965:19), in part by clarifying and collating all of Smithsonian’s activities, but also by 429 creating a more approachable format, full of images. He also launched the Smithsonian Magazine in 1970. The 1950s thus marked a distinctive split in the formerly interwoven Mission, passed down from James Smithson’s will, of the “increase and diffusion” of knowledge, where “increase” became defined by a rigorous research agenda and the institution mimicking a University culture, and “diffusion,” while including high profile publications, became a broad public communication agenda defined by newly modernized exhibits and more diverse programming. Amidst this energetic but departmentalized and professionalized institutional culture, the next generation of exhibits would have to be produced in both realms. Ever since, Smithsonian has been grappling with its mission as two equally important but fundamentally different tracks. Tracks that, particularly as budgets have tightened, and commercially viable enterprises have become important to the working of the museum, come into conflict. Moreover, the extent to which some of the institution’s initiatives in “diffusion” necessarily diffuse “knowledge,” and not pure entertainment, have at various times come under attack. Furthermore, in recent years, the concept of “diffusion” itself has been turned inside-out, as trends in thinking about attraction, affect, free-choice learning, and engagement have changed the language from Museum ?public to public?Museum. 7.3 Increase and Diffusion 1970s-1990s The explosion of staff and the many changes implemented by Carmichael and Ripley in the 60s had initiated a massive sea change at the institution. By the 1970s, the NMNH was reaping the benefit of these changes, with a huge staff and huge outputs, and it was during this decade that the Museum capitalized on increased research staffs by hiring many more people to 430 assist them in their work. Dillon Ripley continued to lead the Smithsonian in its strengthened research and public missions. Across Smithsonian, under Ripley’s adoption of the philosophy of growing by splitting units was growing the institution, its public image and its research profile. The period also marked the beginning of interdisciplinarity in both research and exhibits work, as increasingly professionalized or niche fields came together in increasing and diffusing knowledge. A growth of staff in exhibits, internal production and artistic shops meant that the mid-1970s saw the flourishing of professionalized ‘in-house’ exhibits production, buttressed by the foundation of larger-scale offsite facilities at the Office of Exhibits Central. This was also an important time, following the shaky and racially-charged climate of the late-1960s, for thinking differently about the museum public and their diversity. By the 1990s, major economic set-backs and cultural shifts meant that exhibit development, along with many other large-scale diffusion efforts at the institution, began to be both privately fundraised and outsourced to contracted firms. 7.3.1 Research 1970s to 1990s On the research side of the Institution, many new research institutes were founded, while others were exponentially growing. These included the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Tropical Research Center, and the Radiation Biology Laboratory. In Paleobiology alone, from 1960 to the early 80s staff grew from eight to 23 research scientists plus vertebrate preparators, an illustrator, preparation supervisor, paleobiology information specialist, inventory supervisor, collections management supervisor, collections manager, and 60 additional affiliated staff, all in the East Wing (Smithsonian Year 1983b:529). 431 There were now the seven departments within the NMNH that exist today—Botany, Vertebrate Zoology, Invertebrate Zoology, Mineralogy, Paleobiology, Anthropology, and Entomology. Within each department, following the increases in research staff, the 1970s marked the beginning of major increases in “support staff.” As Erle Kauffman later described: This was one of the great needs, that is, high class research assistance, not just preparators, but people who could work with you and work with your data and who could understand your problem. That meant, of course, a new concept in hiring. You had to be prepared to hire or at least to raise people to five, seven, and nine levels, to put a higher ceiling on research assistants or so-called sub-professionals … Porter Kier is the person who’s now set the three-to-one ratio, and at the time he was very much wrapped up in this … I think that conversations with him perhaps had an impact, ultimately. (Kaufman 1975: 21-22) Porter Kier was indeed a major figure in this shift. Alongside the emphasis on greater and higher profile academic publishing, he pushed for not just a one-to-one or one-to-two staff to support staff ratio, but a one-to-three ratio. This meant a massive growth in the overall sizes of departments. For geology, with the USGS sharing space with the department, this meant that nearly 80 people were working side-by-side on paleontological projects. Meanwhile programs begun in the 60s meant that there were larger numbers of post-doctoral students in many departments. Collaborative programs with universities such as George Washington led to more staff were teaching courses at partner institutions. Each of the sub-fields within broader disciplines like Paleobiology became more specialized, yet at the same time this period marked the beginning of strategic/purposeful interdisciplinarity at the Museum.15 By 1975, Ripley was already advocating “a consolidated Museum Support Facility to house, curate, and conserve collections, in an off-campus setting, away from the Mall. The 15 In fact the disciplining and professionalization of the Museum, fostered the first “interdisciplinary” research, including in Paleobiology the formation of the ETE program around 1980. 432 public exhibition facilities on the Mall should not be further cramped by the increasing pressures of storage and curation.” He noted, “We already possess the land and some of the facilities at Suitland, Maryland, to expand appropriately” (Ripley 1975:9). 7.3.2 Outreach 1970s-1990s At the pan-Institutional level, the emphasis on diffusion as broad public outreach continued to expand under Dillon Ripley’s leadership. Ripley’s philosophy of growth through splitting was indeed expanding the Institution at an increasing rate. This was true both at the micro level of museum staffs and departments and at the pan-Institutional level with the establishment of many new Smithsonian units, including the Archives of American Art in 1970, the Renwick Gallery in 1972, the Hirshorn in 1974, the Air and Space Museum in 1976. Under this system, major changes in outreach and exhibitry began when, in 1973, two major shifts took place. First, a “rearticulation” at the Institution split the centralized SI offices dealing with exhibits, education, and building management between Smithsonian units, so that for the first time each museum had its own internal exhibits, educational and building management offices (formerly staff had been most often stationed in a museum during periods of activity). At the same time, for exhibits anyway, a larger-scale, centralized office, called the Office of Exhibits Central was established to handle large-scale projects and equipment. Here, the biggest projects at the institution’s museums could be undertaken in a large-scale space with a concentration of specialist artists, model-makers, taxidermists, and designers of all sorts. This was indeed necessary for the new museums opening at an increasing rate. OEC involved two parts: 433 1) Special Exhibits Resources Group—models, plastics, restoration shops, freeze dry laboratory, motion picture unit, museum lighting office, audiovisual unit, exhibits editor’s office 2) Central Design and Production Group—traveling exhibits, folklife, developed shop facilities and procedures At first, OEC was split between a few facilities, including shops and labs continuing to be used at various museum locations (Smithsonian Year 1974b:204). However by 1975, all of these parts were moved into a single coherent space at the Smithsonian Institution Service Center on 1111 North Capitol Street. Much of this new movement seemed to be in reaction to the fact that the emphasis on exhibits had lulled significantly by this time. After Exhibits Modernization, and the 24 major halls that had been re-done at NMNH between 1954 and 1974, the museum was on an exhibit hiatus (from 1974 to 1984 only 7 halls were opened) (“Long Range Exhibit Plans” 1842:2). Kier made it his priority to re-start the ambitious exhibits program. By1973, the Exhibits Committee was discussing the drafting of a new exhibits long-term plan. By the late 1970s, as we have seen, a new approach was adopted in the production of exhibits to facilitate better communication, both within museum staff and to the public. Long range plans in 1973 had been intended to lay out: 1. Ground Plan for the Museum 2. Exhibits Techniques ("Exhibits Committee Meeting Minutes" 1973a) This kind of strategic planning, as it was soon called, became the status quo in the museum and across Smithsonian. The plan needed to “be an organization of our treatment of natural sciences, especially spatially, a flexible framework on which to build, modular, a guide to placement of materials, and contain a unified approach for the public. It should be a working document or blueprint but need not be rigidly observed” (“Exhibits Committee Meeting Minutes” 1973a). As 434 described in the previous chapter, the fossil hall complex was exemplary of these shifts taking place—both in its more long-term and holistic planning, and in its interdisciplinary approach. Further, as we saw in the last chapter, while Education was not yet a fully-formed department in the Museum, with only one staff member in a leadership role, Exhibits was becoming a hub of expertise. For the first time, staff in Exhibits were no longer identified by their artistic production and craftsmanship, but by their expertise and education in specific kinds of exhibits work. They were professionals. This was exemplified not only in the work they were capable of producing at the Museum, but pan-Institutionally through the Office of Exhibit Central, which housed additional and even more specialized personnel and equipment, and had additional, large-scale spaces for the work. Moreover, exhibits staff were collectively going to professional conferences and participating in what was becoming a wider field. As one Federal Budget Request Submission shows, exhibits budgets began to include “several trips by Larry O’Reilly and other management staff personnel to attend conventions and study exhibit techniques at various institutions for a total of $13,750”("Federal Budget Request Submission" 1987a). At the same time as this Institutional rearticulation, Porter Kier, the next great leader at the Museum of Natural History, was appointed Director in 1973. Formerly the Chairman of Paleobiology, Kier took initiative in re-vamping the exhibits program, which, for nearly ten years had remained stagnant. In order to accomplish this, he appointed a new Exhibits Committee with representatives from each of the scientific departments, the Office of Exhibits, the Office of Education, and the Office of the Director to meet every two weeks and forge new directions in exhibitry. 435 Soon after, a series of innovative exhibit spaces opened at the museum. Later called “prototype exhibits” these spaces were “ designed to establish a close and unusual rapport with museum visitors” where they could touch, play, and experiment with specimens and species. The first of these, opened in March of 1974, was the Discovery Room, where children, guided by volunteers and staff from Education were encouraged “to keep their hands on and not off the exhibits” (Kier 1974:75) and to handle objects arranged by types, colours, shapes, tastes, textures, and smells. Next among these was the Insect Zoo, opened in 1976. This allowed the public to interact with live insects and arthropods. It was the first of its kind, and was later mimicked by many other institutions including the Cincinnati Insect World, Fort Lauderdale Discovery Center, the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Boston Children’s Museum, and the Bronx Zoo. Last among these experimental exhibits was the Naturalist Center, also opened in 1976, which invited “serious amateurs” to explore hands-on natural history collections with microscopes and other equipment, assisted by volunteers ("A Restatement of the Long Range Plan" 1978a:8-9). Kier also thought carefully about what has now been institutionalized in a new pan-Smithsonian Department, “visitor experience.” One of the Exhibits Committee’s first tasks was to implement what they called a “Public Orientation Program,” to help visitors with signage around the museum. In addition, in 1973 the Exhibits Committee agreed to print 5000 visitor orientation guides for the NMNH put together by Exhibits Committee members, educational psychologists employed by Museum programs, and other public service employees (Hickey 1973). In that year they also debated printing free maps. The committee decided to hang large-scale colourful banners around the rotunda with the names of each of the halls and a corresponding symbol above each of the wing’s main entrances. 436 These were then repeated in the Constitution avenue entrance and on visitor maps (“A Restatement of the Long Range Plan” 1978a:4). In addition to encouraging the formation of spaces such as the Discovery Room, Kier encouraged the formation of exhibits that put the showy, aesthetic nature of museum objects first. The hall, Splendors of Nature, brought together the Museum’s most beautiful, stunning, or surprising objects. Kier also applied for extra government money to, in 1975, build escalators leading up from the ground floor to the main exhibits halls on the first floor. He also built the first café in the Museum when the new West Court building was completed in the former interior quad of the west side of the building. If visitors were going to enjoy all of the exhibits, they’d be sure to get hungry! (Kier 5.17.13) Notions of the public and their ideal relationship with the museum, and therefore the modes of diffusion for the museum, were drastically shifting at this time. Racial tensions were high in Washington following the race riots of 1968 and their aftermath. For the first time, the NMNH began to enlist outside researchers to undertake visitor studies, based on a growing literature of museum education. In fact, in exhibits boxes including these studies, I found an incredible copy of an appendix to a study—perhaps from another institution—that included some 96 annotated bibliographical entries for literature on museum education and visitors from 1930 up to 1965 ("Appendix A" 1965). By the 1970s, the museum was beginning to implement recommendations and theoretical models developed over the previous 40 years in what was becoming a full-fledged field of study—Visitor Studies. In the mid-70s, the NMNH undertook its first visitor studies by hiring behavioral psychologists to systematically assess its galleries. As Director Richard Cowan wrote, “If ivory towers existed here earlier, they have long since crumbled, spilling their occupants into the midst of the concerns that involve us all” (Cowan 1970:30). A 1975 study by Robert Lakota called 437 “The National Museum of Natural History as a Behavioral Environment,” analyzed NMNH spaces by “environmental analysis” and “behavioral performance” (Lakota 1975).The following year, Lakota conducted a study called “Techniques for Improving Exhibit Effectiveness,” where he described “exhibits themselves,” not just education programs, as educational environments. Learning, he described: … refers to any measurable changes taking place within the visitor which can be directly attributable to the exhibit experience. These changes could include the acquisition of new knowledge, concepts, perceptual skills, or attitudes. This is what impact truly means. It is not sufficient to equate exhibit effectiveness with popularity (visitor count). The mere fact of attendance says nothing about the value of the experience to the visitor (Lakota 1976:1). He also noted, poignantly in this study, another major change taking place at Smithsonian and museums around the world—that fiscal support was beginning to be based on the assessment of their educational role. “Based on the experiences of public school systems over the last 15 years,” he wrote, “it is likely that the accountability associated with those tax dollars will question not only who comes to museums but what they leave with” (Lakota 1976:2). It is in these studies that I found the first mentions of now prominent terms such as “free-choice” and “museum audiences.” Some of Lakota’s recommendations included: -Make the content interactive by asking questions and directing attention to the exhibit -Have visitors discover answers by guiding their inspection of the collection -Use music and sounds only when clearly appropriate, not in an attempt to make a boring narrative more bearable -Do not let sequences run to long. Short passages are especially important in broadcast systems -Keep professional control over content—do not relinquish that control to a vendor. (Lakota 1976) 438 Of course, visitor demographics were also paramount at a place that was beginning to think more broadly about its public. In another study that year, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, Inc. found in their comparative study of Smithsonian museum visitors that at NMNH were: 52% male, 48% female; 93 % white, and 7 % nonwhite (the lowest percentage of nonwhite visitors among all of Smithsonian’s museums) (Yankelovich, et al. 1976:17). By 1983, the Smithsonian had its own Office of Museum Evaluation Studies. Robert Wolf and his assistants undertook museum visitor studies including ““Don’t brush your teeth anymore. Toothpaste’s got earth in it!: A study of the role that objects can play in the experience of visitors to a museum” (Wolf and Cave 1983). Fiscal changes at the Institution shaped elements of its diffusion. This was the first time guidebooks were published for individual galleries. Both the Insect Zoo and the Ice Age Mammals exhibits acquired funds to print small booklets for sale in the Museum’s Shop. These small booklets were produced to promote the exhibit and to give visitors something to take away. Soon, “The Elephant Press Fund” was established from the revenues to print future booklets ("The Elephant Press Fund" 1977a). By 1980 the museum, then under the Exhibits Direction of Eugene Behlen, had produced four of these guides (Ruh 1980). In terms of diffusion, up through the end of the decade, this was a period of broadening institutional outreach and, as Adams put it, rethinking outreach and popular education in a “more comprehensively inclusive manner” (Adams 1990:13) that also paid attention to diversity. In 1987, SI established the Smithsonian Cultural Education Committee, acknowledging a responsibility to ethnic and cultural minority communities in the US (Adams 1990:24). The Office of Institutional Studies was encouraged not just to look at who was coming to the SI Museums but what “Educational experiences” they were getting from them (Adams 1990:25). 439 At this time the then Assistant Director for Exhibits, Larry O’Reilly, articulated a plan to pull together outreach activities under a single office at Natural History—a Division of Public Programs. O’Reilly felt that to handle increasing demands on Exhibits and bolster the Department with fuller institutional support, a central, umbrella Division should be founded to house Exhibits, Public Relations, Development and the new IMAX theater branch. Below is his proposed structural drawing. Figure 7.4 O’Reilly’s draft drawings for a new Division of Public Programs c. 1987. 116 Under the expanded Division of Public Programs, an Associate Director, a high level administrative team member, would now direct outreach activities at the museum. Robert Sullivan would become the first to hold such a position in 1990 (Sullivan 2.18.14). 440 7.4 Fiscal Planning and Private Fundraising As the 1970s got underway, budgets for Smithsonian museums were being cut, spread thin or diminished by inflation. The Institution’s reliance on private funds increased dramatically—from 12.1 million dollars 1965 to 35.9 million dollars in 1975. Removing federal grant and contract awards, the Institution’s private funds budget went from 3 million to 25.7 million over that period (Ripley 1975:7). This shift “does reflect the greater flexibility of private funds to begin new activities as opportunities arise—specifically it has allowed the expansion of the Institution’s education “out reach” program through the National Associates …” (Ripley 1975:7–8). By 1975, Smithsonian Associates had reached 900,000 donor members (Ripley 1975:16). Thus began the beginning of Smithsonian’s emphasis on self-reliance, for: Only in this fashion can we carry through our objectives in a businesslike and timely fashion. I have always felt that the Congress encourages us to act in such a responsible fashion and indeed they have. The fact that we are filling in the West Court of the Museum of Natural History using funds that the Institution has raised privately so as to improve the facilities for our visitors, school classes, tourists, and Associates alike, as well as to produce restaurant accommodations for their comfort, has reminded our Congressional committees that we have an obligation to do this. We can act independently and prudently as we are chartered to do, using private support to achieve goals related to the education and convenience of our visitors. This is a facility which would have taken far longer to achieve using the normal budget review and Congressional appropriations procedures and would, therefore, have been inevitably far more expensive. We can be thankful that our charter gives us such flexibility (Ripley 1975:15). Taking on projects with private funds meant they could be done on their own terms, in shorter amounts of time, and without the uncertainty of Congressional appropriations. Indeed, Kier’s 441 West Court building project which had provided spaces for a restaurant and the Naturalist Center had been accomplished this way. This, in turn, solidified the movement toward drawing up internal long-term plans to refurbish all of the Museum’s halls with the ambitious schedule of opening at least one or two major halls each year (Kier 1975:92). The Office of Audits was established in 1975, in part to check Institutional efficiencies under more stringent budgets (Smithsonian Year 1975). Ripley later wrote that when he came to the institution, 90% of its budget was from the government (Ripley 1985:8). Over his tenure, this changed drastically as budgets increased exponentially over allotted Congressional appropriations. One figure from the Office of Contracting web page is that in 2004, 64% of the Smithsonian’s budget was from Congressional appropriations("Let's Do Business" 2014c). The budget increased immensely as the institution exponentially grew, such that the budget for 1980 of $200 million was nearly the same as total operations for the first 100 years of its existence: “equal to total operating Smithsonian expenditures 1847-1963” (Ripley 1985: 8). This was not only out of fiscal necessity but, at least according to Ripley, about national ownership: “No wonder the public didn’t see the Smithsonian as their own; it belonged to the Feds. If people came to know the Smithsonian better, we reasoned, not only would they profit personally and intellectually but they might come to support it more. In time, then, we might restore an organization supported equally by private persons and the government” (Ripley 1985:8). These trends became increasingly prevalent over the rest of the decade. Under Robert McCormick Adams’ leadership, the Smithsonian grappled with further budget constraints, and at the same time increasingly emphasized its outreach responsibilities. In FY 1986, he said: For the Smithsonian, as for many institutions dependent on public funding, 1986 was a year of increasing uncertainty. Budgetary constraints have begun to bite deeply into our 442 capacity to make and execute any new, ambitious, long-range plans … we face difficulties in meeting minimal staff and equipment requirements to open these facilities without seriously eroding programmatic strength in other parts of the Institution. (Adams 1987:9) Summing up the Institution’s budgetary difficulties, Adams said at the end of the decade: In a narrowly budgetary sense, these are unquestionably difficult and uncertain times for the Smithsonian. The maintenance of what is called a ‘current services ‘ budget—freezing growth in most respects, while accommodating some but not all of our unavoidable increases in costs—is about the best the Institution can look forward to for several years ahead. Planning, meanwhile, is hampered by divergent assumptions about the trends of future federal budgets, not only between the administration and the Congress but within the Congress itself. (Adams 1990:9) Meanwhile, the Institution opened more than 125 exhibitions in 1986, including “blockbusters and small gems” (Adams 1987:18). Adams was the first secretary to mention the museum as dialogue: Visitors questions, not to speak of the prior need to make exhibits intelligible, encourage a dialogue reaching far beyond the stratified circles to which most academic faculties confine themselves. Museum exhibits, let me emphasize, need not be frozen and didactic. They can genuinely involve at least some members of the public in their improvement and even in their initial design (Adams 1985:15). And participation: Museums, for example, must not only accommodate to but creatively interpret intensified demands for public participation, and for a decentralization of society permitting a multitude of individual choices (Adams 1986:15-16) In 1986 the NMNH initiated its first self-audit. A contracted company, McKinsey& Company, Inc., conducted a six month study of the museum, “focused on organizational effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses”(Hoffman 1988:134). The report produced, titled A Management Agenda, “recommended changes in strategic planning, development, communication, and 443 organization,” changes that were heeded as the museum planned its future into the 1990s. The new Director of NMNH, Robert S. Hoffman, “appointed eleven task forces to develop specific recommendations for implementing the report’s findings, including the establishment of a development office and a national advisory board” (Hoffman 1988:134). In the following year, the Institution established an Office of Institutional Studies under Zahava Doering, who led the charge in conducting surveys and audience studies across the institution (Adams 1990:13), for, as Adams wrote, A complex institution like the Smithsonian must engage in continuing self-assessment and careful thinking about the future if it is to serve its public effectively while making its obligations to preserve its collections and advance knowledge. (Adams 1990:24) In the 1980s each Smithsonian unit opened its own development office, as opposed to relying on a centralized Office of Membership and Development (Smithsonian Year 1989:169). Through this central office, however, the Institution adopted a tiered system of accepting donor members: Supporting $60, Donor ($125), Sponsoring ($300) Sustaining ($600), Patron ($1200) James Smithson Society ($2000) restricted or unrestricted funds (1989:172). By 1989, the annual report of the institution takes on the look of promotional fundraising material, replacing the previous, encyclopaedic account of the institution’s work. As a result exhibits were increasingly valued as one arm of a much broader institutional vision of diffusion. The increased dependence on and desire for private funds began to shift thinking about a wide range of projects, including exhibits. Pan-institutional changes in the professionalization of museum disciplines created new cultures of work that came together in the production of exhibits. Across the Institution, there was a flourishing of development and professionalization in both the sciences and the exhibits sides of the museum during this period. Still today, nearly every oral history interview I conducted, no matter the departmental 444 affiliation, noted the vastness of exhibits personnel and expertise from the 1970s to the 1990s. The period was marked by changes in the imagination of the public and in funding for the museum’s work. When Ripley wrote his final report, he noted the drastic shifts he had witnessed over his time at the Institution. He noted that in 1964 he had written: Museums and their related laboratories are just entering a new era, and museum resources are being drawn upon as never before for general education.” [Emphasis belated]. Twenty years later, I relish the memory of what was in the air—an electric and electrifying energy like a summer storm over the great plain of the then empty Mall.” (Ripley 1985:6-8). Truly, the changes wrought over the period were immense, particularly in the expansion of the mission of diffusion. 7.5 Increase and Diffusion in the New Millennium These trends in the factioning and professionalization of the “increase” and “diffusion” amidst changing cultures at the Institution became even more prescient as the Museum moved toward the new millennium. The fossil hall complex is an incredibly interesting case for thinking about cultural changes in the museum world and the context for exhibits production at the Smithsonian. From the 1980s to today, there were vast changes in funding and professional cultures that affect exhibits. The 1980s saw the end of in-house designed and funded exhibits. The now to be replaced fossil hall complex was the last of these. Over this 30-year period, the financial realities museums now grapple with unavoidably changed the meaning of diffusion, shifting it toward both wider definitions of the public and profit-driven, commercial ventures. Robert McCormick Adams continued in his leadership through 1993. Throughout Adam’s leadership, he advocated for a diversification of SI audiences, 445 broadening outreach to all the cultural and ethnic groups that constitute the U.S., while also stressing the need to make the Institution more efficient, to set institutional goals and to assess its performance in these areas (Adams 1992). Inherently, this led to tensions about the extent to which diffusion came to mean either populism or, worse, commercialism as the breadth of Smithsonian outreach expanded. To meet our responsibilities to diverse audiences, we must shift our thinking of museums as establishments whose timeless, unquestioned authority can be likened to that of a temple, toward a status much closer to that of a forum—a place, as Canadian museum director Duncan Cameron has written, for ‘confrontation, experimentation, and debate.’ This is not a transition that has been warmly welcomed in all quarters. One well-known dragon-slayer of populism in museums argues that a concern for reaching broader audiences is virtually to be equated with philistinism. (Adams 1992:8) Indeed, budgetary considerations continued to underscore the need for setting institutional priorities and goals, with measurable outcomes. And, as Adams put it, “It is always somewhat threatening to hear of the need for establishing priorities in a cultural or intellectual enterprise” (Adams 1991:13). However, as he noted, the Institution continued to be affected by the recession, from which the U.S. was just recovering: Concurrent with the careful and deliberate reduction in scale is an ongoing restructuring of the Institution. This has several objectives. Greater economies of operations are prominent among them. Our primary goal, however, is to ensure the Smithsonian reputation for excellence of research and quality of public service even as a leaner scale of operations is achieved. (Adams 1991:13) Thus efficiency and organizational simplicity became new goals of the administration, both to “simplify decision-making,” and to “improve[e] accountability and eliminate[e] redundancies.” Under a model of “total quality management,” the institution began thinking more about “cost-effective service at every level” (Adams 1993:5). Adams, though, never made concerted efforts 446 to shift the institution’s focus toward private funding, even though federal appropriations, particularly for exhibits, diminished after the Bicentennial (Post 2013:225). The Regent’s next choice for secretary would have the business know-how to navigate this new world. As Post writes, “In the boom times of the late 1990s, there was the general admiration for high-level business expertise and the notion that a businessperson might be inclined to stay out of trouble” (Post 2013: 245). I. Michael Heyman was the first secretary appointed by Smithsonian regents, not with an academic discipline, but from the business world; indeed, during his tenure, Smithsonian’s diffusion took a decisively commercial turn. In 1993 when Heyman assumed the Secretary position, he recognized that major changes were in order and steered Smithsonian in a new direction. As Post writes, “With Ronald Reagan in the White House and retrenchment the watchword, there was a tacit understanding that Smithsonian appropriations were to be limited to salaries and upkeep. Money for exhibits would have to come from the private sector … At the urging of the regents Heyman established a national board to raise funds for major initiatives; he also encouraged the bureaus to follow suit” (Post 2013: 225). Where even just a few years before, Heyman noted, Smithsonian could rely on generous Congressional monies, the future of “bleaker” fiscal prospects would require the Smithsonian to “rely on private support from individuals and corporations. A systematic effort to increase private support has started very well under Secretary Adams. We must enhance that success by working closely with donor groups. And we must enlarge our connections with the corporate world” (Heyman 1995:5). With this came a need to show efficiency and accountability “both to husband them and to underscore our credibility to those who provide them—the government and our donors.” In Heyman’s first report, he also ordered the Smithsonian’s three tasks within the 447 broad mission of the increase and diffusion of knowledge thus: “First is public education. Second is a university-like research operation. The third task is hosting and maintaining, at last count, 140 million objects” (Heyman 1995:5). Heyman invested capital and energy in a number of Smithsonian commercial units, notably hiring Gary Beer, formerly of the Sundance Institute, to head Smithsonian Business Ventures (SBV) and expand ‘commercial revenue streams’” (Jacqueline Trescott ‘top Down Change at Museum” Washington Post, 12, February 2000 cited in Post 2013:232). Also during Heyman’s leadership, annual reports transitioned to flashy, 100-page booklets with a page for each SI unit. The last 20 pages were devoted to financial charts and the auditor’s report. The only lists of names included in the reports were regents or benefactors. For example in 1999, twenty donors gave gifts of more than a million dollars to the institution, with one of these gifts from Steven F. Udvar-Hazy, a whopping $65 million for a new satellite Air and Space facility in Virginia (Post 2013: 226). Beyond commercial ventures, Heyman set in motion a number of broad institutional changes that set the tone for the period. Most importantly for the Institution’s mission, in October of 1994, he combined a number of assistant secretarial offices to establish an Office of the Provost marking “a major step in the strategic planning of a more efficient and effective institution” (Heyman 1996:31). Former Assistant Secretary for the Sciences Robert Hoffman was appointed acting provost and was placed in charge of all facets of the increase of knowledge, all of the scientific, museum, and educational work of the Institution. As the report for that year reads, the newly created position “plans, coordinates, facilitates, and evaluates the Institution’s activities in research, collections management, exhibitions, education, and cultural programs” 448 (Heyman 1996:31). Soon after, Dennis O’Connor was appointed to that position, and as he wrote: Two vital processes of discovery converge at the Smithsonian: Research and Education. To “diffuse” knowledge we must first “increase” it, so the research conducted by our scholars and scientists is a necessary precursor to the educational experiences our visitors enjoy. As provost, I hold an enviable position at the point of convergence, working with the institution’s great museums and research centers as they help the process of discovery to flourish (O'Connor 1998:23). Figure 7.5 Smithsonian organizational charts 1992 and 1997.117 449 Heyman was also the first to establish the Secretaryship as a position of managerial power. Where former secretaries had very little to do with the day-to-day workings or goals of exhibits or curatorial work, Heyman had a distinctively hands-on approach. He felt strongly that curators were not necessarily equipped to make exhibit content accessible to the general public. As Robert Post writes: But when Michael Heyman became secretary, in 1994, he acted as if there had been a decisive shift in the relationship of the Castle and the bureaus, and that the secretary had absolute power. In the history museums, it looked to Heyman as if exhibits were in the hands of men and women whose world of discourse was verbal, not visual, and who were using ‘the academic voice in their scripts … in a context where the audience takes them as authoritative statements.’ How many words, how many silk-screened paragraphs, would ‘weary exhibition-goers … be willing to read?’ And was not the Smithsonian ‘moving to a point where a torrent of words overwhelms the objects visitors come to see?” (I. Michael Heyman, “Do Curators Have anything to Learn from Lawyers? 1996 Hart Lecture, Georgetown Law Center 20 March 1996 cited in Post 2013:224) These changes came into public consciousness in the early 2000s, with controversies surrounding the secretarial leadership of Lawrence (Larry) Small. After Heyman’s departure, and in the booming economy, the regents decided again on “somebody with ‘financial savvy and managerial panache’” and selected Small who had been President of Fannie Mae (Barbara Conable in Irvin Molotsky “President of Fannie Mae is to Lead Smithsonian” New York Times, 14 September 1999 cited in Post 2013:228) Under Small, who has been criticized beyond other controversies with “view[ing] the life of the mind with astonishing indifference” (Milo Beach cited in Post 2013:231), the Institution expanded its commercial ventures and integrated them into the other functions of the institution. In a reorganization just three weeks after he began his position, he brought “‘together those components of the Smithsonian that have natural connections and common priorities’: Science; 450 Finance and Administration; Business Ventures; Art and International Collections; and American Museums and National Programs” (Jacqueline Trescott ‘top Down Change at Museum” Washington Post, 12, February 2000 cited in Post 2013:232). In this new structure, SBV “would now be a separate entity” that had its own “board of directors who would seek to enhance ‘profit centers’ such as IMAX theaters, six restaurants, fifteen gift shops, mail order and online shopping, a shopping-mall retailer, and, most importantly, cable television and Hollywood movie revenue” (Post 2013:340). New commercial venues sprouted up across the institution, from “fast-food franchises in the cafeterias or a torrent of made-in-China trinkets in the gift shops. At one point, an internal document was leaked indicating that naming rights for nearly every single piece of Smithsonian real estate was for sale, even he most sacred, and this was confirmed when Samuel P. Langley’s name was erased from the IMAX theater in the Air and Space Museum in favor of the name of a $10 million donor” (Post 2013:241). Small’s “streamlining” and his emphasis on commercial opportunities made him very unpopular very quickly, so much so that Storrs Olson, an ornithology curator at NMNH is quoted saying just a year and a half into Small’s leadership to a Virginia congressman that “In the short 15 months since [Small] assumed office he has become surely the most reviled and detested administrator in the Institution’s history” (Olson cited in Post 2013: 236). The Smithsonian Congress of Scholars, a body of nearly all of SI staff involved in research, wrote a “letter of concern drafted and addressed to regents” complaining that Small was “obligat[ing] the Museum to relationships with private individuals that breach established standards of museum practice and professional ethics” (Post 2013:238). 451 Regardless of controversies surrounding Small, across the Institution private sector funding was reaching new heights. From 1996 to 2000 private sector funding skyrocketed from $40 million to $147 million in 1999, to some $206.6 million in 2000. At Natural History, tensions came to the fore under the leadership of Frank Talbot as Director of NMNH and Robert Sullivan in Exhibits and Outreach. Still today, many staff in the museum attribute the most drastic cultural shift at NMNH to the arrival of Talbot, who was appointed director in June 1988, and soon after Robert Sullivan (Sully), who, to this day is a polarizing figure. In Sullivan’s defense, Elizabeth Duggal described the tight fiscal pressures he found himself under, that continue today: In fairness to him—the erosion of the resources. I know Jon [Coddington] would say the same for both sides, but it’s really quite astounding to me right now wearing my public engagement hat, how little of the budget we have … We’ve got all these scientists running around the building. And I’m not saying it’s not quality, but we’re supposed to serve eight million plus visitors, and it’s all done kind of on a shoestring … So, Sully faced a lot of pressure to make cuts (Duggal 12.4.13). Others, too, have noted that the financial and organizational shifts taking place, while gradual, happened faster than the Institution could adapt or administrators could pose adequate solutions. As Scott Wing said of this time: And I’m not sure that the Institution, even the people that were in charge of it, knew how you handle that. So this whole idea of coordination between the goal setting exercise and the fundraising exercise was less … they were not maybe as tightly connected as they are now thought to be or should be and I think mostly are. It took maybe 10 years to begin to really … I think first it was like, “Really? We’re not going to have the money to do this any more? How are we supposed to …?” And then, OK, well that means the next director who comes in has to be somebody who can raise money but how do you do that? I think it took quite a while to begin to move into the new environment. I think Cristián [Samper] was the first person who effectively began to do that at this museum. (Wing 8.16.13) 452 In general, the period saw declines in scientific staff at NMNH. From 1991 to 1993, while the number of total staff at NMNH stayed stable at 600, the number of staff scientists got progressively smaller—130 in 1991, 120 in 1992 and 114 in 1994 (1991:49;1992:30; 1994:32). From 1985 to 2000, the Director’s Office staff increased by 150% while scientific staff decreased by 23% (Yochelson 2003:167). There were other staff cuts, though, on the outreach side. Across the Institution there was downsizing in staff by offering early retirement packages under new fiscal constraints. As Kim Moeller said of the scene in Exhibits: The way that works is that if you have seniority but your slot’s going to get taken, you have the ability to bump someone else somewhere else. It was very minor and it didn’t affect Exhibits officially, but I remember we went through that phase of panic. Everybody had to make sure that their resumes were absolutely current so that all of your information was there because they were going through all of that. And of course everybody’s nervous about whether it’s going to happen or not happen. And then right about that time, then they decided, well, the way to not have to worry about that would be “early outs,” so they were offering early retirement packages. And at that point we lost quite a few folks. (Moeller 6.12.13) It was at this point that many staff, including managerial staff, retired from the Exhibits department. And so, between that [cuts in positions] and then just general retirement over the next bunch of years, there were just less of us. So by the time I became the Graphics supervisor … Let me back up. When I was hired, Rena was the Graphics Supervisor, and there were six people in the shop (including me), working in graphics production. So there were seven people total in the Graphics shop. And the same was true for the Fabrication Shop. There was a supervisor and six guys on the bench. And AV that was John Anderson at the time was in charge, and he probably had a good four or five guys. (Moeller 6.12.13) 453 Today, as we saw in Figure 5.8, each of these sub-departments has between one and four people (two in graphics, four in fabrication, three in AV, for instance). The push to acquire private funding under fiscal constraints also accelerated. Major gifts to the Museum increased, and in 1992 the NMNH received four gifts at more than one million dollars each, a major fundraising landmark. This shift was frustrating for staff on the ground. Where previously there were funds to renovate exhibits on a steady schedule, now there was no internal money to continue taking on big projects. As Scott Wing commented: So, over a period of a few years, the place went from having this kind of, “well this is part of what we do is renovate halls” … But very quickly after I got here I think that just dried up. And by the 90s I think it was pretty much, Exhibits were going to get redone if you could raise money to redo them. So there was this kind of wheel spinning thing where people were trying to make plans, which I guess today would be called “strategic plans” for grand schemes for how the exhibits should look. But there was no money to do those things. And maybe making those plans was part of figuring out how to raise the money to do them. But it didn’t result in a lot of money. So things would happen but they would happen when somebody found a sugar daddy to make them happen. And then, people would get frustrated because, “well, we weren’t planning to do that exhibit, it just happened. (Wing 8.16.13) One of the frustrations staff had with Sullivan and other administrators at the time was that they seemed to let money dictate core projects rather than the other way around. Scott continued: The rules are maybe a little clearer now, so you know you’re not going to do a big exhibits project unless you find a donor. That’s just clear. But I think at that time it was much less clear. It was much less clear how the priorities of the museum were going to be determined by who you could raise money from. (Wing 8.16.13) Under the new system of increased private funding, the first exhibition to open at NMNH entirely privately fundraised was Geology, Gems and Minerals. This was also one of the first halls to be named for a donor. In September of 1997 it opened as the Janet Annenberg Hooker 454 Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals named for the $5 million primary donor. However, all in all, more than $13 million was raised from private donations to build the hall. This was directly correlated with the shift to contracted exhibits work. It was thus just as Life in the Ancient Seas, the last of the Paleo hall complex, was opening in 1990 that the Museum began contracting more exhibit work. As Kim Moeller, a designer who came into Exhibits in Graphics at this time said, beginning with the re-installation of the Insect Zoo, exhibits began to be partially contracted, so that the design were done by a private firm, and production was done in house: You had the minerals and crystals side of the hall, and the national gem collection, and the mine. We did that production in house. All of it was being designed outside. So again, we’ve got an outside firm driving a lot of the big stuff, but as far as the production was concerned, we did that half of the hall. And D+P built and designed the other side. So Plate Tectonics, Solar System, that side was done by them. (Moeller 6.12.13) Scheduling, especially with new pressures from donors supporting exhibits, drove some of these shifts: So that’s, you start to see that [the schedule reduction]. Then, the next big project after that was starting on GGM, and when we started Geology Gems and Minerals, it was . . . the decision was made, because it was so big. And a lot of it was being driven, I believe, by schedule, really. Back when we were doing Paleo, it was kind of already understood that you could do it in several phases over the course of so many years. Because really from start to finish that was many years in the making … Geology, Gems and Minerals was a different thing though because I think that the donors who were giving the money really had a set timeline that they wanted to see stuff open. And at that point they made a quick decision that, OK, we were going to split the work. (Moeller 6.12.13) That, she noted, was the beginning of a real shift from in-house to contracted design. 455 It was not only because of “government cutbacks” that these changes happened. The shift to contract work as also, former Assistant Director of Exhibits Rena Selim said, “because a lot of what we were doing became more and more technical. You needed better, more expensive equipment, more expertise, that it made sense to hire companies that were making tens of exhibits a year as opposed to us, where it took us two to three years or more to do an exhibit” (Selim 4.10.13). This trend toward contract work was very much encouraged by Robert Sullivan, the new Associate Director for Public Programs. Just before his arrival at Natural History, he had published a piece called “The Museum as Moral Artifact,” in which he wrote: “Museums, by the very nature of their cultural purpose and the decisions they make, are moral educators for their visitors and communities. If this moral education is to be purposeful it must be based on clearly formulated aims and content uniquely suited to the museum’s purpose, intent, and resources” (Sullivan 1990). The heightened economic constraints led to internal changes at the museum. As Strathern and others have noted at across institutional contexts, business models and language were adopted at Smithsonian (Strathern 2000). You were asking what the culture was like. The curators were feeling the same thing. They were feeing that the executive branch of their museum was taking on very much of a business model. People started using business acronyms, and business terms, and when our performance plans now have …You’re supposed to have customer reviews of your service and your customers are the people on staff, who you are doing things for. (Telfer 6.27.13) 456 I heard many times over at the museum, both casually and in interviews, that where before, staff would ask each other for favors or more formally, internal work orders, since the 1990s even internal transactions have been charged: It was an environment where everyone was being asked to do more with reduced funds … And, that was the thing that early on I was kind of shocked by, was that for the museum as a whole, I realized very quickly that, in order to get anything done, you had to, essentially, pay somebody to do it. So, if we wanted a silt trap installed in the FossiLab sink, we would have to pay them to procure the silt trap and then put it in. And, Steve and I, any number of times, we’re doing a PVC pipe work and other stuff on our own. We found a way of buying and installing a silt trap ourselves, and I just … It made no sense to me. People would say to me, “Well we used to have a machine shop. If you needed something, they would make it for you. And that was just … They were there to help you.” But, budgets have been cut so severely that it was … Everything became a transaction … (Telfer 6.27.13) Thus, in trying to start a FossiLab website, Abby Telfer, a Paleo staff member, ended up having to apply for an internal Director’s Office grant, the Web Access Grant (WAG), to pay the Education department, to make videos for the site through the Office of Exhibits. (Telfer 6.27.13) So, that was sort of symptomatic. This is something that was driving the scientists absolutely nuts, and it was all part of this compartmentalizing the museum into financially independent departments that will have to sort of justify their budgets and become more efficient or something but in the end it became much less efficient because you couldn’t just go and ask somebody to do something for you. You have to do some sort of negotiations and figure out a monetary transaction for it. (Telfer 6.27.13) Under this recent system, at the Office of Exhibits Central, staff works to complete projects for other “Smithsonian clients” (Reeder 7.31.13). In units like OEC, staff work for other Smithsonian’s units or individual needs, because of this relationship. As Angela Roberts Reeder said of decisions disagreements at OEC, staff there often had to go a direction that the client 457 wanted, even if it went against OEC’s recommendations: “Okay, we’re going to do it this way. You’re the client” (Reeder 7.31.13). Each of these “clients” would have different goals and voices: “So you really had to learn who you were working with” (Reeder 7.31.13). Staff continues, however, to do rogue, do-it-yourself work in order to get things done that seem to have institutional stoppages. This is perhaps symptomatic in a place with such an entrenched institutional culture and structure, particularly one so risk averse and with increasingly formalized internal economies or systems of exchange. Abby Telfer continued on the revitalization of the FossiLab: Really, all the progress that we made was because people were giving us time, giving us equipment. I would send out emails saying, “Does anybody have a tripod or does anybody have a photo stand, a copy stand? Does anybody have a microscope that they’re not using? Can we either have it or have it as long-term loan in the FossiLab?” Every time I did that, someone would dig up something within the department. So, it all worked out. (Telfer 6.27.13) Though staff will sometimes lament the loss of camaraderie and community feel of the ‘old days’ in the museum, things still get done through relationships and informal economies. “Personal connection,” as Amy Bolton put it in an interview, is the key to finding out information and getting things done in the museum. As she said of her first experiences at the Museum: So, I did what I usually do with a new project which is I try to find people who can help me navigate the place and find the people who know how to get things done, figure out how they get things done, and either do something similar or do what they do. But really it’s about figuring out the culture, and there isn’t just one culture, there’s like 10 cultures in this building. That I learned as well, as I went from department to department. (Bolton 6.26.13) 458 Or, put another way: “If they don’t know you, they’re not answering your email” (Bolton 6.26.13). Being “charming,” “respectful,” and not “wast[ing] people’s time” are important to building relationships that facilitate day-to-day work. Thus exchanges built on (and themselves build) relationships continue to make up the social fabric of the museum. The ability to navigate social networks in the museum is an important kind of power for staff without obvious institutional status. This was also an important time for shifting notions of the public and museum experiences. Terms such as “stakeholders” and museum “constituencies” came into common parlance, and Sully ushered them in enthusiastically (Post 2013:275). Moreover, “‘the criterion of success’ for an exhibit was ‘whether it has achieved an affective experience, inducing new attitude or interest, not whether visitors walk away from a museum having learned specific facts or having comprehended the basic principles of a scholarly discipline’” (Lord and Lord 2002 cited in Post 2013:281) The conceptualization of the public also changed drastically in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the midst of vast technological changes. In May of 1995 the meaning of diffusion changed indefinitely when Smithsonian launched its first World Wide Web site—including a homepage and some 2000 connected pages. With this site, the Institution made good on “a promise that the Smithsonian would become more than the place to visit in Washington, that we should become present throughout the country in new ways, and that we would become deeply engaged in this new world of information transmission and sharing” (Smithsonian Year 1996:21). Within five months, the site had received more than 8.5 million hits (Smithsonian Year 1992:21). 459 Alongside broader movements in museums, libraries and heritage organizations toward participation, web culture has dramatically altered the notion of diffusion, as user-generated models for engaging with digital objects and spaces has a much more two-way understanding of knowledge exchange and not merely one-way diffusion (Lynch 2011b; Marty 2011; Matusiak 2006; O'Brien and Lebow 2013; Parry 2007; Richardson 2011; Roussou 2008; Russo, et al. 2008; Simon 2009; Stephenson 1999). As I saw in Deep Time production, and throughout my time at Smithsonian, much of the language around diffusion has been reversed. Rather than thinking of diffusion as a one-way movement of knowledge outward, Smithsonian is trying to embrace trends in understanding users, harnessing affect, cultivating experience, crowd-sourcing knowledge and participatory models—trying to know its publics and draw them in, learn from them, or give them the tools to participate in knowledge production, rather than pumping out information at higher rates. Smithsonian’s “digital volunteer” online and archival public transcription center is just one of many recent examples ("Smithsonian Digital Volunteers" 2013d). As Amy Bolton described her philosophy of Education at the NMNH: … the pedagogy that I ascribe to is constructivism. So although there isn’t really, at least there wasn’t 10 years ago, a single constructivist theory of learning. But in this museum, in this learning environment, with the variety of people that we serve, it’s a constructivist learning environment where the individuals construct knowledge at their own pace in their own way as they attempt to make sense of their experiences, not always coming to the same shared knowledge because of who they are as individuals. (Bolton 6.26.13) The movement from diffusion as a one-way, and clearly delineated set of publications or exhibit messages to “serving” the public, “creating experiences that facilitate knowledge construction for visitors,” and helping visitors to form an identity with science as well as overcome “their fear of science” (Bolton 6.26.13; 5.16.14) turns the idea of “diffusion” inside-out. Likewise, as Mike Lawrence said of envisioning design: 460 So as I start laying out an exhibit, I think as if I’m in the shoes of the people that are going through it, and what do they see, in what order … It probably comes from architectural training or thinking as in city planning that an exhibition is made up of this … sequence of experiences rather than just isolated experiences. So you have to think of how you move people through. How do you attract somebody and how do you give them space to linger, and how do you give spaces for people to gather or have a private moment with something or whatever it might be. (Lawrence 7.31.13) It is not just Educators and Outreach professionals who take this view, as we saw in discussions in the 10% Phase for Deep Time. As Hans Sues said of changes in exhibits philosophy: In the past, exhibits were basically sort of structured to put a whole bunch of stuff out there, and curators would really sort of go out of their way to put as many objects as possible into an exhibit. But nobody ever asked, “What does the public actually want to know and see?” and “How is this particular exhibit meaningful to them?” So this whole idea that we’re now sort of thinking about when we design exhibits, personal meaning making. (Sues 6.24.13) This involves a qualitative shift toward engagement and affect as opposed to instruction. These discussions also seem driven by knowing that knowledge is free, but the Smithsonian still has something unique to offer. As Elizabeth Duggal articulated: My philosophy about public engagement is that the overriding focus should be on meeting the visitor’s expectations. It’s about developing an experience our public will find rewarding, engaging, fun and intellectually stimulating. At the Smithsonian, sometimes we get caught up on focusing only on our mission and on what we think the visitor should know or learn. Museum staff often say “I think this would be a good public program.” Or ,”I want this exhibit,” or ,”let’s feature our science.” Well, why? I ask quite often. Why will that topic be important to our audiences? If you don’t ask the relevancy questions, you sometimes can get vanity exhibits on obscure topics. While these exhibits or programs are nice, we always need to evaluate our work to ensure we are meeting the public’s expectations. Also, when you have to prioritize your choices 461 because of funding and staff resources, you need to think again about the audience that comes through the door and how to be responsive to them. (Duggal 12.4.13) While not driven by philosophies of marketing as many admission-charging institutions, the Smithsonian is trying to engage new publics on a broad level. Of course, there are financial benefits in the long term for cultivating wider communities of devoted Smithsonian supporters. Amidst new digital cultures and “a warning from a pollster that Smithsonian name-recognition had slipped slightly and that a quarter of all respondents thought the institution to be ‘elitist’” Wayne Clough tasked Pherabe Kolb, Associate Director of Strategic Communications, with a new campaign to brand the Smithsonian and “to help us change the way people see us, and to place more emphasis on what we do instead of on what we have” (Post 2013:282). Wolff Olins, a UK ‘brand experience’ company conducted research for a new SI tagline and website that would connect all of SI’s units and research together, aimed at 18–34 year old ‘aware millennials’ and ‘aware moms’. During my first few weeks at NMNH, Seriously Amazing, the institution’s first national ad campaign, and SeriouslyAmazing.com were launched as “the place to go for answers to our intriguing questions,” with mixed reception("Smithsonian: Seriously Amazing" 2012c; Fischer 2012; O'Neal Parker 2012). Meanwhile, private funding is now the only way to go forward with large-scale exhibit projects. David Koch, of Koch Industries, donated $35 million to Smithsonian for Deep Time, and the goal is to double that in fundraising. Today the Smithsonian’s federal appropriations sit somewhere near $870 million ($811.5 for 2012, $52 million above the previous year. Of this, some $640 million goes to Salaries and Expenses, and $175 to Facilities Capital, which in 2012 included $75 million for the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Smithsonian has four “grand challenges,” outlined in the SI mission, that have their own budget 462 lines and “Consortia” to encourage cross-disciplinary and cross-SI unit collaborations in research ("Smithsonian Fiscal Year 2014" 2013e). Twenty-five million has been proposed under the Obama administration for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs to support future national “workforce needs.” Smithsonian now has a Center for Learning and Digital Access, that “create[s] new online resources and experiences for students that have a measurable impact,” and that will coordinate with STEM funding that comes to the Institution (“Smithsonian Fiscal Year 2014” 2013c). $2.3 million of next year’s proposed budget will go to “comprehensive digitization to make the collections and the expertise of scholars, scientists, researchers and curators accessible online.” SI has grown to employ more than 6,000 people, 700 of whom who do research. There are 19 museums, 20 libraries, the zoo, and a number of research centers, stretching beyond D.C. to eight states and almost 100 countries, plus some 170 affiliate museums in 40 states, D.C., Puerto Rico and Panama. SITES is now the “largest travelling exhibition service in the world,” reaching more than five million people per year. In addition, Smithsonian delivers the Smithsonian channel to millions of households and has a readership of some seven million for each month’s issue of the Smithsonian magazine. SI websites in 2012 had 81 million “unique visitors,” and its Twitter and Facebook accounts have some two million followers; while the YouTube channels had more than one million views ("Smithsonian Fiscal Year 2013"2012b:3-4). One of SI’s missions is “broadening access” in its current strategic Plan, “to become the trusted source of information on the World Wide Web by using new technologies to share its vast collections and extensive research, along with the expertise of its scholars, scientists, researchers, museum specialists, and curators,” while its Digitization Strategic Plan and Web and 463 New Media Strategic Plan aim to “stimulate learning and innovation” (“Smithsonian Fiscal Year 2013” 2012b:4). This emphasis has manifested in a resurgence of the Education department at the NMNH. As with Exhibits, the Department first shrank under Robert Sullivan. When Shari Werb got to the fledgling department: It wasn’t called Education, I think it was called Visitor Services. They had made a decision that they didn’t want it to be called Education, because they didn’t feel like it was effective that way at that time, and they wanted to really be envisioned, the department. I think there were a number of people that had felt a little bit demoralized over time. Their line of resources had been taken away from Education, a lot of people had left. (Werb 9.6.13). With Cristián Samper’s tenure as Director of NMNH, and Elizabeth Duggal’s appointment Associate Director of Public Programs (re-named “Engagement”), Museum revitalized its focus was on education. As Shari Werb articulated: One of the things that happened before I got here is Elizabeth brought in Myles Gordon, who was vice president of Education at the American Museum of Natural History, as a consultant to do a national search for an education director and to begin to kind of assess this museum for people’s impressions … really to talk to scientists and others about the education here and create a strategic document about education at Natural History … and suggestions for what could happen moving forward as they began to plan for an educator coming on board as Director of Education, and so some of the decisions that were made is that the Director of Education needs to be part of the senior leadership team … (Werb 9.6.13) With an Educator on the senior leadership team as an Assistant Director, the Department grew in staff and vitality quickly. While the Exhibits staff has shrunk considerably in the years since major structural shifts of the 1990s, the Education department has actually grown. As Amy Bolton put it, “it’s one of the few places that seems to be building rather than cutting or not replacing people as they retire” (Bolton 6.26.13). 464 On the other hand, Samper made a clear move to “reaffirm scholarship as a top priority of the institution, and to redirect funds to the fellowship program,” which had been cut under Small (Post 2013:244). Samper, who has now left NMNH, has the reputation of a new generation Ripley—the sort of genteel, level-headed leader who was equally supportive of the scholarship and outreach that the museum needed as it entered new millennium. After it seemed the Institution had gone too far in the direction of corporatization, there has been, in some ways, a movement back towards scholarship and its “increase.” In general, in particular for the Museum’s research branches, life at the Institution has not changed much in many ways. As Robert Emry said in an interview: Well, just from the point of view of a research curator, I don’t think it has changed that much. You know, our basic job of research and publishing our findings and so on, but I think the bigger changes are in public programs like Exhibits, which seem to be going more and more to development by outside researchers and contractors. (Emry 4.8.13) Public engagement is still one of the biggest drives of the institution. In a recent workshop on visitor experience training, I also saw the new internal emphasis on audience advocacy across the institution. In a video called “Exciting the Learning in Everyone,” Secretary Wayne Clough tells current staff that the mission to diffuse knowledge is increasingly difficult in an era of ubiquitous informational noise ("Exciting the Learning in Everyone" 2013b). Staff agree that “information is hugely democratized now” (Blond 7.1.13). As Kara Blond said in an interview: “There is a lot of talk about visitor-centered work and I think it’s hard … I mean, it pushes you to do what you do well differently, but do it with visitors at the heart of the effort” (Blond 7.1.13). This seems to be the crux of new movements at the Smithsonian—it’s mission to increase and diffuse knowledge has remained constant, but there have been shifts in the scope and scale of these projects. Diffusion in particular has expanded and even inverted, so that 465 Smithsonian’s professionals work ever-harder to imagine and pre-empt public experiences to encourage broader and more sustained relationships with in-gallery, virtual, or potential visitors. 7.6 Chapter 7 Conclusion The fossil halls were last completed in the 1980s, when exhibits were “home-made” (Love 8.7.13)—internally designed and funded—and the museum was in what people often refer to as “the golden age,” when Ripley was Secretary and Porter Kier was NMNH’s Director. The years since have seen some of the biggest changes in the Institution’s finances and understandings of diffusion as manifested in wider public dissemination of knowledge. The context for producing Deep Time is a direct result of many of the changes that came in the late 50s, that meant a functional split in the Institution’s mission of “increase and diffusion,” but also of controversies and more acute fiscal changes that took place since the last time the halls were re-done. This chapter has described what I am arguing is a shift in emphasis at the Smithsonian from the “increase and diffusion” to “diffusion and increase.” Where many aspects of research and collecting culture have remained the same over the last 150 years, the notion of “diffusion” has vastly expanded to include the broadest and most ubiquitous forms of dissemination in the Smithsonian’s history for the widest possible national international publics. Facilitated by new technologies and broader movements in “participatory” methodologies, the institution has even, I argue, inverted this notion of “diffusion” such that the emphasis is on reaching, understanding, and encouraging public sentiment and input. Within this wider ideological shift and tighter fiscal constraints, exhibits have become an even more vital nexus of the NMNH’s three “stools” of “research,” “collections,” and “outreach.” 466 8. Conclusion In the early 2000s when Sharon Macdonald’s seminal edited volume A Companion to Museum Studies was published, museum practitioners and theorists had begun to recognize a new phase in museum studies: new paradigms and the “new museology” had “come of age.” In reflecting on this new era in museology, the volume brought together essays to explore and interrogate new “museum orthodoxies” (Macdonald 2006:2). Indeed, as essays in that volume pointed out, the shift away from curatorial authority, the move toward collaboration, perhaps even as a kind of brand, and the new adoption of efficiency and business models in the museum, had all become prevailing models for museums. This thesis goes some way toward questioning the timing, causes, and grounded realities of these new “orthodoxies” through a detailed case study of a set of halls at one museum. Indeed, curatorial authority has been destabilized, to the extent that museum professionalization has meant that a new group of experts are important players in exhibits processes. Yet, the play of power in making that shift, which took place over the last 65 years, in this particular case has been consistently rocky; even today no one in the museum is sure what the right balance of curatorship and audience advocacy is. As with many of these other ‘new’ paradigms, I found that their fundamental roots lay not in shifting Reagan-Thatcher policies of the 1980s, but in the beginnings of professional cultures and new imaginings of the public in the post-War era, that really took hold in the late-1950s. From the rethinking of spaces as visitor- and story-driven, and therefore no longer primarily about objects (alongside new scientific thinking), to new professional culture clashes, to the institutionalization of large scale “diffusion” 467 initiatives alongside massive growth of the institution, each of the levels of exhibit development I have described here trace their orthodoxies to big cultural and institutional changes in the 1950s. Fiscal constraints and moves to efficiency exacerbated many of these fundamental frictions, particularly as new projects, disciplines, and departments vied for ever-fewer resources. Thus echoing my initial suspicion that, as Handler and Gable had claimed, “most research on museums has proceeded by ignoring much of what goes on in them” (1997:9), I found that grounded exploration of the Smithsonian and its fossil halls questions the timeline and some of the claims put forth in the wide-ranging literature about sea changes in museums in the last 30 years. These claims include that museums have moved toward public engagement and access while juggling rampant funding cuts, institutional restructuring, “audit cultures” (Strathern 2000), the pressure to “edutain,” the increased use of corporate institutional models, and private funding (Mclean 2002). Indeed, as Michael Ames observed in Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes, competing historical forces—democratization and professionalization—have created new paradoxes for museums. But in the case of Smithsonian’s NMNH exhibits, conservative policies and behaviours are more intrinsic to the nature of the institution. They are not merely driven by “capricious and increasingly politicized funding policies of governments and private sector, along with dependence on admission fees and other generated revenues” as has been argued by Ames (1992:7) and others (Alexander 1996; Falk and Sheppard 2006; Macdonald 2002; Rentschler and Hede 2007; Shelton 2006). This is certainly the case since Smithsonian museums, with the exception of the New York Cooper-Hewitt, continue to be admission free. Nor did I find that, among this particular group of exhibit producers, there was any general expectation that museums should be uplifting and emphasize the positive side of history. Rather than a “customer 468 is always right” attitude, there has been an inversion of the notion of diffusion. Much outreach work proceeds by trying to imagine visitors’ experiences, wants and attitudes, such that difficult and politicized messages become more palatable. This leads to another set of Ames’s claims that do ring true after conducting this research. In his introductory discussion of museums’ ability to address current issues, he notes that: Museums, in fact, may not be properly constituted to be topical when advocacy or controversy is involved. To begin with, curatorship is based on the scholarly model of extensive research, careful accumulation and assessment of evidence over time, a focus on objects rather than on issues, and political neutrality. This discourages their immediate public (though perhaps not private) response to sudden events. (Ames 1992:7) While I hesitate to make a direct comment about this in the case of Deep Time (time will tell whether its final iteration, and the programming and research surrounding it, generate the kind of public impact the group intends), Ames’s statement gets at the heart of one of the most difficult areas the group faced in planning and visioning the exhibit at a high level. As scientists at a national museum, there was no real desire or ability to be political advocates in the true sense of influence. The internal culture of accuracy coupled with committee-driven decision-making and many levels of approval for any public facing communication, alongside its publicly trusted brand, likewise discourage responsiveness to current issues. Moreover, with a long planning timeframe and an even longer hall lifespan, there were ongoing debates about how to make an exhibit and topic relevant. Whether relevancy in either topical or political arenas on such a large time and spatial scale, in such a large and longstanding institution with such a wide set of publics and broad public mandate, is even possible, is yet to be seen. I am not sure that these challenges are products of recent institutional changes as they are of expectations emerging from a new cultural field in which the Smithsonian now exists. Similar 469 to annual reports from the early 1950s, that saw a new world of automobiles and home televisions, it seems the public in a world driven by Twitter feeds and round-the-clock news expects not only responsiveness, but also personally tailored or user-generated responsiveness. At a high level, the Smithsonian wants to keep up. Many of the people who work there aren’t sure yet whether it can, or should. Figure 8.1 A packed house for a panel on participatory experiences and engagement at the Museums and the Web conference, April 2014.118 This new participatory milieu adds to ongoing tensions about outreach and research. This was one of the clearest things I observed at the Museum—the cultural, political and professional divides between audience advocates (Exhibits professionals but also educators, social media and press officers etc.) and curators. While often writers and other outreach professionals find it productive and stimulating to work alongside science experts who are passionate colleagues and important resources to have on-site, curators tend to have bad reputations for being elitist, entitled, verbose, stubborn, self-important, naysaying, brutally critical, out of touch, and 470 generally difficult to work with. Stereotypes about outreach staff tend not to be so clearly defined, but in general there is a fear that they will take curatorial input and twist it, misinterpret it, rephrase it into language that changes its meaning, dumb it down, package it into ill-fitted media venues or gift shop gimmicks, or otherwise add things to it that don’t belong or worse, aren’t true. For writers and other communicators in the museum, while I heard from one person that they felt “blasphemous” saying so, the content is secondary to it’s communication. This is a fundamental difference in perspective. Upon reflection, it is sometimes surprising that these groups work as well as they do together. As someone interested in both research and outreach in exhibits work, and now frequently attending professional conferences like the Visitor Studies Association or Museums and the Web meetings, I have found more and more that these perceptions and frictions are common everywhere. As Richard Lewis put it: … every project that we go to, that sort of balance or conflict between curatorial and exhibits is- when I speak about the shape of groups that we’re going to work with, obviously that’s one of the first sort of physical structures that we look for, is how are curatorial and exhibits are doing? Are they talking to each other? Or do they want to kill each other? And we certainly have seen other projects … where they literally do want to kill each other—I mean, there’s no question that they want to kill each other. (Lewis 8.2.13) In Post’s recent text, he reproduces a cartoon from Exhibit Designer Benjamin Lawless. In the drawing, “The Finger of Blame,” Lawless depicts two men facing eachother at a table. Lawless holds a prop he apparently brought to exhibit meetings to lighten the mood when disciplinary frictions got out of hand (Post 2013:83). 471 Figure 8.2 “The Finger of Blame” by Benjamin Lawless.119 Likewise, I heard that some of the frictions I saw at the NMNH are acknowledged in wider disciplinary fields. As Angela Roberts Reeder said, while: One of the things I’ve heard from other writers, and it’s a pet peeve of mine, is that we are often accused of “dumbing down” the exhibit. I think that it’s just snobbery because you can’t dumb down the material. The material is material, the content is content, the science is the science. But you have to start where the majority of your visitors are, and if the majority of your visitors are at point E, you don’t start at point M and expect them to get it within the constraints of the museum visit. Also you don’t go to point A … you’ve got to find out where the visitors are at (Reeder 7.31.13). As Jonathan Coddington put it, while as an administrator you come to “appreciate everybody’s point of view, and everybody has a good point of view” in the grind of exhibits planning, “There’s a lot of different voices there, and there’s a lot of collision and vigorous argument about what the content of the exhibit might be” (Coddington 9.19.13). And as Kara Blond said of earlier experiences at other Smithsonian museums of these relationships: “It’s very similar across the board, and similarly contentious and strife with emotion and frustration, and lots of good stuff, too, but it’s a similarly difficult relationship” (Blond 7.1.13). These 472 frictions/complementarities thus seem to be widespread in the broader institutional field. In working through projects like Deep Time, museum professionals have to work past perceptions and disciplinary doctrines to find complementary solutions. While often this “interstitial” space or “contact zone” is fraught and illuminates power imbalances among staff, it also creates a unique space of innovation and problem solving. As Hans Sues said: And nowadays it has completely changed because we realize that all of the different groups of people in the museum have different skill sets and those are complimentary skill sets so that when you build an exhibit, yes the curator has knowledge but the technician knows things that are relevant to making the exhibit. The exhibit designer has ideas that flow into the exhibit … [the idea that] the curator basically says, “This is my list, make this happen.” … That’s just no longer acceptable, at least to us here in our museum. As you’ve seen this, in our exhibit design, we just build these themes and it’s sort of back and forth, like yes, as a curator you have this instinctive drive to put more science, more stuff into an exhibit. But the educators will say, “This doesn’t mean anything to my people. How about this?” And you suddenly go, “I have never thought about this way but that’s a great idea” (Sues 6.24.13). The ways I have described these “in-between” spaces, and “innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation,” will I hope, resonate with the wider museological field (Bhabha 1994:1-2). The space of exhibits production, as a microcosm of the wider museum, is a unique space for observing how “social articulations of difference” intersect with shared imaginings and innovation (Bhabha 1994:2). Moreover, this research became, much more than I had anticipated, a genealogy of these collaborative processes. More than problematizing blanket notions of collaboration, this thesis has traced the cultural trends and professional discourses that engender messy collaborative spaces. My reference to Bhabha’s work on the politically crucial nature of addressing these articulations of cultural difference is perhaps ironic. Bhabha’s project, one of rearticulating or 473 reformulating the “post”-colonial, is one that specifically refutes “the ontology of the white world” and “its assumed hierarchical forms of rationality and universality” (Bhabha 1994:273). The worldview of paleontologists driving Deep Time is very purposefully universalizing, not in terms of race identities but in terms of humanness, scientific understandings of earth, and what constitutes legitimate facts or truths about the world. For scientists at the NMNH, truths about the world are disciplinarily and politically crucial. I noted in the introduction that when I embarked on this research, I had the tendency to take for granted that scientific truths were socially constructed, and truth-making subjective. I realized upon getting to know curators and scientific fellows at the NMNH, that the term “cultural relativism” is a sullied one among scientists. It seems that the most extreme connotations of the term, of utter moral relativism and deconstructivist approaches, have come to define it for scientists. These connotations make anyone who uses it seem, at best, ridiculous and detached from the truth, and at worst, opponents undermining the scientific pursuit of knowledge. After many arguments and a year of trying to understand scientific perspectives and the research itself, I am convinced that a productive way to approach these topics theoretically and socially (and to therefore encourage collaborations between anthropologists and scientists in a wide range of contexts) is through a grounded and hybrid approach. As Latour writes: Yes, the scientific facts are indeed constructed, but they cannot be reduced to the social dimension because this dimension is populated by objects mobilized to construct it. Yes, those objects are real but they look so much like social actors that they cannot be reduced to the reality ‘out there’ invented by the philosophers of science. The agent of this double construction - science with society and society with science - emerges out of a set of practices that the notion of deconstruction grasps as badly as possible. The ozone hole is too social and too narrated to be truly natural; the strategy of industrial firms and heads of state is too full of chemical reactions to be reduced to power and interest; the discourse of 474 the ecosphere is too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects. Is it our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society? (Latour 1993:6). While the scientists I worked with know that scientific truths are politicized, negotiated, and under continuous debate, there is still a drive to be objective in presenting them. More importantly, the stakes for the Earth’s health are too great, and the political milieu too fraught and dangerous to call facts “subjective.” This study shows that while actors strive for objectivity in presenting, here, very morally serious messages, both the exhibit-making process and its final product are clearly political, creative and subjective. However, learning as much as I could about the science of paleobiology and paleontology, and understanding the worldviews of scientists also convinced me that Latour’s approach to sociotechnical systems, in which the world studied by scientists (made up of biological, processual and physical actants of all sorts) is not only real, but part of the same world as scientists studying it, is a productive hybrid stance. In this view, the forces and things out in the world that scientists study, scientific practice and practitioners, and discourse that circulates in political and cultural life, are all real and powerful agents in the modern world. Moreover, as Ingold has also argued, and as NMNH staff themselves describe, human practices may not be so different from natural ones, as actors and things in the world co-produce and mutually constitute the world together (Ingold 2000). Latour made the point in We Have Never Been Modern that, uniquely, anthropologists’ methods for describing the social world were one instance in which scientific and cultural approaches to epistemological understanding could be combined: This would be a hopeless dilemma had anthropology not accustomed us to dealing calmly and straightforwardly with the seamless fabric of what I shall call ‘nature-culture’, since 475 it is a bit more and a bit less than a culture (see Section 4.5). Once she has been sent into the field, even the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying … In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated. (Latour 1993: 7). Latour’s description makes a strong case for ethnography in modern institutions. Anthropology’s methods of data collection and ethical stance allow for hybrid analysis and description. This allows the ethnographer to take seriously the ways that the issues involved in Deep Time are, both “too social and too narrated to be truly natural” and “too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects” (1993:6). As Canclini has put it: … we should go beyond cultural studies limited to hermeneutic analysis and open up to a research agenda that combines signification and facts, discourses and their empirical groundings. In sum, we should construct a rationality that can encompass everyone’s reasonings as well as the structure of conflicts and negotiations (Canclini 2002:13). Moreover, having focused on the politically and socially delicate space of interdisciplinary collaborations, I wonder whether this stance is a way forward in accepting the disciplinary practices of not only scientists and cultural theorists, but those in education and other fields with more varied approaches to knowledge and its construction. As Latour has written in a more recent piece, Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorism. Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target … It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new 476 threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. (Latour 2004:225) In a world in which global climate change is an environmental reality, Latour suggests that arguments involved in the critical and social study of science have been twisted and obscured. He writes: “I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show ‘the lack of scientific certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a ‘primary issue.’ But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I?” (Latour 2004: 227). The critique of fact, “has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main target” (2004:231). Thus, Latour argues, it is politically crucial for academics, not to abandon the critical lens, but to refocus it in order to aim at the same collective targets—what he calls “associations” of “things” and “matters of concern” (Latour 2004:227). As I have argued for exhibits production, a hybrid approach that takes seriously other epistemologies, and uses the intersections between disciplinary practices to pose innovative solutions, may also span wider disciplinary schisms. Bhabha’s work on interstitiality thus remains a useful tool for thinking about not only cultural contexts at the Smithsonian but broader academic fissions. Bhabha’s work is also important to thinking about the ways that the historical contexts for frictions/complementarities are enacted or reified in interstitial spaces. The Smithsonian is a place immersed in its own history and traditions. Thus, I found that tracing cultural differences among experts similarly addressed, … the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic. (Bhabha 1994:35) 477 Indeed, the more time I spent in the Museum and in the archives, or in oral history interviews, the more I registered the ways in which Smithsonian’s past is rearticulated, remembered, or used in maneuvering or asserting power. History at the Smithsonian, is mobilized as strategy, while big personalities—Goode, Baird, Ripley, Sullivan, Samper—continue to resonate in contemporary spaces. Placing my contemporary cultural analysis against a historical one is also a means of exposing the development of an institution as a cultural system, and the ways that paradigms and values are both transformed and reproduced in its development. Attention to history allowed me to trace in what spaces, amidst what cultural and institutional shifts, and “on what basis,” values, dynamics, “knowledge and theory became possible” (Foucault 1976: xxi). In this way my research also became a contribution to work in the history of science. In his forward to a recent Gosden and Larson book on relationality and the Pitt Rivers Museums Michael O’Hanlon writes that “more than most institutions, museums appear as unusually ‘finished’ entities”(Larson, et al. 2007:xvii). At the NMNH, not only were exhibits never really finished, they were produced by increasingly diverse groups of people who often didn’t agree. Moreover, the development of the process for producing exhibitions was one driven by a constellation of actors and contexts. As I articulated in the above discussion of Latour’s work, it has been the long pursuit of historians of science to explore the processes by which things that look finished are socially or culturally produced. As Kuhn showed in his foundational work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, viewing the history of science as a “repository” of the “constellation of facts, theories, and methods” made by actors “striv[ing] to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation” uprooted the “image” of “finished scientific achievements” (Kuhn 478 1962). Rather than viewing historical developments simplistically or chronologically, Kuhn argued for an investigation of the moments when the whole of a scientific profession comes “to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science” (Kuhn 1962:6). As I found with exhibits techniques and practices, paradigm shifts emerged not from “a single group conversion” but “an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances” (Kuhn 1962:157). Studying the past at the NMNH was also a window into the ways the museum’s history is discursively reproduced in the present. Institutional memory manifests in the organization both through conversation and storytelling and in formal documents that structure the institution. These set the tone and realm of possibilities for action. Recording oral histories and paying attention to how the past is talked about in the museum helps to track points of disjuncture and discontinuity (histories of difference, as well as “resemblance”) amidst what I came to find were multiple epistemological fields “in which knowledge … grounds its positivity and thereby manifests … its conditions of possibility” (Foucault 1976:xxii). Much of the difficulty in changing practices or the tone of Smithsonian is tied to this deep sense of history. Constraints on change are also part of its hybrid government/academic structure, as Jonathan Coddington articulated: … it’s a odd hybrid between a purely academic institution with sort of an increasing bulge of federal bureaucracy and rules that … on the one hand, they keep you honest, but I think they’re also actually pretty good for things like, diversity and other things that … But it can also be tedious, hard to work through. (Coddington 9.19.13) Kirk Johnson in fact said that these challenges were part of the appeal of the Directorship: he wanted the challenge to create a more nimble and effective environment. Comparing the NMNH to his former Institution, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, he said: 479 Well I used to say about Denver that the Denver museum was large enough to be impactful and small enough to be nimble. And the National Museum is so huge, it’s not nimble in any way. And it’s also Federal and it’s Smithsonian so it’s very complex and a lot of the procedures defy common sense. So it’s actually very hard to change the course of it. It’s hard to screw it up and it’s hard to make it get better. It’s hard to make it do anything but what it does. I mean, I could literally go to work in my office, sit there and do nothing and it would all just turn ahead. (Johnson 7.18.13) This is why staff joke that it is like trying to turn the wheel on a giant ship. Risk-aversion is also inherent in the grandeur of the NMNH’s stage and the very real responsibility staff feel, as “public servants” (Werb 9.6.13) to the way they spend public money. They are also very serious and sincere about their work. As Fang-Pin Lee said: I think sincerity, too. I think there’s a lot of sincerity at this place. Everyone’s very sincere in their efforts. Even at the most challenging moments of trying to come up with solutions or consensus, and the anxiety is because everyone cares so much. So you have to weigh that with the frustration. (Lee 8.14.13) While outreach and managerial discourse centers around modularity and becoming a more “nimble and flexible” place (Duggal 12.4.13), staff are reluctant to make mistakes but feel there should be more room to do so. There is, particularly in Exhibits, a lot of discussion about “permission” to both take initiative, and to fail. Curatorial staff in particular also like to assert what they know, unfortunately sometimes by exposing how wrong someone else is. After one such early encounter at the museum, Amy Bolton said: “So he wanted to show me how wrong I was, and I was like I was like, ‘Wow. Okay. It’s a sport around here. I get it.’” (Bolton 6.26.13). Risk-aversion and many departmental tensions are also about fiscal constraints and capacities. Everyone is vying for fewer resources. There is less staff time to get things accomplished with. Risk-aversion may be a result of the daily ways actors choose to act or vie for power amidst increasing constraints. It is not only in this fiscal climate, but since the first 480 museum renovations began in the 1950s, that management knew they couldn’t keep up with current science at the rates that halls could be redone. Hall renovations are few and far between in part due to resources and because with as many halls as the museum has, “They do one a year … It takes them 40 years to get back to the original ones” (Duggal 12.4.13). Thus risk-taking in permanent halls is dangerous. With so many ongoing exhibit projects, aside from very minor installations, only the next generation will have the chance to make major changes. Meanwhile, debates about fossil exhibits also have interesting potential contributions to the authenticity debates of material culture theorists. As I described in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, fossil mounts, often seen by the public as single entities, are necessarily assemblages of original fossils—themselves created by mineral replacement of the bone of an animal that once lived—sometimes from multiple individual fossilized animals (a composite), plus sculpted and/or cast pieces based on specimens found elsewhere, in other museums, opposing parts of an animal, or using an educated imagination. These (assemblaged) icons are seen as ‘real’ or authentic by the public; for scientists, cast pieces are still considered scientifically valid objects—accurate enough to be used for research—and highly valued, despite the emergence of isotopic analysis and other methods that today rely on the use of ‘real’ fossilized bone. Fossil displays thus seem to be in interesting case for considering issues of authenticity and duplication in relation to modernist critiques of technological reproduction (Benjamin 2010[1930]) and postmodernist- or counter-arguments posed since (Isaac 2011). This is interesting because dinosaur exhibits are prime targets for critiques of “spectacle” and the Disneyfication of museums. In writing following on philosophical or semiotic critiques of mass-culture, exhibits on Monet, mummies, or dinosaurs are seen as symptomatic of a new era in which the dominant mode of production is increasingly one of “spectacle,” an accumulation of 481 images that mediates social relations in a world of “mere representation” (Debord 1983 [1967]) . This notion of reality as mere simulation, and of capitalism’s shift from the production of commodities to the production of signs, has become practically ubiquitous in postmodern and neo-Marxist criticism—following on the semiotic analysis of hyperreality on the mass-culture “mythologies” and the “sign” (Barthes 1974 [1957]; Baudrillard 1994 [1981]). Debord’s work has been used to critique the McDonaldization, commercialization, Disneyfication of the museum, and the shift toward ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions and spectacular or simulational ‘experiences’ where it is assumed that social relationships between people are being replaced by mediated images and substantive content by surface-level entertainment. Likewise Benjamin’s influential argument that the “here and now” of the “original”, its “authenticity”, its “aura” and its “unique existence,” are obliterated with “mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin 2010[1930]:13) has been formative in museum discourses. Fossil mounts, never having been “original” in the sense of a painting, and yet certainly possessing “aura” when considered “real”—and in the post-Sue era of T-rex auctioning not quantifiably valued in the millions of dollars—offer an interesting case for thinking about authenticity and objects. In mid-April of 2014, both the spectacle and the authenticity claims for dinosaurs came to the fore as a new “Nation’s T-rex” was transported by FedEx (rebranded in T-Rex paraphernalia) from the Museum of the Rockies to the Smithsonian. The NMNH’s first “real” T-rex, the Wankel Rex, would be permanently loaned for 50 years from the Army Corps of Engineers. Scientists are aware of these wider debates, and self-reflexive about them. As Hans Sues articulated, distinguishing NMNH scientists’ approach from postmodernist ones: There’s a tradition even now in museums, that sort of holds I think it comes sort of out of the postmodern museum tradition in France, in particular, that objects are basically just 482 tropes in a museum. We tell stories, sort of like a narrative or a theater piece. The object is not that important … but scientists, who look at objects don’t find them mute at all and they tell us a great deal and so that’s why … The first approach one might actually say, any object will suffice, whereas in a museum as ours, that has a terrific diversity of objects, we can pick objects and then basically, tell the public what we think about them, invite the public to tell us what they might think about them. It’s a very different approach. (Sues 6.24.13) The aura of objects is thus also part of the internal Smithsonian discourse about its uniqueness in the contemporary moment. While information is free, and most facts google-able, Smithsonian has the “real thing” and a unique potential to inspire visitors to ask questions with “object-based learning” and “the power of the object” (Bolton 6.26.13). The NMNH’s new Education Center, Q?rius, aimed to harness that potential with modular, touchable, and exploratory exhibitry and activities. Smithsonian’s collections are important to reaching visitors not only because “people understand collecting things” (Bolton 6.26.13), but also because collections are seen as the basis for new research and new unknown questions; a space like Q?rius aims to use activities around collections to inspire the public to engage in research. There is also a sense that “at some deep level, some people have some kind of craving right now for authentic things because the virtual world offers so much” (Sues 6.24.13). Smithsonian’s 137 million objects are what set it apart from other institutions in the “knowledge economy” (Falk and Sheppard 2006). It is also true that branches of the Smithsonian, such as Smithsonian Enterprises, which runs its shops, restaurants, and other profit-seeking entities, does value marketing and “infotainment-entertaining” to be financially viable and “economically self-sufficient” (Ames 1992). As Elizabeth Duggal told me of the App Shaker, brought in through a contract negotiated by Smithsonian Enterprises, 483 And if kids enjoy it, and it causes them to go online and look more about dinosaurs or walk down to our Fossil hall, this is a good thing. It is another lens into the Museum so I encourage these experiments. I do push back a lot on media pieces though because they can be faddish. Technology becomes out of date quickly and it is expensive to maintain. Are the media experiences worthwhile? Do they really make a difference in the exhibit design or visitor experience? (Duggal 12.4.13) She continued about Smithsonian Enterprises’ and the balance of shops and exhibit space, “I know our staff prefer more exhibit space and less commercial activities, i.e. stores and restaurants. However, people like to buy a cute cuddly dinosaur plush toy to take home as a souvenir or they need to eat lunch … so our staff needs to reconcile the need for visitor amenities.” At the end of the day, Smithsonian Enterprises, “were set up to make money for the institution and we really need the extra funds” (Duggal 12.4.13). And with resources limited, “we have to define what is measurable success from the very beginning” (Duggal 12.4.13). It has also indeed been since the 1980s that the museum has sought private funding and donor-driven projects have become the norm for exhibits. In-house money did indeed taper off relative to the cost of exhibits and their personnel and technical needs—at the same time that the institution was growing exponentially. As Ames pointed out, the dual move toward democratization and professionalism has caused increased tensions, since 1) increased professionalism raises operating costs, 2) museums seek innovative programming while wanting to “play it safe,” 3) there’s impetus to use or allow the public to interact with “real” collections while also preserving them 4) museums try to seek corporate and individual support while asserting curatorial autonomy (Ames 1992:13), which has simultaneously lost strength due to the 5) power shift away from curators toward those in public programming, outreach and revenue generation (Ames 1992:159). 484 As I heard from many staff, and saw in some cases, there are “certain aspects of this business model that seems to have created inefficiency rather than improve the overall output” (Telfer 6.27.13). With the working model that each Department be financially independent, and resources low, it is often difficult to use all available staff and equipment resources to get things done. I argue that many of these frictions are part of any (certainly large-scale or national) museum’s guts; they have deeper roots in the nature of exhibits (static objects to describe a world always in flux), creative processes (inherently power plays, not blanket “collaborations), and museum missions (supporting general and scholarly publics). This research therefore speaks to wider debates about collaboration and other contexts in which divergent disciplinary and institutional logics are at play. The mere fact of there being so many different models and metaphors to talk about the kinds of frictions/complementarities I describe here and ways to overcome, bridge, fuse, or otherwise synthesize or generate new knowledge from them, suggests that these are rich areas for social analysis. I have already mentioned digital and physical “contact zones” (Boast 2011; Clifford 1997; Pratt 1992), “hybrids” (Canclini 1995; Canclini 2001) and “cultural hybridity”(Shelton 2001), “interstices” (Bhabha 1992), dialogue (Bakhtin 1981), “creative bureaucracy” (Born 1995), critical work on collaboration (Shannon 2008), and of course, “frictions” (Tsing 2005), in addition to theorizing of “hybrids” in “sociotechnical systems” (Latour 1993) or other modes of thinking about “things” that break dichotomies like the nature/culture divide (Henare, et al. 2007). Where I had intended to focus on broad institutional shifts, I found that at the Smithsonian’s NMNH, a seemingly homogenous or singular cultural field, these awkward spaces and intersections were similarly present. 485 This thesis therefore also makes a case for grounded study of the internal workings of large-scale institutions such as the Smithsonian. Rather than approaching the place as an outsider or critical theorist, or pitching “monocausal explanations” (Penny 2002), an insider perspective gives the researcher insight into the complexities of what Tony Bennett calls the museum “apparatus”(Bennett 1995). In terms of broader debates about museums as “technologies of progress” (Bennett 1995), paleontology exhibits were never grounded in the social Darwinist thinking that many early Anthropology exhibits were. Unlike Ames’s and others’ work on anthropology exhibits, fossil exhibits are not mirrors of the discipline of anthropology; fossil displays are not really “forms of cannibalism made safe for polite society.” They tell us other things about “ourselves,” human imagination, and colonial pasts (Ames 1992). Certainly a “technology of progress,” fossil displays did indeed showcase the supremacy of Western knowledge, and were firmly grounded in the colonization of settler societies in North America. Yet the bookish Charles Gilmore, or his superior, geologist George Merrill, or Nick Hotton in the 1960s—these men, however much products of broader colonial forces, were not guided by narratives of human progress, but rather saw themselves as contextualizing human existence within a much deeper past, and increasingly over time, evolutionary narratives that saw humans as the end-product of a long lineage. Moreover, studying a non-Anthropological exhibit anthropologically brings up new kinds of theoretical questions about objectivity, disciplinarity, authenticity, collecting, and the colonial legacy of the modern museum. The grounded realities of historical and contemporary work at the NMNH have illuminated some of these counterpoints to debates in anthropology and exposed some of the museum’s inherent paradoxes. The singularity of objects, their importance as “real” things, their 486 affective capabilities—these truths about the qualities of objects like dinosaur fossils are up against an increasing drive to communicate stories and concepts that by definition aren’t communicated well with them. Outreach and research imply different and increasingly professionalized disciplinary and cultural practices; expertise has become somewhat democratized, with uneven and sticky social and political implications for the everyday work of people in the museum. Diffusion has been turned inside out to some extent, but being “majestic and inviting” or ceding authority over knowledge, is similarly contested ground. In creative processes, though, I argue that these tensions and many of the constraints in which production takes place drive some innovations as much as they stifle others. Staff members who work on these projects, in the long term, have usually described them to me as rewarding. As Kay Behrensmeyer said of the Mammals Hall exhibit, complete in 2004, while there was, “So much wrangling over words and how to present things and how to make it interesting to different age groups” and there were “disagreements and lots of bumps in the road, “it was, she said, “all a creative process and it was a team process. And I guess I like working in teams” (Behrensmeyer 6.3.13). As Sally Love commented, “It’s so important for a team to feel comfortable with each other, to have the discussions that sometimes are not totally agreeable, but you have to have them, but to feel comfortable enough to do that … and you start to become more of a working, cohesive unit” (Love 8.7.13). As Scott Wing put it, today the NMNH is “engaged in exhibits that everybody’s happy to be working on or wants to work on and thinks are important to work on. Then suddenly the relationship is just way, way, better because the goals are lined up for everybody” (Wing 8.16.13). And while group cohesion, based on mutual respect is crucial, that important “creative tension” (Moeller 6.12.13) staff describe, is often what makes good exhibits. It is often in these spaces that different experts have the chance to assert 487 their expertise and earn respect. In exhibit meetings, staff from different departments and backgrounds have a chance at “earning people’s respect” by “demonstrating your expertise, defending your position/perspective, and being an honest broker” (Bolton 5.16.14). Reiterating what many staff, and what Kim Moeller so poignantly said of this important space of compromise and creativity: And to be honest with you I think that’s the way it should be. I think that is the core of the dynamic. You’ve got the science side who is doing the research and coming up with this information. We’re the diffusion side that’s trying to get the knowledge out there and the creative way that you do that. And the artistic tension that comes in the middle of that is what we wind up with. That’s the product. And I think it’s always going to be like that and it should be like that. That’s the balance. That’s what keeps the equilibrium. I think if everybody was in one direction or everybody was in the other direction, we’d wind up with a really horrible product, but I think the balance of those two is exactly where it needs to be. And I wouldn’t change that for a minute. (Moeller 6.12.13) Reflecting on his talk on the outcrop at the K/T boundary, Kirk tells me in a bunkhouse in Marmarth, North Dakota: Because the museum is, I keep saying, it’s three things: it’s collections, it’s research, it’s a public audience. And that’s, it’s sort of Deep Time because the exhibit is those three things … And usually people are specialists in one of those three things—whether it be the exhibit people or the scientists or collections people … That’s why we’re in North Dakota with all these people is to put them together … That’s kind of the way I think about it. Teams can do amazing things if they function as teams. If they love each other and respect each other and fight with each other … You have to acknowledge that your knowledge has limits and other people know other things better than you know them; and that the right answer is somewhere between the two or three of you. That’s the dynamic tension of building an exhibit. (Johnson 7.18.13) 488 This research suggests that these tensions, creative and political, which I have framed as complementarities and frictions, are not new. They have traces in the very early museum, and clear roots in cultural and institutional changes of the late 1950s. Exhibits production thus emerges as a subjective and creative act, rooted in particular institutional contexts and histories, taking place at the intersection of paradoxical institutional missions and divergent disciplinary cultures. 489 9. Coda: The Nation’s T-rex At 7a.m. the rotunda is already filled with people—reporters are lined up three deep at the museum’s entrance facing a series of flags, a podium, and a wooden crate—the little altar to herald in the Nation’s T-rex. Many of the staff in exhibits have been at the museum since 5; press staff since 3am. The ceremonies will celebrate the arrival of the T-rex after a two-day cross-country trip in a FedEx truck from the Museum of the Rockies. The husband and wife team driving the truck took turns sleeping, so it’s come straight from Montana to D.C. When it left Bozeman, it was sent off with a caravan and a re-branded FedEx truck with a giant T-rex logo and the words “Delivering History: The Nation’s T-Rex” on it. When it arrived at the museum the temporary light installed to unload the T-Rex was visible from Arlington, across the river. Staff crowded the loading dock to watch the 16 crates get brought in off the truck and upstairs to the newly installed “Rex Room,” where the T-rex would be unpacked, scanned and photographed on public display for the next four months. In the fossil halls, a quirky reporter from the Weather channel is interviewing Matthew Carrano, asking him about his favorite T-rex facts. Other TV and news crews are continuing to assemble around the front entrance. By 8:50, the whole museum staff seems to be in the rotunda, filling the ground floor and the balconies on the second and third floors. 490 Figure 9.1 Entrance to the Museum from the third floor balcony, April 15, 8:50am120 Figure 9.2 Entrance to the Museum, April 15, 8:55 am121 491 At 8:59, Kirk Johnson and the Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers are gearing up to give their opening speeches. As Kirk said at the donor event celebrating the T-rex’s arrival, the large amount of press and social media attention the T-rex got for the Museum was a clear reminder of the “tremendous iconic power the Tyrannosaurus rex has.” The Rex was originally discovered by Kathy Wankel, hence the name “Wankel Rex” and her husband in Montana in 1988. Jack Horner, famously the inspiration for Jurassic Park’s paleontologist and part of the “dinosaur renaissance” of the 1980s and 1990s, identified her early find as a T-rex arm, the first that had ever been found. The specimen was partially prepared and put on display in a death pose in the museum. A metal cast of its bones was installed at the front of Jack’s Museum. In the early millennium, Horner was commissioned to procure a T-rex for the Smithsonian, and when he didn’t find one, this long-term loan was arranged instead. The T-rex, stewarded by the Army Corps of Engineers because it was found on public lands, was arranged to come to the Smithsonian on a fifty-year loan. Commanding General and Chief of Engineers, Lieutenant General Thomas P. Bostick made opening remarks on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers at the opening ceremonies. Both here and at a donor event the next evening, the T-rex is greeted with lengthy speeches. The Museum of the Rockies is proud to have the Nation’s T-rex represent Montana and its people on the National Mall. The Museum is grateful to the Army Corps of Engineers for their stewardship and to Kathy Wankel for her historic find. The T-rex arrival is covered by most national media station, and “trends” on Twitter on the day it arrives. 492 Off to the side of the rotunda, the Rex Room, in many ways the contemporary iteration of the 1936 Dallas Expo exhibit, showcases the Nation’s T-rex being unpacked, 3D scanned, and inventoried to overflowing crowds through October. The Rex Room is in one of the small temporary galleries that’s an offshoot from the rotunda. My friend Shannon did the design—a giant silhouette and side view of a T-rex skeleton, and bright orange highlights. As an online component, the exhibit also links to a “Photorama” where the public is being encouraged to upload photos of themselves in the current halls before they close. On the weekend of April 27 and 28, huge numbers of visitors came to the museum to see the current halls one last time before their closure. Staff and volunteers from Paleobiology and Imaging set up stations throughout the hall to talk with visitors about their work, ask them about their memories of the halls, showcase future plans, and upload visitors’ photos to the live Photorama. Jurassic Park 3D played twice that weekend to a packed house in the IMAX theater. 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California Academy of Sciences. 517 Appendix A: Lists of Relevant Leadership Secretaries of the Smithsonian Institution Spencer Fullerton Baird 1879-1886 Samuel Pierpont Langley 1887-1906 Charles Doolittle Walcott 1907-1927 Charles Greely Abbot 1928-1944 Alexander Wetmore 1945-1953 Leonard Carmichael 1954-1964 S. Dillon Ripley 1965-1983 Robert McCormick Adams 1984-1993 Michael Heyman 1994-1999 Lawrence M. Small 2000-2007 G. Wayne Clough 2008-2014 David J. Skorton 2014- Directors of the Smithsonian National Museum/NMNH U.S. National Museum George Brown Goode 1881-1896 Charles Doolittle Walcott 1897-1898 Richard Rathbun 1899-1917 William DeC Ravenel 1918-1924 Alexander Wetmore 1925-1947 *A. Remington Kellogg 1948-1962 Museum of Natural History Albert C. Smith 1959-1962 T. Dale Stewart 1963-1965 Richard S. Cowan 1966-1972 Porter M. Kier 1973-1978 James F. Mello 1979 Richard S. Fiske 1980-1985 James C. Tyler (Acting) 1986 Robert S. Hoffman 1986-1988 Frank Talbot 1989-1994 Donald Ortner (Acting) 1994-1996 David Pawson (Acting) 1996 Robert W. Fri 1996-2001 Doug Erwin (Acting) 2002 Christian Samper 2003-2012 Kirk Johnson 2013- *after 1957 Natural History is separate from US National Museum; Kellogg is Director of both units FY 1958. 518 Paleontology Head Curators of Geology George P. Merrill 1897-1929 Ray S. Bassler 1929-1948 F. W. Foshag 1948-1954 Gus Cooper 1955-1963 Chairmen of Paleobiology Gus A. Cooper 1963-1967 Porter M. Kier 1967-1972 Richard E. Grant 1972-1977 Martin A. Buzas 1977-1982 Ian G. Macintyre 1982-1987 Jack W. Pierce 1987-1992 William A. DiMichele 1992-1997 Richard H. Benson 1997-2001 Douglas H. Erwin 2001-2002 Scott Wing (Acting) 2002 Ian Macintyre (Acting) 2002 Scott Wing 2003-2006 Daniel J. Stanley 2006-2007 Conrad Labandeira 2007-2010 Brian T. Huber 2010- S Exhibits Chief Exhibits Specialist John E. Anglim 1956-1965 Lucius (Lou) Lomax1965-1973 Chief of the Office of Exhibits Harry T. Hart 1973-1976* Eugene F. Behlen 1976-1983 Carl Alexander (Acting) 1984 Assistant Director of Exhibits Lawrence P. O’Reilly 1984-1992 Rena Selim 2006-2008 Michael Mason 2009-2013 Kara Blond 2013- (Acting) Associate Directors Public Programs, Robert Sullivan 1990-2007 Public Engagement, Elizabeth Duggal 2007- 519 Appendix B: Geologic Time Scale U.S. Geological Survey: http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/parks/gtime/ 520 Appendix C: Fossil Exhibits Timeline 1871 First vertebrate fossils (casts) on display at the Castle. 1872 First vertebrate fossil mount, the Irish Elk, placed on display in the Castle. October 1881 Fossils move to the U.S.N.M. (Arts & Industries). April 26, 1909 Fossils begin moving across the mall to the new U.S.N.M. building (NMNH). October 15, 1911 Fossil halls open in the new U.S.N.M. building (NMNH). June 6, 1961 Fossil Plants & Invertebrates, Fossil Fishes & Amphibians, and Prehistoric Mammals open. June 25, 1963 Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles opens. Spring 1964 Balcony to Dinosaur Hall opens. c. 1967 Age of Quaternary Vertebrates (Ice Age Mammals) open to the public. September 13, 1974 Ice Age Mammals and the Emergence of Man opens. April 17, 1980 The Conquest of Land and The Flowering Plant Revolution open. December 4, 1981 Dinosaurs: Reptiles—Masters of Land opens. May 30, 1985 Mammals in the Limelight opens. June 27, 1986 Early Life: Earliest Traces of Life opens. May 18, 1990 Life in the Ancient Seas opens. May 24, 2001 3-D Scanned and restored Triceratops unveiled. December 11, 2002 Early Paleo Hall Renovation Meeting. April 9, 2009 Deep Time selected as one of NMNH’s “Big Ideas” December 3, 2012 Launch of first Deep Time workshops April 26, 2013 Final Deep Time 10% Draft sent for Approval December 11, 2013 Final Deep Time 35% Package Submitted April 28, 2014 Paleo Halls close to the public. September 1, 2015 Proposed completion of Deep Time exhibit design. 2019 Proposed Deep Time Halls & Exhibit opening date. 521 Appendix D: Interview Questionnaires D.1 Sample Team Interview Questionnaire INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE Project An Ethnography of “Deep Time” Principal Investigator: Susan Rowley, Curator of Public Archaeology, Associate Professor in Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Tel. (604) 723-0494 Co-Investigator: Diana Marsh, PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia, Tel. 732 570 2170, email marshd@interchange.ubc.ca Interviewee: Date: Location: Purpose: Diana Marsh is conducting interviews as part of her PhD dissertation research, which will result in a PhD thesis. The general aim of this research is to investigate the ways that museums bring knowledge to the public, giving attention to the way this process is shaped by the particular museums’ institutional histories and cultures. This research takes the formation of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)’s dinosaur hall as a case study, from its first iteration at the turn of the century to plans for its upcoming renovation. This project will contribute to a better understanding of how knowledge is mediated in the public presentation of scientific research and what grounded impact historical shifts in museum institutional organization have on the contemporary process of exhibit-making. 522 Background Questions 1. Tell me a little about your background & training 2. How did you get interested in that? a. How about as a child growing up? 3. Who did you study with in your undergraduate and graduate programs? Did you have any important mentors that inspired you to do what you do now? a. Are there different schools of thought in your field/ ___________? Were you trained under a certain philosophy of ____________________? In museums specifically? 4. How would you characterize your overall approach to your discipline/__________? a. In museums specifically? 5. How have you seen the field of _________change since you got started? a. What about specifically in museum education? Institution Questions 6. When did you first get started at Smithsonian? What brought you to NMNH? 7. What positions have you had at the institution? 8. When was your very first project here? 9. What was the Education department like when you got here? 10. What was the museum like when you got here? (first impressions) 523 a. How would you describe your daily work here when you started? b. Who showed you the ropes? 11. What would you say the relationship between scientific departments and education departments was like? a. How about scientific departments and exhibits and programming work in general b. What is that relationship like now? 12. What do you think has changed about the museum from when you started to now? Exhibits Questions 13. In what capacities have you been involved in exhibits at the museum? a. Were there any that were your favorite? 14. Can you describe the relationship between exhibits and research in general and at this museum? To you, how do they – or should they – relate? a. What’s your approach to communicating the research that goes on at the museum? b. I’ve heard you talk about the importance of affective learning and personalizing exhibit content, as well as understanding the diversity of visitor experience at the museum. Can you tell me a little about how you see research ideally being communicated or learned in exhibits? 15. When you got here the dinosaur hall would have been complete. What do you remember about those halls at the time? What were your first impressions of them? 524 16. Were you involved in any of the planning for any part of the Fossil Hall complex or more recent updates? a. Can you tell me a little bit about that space? i. What was the main vision for that installation? What is its main goal now? ii. What are your main goals for that project? 17. What has been your involvement in the FossiLab? Do you have any recollections about the space in terms of an active lab or as a public face for science? 18. Do you recall between now and when you first got here, how decisions regarding exhibits were made and how exhibits were developed? Has that process changed at all over the years? 19. When did you first get involved with Deep Time? 20. How were exhibit development or team roles similar or different from the Deep Time project in process, vision, or team structure in other exhibits work you’ve been involved in? 21. Overall, what are the main challenges and opportunities in creating exhibits? a. Today more often (and certainly for Deep Time) the development process involves a team with really varied expertise. How do you see the dynamic of the team working? How would you describe the decision-making process over content and design decisions? 22. You’re the main _________________ on the Deep Time project; How would you characterize that role on the Core exhibit team? 23. On the temporary exhibit team? 525 a. What are your main priorities for the project? b. How is the Deep Time vision different or unique from other projects? c. How would this project rate for you in terms of importance relative to other exhibitions? d. How would you summarize your dream for the exhibition – either in your vision of what the space would look like, what people would feel or do there, what they might say or do upon leaving? e. How does your particular expertise play into the Deep Time project? f. How would you characterize the role of curators in the exhibit process? g. We’ve heard in other interviews that the exhibit development process really changed beginning with the Exhibits Modernization Program through to today. The inclusion of educators, exhibit developers and project managers on teams being one shift, and the change from copyeditors who copyedited curatorial research documents to writers who generate content. Have you experienced these or other changes? What impact have changes in the development process created in exhibitions? Are there other changes you’ve noticed? h. Education is one of the departments that’s really grown since the 80s and the last iterations of the Fossil Halls. How has that changed the process of exhibits work at the museum? (opportunities/challenges?) i. At 10% there was emphasis on designating programming spaces in the Halls early on in the process, and even doing some initial brainstorming as to what programming might look like in the Halls. How is this similar or different to other exhibits you’ve seen developed? 526 24. How has the change in directorship affected the exhibit process? How does having a director with an expertise in paleobiology impact the exhibit? 25. How would you say Deep Time compares overall to earlier iterations of the Fossil Halls? a. What’s different? What remains constant? b. What about other exhibits you’ve worked on? D.2 Sample Oral History Interview Questionnaire INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE Project An Ethnography of “Deep Time” Principal Investigator: Susan Rowley, Curator of Public Archaeology, Associate Professor in Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Tel. (604) 723-0494 Co-Investigator: Diana Marsh, PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia, Tel. 732 570 2170, email marshd@interchange.ubc.ca Interviewee: Date: Location: Purpose: Diana Marsh is conducting interviews as part of her PhD dissertation research, which will result in a PhD thesis. The general aim of this research is to investigate the ways that museums bring knowledge to the public, giving attention to the way this process is shaped by the particular museums’ institutional histories and cultures. This research takes the formation of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)’s dinosaur hall as a case study, from its first iteration at the turn of the century to plans for its upcoming renovation. 527 This project will contribute to a better understanding of how knowledge is mediated in the public presentation of scientific research and what grounded impact historical shifts in museum institutional organization have on the contemporary process of exhibit-making. Your Background Questions 1. Tell me a little about your background & training 2. What brought you to Smithsonian or NMNH? 3. How long did you work at NMNH? At Smithsonian? 4. What was your position (positions) at the institution? a. How would you describe your daily work when you were there? b. Did you have any other positions at the institution? 5. In what capacities did you work on exhibits at the museum? Institution Questions 6. How would you characterize how the museum worked when you first got there? 7. What would you say the relationship between scientific departments and exhibits work was like? 8. What do you think changed about NMNH (or Smithsonian) from when you started to when you left? Paleo Hall/ Exhibits History Questions 9. When you worked on the last project in the Paleo Halls, what would you say the main goal of the exhibit was? 528 a. What were your main priorities for the project? b. Who were your most important audiences for that exhibit? Did those audiences influence the exhibit planning process? 10. What do you remember about the planning of those Halls? 11. As you know, the museum is beginning a seven year project to renew the Fossil Halls. How do you think this new project and exhibit, Deep Time, compares to earlier iterations of the Fossil Halls (or other exhibits) you’ve seen at NMNH? 529 Appendix E. List of Figure Sources 1 Figure P.1 The Team at the KT Boundary, Hell Creek Formation, July 2013. Photo by the Author. 2 Figure P.2 Scott Wing and Rich Barclay Breaking Apart a Fossil Leaf Slab 1. July 2013, Photo by the Author. 3 Figure P.3 Scott Wing and Rich Barclay Breaking Apart a Fossil Leaf Slab 2. July 2013, Photo by the Author. 4 Figure P.4 Kirk Johnson, Skip Lyles, Scott Wing, and Rich Barclay excavating fossil leaves, July 2013. Photo by the Author. 5 Figure P.5 Scott Wing, Kirk Johnson, Skip Lyles, Kim Moeller, Nora, Loughlin, Sally Love excavating and wrapping fossil leaves, July 2013. Photo by the Author. 6 Figure P.6 Chiseling at Taurosaurus, July 2013. Photo by the Author. 7 Figure P.7 The Team at a microfossil site, July 2013. Photo by the Author 8 Figure P.8 The Team hikes across the badlands. July 2013. Photo by the Author. 9 Figure 1.1 Participants in the 50th Anniversary of the Paleobiology Department. Left to right: Dan Chaney, Richard (Dick) Fiske, Fran Hueber, Diana Marsh, Robert (Bob) Purdy, Ian Macintyre, Richard Bambach, Scott Wing, Kay Behrensmeyer, Alan Cutler, Thomas Waller, May 2013. Photo by attendee. 10 Figure 1.2 The Team at the Ceratopsian Site, July 2013. Photo by the Author. 11 Figure 2.1 Stereograph of Megatherium and Glyptodon 1872. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Castle Collection. 12 Figure 2.2 Hadrosaurus foulkii in the Smithsonian Castle c. 1874-1882. Photo by Susan Myers. http://www.si.edu/ahhp/sibtour_lmh5. 13 Figure 2.3 USNM (now Arts and Industries Building) under construction 1879. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image 2005-8427. RU 95, Box 32, Folder: 7. 14 Figure 2.4 Constructing the Comparative Anatomy & Osteology Hall, National Museum 1881. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image 2002-12146. RU 95, Box 43, Folder 14. 15 Figure 2.5 USNM (Arts and Industries Building) floor plan, 1925. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image SIA2013-07638. RU 562, Box 1, Folder: Photographs, Interior and Exterior, A&I Building. 16 Figure 2.6 Systematic Geology Hall, South West Range, Arts and Industries Building c. 1903. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image NHB-16279. RU 95, Box 43, Folder: 26. 17 Figure 2.7 Comparative Osteology Hall c. 1881. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image MNH-4318.tif. RU95, Box 43, Folder 14. 18 Figure 2.8 Comparative Osteology Hall with Basilosaurus Cast, Arts and Industries Buidling, 1896. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image NHB-9469. RU 95, Box 42, Folder: 12. 19 Figure 2.9 Papier-mâché Stegosaurus on display at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904. International University Lectures, Volume 5, New York, University Alliance, Inc., 1909, pp. 84-85. 20 Figure 2.10 Clipping, “The Sunday Star,” advertising the mounting of Triceratops, 1905. Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 21 Figure 2.11 Map of the Smithsonian Museum Grounds c. 1911. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image MAH-27994. RU 95, Box 30, Folder: 1. 22 Figure 2.12 Map of the Natural History Building First Floor 1913. Report on the Progress of the U.S. National Museum 1913, pp. 16. Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/24288#page/24/mode/1up, Accessed May 15, 2014. 23 Figure 2.13 Current numbering for East Halls 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Illustration by the Author. 530 24 Figure 2.14 Basilosaurus in the Hall of Vertebrate Fossils c. 1912. 28533.tif, “Hall 2 Exhibit Prints.” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 25 Figure 2.15 Cyanotype of the Vertebrate Fossil Hall c. 1913. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image 2005-3000. RU95 Box 44A Folder 14. 26 Figure 2.16 Fossil Crinoids, Springer Collection c. 1920. 30543.tif, “Hall Opening 1961.” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 27 Figure 2.17 Legs and Pelvis of Allosaurus fragilis Marsh. 28505.tif, “Hall Opening 1961.” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 28 Figure 2.18 Top view of (top left) 1904 papier-mâché model of Stegosaurus, (bottom left) the mounted skeleton of Stegosaurus stenops, and (right) Stegosaurus stenops in death pose, known as the “roadkill” exhibited as found. 20895.tif, “Hall Opening 1961.” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 29 Figure 2.19 Diplodocus Construction c. 1930. 30124A.tif. “Hall 2 Exhibit Prints.” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 30 Figure 2.20 Visitors to the Smithsonian 1881-1924. Report on the Progress of the U.S. National Museum. 1924, Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/107636#page/34/mode/1up, Accessed May 15, 2014. 31 Figure 2.21 Sketch of the Texas Centennial Exposition display c. 1935. Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 32 Figure 2.22 Norman Boss preparing Camarasaurus at the Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas, 1936. Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 33 Figure 2.23 Norman Boss and public onlookers at the Exposition, 1936. Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 34 Figure 2.24 Lion Diorama in the Mammals Hall c 1913. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image NHB-24881. RU9516, Box 1, F: Watson M. Perrygo Oral History Interviews 35 Figure 2.25 Anthropology Hall and Diorama Displays c. 1911. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image SIA2009-2193. 95, Box 44, Folder 1. 36 Figure 2.26 The Fossil Hall’s First (Jurassic) Diorama, installed c.1938. Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 37 Figure 2.27 Hall in the 1940s. 43958.tif. “Hall 2 Exhibit Prints.” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 38 Figure 2.28 Detail of Diana of the Tides, John Elliott. installed c. 1911. IMG 80-5863. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Dinosaur Hall Construction I. 39 Figure 3.1 Deep Time exhibit timeline. Courtesy of the Office of Exhibits, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian 40 Figure 3.2 Deep Time content matrix 2013. Courtesy of Matthew Carrano, Curator of Dinosauria, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 41 Figure 3.3 The Cooper Room 2013. Photo by the Author. 42 Figure 3.4 Chairs of Paleobiology in the Cooper Room 2013. Photo by the Author. 43 Figure 3.5 Exhibit meeting in 71A, 2013. Photo by the Author. 44 Figure 3.6 Draft bubble diagram by Fang-Pin Lee, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist. 45 Figure 3.7 Friction/complementarity content debates. Illustration by the Author. 531 46 Figure 3.8 Theme 1. Illustration by the Author. 47 Figure 3.9 Zallinger mural at Yale’s Peabody Museum, 2013. Photo by the Author. 48 Figure 3.10 “Spectrum of Exhibit Types,” drawing by Fang-Pin Lee, 2013. Photo Courtesy of the Artist. 49 Figure 3.11 Theme 2, Illustration by the Author. 50 Figure 3.12 TPS Units, Richard Lewis Media Group Illustration 2013. Courtesy of RLMG. 51 Figure 3.13 Theme 3. Illustration by the Author. 52 Figure 3.14 Team testing App Shaker 2013. Photo by the Author. 53 Figure 3.15 Team watches kids testing the App Shaker immersive screen, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 54 Figure 3.16 Mark Ostrander presenting media density to the team in the Cooper Room, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 55 Figure 3.17 Fang-Pin Lee drawing for the group, June 2013. Photo by the Author. 56 Figure 3.18 Theme 4. Illustration by the Author. 57 Figure 3.19 Citizens for a changing planet brainstorming, June 2013. Photo by the Author. 58 Figure 3.20 Journey through time white board sketch, June 2013. Photo by the Author. 59 Figure 3.21 Final 10% bubble diagram, April 2013. Courtesy of R+P. 60 Figure 3.22 Final 10% ploor plan, April 2013. Courtesy of R+P. 61 Figure 3.23 Final 10% sketch rendering, April 2013. Courtesy of R+P. 62 Figure 4.1 The fossil halls, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 63 Figure 4.2 Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles c 1963. 1155-D. Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 64 Figure 4.3 Plans for the first exhibit pathway c. 1961. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 3 of 4. 65 Figure 4.4 Map of fossil halls 1963. “S:Dinosaur Scans: DinoBlackandWhite,” Courtesy of Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 66 Figure 4.5 Exhibit “windows” in Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles c. 1963. “S:Dinosaur Scans: DinoBlackandWhite,” Courtesy of the Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 67 Figure 4.6 Draft Exhibit Plan by Ann Karras c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4 68 Figure 4.7 Label hierarchies marked on exhibit plans c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4 69 Figure 4.8 Craig drawing Edmontosaurus and Gorgosaurus with integrated labels, 1962. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 70 Figure 4.9 Craig drawing Ceratopsian skulls with panels, label heirarchies, and textures, 1962. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 71 Figure 4.10 Draft plan for “Would you like to touch a dinosaur bone?” installation c. 1961. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 3 of 4 72 Figure 4.11 Notes on colour techniques for the 1960s halls c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 532 73 Figure 4.12 Draft paint colours for Paint Shop c. 1962. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 74 Figure 4.13 Drafts with visitor viewpoints c. 1962. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 75 Figure 4.14 Draft drawing featuring visitors on proposed mezzanine c. 1962. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 76 Figure 4.15 Draft of wayfinding signage with text c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 4 of 4. 77 Figure 4.16 Proposed hall closure mural c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 4 of 4. 78 Figure 4.17 Pre-modernization humerus label c. 1958. “S:Dinosaur Scans: DinoBlackandWhite,” Courtesy of Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 79 Figure 4.18 Post-modernization humerus label c. 1963. “S:Dinosaur Scans:DinoBlackandWhite.”Courtesy of Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 80 Figure 4.19 Proposed fossil plant graphics c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 81 Figure 4.20 Proposed vertebrate silhouette graphics c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 82 Figure 4.21 Norman Neal Deaton Jurassic ecosystem diorama 1963. “S:Dinosaur Scans: DinoBlackandWhite,” Courtesy of Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 83 Figure 4.22 Matternes mural comp drawing for Miocene Mammals on the Run c. 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Acc 84-164, FMC161, Folder 1. 84 Figure 4.23 Completed 1961 display—Brontothere and Opportunity Knocks for the Oligocene Mural. IMG 90-9513. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Fossil Mammals. 85 Figure 4.24 Hotton approval stamp on production copy, January 1963. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 14, Folder: Hall 2 Drawings Dinosaurs and Other Fossil Reptiles File 2 of 4. 86 Figure 4.25 Triceratops and clay model c. 1913. “Hall 2 Exhibit Prints, “Courtesy of Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 87 Figure 4.26 Moropus and model c. 1961, Photo by Chip Clark, late-1970s. IMG 80-6062. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Fossil Mammals. 88 Figure 4.27 Dire wolves and horse with storyboard behind c. 1967. “Hall Opening 1961,” Courtesy of Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 89 Figure 4.28 Ely Kish painting Life in the Ancient Seas c. 1990. IMG 89-22189. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Life in the Ancient Seas. 90 Figure 4.29 Marguerite Noga and Steve Pierson work on John Gurche’s Time Column, 1981. IMG 81-14664. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Dinosaur Hall Construction III. 91 Figure 4.30 Top view of John Gurche’s completed Time Column painting c. 1981. IMG 81-14689. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Dinosaur Hall Construction III. 92 Figure 4.31 Conquest of Land and Popular Appeal 1979. “Hall 4-A1, 7/26/79.” Personal Records of Ian Macintyre. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 533 93 Figure 4.32 Hall 2 Construction in 1980, Photo by Chip Clark. IMG 80-5960. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Dinosaur Hall Construction I. 94 Figure 4.33 Completed Hall 1981, Photo by Chip Clark. IMG 81-14690. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Chip Clark Institutional Binders: Dinosaur Hall Construction III. 95 Figure 4.34 Fossil Lab draft plans, c. 1986. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU363, Box 2, Hall 5 Schedules. 96 Figure 4.35 Hall map with pathways, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 97 Figure 4.36 The fossil hall, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 98 Figure 4.37 3D Scanning, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 99 Figure 5.1 The National Museum of Natural History, September 2012. Photo by the Author. 100 Figure 5.2 The Exhibits hallway, May 2013. Photo by the Author. 101 Figure 5.3 Paleobiology 3rd Floor hallway, July 2013. Photo by the Author. 102 Figure 5.4 The Director’s hallway, November 2013. Photo by the Author. 103 Figure 5.5 Abby Telfer, Kay Behrensmeyer, Scott Wing, and Hans Dieter Sues exchanging laughs about a fossil coprolite 2013. Photo by the Author. 104 Figure 5.6 Angela Roberts Reeder describing hierarchies of exhibit text, April 2013. Photo by the Author. 105 Figure 5.7 Exhibit team meeting including R+P, guest Exhibits staff members, and a visiting media group, June 2013. Photo by the Author. 106 Figure 5.8 Exhibit Staff Organizational Chart June 2013. Courtesy of the Office of Exhibits, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 107 Figure 5.9 Deep Time roles draft diagram, December 2013. Drawing Courtesy of the Office of Exhibits, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 108 Figure 5.10 Exhibit meeting with Director Kirk Johnson, May 2013. Photo by the Author. 109 Figure 6.1 Geology moves to the East Wing, 1963. Original image: Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image MAH P63361B. Illustration courtesy of Richard Bambach. 110 Figure 6.2 Memo, Macintyre to Buzas, December 1977. Personal Records of Ian Macintyre. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 111 Figure 6.3 Curatorial staff by exhibit area c. 1978. Personal Records of Ian Macintyre. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 112 Figure 6.4 Macintyre’s call for Research Associates, 1978. Personal Records of Ian Macintyre. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 113 Figure 6.4 Ken Towe, Ian Macintyre, Gene Behlen, Dan Appleman, Fran Hueber on the right, Sue Voss and Elizabeth Hilkert in the background, Richard Molinaroli at very back (here blocked by Hueber). IMG 81-1709. Photo by C. Clark. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution: Dinosaur Hall Construction II. 114 Figure 7.2 Draft layout of the first floor, East Wing c. 1962. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Acc-84-164, Folder 3. 115 Figure 7.3 Virginia school children on the Mall, 1950. Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image SIA2009-2125. RU 95, Box 28, Folder: 44. 116 Figure 7.4 O’Reilly’s draft drawings for a new Division of Public Programs, c. 1987. Smithsonian Institution Archives. RU564 Box1 Folder: Exhibits Program Themes. 117 Figure 7.5 Smithsonian organizational chart. (Left) Smithsonian Year 1992, pp.2; (Right) Smithsonian Year 1996 pp. 7. Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org, Accessed May 15, 2014. 534 118 Figure 8.1 A packed house for a panel on participatory experiences and engagement at the Museums and the Web conference, April 2014. Photo by the Author. 119 Figure 8.2 “The Finger of Blame” by Benjamin Lawless in Post 2013, pp. 83. Personal Collection of Robert Post. Photo with Permission of Robert Post. 120 Figure 9.1 Entrance to the Museum from the third floor balcony, April 15, 8:50am. Photo by the Author. 121 Figure 9.2 Entrance to the Museum, April 15, 8:55 am. Photo by the Author.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Anthropology
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada
Graduate
From "Extinct Monsters" to Deep Time : an ethnography of fossil exhibits production at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
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