Ever wonder how exhibits at museums come together?
In this digital exclusive, Curator of Art at the Springfield Museums Maggie North shares what goes on behind the scenes when curating each exhibit. North also shares what she loves most about being a curator.
Hear Maggie talk about one of Springfield Museum’s current exhibits, Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul, in a recent interview.
Read the full transcript:
Maggie North: Being a curator, I am biased, but it’s the most fun job in the world! And we have — we do think about many factors when we’re choosing exhibitions that come into the Springfield Museums.
We’re always looking to provide variety to our visitors, so we may have a contemporary art exhibition alongside historical permanent collections. Very often we try to make a connection with our permanent collections. Other times, however, we try to bring in something completely new that will complement what we have on view by really building on this story.
And we often think about things like the season. What will the exhibition coincide with? Or does the exhibition offer to us something that we otherwise couldn’t see at that time period?
When we talked about Front Row Center, we talked about how this exhibition of concert photography is really special in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, where we haven’t been able to see concerts as often. So, that’s an example of how the museums can book exhibitions that really provide us with new, exciting or unusual experiences, and the process of exhibition planning is so much fun!
Once you’ve booked the traveling show, your work is not done. There’s, of course, creating the gallery layout, choosing colors, and all of that fun stuff.We also do as much as we can to add interpretive text and labels so that our visitors can come through and have an entertaining but also an educational experience. And we typically add some kind of feedback wall or an interactive or sensory element in the galleries as well.
Zydalis Bauer, Connecting Point: Do you ever get nervous that one of the exhibitions you chose, like, how it’s going to perform within the community? How do you deal with those emotions?
Maggie North: We have an internal team who we talk with. And we also sometimes talk with community consultants when we book exhibitions or when we begin to plan exhibitions, if we’re planning them internally, so that hopefully we can get ahead of some of those questions and we can understand if our visitors or if our community has questions or concerns, we can address those. Of course, there’s never an experience where you can address every single question, but we really try.
And I love opportunities like this to talk with you so that we can really connect with our community out there, and we try to be transparent in fielding questions about why we chose what we chose and field suggestions for what we could display next.
