A lot of work goes into each one of our temporary exhibits! Even though they are only on display for a few months we start planning at least a year out. Katie came up with this idea quite some time ago because we have archival material related to Brigham including a large collection of glass negatives from photos taken during his many expeditions and a large portion of the museum’s collection was obtained by Brigham Senior and Junior. Jennifer Brigham loaned us the Brigham Family archives last summer, to help supplement the exhibit. An intern from Western Michigan University is helping us inventory our archives, the Brigham family archives, and Heritage Battle Creek’s archives. Jon cataloged all three collections and made a comprehensive finding aid. Now, Jon is in the process of scanning all of these archives, creating an electronic set for each group.
Looking through Brigham’s personal archives helped us establish a timeline of his travels. Once the timeline was created Katie could go through the collection and select artifacts that were collected by Brigham during his expeditions. The exhibit features archival materials such as letters, a passport, and a stamp collection, photos taken by Brigham from each expedition, and artifacts collected on the expeditions.
After artifacts were selected we could start researching and writing labels. This takes a long time. After the initial labels are written they get passed around the staff and edited to death! Then labels can be sent to the printer, along with posters and photos.
The week of the exhibit opening was spent putting the exhibition in place. On Monday walls were painted and all of the artifacts were pulled out of store to be organized and cleaned for display. On Tuesday a temporary wall was built, cases were painted, and we started to get a general idea of where things would go in the exhibit. On Wednesday all of the cases were put into place, things were picked up from the printers, photos were put into frames, and the exhibit designer, Ray Wetzel, started putting artifacts into the cases. On Thursday the cases got polished, all of the posters and interpretation was mounted, the supplies for the opening were bought, and finally all of the people came to see the exhibit opening.
The following photos chronicle the exhibits production and the VIP opening.
Thank you to the following for their contributions to this exhibit.
Partially Funded by
Battle Creek Community Foundation -
Berenice Bryant Lowe Fellowship Fund
Research and Development
Jennifer Brigham and The Brigham Family
Mary Butler, Heritage Battle Creek
Jonathan Kirkwood, Archival Intern
Ray Wetzel, Exhibition Design
Kingman Museum Staff and Volunteers
AccessVision Program Production- check out our segment on AcessVision in July!
AccessVision Staff
Art Angood
The Brigham Family
Robert Coward
Valery Holmes
Jonathan Kirkwood
Ray Wetzel
Kingman Museum Staff and Volunteers
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