Coltsville Plan Delivered to State, National Park Service, and General Public | Hartord, CT | December 2008

On December 18, objectIDEA participated in the presentation of a completed Visitor Experience Plan for Coltsville National Historic Park. The plan, commissioned by the state of Connecticut, analyses the interpretive potential of the site, and offers a vision for the use of the remnant buildings that comprise the historic landscape of the Colt Firearms Manufactory known as Coltsville. The focus of the interpretive plan is on the processes pioneered by the Colt Company that honed the future of precision manufacturing in America, and the business ingenuity of Samuel and Elizabeth Colt in the realms of product promotion and international business.

The plan was presented from the lectern of the Church of the Good Shepherd, an 1869 High Victorian Gothic church, whose construction was commissioned by Mrs. Colt to serve the workers who resided in Coltsville.

CT Congressman John Larson opened and closed the presentation with inspirational remarks and enthusiastic endorsement. The presentation was broadcast on the state's public television channel.

Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum | Long Island, New York | November, 2008

Thar she blows – Another whaling museum!

I'm thrilled to be "cutting in" to another whaling museum project. This past October I began consulting with the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum located in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York. Working with EarthRise Design, objectIDEA will complete the facility and exhibition master plan in early 2009.

 

Having served as the exhibition developer during the planning of the Nantucket Historical Society Whaling Museum some years ago (the Museum opened in 2005), I find it both nostalgic and comfortable to be once again contemplating how to interpret the objects and stories of American whaling. 

The collections look familiar: scrimshaw, captains' portraits, figureheads, harpoons, and even a fully 

equipped whaleboat (seen here). We're especially excited to research the differences between New England/Mid Atlantic, and island/mainland whaling operations in an effort to make Cold Spring Harbor's story unique in the region.

Iconic Buildings Offer Historic Views | Boston & Hartford | October 2008

Two projects – one in Boston, the other in Hartford – have recently provided me with very privileged and historic views.

The Old State House and Boston Massacre Site, Boston

In June, 2008, objectIDEA participated in a study with the Boston Historical Society to evaluate the visitors' experience at Boston's Old State House. The study paved the way for an interpretive planning exercise wherein recommendations were made to restructure the circulation of the visitors' experience in the building, and focus the institution's single, emblematic communication aim: This building, once a monument to English rule, is now a monument to American resistance. 

As the interpretive plan took shape, so did the Old State House itself, as it was undergoing an extensive architectural restoration as well. Prior to the re-gilding of the dome, I was invited to climb the scaffolding and inspect the cupola and dome and, in doing so, was rewarded with a view of details (including Boston's first weathervane) and vistas that few people have seen in quite some time.

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Coltsville National Historic Landmark, Hartford

In October, 2008, I was invited as part of a consultancy taskforce hired to evaluate Coltsville National Historic Landmark in Hartford, CT. The thrust of the effort was to evaluate the site's potential as a host for a visitor center and interpret the history of business ingenuity and precision manufacturing in a young America.

The Colt firearms complex, affectionately known as Coltsville, is marked by one of the most iconic buildings in all of Hartford: the grand East Armory with its gold, star-spangled, blue onion dome. A view from the dome reveals the spread of Coltsville and its relationship to the city and the Connecticut River. We hope to extend an invitation to the general public to appreciate and contemplate this view in the near future.

It’s only Rock ‘n’ Roll but I [still] like it | Cleveland, OH | July 2008

I visited the Rock 'n' Roll Museum and Hall of Fame in Cleveland shortly after its opening in 1995 and again, this month, on July 8, 2008. While not much has changed, I was reminded how much I enjoyed encountering this subject matter and the famous objects that the Museum houses. I saw old favorites like Johnny Cash's guitar, John Lennon's piano, Elvis' studded jumpsuit, Madonna's gold bustier, and Janis Joplin's psychedelic-motif Porche. Objects the likes of these, are the essence of any institution that bears the distinction: Hall of Fame

I was also very impressed by the audio-visual presentations that punctuate the mostly static displays. Featuring milestone moments like the birth of rock 'n' roll, the British Invasion and the popularity of the music videos of the 1980s, these interpretive pieces bring the collections to life and have, like the music itself, stood the test of time.

Break On Through – The Lasting Legacy of The Doors was the temporary exhibition offered in the penthouse gallery of the Museum. Objects like Jim Morrison's little, blue, cubscout uniform and hand-written lyric manuscripts from each of the band's four albums, served well to humanize the iconic and mysterious cult figure.

Birds of a Feather | July 2008

My brother, Jeremy Kirchman, is the Curator of Birds at the New York Sate Museum in Albany. He and I share a gene (undoubtedly inherited from our father) that gives us a passionate interest in natural history. Jeremy and I have built our vocations on this interest and have shaped it and applied it, specifically, to our respective careers in the museum field.

He's a scientist who studies the evolution and distribution of birds in the state of New York and across the islands of Oceania. He has focussed his research on a family of birds called Rails.

Rails look to me like a cross between a large sandpiper and a small chicken. Many museums have them in their collections and feature them in their exhibitions, as they are among the poster children (poster chickens?) for island biogeography, endemism and extinction. Although rails are, for the most part flightless, for years they literally flew by me in museums as my attention was seized by their more splendid cousins: hummingbirds, great auks and birds of paradise. When my brother introduced me to his study subjects, these drab birds became beautifully complex and meaningful to me. And I started noticing them.

I visit natural history museums all around the world and I now scan the collections and displays – birdwatching for rails. When I spot one, I snap a picture.

Cold Storage | Cleveland Museum of Natural History | June 2008

Boston Museum of Science | 2007

Fairbanks Museum | St. Johnsbury, Vermont | 2007

The Cigar Box Guitar | Tampa, FL | July 2008

I'm currently consulting with the Tampa Bay History Center as they move to a new building and design their permanent exhibition program. A new facility will open in December, 2008 and one area of the Museum, entitled Cigar City, will chronicle the establishment, growth/decline and enduring heritage of Tampa's cigar making industry. 

Cigar City will exhibit this piece of folk art: a hand-made guitar fashioned from a cigar box, recycled mandolin pieces, and some piano wire. As the exhibition developed, this item became one of my favorite objects due to its emotive potential. 

Representing the intersection of industry and immigrant life in Tampa during the city's cigar-making heyday, visitors will be invited to contemplate the "voice" of this simple instrument: 

• Who may have assembled  the guitar from the basic materials that were found in any of the 300 cigar factories that once formed the growing "skyline" of Tampa? 
• Who's tobacco-stained fingers, weary from a day's work of rolling over 1oo cigars, may have still found the energy and dexterity to navigate the narrow neck of the tiny guitar? 
• Who may have been drawn by the music, perhaps to one of the accommodating porches of the simple, white cassitas that the factory owners built for their growing workforce?
• Did the guitar help to celebrate a Spanish wedding? Did it usher in a new generation of Italian-Americans at a baptism? Did it participate in a street-side demonstration of a burgeoning force of Cuban insurrectos?
• And finally, who recognized that this seemingly unimportant piece of "tramp art" was a witness to Tampa's history and had the foresight to know that, as a powerful storyteller, it deserved to be kept among the prized items in the Tampa Bay History Center's collection?

Dalí and Film | The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL | May 2008

I found myself in St. Petersburg recently, so I went to the Salvador Dalí Museum and took in the exhibition, Dalí and Film.

From the website: Dalí and Film (February – June, 2008) is "the first exhibition examining the profound relationship between the paintings and films of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). The exhibition reveals how Dalí combined his skills in painting with the new and exciting possibilities of the moving image to define a new art."

Please note: details about the exhibition, and acknowledgements to those who created it can be found on the websites for the Dalí Museum and the Tate Modern, London, where the exhibition premiered. It has future engagements in Los Angeles and New York.

First, a little context: It was free museum day in Tampa/St. Pete, and the locals were out in droves. The queue line of museum-goers extended 50+ persons beyond the threshold of the front door. This was at first a little discouraging, but the Museum was more than prepared. I waited no longer than a few minutes before I entered the exhibition. Dalí and Film was integrated across the Museum, and seamlessly interwoven with the permanent exhibitions of paintings and objects. While it was pitched as a temporary installation, it was not confined to a distinct gallery space.

Readers, please accept my apologies for the lack of photo-evidence to support this review. Picture taking is not allowed in the Museum. After I informed a staff-person that I intended to write a positive review of the exhibition, I was granted permission to take a single, albeit bootleg, picture with my mobile phone.

Upon entering the Museum proper, I relished the simple design of the installation immediately:

• Billboard-sized blank walls, the recipients of black and white, filmic projections, contrasted many of the intimately small and brilliantly colored paintings;
  
• The "brushes with greatness" (the famous works) were spaced across the exhibition like crumbs through the woods. They lured me and nourished me. I felt a moment of reverence as I approached the so-familiar painting of melting clocks, that until that moment, I had only seen in books about great art;
• The modest size of the Museum and the exhibition did not intimidate me or generate fatigue;
• The quality of the architectural spaces immersed me in the work: modulated lighting and colors signaled new experiences, and at one point, the floor plane of the gallery rose with a ramp and then fell away in a series of stepped tiers not unlike the lively horizons of the surrealist landscapes that graced their walls.

Thanks to the interpretation (both personal and non), I think Dalí and Film might represent the best interpretive experience I've had in an art museum.

The crowded galleries, which at first registered with me as a distraction, quite quickly became the most interesting aspect of the visit:

1. I was struck by the level of conversation in the galleries. The usual hush associated with art museums was replaced with a buzz more akin to that of a casual café. Patrons were discussing what they saw, laughing and gasping out loud. I saw a few cases where parents or care-givers covered their children's eyes (the exhibit  includes some "racey" imagery), and conversing to a degree that was entertaining and comforting.
   
2. Probably in anticipation of the great numbers of visitors attracted by free day, the Museum positioned many staff and docents on the exhibit floor. At any given moment there was an impromptu tour taking shape and anyone could eavesdrop or participate wholeheartedly. I joined a tour in which a gentleman used the beam of a penlight to point out recurring motifs in one of Dalí's masterworks. He revealed an embedded, cryptic image... showed me something I did not notice at first... shared what Dalí scholars thought about it... and then spun it into a story of Dalí's personal life. In doing this, this man gave me a new eye to view the subsequent works, and a new vocabulary to use in my further encounters and discussions of Dalí's paintings and films. I was, in a moment, equipped with an appreciation for Dalí's use of repeating themes and I (and others) used this tool throughout the remainder of my visit. Suddenly, I was seeing more in the art. Still life paintings became interactive... with no technology.
3. Dalí's work has a reputation for being "out there," and the museum's interpretation acknowledges this openly and freely. "Let's face it," one tour guide said, "this guy was a bit wooo wooo wooo!" (He made the sound of an ambulance while twirling his right index finger at his right temple). His audience breathed a collective and palpable sigh of relief as if to say: "Whew, I thought it was just me..."

So kudos to the Salvador Dalí Museum and the creators of Dalí and Film for the exhibition and for the way it accommodated such a large volume of visitors both physically and intellectually. 

And while I'm not a art historian or curator, I also must acknowledge Dalí himself. His work is a striking juxtaposition of highly describable things (like clocks, houseflies and body parts), and fantastically indescribable somethings (like egg-shaped drippy blobs). The collective works of art give their viewers the ability to use a familiar vocabulary and spin it wildly and creatively. I think this is what the designers and interpreters of the exhibition recognized and emulated in the installation, to the delight of the audience.

I went to this exhibition knowing little more than Dalí was a surrealist dude with a ridiculous mustache who painted some melting clocks. I left knowing more about the man, his prolific body of work (including film), and what characterizes a dynamic and engaging art museum experience.