Tag Archives: museum

Exhibit Opening

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Yesterday, on July 23rd, the exhibit titled Tech Savvy, opened to the public! It was very exciting. So exciting, in fact, that I took my mom and grandma to the Museum of Arts and Sciences to check out the exhibit in order to see how it would be received by the public. Finishing up the exhibit on Friday was a huge relief, as the project had been going on longer than I had been interning there. In fact, one of the first things that I did was write up a label on a vacuum from 1911 that ended up in one of the two vignettes in the exhibit. It was super cool to see a bunch of labels that I wrote up on display in the exhibit. In general, it was incredibly neat to be a part of that process and to work with a bunch of artifacts like the old typewriters, cameras, and phonographs.

One of the goals of the exhibit is to spark nostalgia from people, to get a reaction that makes them go “oh, yeah, my mom used to have one of those in her living room!” or something akin to that. Going to the exhibit with my family (ages 70 and 90), I got reactions like that to a few things, and it was very satisfying. Now that the exhibit is up, it will stay up for a few more months. A couple of my friends said that they’re going to try and stop by to see it, which is super cool! It’s fun to be a part of something that’s going to continue to be on display after I leave, even if it’s only for a little bit.

James Webb Telescope Photo Release

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NASA released photos from the James Webb telescope this Tuesday that just passed. I heard about it immediately because education’s office where I have my desk is shared by planetarium staff, so of course they were talking about it as soon as the photos were released to the public, as well as the buildup leading up to the release. While the release was on Tuesday, it’s exciting for the museum, because we were able to already get the first four photos that were released from the telescope printing and put up in the planetarium lobby and replace four older photos that were taken from the Hubble telescope. The four photos we put up on the wall was the nebula, the quintet of galaxies, the deep field which the deepest and sharpest infrared photo of the universe to date (the photo contains galaxies that are billion of years old, created during the initial Big Bang), and then lastly, the most visually appealing, the Carina Nebula. We’re going to add labels to them soon, but they’re already up and ready to be seen.

While the James Webb telescope offered a nice getaway from a current large project, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We’re currently in a bit of a limbo situation. We need to start moving objects into the gallery, as well as cleaning them up. However, they have a planned floor cleaning in the gallery, so our schedule got moved back a day, so we have a day less to get the Tech Savvy exhibit setup. So, between Tuesday and Friday, we will be cleaning the exhibit pieces and moving them into the gallery, and Monday they will be moving everything out, I presume, while they do the floor and gallery cleaning before the new items are moved in and arranged. It’s all very exciting! We’re getting very close to the opening of the exhibit.

Nearing the Deadline

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Tomorrow (Monday) will be the last day that I can submit labels for the exhibit. It’s because the exhibit, named Tech Savvy, officially goes out July 23rd. I only have two more assigned labels to do, though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get them done. Information about the exhibit was covered in the Museum of Arts and Sciences newsletter. The front cover emphasizes the exhibit with a phonograph on display and the words “Tech Savvy: Home Technology from the 1890s-1990s” written beside it. We actually have technology from the 2000s, like an iMac, which will be in the exhibit that will show “the future” aspect of technology.

The opportunity I had to get to work alongside this curation project has been so much fun. I’m so incredibly happy that I’ve had this opportunity, too, because knowing that I want to work in museums but now exactly knowing where (curation, education, etc.), getting a bunch of different experiences is exactly what I need. I’d never expect that I’d have this much fun doing a curation project, but it’s made me consider looking more in that direction for the future.

Something cool which popped up from my position here at MOAS is that in this summer newsletter, they have a section where they highlight their interns. There’s only one intern per department, so there’s me in the education department and one intern in the curation department, and we each got to turn in a photo of ourselves, as well as a paragraph about ourselves. These feature pretty early on in the newsletter and it’s super neat!

MOAS Tour Exhibits

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Before officially starting at the museum, they gave me a packet for which I could get familiar with the information that pertains to two particular exhibits: The Root Family Exhibit and the Prehistoric Exhibit. The Root Family Exhibit was an exhibit donated to the museum by Chapman Root; the collection began with his grandfather, C. J. Root. The exhibit covers many things – teddy bears, train cars, classic cars, but most importantly, what ties the collection together is Coca Cola. The Root Family was instrumental into the development of the bottle that holds Coca Cola to this day. If you ever visit the museum, you will see an entire wall of bottles that were prototypes for Coca Cola but didn’t last, for one reason or another. In an adjoining gallery, the same goes for vending machines that dished out the beverage. There’s a bunch of them of them to show how they changed over the years.

The Prehistoric Gallery is another big one on tours. Kids tend to love it, because the star of the gallery is our giant ground sloth, which could stand up to thirteen feet tall. Last time I did this tour, a student asked me: “why is a dinosaur standing behind you?” It’s also a lot of fun, because the giant ground sloth and mastodon were both found and dug up in Daytona, which is a point of pride for the museum. Plus, Florida doesn’t get many giant fossil finds. Additionally, the giant ground sloth at MOAS is the most complete giant ground sloth in all of North America, so it has been used to make casts for other museums in the country. Pretty cool!

Prep for the New Exhibit

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One of the biggest jobs we have going on in the office right now, apart from summer camp, is prep for the exhibit set to be open in July. Every time I go in, I’m working on another few labels for the exhibit, which has its downsides due to the lack of identifying information on items so old, but overall, it has been a lot of fun to do! I find it to be a lot of fun researching really old radios, alarm clocks, phonographs, etc. It is a super interesting topic. One of the more funny (but still interesting items) I had to research and write a label for was a 1911 vacuum. The exhibit will include a lot of old technology, such as radios, tvs, phonographs, gramophones, 90s/00s video game consoles, etc., and so I’ve been tasked to identify them, research them, and write a small blurb on them. I think it’s a lot of fun to work with the old technology. It’s always been particularly interesting to me, and now learning about it is a part of my assigned tasks!

The staff member primarily in charge of collecting items for the exhibit brought in about twenty more items from someone who previously collected and now wants to see them preserved and in an exhibit. These items alone were just radios/clocks/alarm clock radios/etc., so I spent the day going through the items, looking for brand names, model numbers, serial numbers, or anything else that would be useful in identifying what the item is. Interspersed between that task, I would work on labels for a list I was given that contains a lot of old phonographs, old home video game consoles, etc. I’d write 1-3 paragraphs going over the history, their function, how it works, and so on. All of this took about a week and I just finished (until I’m assigned more as there’s still more items), so it was a very rewarding task, especially because I’ll get to see all of my work displayed in an exhibit!

My First Week At MOAS

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I started at the Museum of Arts and Sciences this week on Wednesday and had a lot of firsts. I shadowed my supervisor as she gave a tour in the Root exhibit which goes over the history of the Root family, a family which bottled for Coca-Cola and donated a bunch of Coca-Cola memorabilia to the museum; I also shadowed one of the other staff members as she gave a tour of the Prehistory exhibit, an exhibit which holds fossils (namely a giant ground sloth) as these are the two exhibits that I’ll be giving tours on throughout the summer to summer camp groups for younger kids. I was also able to sit in on a planetarium show for the young kids and it was fun to see how excited they got for the live show. I met everyone in the Education Department and got familiar with their roles and how I’ll fit in!

Apart from beginning to revise and shadow for tours, I was also given the responsibility to make labels for a new exhibit we’re planning to open. There’s about ten or so different items that I need to research and give a summary on (when I say label, I’m referring to the description one would find under or beside an object under a museum that describes its origin, function, reason for being there, etc.). It’s a lot of fun, even if it is a lot of work! I’m learning a lot by doing it and I can’t wait to have the exhibit open knowing that I had a hand in making it.

The staff at the museum are incredibly kind and I’ve been quick to fit in there, which is nice. I was worried about feeling left out, but they’re already including me in their jokes and conversations, especially since the lunchbreaks are in the small office for the Education Department, so it only took about a day or so before I was tagging along on tasks and part of some of the inside jokes. All in all, it has been a lot of fun and I’m incredibly excited to get back to work next week! I can’t wait to see what it has in store.