Internships Blog

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been deciding what my final days will look like at the Salem Museum and I have been trying to create my own exhibit. I settled on creating an initial exhibit about Covid that collects data now, the feelings of the public now who experienced the pandemic, and how we share those things beyond these years. What has been important is recording the initial feelings, how people got through the pandemic when everyone was in lockdown, and how we document those things to be saved for later. In an attempt to do those things the Salem Museum has been saving the Salem Times-Register’s newspapers since the Salem Museum has none. This got us thinking about how do we save digital artifacts such as photographs or jpegs since people may be unable to access these in years to come.

I settled on doing the exhibit about Covid since it does touch on something that has greatly impacted my life and the lives of everyone around the world. I wanted to personalize this for the Salem area, how were local people impacted, how were schools impacted, and what did regular people do in order to combat the pandemic locally. It’s important to record this since nationally we can understand how The United States and other countries reacted but this was a global event that also impacted localities.

I started with three topics I thought would be important to this exhibit and that was how schools, businesses and hospitals were impacted. I looked at how schools prepared to reopen, creating a timeline that illustrated how students were expected to learn. Businesses were also another topic I wanted to highlight within the exhibit since I personally remember seeing the articles regarding how many feared they would lose their livelihood due to Covid. I wanted to show that communities rallied behind businesses and still attempted to help others out. Lastly I consulted statistics from the local hospitals in an attempt to understand how impacted this area was by Covid.

However in the past few days the museum has been preparing for the local school art show they host so the large exhibit in the foyer has been taken down. I have put back many of the artifacts to their places in the archives and helped to arrange the space for the incoming art exhibit.

The Center for Studying Structures of Race has been engaging with some exciting things! Next week, we will be wrapping up our lecture series “Monuments, Memorial & Memory.” The series has featured prominent artists, architects, and scholars including Charles Gaines, Mabel O. Wilson, Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Nicholas Galanin and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. These individuals’ works addresses the role of monuments and memorials in society and the lectures invite the Roanoke College’s community and the broader public to examine the intersection of art, public memory, and history.

This lecture series precedes the planning of a significant ongoing project. CSSR is partnering with Creative time to erect a permanent memorial on Roanoke’s campus commemorating the enslaved persons who built the college and contributed to the wider region. Creative Time is a prolific fine arts organization that has commissioned and presented public art projects with thousands of artists across the nation and around the world.

These lectures have been incredibly informative and engaging as we have heard from spectacular individuals who think about monuments, memorials, and history in new ways. Architect Mabel O. Wilson explained her role in creating the University of Virginia’s memorial to enslaved laborers. Contemporary artist Nicholas Galanin discussed his installation works that engage with monuments with colonial narratives in the U.S. and abroad. In one work, Shadow on the Land, and Excavation and Bush Burial, Galanin excavates the ground in the shape of the shadow of a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney, Australia. The concept of the work is to dig deep enough to bury these monuments and white supremacist narratives.

The BMCF has asked me to assist with research regarding an upcoming exhibit for June and July focusing on environmental issues in the area such as the agricultural history of Blacksburg (which is very rich due to Virginia Tech), sustainability, and consumerism in the area. I always find it fun to branch into different topics outside of my usual scope of research. Even though I will have graduated by the time the exhibit is up, I can’t wait to see pictures.

Until this point, I really didn’t know anything about agriculture at all and I’ve found it interesting how so many of these things intersect. Along with mining, Blacksburg has been an Agricultural powerhouse for years. Before being called Virginia Polytech Institute, it was first and foremost an Agricultural school. Today, the research gathered from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has really allowed Blacksburg and the state of Virginia to shine. Virginia provides a large percentage of the nation’s apples and turkey, which explains why the mascot for Virginia Tech is a turkey! Although he’s also known as a “Hookiebird”

The BMCF wants to focus its attention on not only agriculture but landfills too. We not only want to show how many landfills have reached passed capacity but also ways that the City of Blacksburg can hopefully address this issue on a local scale. Sustainable Blacksburg.org is a great source for anyone to find ways in which they can improve their consumerism habits in their daily lives.

One of the main projects that I started working on earlier in the semester is finally done! In order to gain the attention of a wide variety of audiences, especially teens and young adults, we created a flower wall perfect for taking group photos and selfies. We used paper to construct the flowers and thrift picture frames. I was amazed how one of the Museum’s volunteers Pramillia made such a gorgeous rose as the centerpiece. Kate Skelly, Janean Williams, and I came up with this idea as we originally wanted to tie this into Victorian Flower Language or Floriography because the Alexander Black House takes a lot of its inspiration from Victorian-style architecture.

As the BMCF also focuses a lot of its attention on art, I hope that the wall will also open up opportunities for craft classes or kits, especially for younger audiences. I created a blog post discussing Florigraphy in more detail and it will be accessible on the BMCF website along with QR codes placed both nearby the photo wall and on printout cards at the front desk. I am so unbelievably happy with how cute the wall looks and I hope with spring flowers blooming in Blacksburg that more people will decide to stop in for a quick photo opportunity. I’ve heard a few patrons talk about the wall as we were putting everything up, so I’m taking that as a good sign that we already have people interested.

Throughout past weeks I’ve interacted with patrons more, maybe a more typical museum experience. Discussing things over the phone with patrons such as the exhibits that are featured within the museum, scheduling events, and referring callers to other resources. It allowed for more personal connection with people and how they interact with the museum. Especially for a small museum being able to interact well with regulars, patrons and people who are simply asking questions; allows for deeper connections with the community. The museum is for the consumption of the public and they are the greatest asset. Setting up events to make everything accessible and being aware of the communities desires. Alex and Fran have been doing extremely well with this, especially when I got patrons asking for them specifically is watching how they help others in their requests from the museum.

For the final bits of my internship I have been planning a personal exhibit to end my time at the museum. Since the last two years of my life have been centered around Covid I decided to develop an exhibit around Covid. I talked to Fran about concerns the preservation of materials that are connected to events happening now. We talked about how to preserve things for future generations. For instance the accessibility of images through digital means: that in 50 years .jpegs might be unable to be accessed. So we must think about how we present information in the past but also how we save information. Especially since everyone right now has lived through the Pandemic, how does an exhibit present current experiences? Questions to ask ourselves would be how much political commentary do we include, the emotional input, and the social impacts too; do we include these things as facts and cause controversy? It is something I will ask for guidance on how to develop this exhibit.

During my entire time at the Salem Museum I’ve accessioned many things: from lighters, books, records and now a water pipe from the 1800’s installed within Salem and donated by the City of Salem. While this is a small thing, I still think that it is interesting that it was donated by the city itself and that they had the interest to have someone save part of the pipe and bring it to the museum. I think it’s something that is interesting to save, but again this goes back to the idea of how to save things and what to save. I think that this water pipe can and will be utilized by the museum later on in an exhibit somehow. It’s interesting to feel that the artifact I accessioned will be utilized by someone else many years down the line to explain life in the 1800’s.

Since the last update, the Salem Museum has now opened to patrons which have been nice to see the daily workings of the museum. This means that an integral part of the job, interacting with visitors, has now been added to my experience. It has tested me on the knowledge of the museum itself: where the exhibits are, details about them, how they connect to Salem, and how the patrons can interact within the exhibits.

Within the past few weeks, I have been asked to do particular tasks around the museum other than interacting with the visitors. I have prepared the signage for two exhibits, worked on accessioning new artifacts into the collection, researched two specific topics for a new exhibit, and created the signs for another exhibit. For me the research feels like a visual paper, gathering the information and selecting what is most important for the public to be aware of. However, I struggle with pairing down my information from the collegiate way I have been trained to write and it has been frustrating to attempt time after time to get the facts accessible and digestible within the specified area. I think this is something that I have struggled with overall but it is especially seen within this field. I do believe this will also help me within my own writing later as I will be able to pair down what I am saying to the bare-bones facts.

It has been interesting to see the different factettes of museum life but one thing I am drawn to is the quieter aspects such as research, placement, creation of the exhibit itself. The physical aspect of researching the topic and finding information on that particular thing that could change the way I’m researching has intrigued me. Choosing what information will be prioritized within the exhibit and how it will be displayed is important, and it’s something that I enjoy. Especially the placement of items within the exhibit, how they are seen on the walls, how they connect to the artifacts, how they connect to each other and the story they tell together is important. For this, I have included the photo of finished signs that will be displayed regarding the silhouette of Andrew Lewis and the id tags for photographs within the Civil War exhibit.

This week at the Center for Studying Structures of Race has been exciting! We recently received a camera and lighting equipment to photograph our archives. I have been spending a lot of time going through all of our processed objects and books and photographing them. It has been super fun learning how to use the camera and equipment to take high quality photos of a ton of different types of objects. This is the first step in creating a digital archive for CSSR. This digitized archive is going to be incredibly helpful in organizing our collection. Having high quality images of objects to reference is important because right now we only have object descriptions with no photos. The photos added to the digital archive will allow us to quickly find certain things we are looking for and know exactly what is in our collection. This archival work is especially important because we are receiving new acquisitions almost weekly!

As my internship continues on, I have been tasked with an exciting yet challenging project for the Center for Studying Structures of Race. For the last two weeks, I have been helping the Center get its Instagram page up and running. We are planning on posting events such as conferences and guest speakers as well as other research, projects, and information that the Center wants to post on social media. This process has been interesting because the Center is so new and I have not really had PR type experiences. I think using social media is a great way to get people, especially younger generations, engaged with public history. However, it is tricky to cater information about topics like race on a public social media platform. Our goal is to provide digestible and informative posts about structures of race without inserting personal opinions.

I have also been reading White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger and Nineteenth-Century Brick Architecture in the Roanoke Valley and Beyond: Discovering the True Legacies of the Dyerle Builders by Michael J. Pulice. White Lies is a phenomenal book that has short, personal stories from Berger about his encounters with ideas about race in the United States. The other text is super informative about nineteenth-century brick work especially as it relates to structures at Roanoke College such as the Administration Building, Monterery House, and Bittle Hall.

Right now, I am crafting visually engaging posts about the Administration Building at Roanoke, the dedication plaques on the Admin Building, and artwork relevant to our annual themes. Canva has proven to be a great program to create Instagram posts. I have been learning a lot about the program and other information about PR. Below is a snapshot of a post I have been working on and the two texts that I have been engaging with.

Due to weather and unseen events in recent weeks, I started my internship remotely for the first two weeks. After coming into the Blacksburg History Museum and Cultural Society’s main building, the Alexander Black House, I was able to make connections to my previous internship experiences. I saw new and exciting things, I loved how many models there were of local Blacksburg Buildings and how beautifully reconstructed the Alexander Black House was. The Alexander Black House, built-in 1896 in the Queen Anne style was reconstructed during the early-mid 2000s. Much of it remained intact but from the exterior, you can’t tell there was an extension to the house. It is interesting to see the relationship between presenting historical information and engaging with cultural heritage. I do not have experience working on the cultural side of this type of institution, but I am excited to learn more through this semester.

My main projects as of today are focusing on ways in which we can gain attraction from younger audiences up until college age. For March we want to re-decorate one of the meeting rooms on the second floor and to include a photo wall to connect the museum to those who are invested in social media posts, primarily teens. My more long-term projects will involve re-making a timeline of Blacksburg history and researching for that. My hope would be to have an form of immersive digital timeline if this could be achieved but that is yet to be determined. I will also be working with the Blacksburg Museum and Cultural Foundation to re-vamp their social media and/or blog.