Today I had a really cool experience where I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of the Virginia Museum of Transportation’s staff meetings. What was particularly cool about it was that it was not just any staff meeting- it was one where a representative from the exhibit design company “riggs ward” came in to speak with all of us about the plans to make the VMT better. I actually had no idea that there were plans underway to completely revamp this museum for the better; I knew that it was not doing so well in terms of sales and that it would not be long before it inevitably went under because of what my supervisor had told me, but I did not realize what was being done to fix the issues.
It turns out that “riggs ward” is a company based out of Richmond, Virginia that does contracting work for museums and visitor centers. They specialize in creating interactive exhibits that really engage the audience in an intriguing way. I had no idea that companies like this even existed; I had always assumed that this was the work that was done exclusively by the museum curator and other museum personnel they had assisting them. But it turns out that the museum world is much more complex than I originally thought and that there are actually several different avenues I could go down to pursue a curatorial type career; riggs ward taught me that you don’t necessarily have to be just a curator at one specific museum. Rather, it is possible to jump from museum to museum, visitor center to visitor center, to create really cool modern and participatory learning avenues.