Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

I was supposed to end the internship on Tuesday, but one of the other interns dealing specifically with the oral histories had to leave the project and Lynn wanted me to help with the oral histories so she let me stay until Friday.

The week was spent almost entirely on oral histories.  The first one was on Monday with former mayor and mayoral candidate of Clinton, LaMetta Wynn.  She was the first African American female mayor in Iowa in either the late 1990s or early 2000s (the exact date eludes me at the moment).  The second one on Monday was with Jasmine Bailey, the female wrestler on the Iowa City West High Wrestling team.  On Tuesday we did an interview with George Newman, an African American World War II veteran and an active participant in the Burlington community.  We also interviewed Madgetta T. Dungy, the first African American woman to graduate from Cornell.  On Thursday, we interviewed her husband Claibourne Dungy.

It was a rough week for me.  I’m not a strong interviewer inherently and I haven’t had much practice, but I guess they went well enough.  I don’t like that I had to be in the videos, but whatever.  I would like to maybe work with one of my organizations to do an Oral History Project.  I haven’t thought about it much yet, but I think it would be a good project to work on with one of my groups.

Wednesday was a halfday which I spent backing up the oral history files and finishing the panels from last week.  On Friday, I put all the archives that we had laid out back in their files and boxes and scanned all of the Liberia letters into one big file.

I can’t believe my internship is over.  I had such a great time and really look forward to volunteering with the museum in the upcoming school year.  I’ve learned so much and it was absolutely my dream position.  I still don’t know what I want to do in the future, but this has been such an enlightening experience.  Thank you AAMI!

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

This week I spent the earlier days preparing for Wednesday’s meeting between museum representatives and the “Only One” advisory committee.  When we go to these meetings, there are plenty of opportunities for the committee to review the images and objects we have been thinking on and offer their advice and suggestions.  In order to streamline the process I spent the majority of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday working on a powerpoint file with all of our intended photos, archives, and objects.  Each slide needed a caption of who was in the photo, where it was taken place, and when.  Organizing the powerpoint was a bit tedious even though we have a powerpoint of the images, Lynn wanted to rearrange the exhibit from chronological to categorical.  One of the workshops she went to while at the conference last week pointed out that doing things chronologically tends to build a falsely positive outlook into museums that prevent people from evaluating what happens today as they would what happened in the past.  We explained that to the advisory committee and then showed them the photos and it seemed to match what the Johnson County Historical Society is doing with their portion of the exhibit as well.

Another thing Lynn wanted to have ready were examples of the panels.  At the beginning of each section (when the layout is finished) there will be a panel that gives a historical overview of the category as well as some other information.  As I’ve mentioned before, exhibit labels (panels are considered labels) require a great amount of thought in order to be executed properly.  I’ve been avoiding them because I’m not 100% confident about my label-writing abilities up until now, but Lynn wanted them done so I had to do them.  I finished drafts of all but three sections before the meetings and worked on the last few on Friday.  I know little about the history of several categories (military, specifically) so I had to do a half-day’s worth of research and source verification before I felt comfortable writing the label.  From what Lynn said, my labels turned out well for a first draft.

When I wasn’t working on meeting things,  I got to do some more preservation of damaged archives.  Two of our boxes of archives ended up at the Czech museum across the river after the conservation center was finished stabilizing them.  We just got them back and they are in pretty bad shape.  The flood was three years ago, but we are still working on recovering the damaged archives.  Lynn went through the box and told me what needed to be done with each damaged file and I started some of it, but there are so many fragile things that she will have to handle that I can just watch.  Too bad my internship is almost over because we probably won’t have time before I leave.  I also got to clean a Jesse Jackson banner from when he was campaigning in the 80s.  The pictures below are before and after pictures of the back of the poster.  The black squiggles are flood mud.

I can’t list all of the things I’ve learned this week.  After the meeting I was feeling really insecure about the work I’ve been doing because some members of the committee weren’t convinced that what the African American museum is doing fits the original idea of the exhibit.  Afterward, Michelle and Lynn both mentioned that those responses were expected and I should just keep going with what I’ve been working on.  I guess this relates to one of my biggest struggles during this internship which has been accepting criticism.  I have a hard time with it, but if I go slow (I’ve learned) and take breaks when dealing with criticism I can really learn from feedback others have to offer.

I don’t know exactly what I want to do yet.  I really enjoy handling items.  I really enjoy meticulous tasks.  I’m not a huge fan of research and it depresses me that maybe 30% of the information that gets put into an exhibit will be absorbed and retained.  I’m still on the fence, but Lynn has already hinted that I would be welcome back throughout the year to assist with other museum tasks if I have time which will give me more time to explore what goes into making a museum tick.

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

This week was the crazy week.  My car stopped working properly and both Lynn and Michelle were out of town so please excuse this entry if it seems a little scattered or hectic.

Before Lynn left, her and I made a list of things I should accomplish while she’s gone.  The list was pretty ambitious if you ask me, but I was able to complete most of the tasks.  A few of the tasks I had involved cleaning the flood-damaged items.  I had to finish the posters and make a folder for them to go in the flat files (large drawers in the archives loft).  There are quite a few people we have on a list to set up oral history interviews with so I researched some of them as much as I could.  I also finished copying the working files, papercliped related pages and organized them for filing later.  The pile is too large for me to really fathom doing just yet, partly because some of the people in articles do not yet have folders and it is at the discretion of the curator that we make new folders.

This week also, I decided to continue researching African American music.  The collection items we are using to build context center around advertising and entertainment, both of which apply to sheet music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I wanted to know the progression of music in those periods so I could include it in the main timeline we have running and also so I can potentially talk about it in upcoming panels.  I did more research on Buxton, IA for a task Michelle had for me and I looked into ways we can restore and preserve leather in-house.

On Thursday, I got to meet the new(er) intern from Germany who is here to help with the flood-damaged textiles.  I do not envy her job.  She has to be super meticulous about cleaning the dirt off of the textiles, many of which now permanently retain the stains because it is now three years after the original damage.  On Friday, I dug into a pair of boxes that was returned from the Chicago Conservation Center full of flood-damaged archives that will most likely not be conserved.  They are stable (no bacteria), but they need to be replicated and disposed of or cleaned and given special care.  As I was going through I found many one-of-a-kind items that I think will need to be cleaned as well as possible and given special care.  It can be difficult to do that on a small-museum budget, but I intend to volunteer as much as possible with the museum and hopefully I can help process some of the items and continue doing research for Only One.

Next week, we meet again with the Only One advisory board so before then we will have to get a lot of work so we have more tangible evidence of the work we’ve been doing.  From meeting with the advisory board, I’m learning a lot about how to pull the really good ideas out of a conversation and how best to incorporate them.

As I mentioned, I plan to continue volunteering with the museum as much as I am able during the school year.  I really enjoy working there and there is just so much to do still with flood-damaged items and the archives moving.  I’m excited for what the school year brings.

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

Pardon the late entry.   A troublesome start to the week of the 25th pushed the blog right out of my brain!  Anyhow, during the week of the 18th (the 6th week of my internship) I got to try my hand at cleaning flood-damaged items.  In 2008, Cedar Rapids flooded hugely as many will never forget.  The museum is right next to the Cedar River so it flooded pretty badly in ’08 with little warning.  I believe the story goes that the curator at the time was told the museum would flood three feet so she moved as many items as would fit up to 5 feet.  Grand total, the flood waters got to just over 5 feet, so some things did get wet (the gallery was washed out entirely), but the majority of the items stayed dry.  Here we are three years later just beginning to process some of the flood damaged items that have either never left the museum or have been returned from conservation centers around the midwest.  Though I’m behind on my timeline, watching Lynn rehydrate the photo last week has me itching to try my hand at dealing with flood damaged items.  As such, Lynn let me work on a set of posters that is stable (no paper-decomposing bacteria are left), but will not be cleaned by a conservation center because there is just no money to do so.

Earlier in the week I pulled out and arranged the potential archive items for the Only One exhibit.  Michelle, the educator, Tenika, Michelle’s assistant, Lynn and I all met together to go through the photos, collection items, archives and video clips that I have been finding and researching over the last few weeks.  Michelle offered some new insights on where to go from here forward and how to approach some of the items when I go to write labels.

Lynn and Michelle are gone for the first half of the week of the 25th.

This week, I’ve been learning a lot of item cleaning/handling things.  I’ve been watching Felicity, another volunteer with the curator department who is going through all of the photographs, digitizing them and putting them in their new home locations in the loft.  Preservation can be somewhat tedious as I’m learning, but it’s worth it, in many cases, to keep the original in tact.  Though, I’ve noticed that Felicity is an advocate for digitizing to avoid handling the originals.  I don’t know that I agree with locking the originals away in favor of copies.  I know it is to protect the item, but there’s nothing quite like seeing the actual photograph.

I’m really excited about what I’m learning at the museum.  I think I would like to take a chemistry class so I can learn more about the acids in papers and how to preserve the physical record as well as conservation materials and other things.  It’s all so fascinating to me.

Claire in the Archives Loft

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

I checked the timeline my site advisor set up for me and it seems we are a little bit behind schedule, but I plan to work fast and perhaps extend my internship by a few days to make sure I complete everything I should by the time I’m supposed to.  This week was a bit adventurous.  I spent the first part of the week reading how to write exhibit labels.  There is quite a bit of thought and research that goes into writing and evaluating the effectiveness of research labels.  Following that, I did some more research for elements of the Only One exhibit, namely to do with video clips of shows from the ’70s until now.  Family Matters (the show with Steve Urkel) and Sesame Street have thus far provided most of the clips.  I also got to see some cleaning/recovery on flood-damaged items.  There is no in-house conservator in the museum (it’s just too small to support a conservation department), but sometimes problems such as flattening photos or rehydrating them can be handled in-house so the photos become easier to store and assess.  Finally, the rest of my week was spent scrolling through collection items, digitized photographs, and archives on the computer as well as finding them in their home locations to put them on a list of items to consider.  So far, I’ve pulled items that have both racial overtones and overt racist tones because I want to have a broad spectrum of perspectives available when we look at how to make these items/records/etc a comprehensive exhibit.

Thus far, I’ve learned a little bit about conservation, a lot about how to take proper research notes, and the basics of exhibit labels.  I’m extremely excited to continue learning everything I can.

For now, I have been thinking about what I can do to continue working with the museum.  I know I have ninth block off next year and I wonder if they would accept my help as a volunteer then and perhaps over next summer.  Perhaps another internship.  I would really enjoy working there some more and learning more about what happens in the curator department.

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

This week, I began research for The Only One exhibit.  Thus far, I have spent the majority of my time looking for racial advertisements and only one photographs from the last 30 to 40 years.  We have plenty of photographs and objects from before the 1970s but not too many from after the 70s and into the 2010s.   I’ve been doing research into Sesame Street and their diversity goals in the early 70s, BET and their founding mission, Shirley Temple and Bojangles, Dumbo with the Jive-talking crows, as well as paper advertisements that only show African Americans in service positions.  I’ve also started and completed a draft for the Buxton traveling exhibit.  Earlier in the week, I made corrections on the traveling exhibit texts I’ve worked on thus far.  I have input from most of the staff to sort through and accommodate.

I’ve been learning a lot about exhibit labels.  Part of what I will do involves writing labels for The Only One, so Lynn has given me labels from previous exhibits as examples for the general idea of exhibit labels.  That and if I can pick out some of the easy mistakes to make in these, it will make writing my own easier.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to best prepare for museum work, in terms of undergraduate and graduate degrees.  There is not a museum studies program at Cornell and the curriculum at other schools for museum studies seems pretty well preparatory.  I will have to talk to my advisors when school begins so we can talk some about how to accommodate my interest.

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

This week started much the same as the other two.  I received some corrections for a traveling exhibit text that I drafted last week and made those changes.  I also started and finished a traveling exhibit on civil rights (lower case) in Iowa beginning with the Iowa Territory and working my way forward.

Wednesday I started working on the exhibit I am there to work on, called “Only One.”  The premise of the exhibit is to showcase photographs in which there is one African American and build context around those photographs using depictions of African Americans in advertisements, toys, and other items.  On Wednesday, the “Only One” advisory board (consisting of our museum representatives, someone from the Johnson County Historical Society (JCHS), and relevant community members) met to discuss progress that had been made, review and vote on photographs, and talk about steps moving forward.  I got to meet one of the other interns working on the “Only One” project through the museum.  At this point, it sounds like JCHS and the museum are doing slightly different things.  Because the museum is specifically focused on African Americans, we will only showcase photos of African Americans.  Because JCHS caters to all of Johnson County, it is proposed that they include photos where a minority (not necessarily an African American) is the only one.  I think JCHS is dependent mostly on photographs and oral histories rather than objects the way we are so there will be two similar exhibits that take their own flavor.

Before that meeting I went through all of the photos the museum is interested in using and organized them chronologically with captions.  Thursday, I spent the day researching those photographs as much as I could.  Friday, I went through all of the scans of photographs to see if there were any that we would benefit from having in the exhibit.  I also got to put on gloves and go through the flat files to see if there were any objects in there that would make a good addition to the exhibit.  The flat files are artifacts that should lay flat such as posters, large photographs, full newspaper clippings and plates, sheet music and full page advertisements.

Highlights and things I’ve learned:

• I really enjoy working with collection items and actual objects.  Going through the large files on Friday was quite fun.
• Sometimes, the internet will fail you.  It will give you false information or not have the information you need at all.

I loved going through the files on Friday.  I would like to see what else Lynn does, but I’m thinking I might want to go to graduate school for museum studies, specifically for curating.  I think that would be loads of fun.

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

This week I have spent the majority of my time again working on updating the traveling exhibits.  I didn’t just do research this time, however.  I also spent some time picking out images and crafting one of the exhibits from scratch.  At some point, the museum wanted to do a full temporary exhibit on African American churches, but there was some debate on the exact content of the proposed exhibit and some difficulty acquiring appropriate items so it never came to fruition.  Instead, it will become a traveling exhibit so the research I did for that (looking at denominations, why those denominations, the oldest churches, the kinds of programs, why the churches were opened, etc.) isn’t based on a previous outline.  There is still more work to be done on that one, specifically choosing the images and writing labels, but the text is in its first draft stage and is visiting other staff members for suggested revisions.  I don’t remember which exhibits I finished drafts for this week and which ones I finished drafts for next week, but thus far I have completed drafts for four traveling exhibits.  The other part of my time I have spent again with the letters, flattening, replicating, and placing into archival sleeves.  I don’t know what will happen with the letters or the pottery they accompany, but I certainly hope they will become an exhibit.  They are a fascinating look at another country in another time.  Next week, I will start on next year’s temporary exhibit, Only One.  There is a meeting with the other agencies involved with the exhibit to go over all of the pictures.  After that meeting, there will be a more clear idea of what I will need to research and Lynn will have me help her compile a master list of all items that might pertain to the exhibit before we will make decisions about which items best illustrate the theme of the exhibit.

Thus far this week I have learned:

• People communicate in different ways and knowing what someone really means when they speak or how they say things can make the difference between doing things right and doing things wrong.
• Effective note-taking is one of the many ways to keep track of information and it makes fact-checking/tracing steps through research remarkably easy.
• Even though I surround myself with people who think like me, not everyone does and there is no way for me to know who thinks what.
• A handshake and a smile are key ingredients in the beginnings of any working relationship whether they be directed towards the Vice President of the company or the head of Facilities Management.

I really enjoy doing the work I’m doing.  I would like to see what other things Lynn, the curator, does during the day so I have a complete idea of how the curator’s job works.  I would like to know what the volunteers are doing, specifically what the Past Perfect system does and why.  I would also like to know more about digitization and the ins and outs of archiving.  Now that I’ve read a grant I would like to know where the idea for grants comes from, guidelines for writing them, who is involved, and I would like to see some guidelines for how giving agencies decide which grants to allot money for.  Also, who are the giving agencies?  These are just some questions based on things I’ve seen outside my specific job that pertain to maintaining the museum that I would like to understand better before I set any professional goals.  Generally, I’m excited about what I have to do.  Again, this is something I could see myself doing professionally and I would be quite content, but it has only been two weeks.  I would still like to give myself more time to really absorb and understand before implementing any of the wisdom I’ve picked up thus far.

Claire Solak ’13, Small Fellow in Museum Studies

This week I spent the majority of my time between two projects.  I worked primarily on updating the museum’s traveling exhibits.  Because it is the African American Museum of Iowa, often cities outside Cedar Rapids (where the museum is located) will request one of these exhibits to show in a public place such as a library.  The old traveling exhibits came in heavy trunks with velcro pieces that seemed less polished and had the potential to fall off or be misplaced.  The new ones will come printed on panels so there is no worry about pieces in the wrong place or children walking away with some.  This week I have finished first drafts for the African American Women’s traveling exhibit and the one on George Washington Carver.  A draft of the text for the sports exhibit is almost complete and I have about three more to work on for next week as well.  These little projects are giving me a ton of background information on Iowa history.  Because the main exhibit I’ll be working on requires synthesis based on particular points in Iowa history, it’s a great preparatory project.  That and a lot of this history has me thinking about how things are now and what we can take from the past to enrich the present.

The second project I have been working on involves letters from a couple who spent a few years in Liberia in the ’70s.  They are a husband and wife pair whose parents (I think) lived in Mount Vernon.  Most of the letters are addressed to a house in town.  I’ve mostly spent time flattening the letters so they can be put in archival sleeves and making copies of them (the museum can’t keep the letters, but the couple has been kind enough to allow the museum to make copies).  I believe these letters accompany some pottery that the husband made.  I’ve read through some of them and even from 40 years ago there are so many differences in the way these letters are crafted and the way we communicate today.  Frankly, I’m surprised that there are so many letters given the efficiency of international snail-mail back then, but beyond that there’s a level of detail that I’ve rarely seen today.  As far as curating skills, I’ve already had a lesson in what skin oils will do to paper artifacts and when to use gloves vs. clean hands.  The letters are a clean hands project because the gloves are bulky and might tear the letters as they exit their envelopes.

Some of the things I’ve learned this week (besides when to use gloves and when to use clean hands) include:

• While researching, taking a break every hour and a half or so to do something that doesn’t require as much thinking is beneficial for productivity throughout the day.
• The amount of reading is intense, but so far my classes have prepared me well to do a considerable amount of reading in a short amount of time.
• Those days in the Cole computer lab with the Librarians working on search terms were the best time I’ve spent yet.
• I like handling items and getting to know those items, where they came from, how they connect to us, etc.
• I work best with a definite idea of how long I will be doing what I’m doing (hence getting the timeline for the fellowship from my site mentor was greatly beneficial).
• The block plan is a very short amount of time to do as much as we do (I’ve spent one week doing one thing).
• Too many questions are way better than too few.

So far, I’ve been thinking a lot about how an upper level degree in museum studies or a job as a museum curator.  I am genuinely enjoying what I’ve done so far.  I think I need to learn how to be a bit quicker about researching, but I’m learning how to do that as I go.  I think I would enjoy working in a museum, but I’d have to think about how to handle a non-profit salary.  It’s bound to be less than the work I would end up doing, but so far it has been so fulfilling.  It’s only been a week, and I know this, but I’m definitely keeping the idea that “this could be what I do someday” in the back of my head.