Our guest blogger today is Whitney Klotz. I met Whitney while she was working on a BA in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. As part of my class, she led tours in the Paths of Life exhibit. Enjoying working in the museum, she went on to pursue a MA in Museum Studies from  George Washington University. To complete her degree, she returned to ASM for an internship in the education office. Her blog explores how exhibitions are crafted.

As one explores an exhibition – dutifully reading labels, cautiously leaning in to scrutinize an artifact – it might seem that an authoritative, all-knowing mind or voice has dictated the exhibition’s content and messages; however, that is not the case.  A museum exhibition is a creative product crafted by a team of individuals working to tell a story using objects.  An exhibition reflects the knowledge, interests, and skills of the people who produce it.

ASM’s latest exhibition, Many Mexicos: Vistas de la Frontera, is the result of a major team effort.  As ASM Exhibit Coordinator Davison Koenig put it, to create an exhibition that is a “walk-through of Mexican history (from the pre-Columbian period to the modern day) in just 1600 square feet” is no easy task.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with a few of the key players on the Many Mexicos development team, namely Dr. Michael Brescia, Mike Jacobs, Diane Dittemore, and Davison Koenig.  From my conversations with these team members, I gained a good understanding of how Many Mexicos came to be.  What follows are the highlights of those conversations.

It was the responsibility of Dr. Michael Brescia, Head of Research and Associate Curator of Ethnohistory and lead curator of Many Mexicos, to ensure that a survey of Mexico’s history did not become a hodgepodge, whirlwind tour with little direction.  Dr. Brescia certainly did not wish for visitors to exit the exhibition befuddled.  His conceptual framework anchored the Many Mexicos story and acted as a watchful eye, always on the lookout for tangents and irrelevance.  For him, as he said, it was all about “the big picture,” a big picture that comes full circle.  The exhibition begins with an exploration of pre-Columbian indigenous cultures and concludes in a similar vein, with a look at indigenous cultures as they are in modern-day Mexico.

Mike Jacobs, Archaeological Collections Curator, was charged with reaching far back in time to illustrate the world of Mesoamerica as it was prior to the arrival of the Spanish.  He assisted in the selection of the approximately 80 archaeological objects that comprise the section entitled “Pre-Columbian,” and wrote the descriptive labels for the objects.  Such work was grounded by five major goals set for the section:  1) to identify the major pre-Columbian cultures; 2) to identify pre-Columbian technology with which most people are unfamiliar; 3) to examine the people/cultures of West Mexico (in part, this goal was set because ASM has an excellent collection of figurines from that cultural region); 4) to encourage visitors to “think about Southern Arizona as the northern frontier of Mesoamerica”; and 5) to highlight the role of ASM in “exposing the culture” of the archaeological site of Cuicuilco.

Diane Dittemore, Ethnological Collections Curator, focused a great deal of her energy on ensuring that the indigenous experience is present in Many Mexicos.  She asked herself, “What would help us tell the indigenous story?”  The objects selected to answer that question were chosen based on a variety of factors.  For example, in the section exploring the Yaqui people of northwestern Mexico, one will find a Yaqui bow and arrows.  Such items were quickly approved for inclusion in the section, as they represent the intense conflict between the Yaqui and Mexican government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Ms. Dittemore also wanted to include “cultural markers of the Yaqui performing ceremonies in a new land,” which speak to the diaspora of the Yaqui and their resiliency as a people.  Such objects include pahkola masks and a pahkola rattle.

Exhibit Coordinator Davison Koening’s duties were wide-ranging, as he assisted with both content development and exhibition display or design.  For him, it was critical that the story of Mexico’s history can be gathered from the objects alone.  If the visitor is unable or uninterested, he can pass over the explanatory text and yet, through keen observation, still gain an understanding of Mexico’s past and present.  Mr. Koening remarked that in examining the display of the Spanish horse armor, one cannot help but envision the conquistador traveling through the forest astride the imposing creature that is the horse.  Also guiding Mr. Koenig’s work was a desire to incorporate a wide variety of objects into Many Mexicos so as to ensure that the exhibition resonates with a broad audience.

In speaking with Dr. Brescia and the others, I quickly picked up on a shared sense of accomplishment and pride, feelings borne of creating a product that successfully met the team’s intellectual and artistic goals.  As Dr. Brescia commented, Many Mexicos “reflects the healthy process of push and pull” among its development team members.

For those of you who have yet to visit Many Mexicos, come on in!  Be sure to check out my favorite pieces:  the evocative, nineteenth-century Christ head and the handsome Spanish armor fashioned of leather.