Yakima Valley Museum Newsletter

ON EXHIBITS
A Tale of Two Exhibits
Developing an exhibit—researching and writing the
storyline and designing the exhibit components—represents
about 75% of exhibit production work; construction and
installation are the remaining 25%. These proportions vary
with every exhibit, depending on whether it is “objectbased”
or “story-based.” Object-based exhibits demand
more construction/installation time, and story-based
exhibits require more research/writing time (the work
required to design the exhibit components also varies
with every exhibit but is a separate factor, independent of
whether the exhibit is object-based or story-based). Good
examples of an object-based exhibit and a story-based
exhibit are the object-based American Indian Collections,
recently completed, and the story-based Yakamas At Home.
The new American Indian Collections exhibit is all about
the objects. There are over 300 objects on view …and about
5 pages of label text. Designing the display cases to meet
the conservation requirements demanded by the delicate
artifacts, allowing for convenient rotation of artifacts from
storage to exhibit, and making the largest case portable was
a time-consuming design challenge. And because of the
unique nature of these cases, fabrication and installation
was also very time-consuming. Labels, on the other hand,
which merely identify the objects and briefly discuss the
museum’s collection policy and concerns, are a minor part
of the exhibit and physically separate from the objectbased
displays; yet they could not be written until the exact
position of all the objects on exhibit was known. Because
of this, label-writing was delayed, and, as I write this article,
the few labels have still not been installed.
Yakamas At Home, part of the “Homes” section of the
museum’s core exhibits on Yakima Valley history, is storybased;
it will have about 50 objects on view …and about 30
pages of label text. Like the adjacent exhibit on the Mattoon
Cabin, Yakamas At Home could be described as an in-depth
historical narrative
illustrated with
objects, both from
our collections
and created
especially for the
exhibit. It tells
the story of how
Yakama families
Detail view of artifacts in the new
portable exhibit case.
have lived—their
homes, family
By Andy Granitto, Curator of Exhibitions
Lights from the Neon Garden reflect off the new portable
exhibit case, the centerpiece of the American Indian Collections
exhibit that will display a rotation of the museum’s vast
American Indian collections.
life, and social structure—from 7,000 years ago to the
present. And we are incorporating in-depth research and
rare photographic and written documents from our archives
in the telling of the story. Development of the narrative
labels for this exhibit began more than ten years ago. The
half-scale replica of a Yakama teepee from our collections,
the “big sexy hook” for the exhibit, was installed six years
ago. This is one our exhibits that seems to be forever in
production. Because of the amount of research and writing
required, it has been an ongoing project, always on the back
burner and never at the top of the priority list. But it is
being completed now.
The objects in Yakamas At Home are homes. The central
anchor of the exhibit is a life group/diorama of a household
root-gathering encampment, ca.1850, and it represents
the midpoint of the story, a time when the Yakama had
access to horses, steel tools, and other items available
from other tribes and White traders, yet they still had
unrestrained access to their homeland; the conflict and
injustices of the “Reservation Era” was just around the
corner. An interpretive wall will tell the story of changes in
Yakama home life over time, from the earliest “pit houses”
to modern wood-frame homes on the Yakama Nation
today. Similar to the life-size ca.1850 encampment scene,
but on a much smaller scale, will be miniature replicas of
prehistoric pit houses, tule mat teepees and winter lodge
of the pre-contact era, canvas teepees of the 19th century,
and a wood-frame reservation house from the turn of the
Yakima Valley Museum Newsletter, Fall 2011 Page 4