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Bringing the Country to New Harmonies


Work continues on the Museum on Main Street (MoMS) exhibit New Harmonies. The OEC Fabrication shop is currently working on the components for the kiosk featuring country music. There are many design features that make this kiosk visually interesting for visitors, and technically challenging for OEC staff.

Our staff had to get creative in designing and constructing the components due to some pretty strict size and weight constraints, which make the exhibit less costly to ship. Components need to be strong enough to stay together while on display, but easy to assemble and disassemble for rural museums with small staff and tight spaces. Our staff found innovative ways to customize the plain, ready-made Scenario panels used as the framework of the show. This exhibit also included sound interactives that play snippets of the different types of music featured.

SEE MORE PICTURES of OEC Fabrication at work.

photo: Rob Wilcox and Adam Metallo of Fabrication place the roofing frame on top of the Scenario panel to check the fit.

Orchids Gone Wild!

OEC began working on Orchids: Take a Walk on the Wild Side with the Smithsonian Horticulture Services Division in June 2005. Our Design and Editing department worked with staff from Horticulture Services and the Natural History Museum’s Botany Department to develop the script and design concept. Our Fabrication and Model Making shops built a walkway, panels, a “research station,” trees, vines, and even rain!

See pictures of the OEC team installing the components in the gallery space.

Orchids: Take a Walk on the Wild Side opens Saturday, January 27, 2007, and runs through April 22, 2007, at the National Museum of Natural History.

photo: OEC and Horticulture staff and volunteers put the finishing touches on the orchid exhibit.

Clash of Empires Opens

OEC’s Special Exhibitions Division (SED) opened Clash of Empires: The British, French and Indian War, 1754-1763 on December 15. Truly a collaborative effort, the exhibit was originally organized by the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center (a Smithsonian Affiliate), in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the Canadian War Museum/Museum of Civilization. The exhibit opened in Pittsburgh and traveled to Ottawa before coming to the Smithsonian’s International Gallery.

The exhibition marks the 250th anniversary of the British, French, and Indian War and explores this 3-sided struggle for North America and its effects worldwide. It tells the story of the war that gave 22-year-old George Washington his first taste of military experience and set American colonists on the road to revolution. Clash of Empires features nearly 300 rare artifacts on loan from 63 lenders around the world and nine life-like models of historic figures from the conflict.

SED worked with the Heinz History Center for over a year and a half on the logistics of bringing this complex show to Washington.

The exhibition was originally to close on March 15, but due to strong visitorship, it will remain on view through Sunday, July 15, 2007.

top photo: This life figure, representing an anonymous French Officer at the capitulation of New France in September 1760, was created by Gerry Embleton. Photograph by Ken Rahaim.

middle photo: Andy Masich, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, which operates the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, gives a tour of Clash of Empires at the opening. Photograph by Ken Rahaim.

bottom photo: General Johnson Saving a Wounded French Officer from the Tomahawk of an Indian by Benjamin West, is exhibited for the first time in North America. Courtesy of Derby Art Museums and Gallery, UK

Other high-resolution images of objects in the exhibit can be seen at the Smithsonian Newsdesk.

New Harmonies at OEC

Gospel kiosk in New Harmonies

“You don’t sing to feel better.

You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.”
August Wilson, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” 1981

The Office of Exhibits Central is working hard to complete five copies of a new exhibit for Museum on Main Street, a partnership project of the Smithsonian Institution, state humanities councils, and rural museums across America. New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music features photos, objects, and recordings of blues, country, folk, and gospel, with a little zydeco and tejano to spice things up.

OEC has worked on this show for the last two years — consulting with the curator and editing the text, designing the kiosk structures, graphic layout, and interactives, printing and installing graphics on a variety of media, building interactives and surface treatments, and making reproductions of traditional musical instruments are only some of the aspects of the exhibition that OEC staff have brought their expertise to.

New Harmonies debuts this coming spring in Idaho, Mississippi, Guam, Washington, and Illinois.

top photo: Five copies of the gospel kiosk installed to make sure that all components are correct before shipping.

bottom photo: Theresa Keefe, graphics specialist, adheres a print of Woody Guthrie to a panel.

More photographs

Smithsonian Staff Tour OEC

Staff tour at OEC
On November 16, 2006, the Smithsonian Community Committee (SCC) sponsored a behind-the-scenes tour for SI staff to see the work that the Office of Exhibits Central (OEC) is doing for Horticulture Services’ upcoming exhibit, Orchids: Take a Walk on the Wild Side, which opens January 27, 2007, in the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

An intrepid group of about 30 employees from around the Institution braved the rainstorm to learn about how OEC’s modelmakers are creating foam tree trunks, a wooden walkway, and the didactic panels for the show. Staff also saw a variety of other projects underway, such as New Harmonies for the Museum on Main Street (MoMS), Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; and America By Air at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM).

photo: Carolyn Thome, modelmaker, discusses how she turns a large column of fire-rated urethane foam into a tropical tree trunk for the Orchids exhibit. Photograph by David Liston, OEC.

Traveling Exhibit Preview

On October 10, 2006, the Office of Exhibits Central hosted a press preview and staff opening for Native Words, Native Warriors, a joint production of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Featuring fifteen large-scale banners, this show highlights the contributions of Native American soldiers who used their languages to help the United States armed forces in World Wars I and II.

Staff from SITES, NMAI, and OEC who had worked on this exhibition attended the preview along with special guests from the first venues hosting the show and members of the press. Comments from all were positive. Katherine Krile, project director from SITES, said, “We are all so excited to see seven years of research and hard work finalized in such a beautiful and moving tribute.”

OEC designed and edited the exhibition, two copies of which will travel around the U.S. for the next five years. The first venues hosting the exhibition are the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum in Arkansas City, Kansas, and the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

photo: Michael Headley, director of OEC, and Keevin Lewis, community services coordinator at NMAI. Photograph by Robert Alexander, NMAI.