Week 5: September 16th and 18th

    Hello everybody! This week felt shorter than some of the previous weeks, however it was still another productive week at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse. While I did not get to experience anything new, I did get to continue working on the Pacetti Hotel's newest display cases, making sure that the were filled with interesting artifacts from the hotel and that they were interesting to examine.

    On Monday, Felipe, Holly, and I started brainstorming ideas for what displays we could create for each of the three upstairs bedroom closets.  Each bedroom is modeled after a different era of the hotel and each features furniture and decorations from the period, to give viewers a sense of what the bedrooms might have looked like in the 1880s, 1920s, and the 1970s. Each of these bedrooms is equipped with a closet just to the right of the doorway that, upon the museum's opening, were empty, with no displays to be seen. This was one of the biggest things that Felipe and the rest of the museum staff wanted to work on for the hotel, so we set out to create interesting displays to flesh out these bedroom exhibits. Ultimately, we decided to showcase some of the museum's clothing in these closets, along with some luggage from the hotel. This we thought would make sense for a closet display since these are the sorts of items that people store in closets. This proved to be a bit of a challenge however since the museum's collection of clothing was a bit sparse with only one or two dresses from each period being in nice enough condition to put out on display. Initially, Felipe was worried about being able to design these displays in a way that made sense until, one of the museum's staff, Scott, asked Felipe if he would like his mother's wedding dress from the 1950s. This turned out to be exactly what the museum needed to help finish out these closets and now with a plan in motion, we prepared to put these exhibits together for Wednesday.

    On Wednesday, Felipe had Holly and I going through the museum's storage, learning how things are organized and how to properly store specific kinds of artifacts to prevent them from being harmed or destroyed. Here in storage, we retrieved several pieces of luggage, some quilts, and a few dresses and dress covers, called slips, to put out on display in each of the bedroom closets. Once we had retrieved all the pieces, we initially planned on using for each display, it was time to put them together. We had roughly sketched out an idea of what we wanted each closet to look like on Monday, so that on Wednesday we could get started straight away with moving items into position. We spent time making sure that each display could be easily seen by viewers and made sure to leave room in the displays for things like text panels.

    Overall, this week was very straightforward and simple, but it was still highly educational and entertaining. It was good to see more of the exhibit design process, especially when Felipe believed he was going to have to think his entire vision for these closets. The experience has certainly taught me that you need to be creative and have good problem-solving skills when it comes to designing exhibits to make sure that you can produce a high quality and historically accurate product. 

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