When the Back Burner Becomes the Front Burner
/An Upside to 2020 at the Museum
In March of 2020, as the pandemic and shutdowns were taking effect, Curator Mark Barbour decided to make the best of a bad situation. “The silver lining of the shutdown,” he commented, “was an opportunity to let the back burner move to the front!” Mark immediately got to work with much-needed renovations to the Museum galleries and facility. Because our calendar is always so full with programs and activities, there is usually little time and opportunity to tackle major projects that often involve moving lots of heavy machines.
First was the building and painting of new exhibit and gallery walls in the East Gallery, giving the area a more professional and public friendly environment; it also allowed us to separate the small warehouse area from view and increase the storage capacity with new shelving up to the ceiling. The walls in the 1950’s Printing Shop were also painted and new historical printing shop signs and graphics mounted to the walls. A major project of finally installing 4,000 sf of new vinyl flooring in the East Gallery was also accomplished. This meant Mark was very busy for a couple of months, moving presses and machines to the left while floors and walls were improved on the right, then moving everything to the right, and then shifting everything back.
A major improvement, and maybe the most important, was the complete renovation of all four museum restrooms! Each restroom was outfitted with environmentally friendly toilets, new sinks and cabinets, wainscoting and lights. Plus our volunteer printers now have a restroom dedicated to staff and volunteers, including a deep sink and plenty of industrial soap for easier clean up!
Two new exhibit areas were created in the East Gallery. The first was a long-standing plan for a Lithography Exhibit: From Stone to the Digital Dot. The exhibit features our latest acquisition, an 1870’s French Stone Lithographic Press that Mark literally hauled back from Chicago the first week of March at the start of the shut down. The other long planned exhibit area is for our new Ancient World History Tour, exploring the history of books, writing and paper from caves to the Roman Empire. Mark’s vision is for an exhibit and experience much like professor Indiana Jones’s study to talk about the development of the written word, Medieval Scribes, papyrus and the invention of printing and paper in China. This new exhibit and tour, Professor Lindner’s Curiosity Cabinet, will help us reach 6th grade students studying ancient history.
