Learning takes place on both sides of the exhibits crafted in Exhibition Design—by the graduate students putting together the exhibit, and by the visitors who view the finished exhibit.
“Reviving Nature: Healing in the Lowcountry” is one of three student-designed exhibits created during this past fall’s Exhibition Design. The course is a requirement for the university’s museum management certificate degree program, an 18-credit program that can supplement studies in anthropology, archaeology, art, business administration, history, library and information science, or public administration. Lynn Robertson, director of McKissick Museum, and Kasey Grier, history, were the instructors.
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| Lynn Robertson |
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| Kasey Grier |
“The main purpose of the course is to design an exhibit around McKissick’s collections and to do something that will be of interest to a wide spectrum of people,” said Sarah Kautz, who was part of the team that worked on the “Reviving Nature” exhibit. “We decided to do something on natural healing.”
Kautz, Lauren Davis, and Joe Samolis were students in the fall 2004 Exhibition Design course. They graduated in May 2005 with museum management certificates and master’s degrees in anthropology.
“The USC museum system has a pretty extensive database listing of items in their collections,” Davis added. “You can type in key words to their catalog system and quickly find items. We found a collection of early 20th century medical tools at McKissick Museum including a medicine kit from the 1920's. I also knew that USC's Herbarium had plant specimens we could use, and the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) had a late 18th- to early 19th-century clay bowl from Berkeley County, similar to one that a Gullah healer may have used to crush herbs."
“You can see that we really tried to branch out and find items,” Kautz said. “We worked a lot with Vennie Deas-Moore, a volunteer research associate at McKissick; John Nelson, the curator at the herbarium; Sharon Pekrul at SCIAA; and Leland Ferguson, an emeritus professor of anthropology. Jason Shaiman, chief curator of exhibitions at McKissick, helped us put up the exhibit.”
The course was a good fit for Davis, who is from Baton Rouge and came to USC for its historical archaeology program. “The idea of looking at culture and working with the actual object is something I’m interested in,” she said. She now works in the applied research division of SCIAA and hopes her career will include working as a curator in a history-related museum.
Kautz now works for TRC, a cultural resource management consulting firm in Columbia. Her duties include identifying significant historic and archaeological sites.
A second team in the Exhibition Design course constructed an exhibit on the history of the gamecock; that exhibit will appear online. A third team put together an exhibit on the history of student life at USC; that exhibit will be on display in the Russell House.
Plans are underway to travel the panel version of “Reviving Nature: Healing in the Lowcountry” to libraries, universities, and cultural centers throughout the state. The entire exhibit is on display at McKissick Museum through Sept. 3.
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