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The Virginian-Pilot June 4, 2012 – As told to Pilot writer Josh Brown I"m from Alabama. I grew up in Birmingham and spent a lot oftime down in Panama City, Fla., going to the beach. I grew upsailing with my dad and my brother and had a natural affinity forsailing and boating. I ended up starting college at MississippiState studying architecture. I learned that evidently you have toknow physics and math to be an architect. So I ended up switchingcolleges and graduating from the University of Montevallo in 1987with a degree in history and a minor in art. During that time, I did internships at a museum in Baltimore andworked overseas in France on some different projects. I really gotinterested in boats and boat construction and history. Really theonly way to get into that sort of thing is to work for museums. In the summer of 1990, I got hired at the Peabody Essex Museum inSalem, Mass., as an assistant curator. It"s the oldest museumin the United States. It was a phenomenal collection. I spent 10years there and did about 20 exhibitions. One of the more fascinating exhibitions I worked on was one Iproposed, called "Suggestive Curves." It was takingboats from our collection and some that were borrowed and lookingat them as works of art. Some of them we hung on their sides. Wetook a New England dory and flipped it with its centerboard up.When you did that, it looked like a fish. We really wanted peopleto walk in and look at the form and shape and the beauty. It washugely cutting-edge for such a venerable museum that had focused onhistory. I"ve been here at The Mariners" Museum for 12 years. Icame in 2000 to be the curator of the small-craft collection. And Iwas that almost exclusively for about four years. Then I evolvedinto the curator of maritime arts and culture. In 2007, I was appointed chief curator. I stumbled into that role alittle bit. I wasn"t quite sure what the job entailed. Alittle bit of it is a supervisor role. But most of it is doingprojects and exhibitions. I not only do exhibitions and curatorial work and strategicplanning for the museum, but also I try to bring along our othercurators in terms of doing exhibitions and how we have tried tochange how we do them. Exhibitions are an interesting form of communication. They"revisual, written, audio. Our audience for the most part now consistsof a lot of people who don"t know about maritime history orculture. A lot of them don"t really care about it.They"re being brought here by someone else who may have avery particular interest. You really want someone to be able to walk through the exhibitionand, if they don"t read anything, they get what theexhibition"s about. And if they"re interested in it,they"ll dig a little deeper. We"re trying to makethings that are very complex like a boat or a work of maritime artinteresting to someone, so if they want to follow that line oflearning, we provide that for them. Our exhibition team is looking at how we want to reinterpret thegalleries. I"m leading that project with our education staffand exhibit design staff and our other curators. We"re tryingto figure out a cohesive story. Right now, we have five or sixdisjunct exhibitions, plus the Monitor center and the small-craftcenter. We want to get to a position where we can integrate all ofthose different stories into one large story that goes to a verybroad theme such as exploration. We want to evolve The Mariners" Museum story into somethinglarger and broader for a brand-new audience. We"re lookingthree to five years down the road right now. We"re looking attaking things out of our galleries and replacing them withsomething that is new and can attract a younger audience. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as China Swing Stage Scaffolding , Shoring Frames Manufacturer, and more. For more , please visit Scaffold Props today!
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