Week 5:
Projects Galore

July 20, 2016

This past week has been filled with an abundance of different projects. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between so many things that I occasionally got them mixed up! Lucky for me, the block program has taught me to be flexible and quick so it is nothing I can’t handle!

Early this week Brianna asked me if I would be interested in creating a new exhibit for the decent-sized display box that sits in the lobby. My answer, of course, was yes and we decided that African Americans in the Olympics would be a good theme since it will be going up the first week of August, which is the start of the Rio Games. I knew that there weren’t a lot of Iowan African Americans who made it to the Olympics, so I went more with a general history, such as when the first African American participants appeared (1904). I also talked about the 1936 Games in Berlin, A.K.A. the “Nazi Olympics.” I thought this might be interesting since this was Jesse Owens debut. I learned that that year African American men dominated the track field and totally crushed Hitler’s supreme Aryan ideology.

This was also a very interesting Olympics because four years earlier the Games were held in LA and several African American men and women were barred from competing due to their race. So the 1936 Games were definitely barrier-breaking. Like I said earlier, there are not a lot of Olympic Iowans but I did find some connections. Gymnast Gabby Douglas moved to Des Moines when she was 14 to train. And track star Lolo Jones was born and raised in Des Moines. Lolo Jones ran in the 2008 summer games but returned in the 2014 winter games as a member of the bobsled team, which makes her one of the elite few who have earned a spot on both summer and winter teams. I found more Olympic-related objects in the collection than I thought and after designing my little panel and labels I put them together to see how it would look. It definitely won’t be anything big or grand, but I think it will look nice!

Brianna also asked me to write the script for a Civil Rights panel. The people I had to research were Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver. The first day I got a little swept away in reading about Malcolm X. I suppose because he was considered radical, I never really learned about him in school. But this panel has been much more challenging for me to write than any of the others have. I think it’s because Civil Rights was such a big deal, and I don’t want to mess anything up or offend anyone. And it is incredibly difficult to put everything Dr. King embodied and stood for into 100 words. She gave it back to me with some pretty heavy editing for me to do, which I was expecting. It’s a lot better now but still could use some improvement.

Another super exciting thing is that the graphic designer who creates the panels sent Brianna a draft of one of them. It just so happened to be one of the panels I wrote! It was the “Fiction from Reconstruction to Renaissance” panel which features writers like Frances Harper and Charles Chestnutt. It was amazing to see my work put together like that. Hopefully I will be able to share it with everyone, once I find out about copyrights!

All the major tasks have been broken up with other projects. One thing I am doing is making object labels for textiles we have. When I was creating the layout for my Olympics exhibit I wanted to use a jacket that a local doctor received when he made the US team for track. The textiles, which ranged from jackets to dresses, are all covered with a safe material that is not see-through. I quickly realized that only a couple had object labels which meant I had to take the cover off of every hanger to see what was underneath. Not only is this time-consuming, but it puts unnecessary stress on delicate fabric. So making new object labels will make everyone’s job easier in the future.

Another one of my ongoing projects is Mr. Powell’s photos. It is insane how many photographs he had. I’m almost done with another folder though, so that’s a relief. Cataloging does get a little mind-numbing, and some numbering mistakes I had made on the previous folder caught up to me in this one. So it was a little more time-consuming this time around than normal.

Meanwhile, Brianna and Felicite are hard at work getting together last minute things before the temporary exhibit installation begins. I believe we close the area next week, and I’m so excited!