While I was in DC for the Apollo 50th anniversary celebrations I spent the day
at Smithsonian Exhibits. Smithsonian Exhibits plans, designs and builds
exhibits for many of the Smithsonian museums and offices that create public
facing exhibitions. The director is Susan Ades and I talked to her about her role
overseeing this complex office. They must consider everything from the
preservation of priceless artifacts inside cases they build to the flow of
visitor traffic through the exhibitions to the installation of priceless objects
and graphics on walls that are sometimes 100 years old.
Susan, can you give you a broad overview of your job here? Sure.
So I'm director of Smithsonian Exhibits and we are the in-house exhibit planning,
design and production facility office for the Smithsonian. We work across
the entire institution. We work with all the museum. We work with all the offices
that create exhibitions and there are lots of them that are beyond just
museums, There's Smithsonian Gardens, libraries, archives, the Smithsonian
Latino Center, I mean there are probably 30 different groups that produce some
kind of public facing exhibit and we work with all of them. That is a gigantic
number of people it's a lot of people the thing that I've been most surprised
by is I've talked to the various departments here I guess I'm not
surprised by it but I'm enriched by it is how much collaboration there is
across the whole process of conception to the execution of each of these
exhibits some of them are only going up for weeks some of them for years you are
balancing so many different parameters to tell these stories I'm I'm curious
about building an institution in which every department can feel so
collaborative with every other so you're asking how I do that yeah maybe just to
comment upon it well you know it's museum folk are very passionate people
and it's true at the Smithsonian it's true in every museum I've encountered
including zoos and aquariums them in the same category and when
people care so much about what they're doing while it can make the process
sometimes a little adversarial it's also very a very creative process and people
also know that they need to work together because there are so many
disciplines that have to come together to put an exhibition together you know
if the public could really understand what is behind even the simplest kind of
exhibit display I think that they would be impressed you know from the the
people that make the cases and what are those materials made out of and have the
fire safety people check that out have the conservation people checked out the
fabric that's inside the case you know who has selected the object who takes
care of the object where is it stored where is it going to be in the gallery
what are the environmental controls I mean the it goes on and on and on beyond
just the object the label you know the physical structure that people see and
it's really those people behind the scenes that are what make this work so
interesting because everyone has a different background everyone has come
to museum work from a very different point of view I don't think most people
really grow up and think I'm gonna work in a museum unless they're maybe a
paleontologist or they're an art historian but most people really stumble
upon museum work and then realize it's this whole world that's so interesting
well and I've been noticing again talking to the various departments it's
interesting and it's super creative and each of these people's point of view
really matters within execute making that final execution work well it does
and it's about problem-solving at every step of the way and what I really
appreciate about the people here is that everyone is a problem solver regardless
of whether they're writing they're figuring out amount they're figuring out
the design every single piece of an exhibition is a problem that has to be
solved and everybody brings creativity to the process all the time every day
I'm curious about the metrics by which you
ascertain the success of of an exhibition do you guys do time-lapse
cameras of people's engagement with them or do surveys with visitors about how
they engaged there are studies that are called timing and tracking studies which
I've done I used to work as an evaluator before I worked at the zoo I did
audience research so I would follow people you know with clipboards and I
would track where they go where they stopped who they talked to literally
timing them how many seconds you know were they talking were they pointing
were they what you know what were they looking at so those kinds of things give
you a very clear picture of how people are spending their time and using all
the components of an exhibit but then you have to talk to them or at least
talk to representative people to find out what did people get what did they
think what did they feel to see if the goals that you set out at the beginning
of the process you actually accomplished at the end and ideally you also do
testing along the way and the testing piece doesn't always happen there's much
more testing that happens with software and in other industries and the museum
industry is still trying to figure out how to work testing into our process
just because it's it's expensive its time-consuming and it's an unknown so
when you're setting on a path to do a big complex because exhibit and you have
all your design milestones and your fabrication milestones how do you crack
that process open to saying we're going to pause and we're going to do
prototypes of these five things and we're going to test them because what if
you find out that they're not working what does that then mean for these
schedules that you've put in place where all these people the conservators a
collection people all these people that have been gearing their schedules to of
the work they have to complete to this larger schedule what if you have to
throw all that up in the air and redo it and it's just too much for people to
consider so we are trying to build more a culture of experimentation but it's
it's a slow process but we really have to because museum exhibitions are so
expensive that if we're not testing things and making and refining them then
once it's done and it's out on the floor and it's not working
that's an expensive and time-consuming problem to fix
one of the things I saw that I really appreciate it was a model of a giant
squids eye oh yeah that had been initiated by a docent who we're really
using a volleyball to make the size comparison and paid to have the model
making department give them the squid that's right
what a lovely bit of we can refine this and make this head even deeper to the
audience and teach even better what's also great that an educator is taking
whatever resources he or she has to convey something complex to a visitor
and so if all they had was a volleyball and it was about the size the squid I
they use the volleyball factly educators often have to be you know pretty scrappy
people because education departments typically don't have the resources to
make models so it's great that this person found the money indeed what is
the most difficult part of your job the most difficult part of my job is not
super exciting it really is making sure that I have the right amount of people I
have the right kind of people so that whatever project gets lobbed over the
wall to us that some museum or group wants to do that we can do it just
knowing how to keep the staffing at the right level so that we can deal with all
the needs of the Smithsonian when it's given the people that I have met here
today it seems to me like you're also very much looking for people who might
be an expert in a specific thing but also have a broad base of knowledge on a
bunch of other subjects as well right now they need to know a lot and
especially as technology increases increases and gets more complex people
have to know how to use the hand tools and also the software and the high-tech
tools and they need to want to adapt to those things they want they need to want
to learn so anyone who's working here needs to operate at a bunch of different
levels well I see theirs doesn't seem to be any institutional fear right now of
embracing some of these new technologies I see all sorts of 3d printers and
computer assisted stuff and interact Vivat II it also strikes me again with
all the people that I've spoken to that there's buy-in on every level like
everyone's interested in telling the story everyone feels like a stakeholder
in getting that across the line to teach yes I mean we all take the Smithsonian
mission really seriously and even though we are not a museum ourselves and
whatever we're producing will go into someone else's space we all know that
the end product is something that is going to affect a person a group and
that is really meaningful to everyone I mean the Smithsonian's mission is the
increase in diffusion of knowledge and we all know that and we take it really
seriously I mean it sounds sort of corny but we do it doesn't sound corny at all
um this is a palace of objects to help us understand ourselves in our universe
I'm curious if there is an object in here and that you have intersected with
it that most moved you I mean yes I'm curious I'm curious about I'm never sure
where where I'm gonna find an object that changes the way I think about
things but but you also have a unique position in which you get to kind of
spend a lot of time getting to know these things and I'm wondering if
there's one that stands out I don't know that it's one but we did all of the
object preparation for the african-american history and culture
museum and so there are about 2,500 objects in that museum and we dealt with
all of them except for the Tuskegee airplane and the segregated railcar
because those are really big and they were they were already in the museum but
everything else we dealt with we handled and so all of those objects came through
here and honestly seeing some of the slave materials up close the shackles
the child-sized shackles I mean it was really the power
of the object and it was actually really difficult for the mount makers to work
with some of those materials because they're real and actually it might have
been there was a cat-o'-nine-tails that we exhibited and and the mat was
beautiful because the the whip end was sort of splayed out
so that it was in action and very complicated mount but I looked at that
burnished handle and yeah I've thought of the hands that held that and then I
looked at those whip ends and the flesh that that touched and it was I mean I
still get very emotional when I think about it but it really is the power of
the object and when museums wonder what is our place in a digital world it's
object is our place in the digital world because those things are real and they
have stories to tell and we just have to let them tell their story so I mean I
think that that cat and I tell us is probably the most impactful object I
have encountered Susan thank you so much it's just it's it's this is an amazing
place to me and it's even more amazing getting to peek a little bit behind the
curtain well I'm delighted that you guys all came it's wonderful to have you