In an age when consideration spans shrink and digital experiences dominate, creating significant encounters with historical past presents distinctive challenges for cultural establishments. Robert Parker, curator on the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American Historical past & Tradition, has met this problem with exceptional imaginative and prescient within the museum’s latest exhibition, TITAN, which celebrates the extraordinary lifetime of Reginald F. Lewis.
The exhibition, marking the museum’s twentieth anniversary, doesn’t merely show artifacts behind glass, it reimagines what engagement with historic figures can imply. By remodeling museum areas into portals by means of which guests actually step into Lewis’s world, Parker has created one thing extra akin to theater than conventional exhibition.
“I believe relevance and provocation helps,” Parker explains in a dialog with Munson Steed on Rolling Out’s Design and Dialogue program. “Creating or recreating areas that had been actual in Reginald F. Lewis’s life after which getting a customer right this moment in a recent method to connect with these areas helps them perceive his world higher.”
Democratizing design
What makes Parker’s strategy notably noteworthy is his dedication to collaborative curation. Slightly than imposing a singular imaginative and prescient, he emphasizes the significance of collective creation.
“It’s quite a lot of technique behind design and constructing and the inventive course of,” Parker notes. “Fortunately I’ve a crew of people that may inform me, okay, this doesn’t make sense. Okay, this works.”
This democratic strategy extends to the customer expertise itself. Not like exhibitions that prescribe a selected path, TITAN invitations exploration on one’s personal phrases. “We didn’t desire a linear expertise,” Parker explains. “We wished individuals to have the ability to begin in any facet of this exhibit and to have the ability to sit with the messages.”
The result’s what Steed describes as a sequence of passages, “I felt like there have been corridors every time you moved, the place the creativeness might go and take you based mostly on what they had been saying, and that reflection was with you, and you then needed to take one other passage.”
Designing emotional structure
Three ideas information the exhibition’s emotional structure:
First, spatial storytelling that connects previous to current. Slightly than merely displaying pictures or artifacts, Parker recreated important environments from Lewis’s life, his workplace desk and his non-public jet, full with pictures of Lewis in these areas. These installations enable guests to bodily inhabit moments from his journey.
Second, geometric continuity between container and content material. “We deal with quite a lot of the geometrical shapes that had been reminiscent to the facade of our constructing when it comes to the structure of the Lewis Museum,” Parker explains. This delicate design alternative creates a visible relationship between the constructing itself and the exhibition inside it.
Third, vertical motion as metaphor. Steed describes how the exhibition’s structure creates a way of ascension: “It felt like elevators that you just had been using an elevator, you got here down clearly to get on the desk. You’ve acquired to go up, and the motion simply to take your self and elevate whoever went up.”
These parts mix to create what Parker calls “this escapism for the second” the place guests can “actually connect with Reginald F. Lewis and his story.”
Humanizing historical past
Regardless of the progressive design, Parker emphasizes that the exhibition’s final objective is deeply human, to current Lewis not as a mythologized determine however as an actual particular person whose extraordinary achievements stemmed from qualities anybody may domesticate.
“In historical past, sometimes we prefer to romanticize figures, and we prefer to put people on pedestals,” Parker observes. “I believe we’ve achieved the other. I believe we did our greatest to humanize him in a method the place you may see his classes discovered, and you may see how he bounced again from failure.”
This strategy to humanizing Lewis manifests in three key narratives:
The exhibition highlights Lewis’s centered willpower from an early age, together with his handwritten faculty schedule that demonstrated his methodical strategy to success. “You may see what he was pondering within the Sixties when it comes to what it meant for him to excel effectively after his faculty days,” Parker notes.
It additionally explores Lewis’s resilience within the face of setbacks, embodying his philosophy to “maintain going, it doesn’t matter what.” Parker explains that guests can “see how he bounced again from failure,” providing inspiration no matter one’s subject.
Maybe most significantly, it reveals “the extra or softer aspect of Reginald F. Lewis” as a household man, exhibiting dimensions past the company titan and philanthropist that almost all affiliate together with his title.
Museum as non secular journey
For Steed, experiencing TITAN transcended mere training, it grew to become what he describes as “a non secular journey.” He recounts, “By the point I acquired to the opposite aspect of the room I felt like I might maintain going and going and going and going, and know that I used to be purported to be there, and that he was there with me, and that it was an area for me to refill.”
Parker embraces this characterization, “I’m grateful that it was a non secular journey for you, and I believe that was the final word objective for it to be a journey.”
This transformation of museum house into non secular journey represents a profound shift in how cultural establishments may strategy their mission. Slightly than positioning guests as passive observers of historical past, the TITAN exhibition invitations them to turn into lively members in a shared narrative.
Reimagining cultural house
The importance of Parker’s work extends past this single exhibition. At a time when cultural establishments face questions on relevance and engagement, TITAN presents a compelling imaginative and prescient for a way museums may evolve.
By treating house as narrative, emphasizing emotional connection over mere data switch, and creating environments that foster private reflection, Parker demonstrates how curatorial follow can rework the museum expertise.
“I believe for any little one born in Baltimore or Maryland to stroll in there, I believe he offers them a pedigree that they didn’t give themselves,” Steed observes. “He says it’s yours, so you may declare it. It’s in you.”
This sentiment captures the exhibition’s final achievement. It doesn’t merely current Lewis’s story, it creates an area the place guests may uncover their very own potential. In doing so, it fulfills the deepest function of cultural establishments, not simply preserving the previous, however inspiring attainable futures.
The TITAN exhibition on the Reginald F. Lewis Museum represents a daring step ahead in museum design, one which different establishments would do effectively to review. By reimagining how we have interaction with historical past, Parker has created one thing that, like Lewis himself, breaks boundaries and redefines what’s attainable.
