A Year Gone By

2011 was an exciting year for me in my career as the Manager of Special Exhibits here at Cincinnati Museum Center. We hosted a world-class, blockbuster, limited engagement of Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt which drew over 130,000 visitors catapulting Cleopatra in the top 5 exhibitions ever hosted at CMC. For Cleopatra, my team and I launched the first-ever Cincinnati Museum Center Book Club focused on books, fiction and non-fiction, on the lives of Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Marc Antony. We planned almost half of the Insights Lecture Series with Cleopatra-themed lectures. The lecturers were from around the tri-state area representing the University of Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky University, Miami University of Ohio, Mount Saint Joe University, and even a curator from our friends at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

The Union Terminal Christmas Tree

As soon as Cleopatra closed, we were off to the races to open the bigger and better Holiday Junction returning for its eighteenth year. This year we expanded into an additional gallery featuring the Duke Energy Holiday Trains. I expanded my performing arts section to not only manage the Holiday Harmonies rotunda performances, but to also build and manage the Holiday Variety Troupe. If you haven’t seen them perform, you missed the best part of the holiday. They absolutely stole the show from the exhibition with their renditions of “A Christmas Carol Abridged,” The Twelve Days of Christmas, and countless carols – even the chipmunk’s hula hoop song! They spread holiday cheer throughout the entirety of Union Terminal all season long. 2011 saw the inaugural HoliDate event with our friends from the Dance Academy joined the North Pole Pajama Party on the menu of special program offerings.

As 2012 is in its infancy, I am already looking forward to the exhibit lineup here at Cincinnati Museum Center. On March 2 we will open yet another blockbuster exhibition A Day in Pompeii. This exhibition tells not only the unique story of a city trapped in time by a cataclysmic volcanic event, but tells how the people of Pompeii lived, how they died and how they were discovered. While A Day in Pompeii will be terrific, I have already begun work on the next Holiday Junction featuring the Duke Energy Trains to open in early November 2012.

Of course I plan to travel and see some exhibitions around the country. I’ve already been to Philadelphia to see Giant, Mysterious Dinosaurs at The Franklin Institute, and have loose plans to see Genghis Kahn at Chicago’s Field Museum. Be sure to watch out for exhibits such as DaVinci and Dead Sea Scrolls. DaVinci should be making a couple of stops in 2012, and The Franklin Institute will be opening Dead Sea Scrolls in May.

I hope you’re looking forward to 2012 as much as I am. Until next time!

M

Visit Cincinnati Museum Center’s website at cincymuseum.org

See the Holiday Variety Troupe’s The Twelve Days of Christmas:

http://www.youtube.com/user/museumcenter11#p/u/4/GonW777FmlE

 

Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science – Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal – Cincinnati, Ohio

Greetings Special ExhiBITs fans!

It seems like the two weeks between a new blog post go so quickly these days. Maybe it’s because I’ve been working very hard on getting America I AM: The African American Imprint exhibit opened at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, and another exhibit a few weeks after that, but lets not talk about that…yet… I want to take a look at the first exhibit I managed during my tenure at Cincinnati Museum Center, Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science.

Lost Egypt Cincinnati Entrance

Lost Egypt is a 6,000 square foot exhibit that was produced and is traveled by my friends in Columbus, Ohio at the Center of Science and Industry, COSi. The exhibit was fabricated by Minnesota’s favorite museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the artifacts for the exhibit are on loan from the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibit blends hands-on activities with a great selection of artifacts to tell not an Egyptian story, but to tell a scientific story through the lens of Egyptian history.

If you’re reading my blog for the first time, I will bring you up to speed on the challenges we face in Cincinnati. If you’re an ExhiBITs veteran, this will be old news. In Cincinnati we have two separate special exhibit halls separated by a ramped hallway. This always presents special design and traffic flow challenges. During Gold: The Exhibition, we utilized those hallways by putting items from our collection onto display as an added experience, and then created  a sister exhibit Queen City Gold: Out of the Vault to utilize more space near the exit of the exhibit. For Lost Egypt, we were very fortunate to have these hallways because the exhibit came with a series of enlarged photographs that the COSi team took while they were in Egypt doing their research for the exhibit. The photos set the scene and prepped the visitor for the exhibit.

Orientation Map

Once the visitor reached the main portion of the exhibit they are greeted with a large floor map that orients the visitor to where Egypt is in Africa, and the world. The exhibit basically is split into two sections, the interactive or “fun” side, and the artifact side. The interactive side was packed with fun things for kids and adults to do to understand not only how it might have been to live and work in Egypt, but how it is to work as an archaeologist and an anthropologist. You get to learn the most efficient way to pull large stone blocks to build the pyramids, visit an archaeological dig site, and learn about ground penetrating radar. My favorite is the pot shard activity where visitors  are invited to reconstruct a pot “found” at an archaeological dig site. Visitors can also learn how to speak simple Egyptian phrases, and in “You CAN Take it With You” visitors are invited to think about what types of things they would like to take with them into the afterlife.

Not only do you get to see x-rays of different mummified animals, but the centerpiece artifact of the entire exhibit is a fully intact, well conserved mummy of a teenaged girl, named “Annie.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly a birth-name. Annie is short for anonymous because her name cannot be found.

As I mentioned earlier, we also created a sister exhibit to go along with Lost Egypt centered around Cincinnati Museum Center’s own mummy Umi. Umi comes to us from the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the University of Cincinnati graciously assisted us with performing CAT scans on Umi to determine lots of things including that he in fact is a young male after he was mistaken for a young female for centuries, and magnification of the amulets all over his wrappings.

The exhibit not only teaches that science is important in unlocking the ancient secrets of ancient Egypt, but it also shows that the Egyptian ideals of life after death may not be too unbelievable. After all, Annie is living today teaching people across the country. It’s a small, and quick exhibit to get through, but it is highly interactive, and highly informative.

The exhibit premiered at COSi in the Summer of 2009, we had it in Cincinnati in the Fall of 2009, and it recently opened at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California and will be there until September 6, 2010. The exhibit is set to travel to the member museums of the Science Museum Exhibit Collaborative. See all the official websites below for more information, and for many more pictures, check my Flickr where I have pictures from the Columbus installation and the Cincinnati installation!

I’m off to the opening of National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s newest exhibit Textual Rhythms: Constructing the Jazz Tradition, Contemporary African American Quilts tonight, check back here in two weeks to see what I think!

Lost Egypt’s Official Website: http://www.lostegypt.org

COSi’s Website: http://www.cosi.org follow @CosiCols on Twitter

Science Museum of Minnesota Website: http://www.smm.org/ follow @sciencemuseummn on Twitter

Brooklyn Museum: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/ follow @brooklynmuseum on Twitter

California Science Center’s Website: http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/MainPage.php              Follow @casciencecenter on Twitter

Cincinnati Art Museum’s Website: http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.com follow @cincyartmuseum on Twitter

…and don’t forget us!

Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal

http://www.cincymuseum.org follow @cincymuseum on Twitter

Oh yeah, and me… @Czarshaw on Twitter and Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialexhibits/

Me and the Camel