Mr. Akeley’s Movie Camera - Text 3
Exhibition ideas come from many sources – scientists, staff, exhibition developers, museum members, and visitors. As a repository of more than 30 million objects and specimens, we tend to focus first and foremost on unlocking the stories behind those objects, and the scientific discovery they fuel. The Akeley camera certainly had a good natural history story behind it. Within weeks of its unpacking, Jaap proposed mounting a small-gallery show focusing on the museum’s new acquisition. The “Akeley Camera Show” (as yet untitled) was slated for July of 2018.
The typical genesis of an exhibition goes from idea, to proposal, to concept development, to design and development (the longest phase of the process, including planning the show’s sequence and scope, object selection, floor plans, media scripts, sounds/music, case layouts, conservation assessments, finishes, and much more), and finally, production and installation. Early in the year, Janet Hong was appointed project manager, overseeing all the logistics, and Ryan Schuessler was assigned as developer, in charge of forging the overall concept and writing the label copy. My role was lead content advisor. The proposed location was the Brooker Gallery, a small gallery generally dedicated to objects from the museum’s library and archives. Due to the size of the hall (about 800 ft2) and its specialized nature, the scope is generally limited to just a few objects. Given these factors and the need to connect the theme of the show to natural history, Ryan and I agreed that obvious direction would be to highlight the Akeley camera in the context of Akeley’s obsession to replicate the natural world, and showcase one example from each of his mediums: film, photography, sculpture, and taxidermy. Happily, we had the resources at hand. In addition to the newly acquired camera, our photography archives houses nearly 1,000 glass negatives made by Akeley on his 1896 and 1906 Field Museum expeditions, we have several of the small bronze sculptures he executed in the late 1910s and early ‘20s (plus three life-size lion-spearing bronzes, which would not fit in the room!), and there were a few Akeley taxidermy mounts of manageable size in storage.
The concept was approved, and the work began. Object selection was a key early step. Thomas Gnoske, chief preparator and assistant collections manager of birds (who also does taxidermy and is deeply versed in taxidermy history) and I had one particular animal in mind for the taxidermy example: a Stone mountain sheep from a group Akeley created in 1899, but which had been dismantled in the late 1980s. The specimen was not too large to install in a case, and more important, it exhibited a signature Akeley attitude, chewing at an itchy spot on its rear leg; Akeley was a pioneer in moving taxidermy beyond static and stolid poses to dynamic and even whimsical ones (Tom calls these tropes “Akeley showing off”). An assessment of the Stone sheep revealed some insect damage and a few other flaws, so the museum enlisted commercial taxidermists Scott Kuipers and Doug Petrousek, who agreed to repair the sheep pro bono, assisted by Tom.
