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Interview with Myriam Springuel

Interview //

Touring an extensive range of subject matter across an enormous amount of touring exhibitions each year, TEN met with SITES Interim Director Myriam Springuel to find out about its almost 65-year history, and its role in bringing cultural experiences to locations around the US.

TEN: What’s your background with SITES – how long have been there, and what are your main responsibilities?

Myriam Springeul: I currently serve as the interim director at SITES. I provide leadership for all aspects of the organisation, including setting priorities, creating collaborations with Smithsonian colleagues, making decisions about exhibitions we take into our program, and working with our Advisory Board. We are making lots of changes at SITES; many are internal right now such as creating new processes for developing and reviewing exhibitions, and spending more time talking to potential exhibitors as we develop exhibitions to ensure we meet their needs as they make decisions about which exhibition to book. You won’t see a change in the typical high quality of a SITES exhibition, but you will see us working more efficiently to offer a broad array of topics of interest to the museum field.
This is a homecoming of sorts as I was the director of education and then associate director for programs from 1986 to 1994. In the intervening years, I founded a consulting business to assist museums and cultural organisations respond to change and prepare for the future. It’s an honour to be back in a time of transition when I see every day the impact of a SITES exhibition in communities across the country.

SITES is the Smithsonian’s ambassador outside of Washington, D.C. We bring the collections, resources and expertise of the Smithsonian through traveling exhibitions to museums, libraries, botanic gardens, and other community organisations around the nation.

TEN: And, in your own words, how would you describe the work SITES does, and its philosophy?

MS: SITES is the Smithsonian’s ambassador outside of Washington, D.C. We bring the collections, resources and expertise of the Smithsonian through traveling exhibitions to museums, libraries, botanic gardens, and other community organisations around the nation, and more and more other countries. Sometimes our exhibitions include Smithsonian collections and research, and sometimes those of other organisations. But in all cases, they represent nationally significant stories and are grounded in the intellectual integrity of all Smithsonian work.

TEN: What have been some of SITES’ key exhibitions in recent years – has there been anything that’s performed especially well, or been particularly popular?

MS: As you can imagine, exhibitions featuring American pop-culture are very popular. We’ve traveled three Star Wars exhibitions –“Star Wars: The Magic of Myth”, “Star Wars: Art of the Starfighter”, and our current “Star Wars and the Power of Costume” – each diving into a specific theme through the lens of the films. We’ve explored the creative and comic genius behind the Muppets and many of the Looney Tunes characters through “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” and “What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones”. And we showed a young Elvis before his meteoric rise in “Elvis at 21, Photography by Alfred Wertheimer”.

Our exhibitions that highlight the history and influence of various cultures to the American fabric also do very well. We delve into the impact of Indian Americans in our nation in “Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation”, and uncover the little known migrant worker programme that brought Mexicans to the U.S. during World War II in “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program, 1942-1964”. These exhibitions often provide host museums a means of connecting with new visitors as well as a way to partner with members of the reflected communities on public and educational programs.

Every single day, I am inspired by the work done around SITES exhibitions!

The natural world has so many mysteries to share, and science exhibitions from SITES have helped museum visitors explore the cosmos through exhibitions like “Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe”, and highlighted stories closer to home like “Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants”. The one that has captured many people’s attention is “Titanoboa: Monster Snake” which features a life-size replica of a colossal snake from the Paleocene epoch. Scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of Nebraska, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute discovered Titanoboa in a coal mine in Colombia, and it is the world’s largest snake at 48 feet long and weighing in at an estimated one-and-a-half tons.

See more about “Star Wars and the Power of Costume” here:
(Photos: © & ™ 2015 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization.)

 

TEN: Which exhibitions have you enjoyed the most, personally?

MS: That’s really hard to say! Every single exhibition we do is terrific. I’ve had the privilege of attending a number of openings in the last year, and was impressed and inspired by each installation: “Star Wars™ and the Power of Costume” at EMP Museum, “What’s Up, Doc?” at the Museum of the Moving Image, “American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music” in Puerto Rico and at the Atlanta History Center. And I was also impressed by the beautiful installation of “Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants” and “The Evolving Universe” at South Florida Museum in Bradenton. But that’s just a sampling. Every week I get media clips with reviews of SITES exhibitions from across the country, about host venues promoting programs, and life-long learning opportunities, and reports from staff about the amazing work done at host venues. Every single day, I am inspired by the work done around SITES exhibitions!

TEN: What are some of the main challenges of both your daily job, and for SITES?

MS: The traveling exhibition field is changing. The role of interactives and technology integrated in exhibitions is having us all rethink how we conceive of and design exhibitions. We’re working to maximize our public outreach through digital elements and programming such as the unique mobile app developed for “Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey” which allows users to remix elements of Bearden’s collages into their own creations.

Social media allows us to reach a much broader audience. We think carefully about how social media can help support both the story of the exhibition in communicating to visitors and in supporting the work of host venues. We are committed to providing affordable and very high quality exhibitions to our venues – that’s always a challenge.

We also put time into understanding the needs of our exhibitors, both in terms of exhibition subject matter, presentation style, rental fee, size, scale and scope. Our exhibitions often go to museums that are very different in terms of discipline and size. Designing to meet those very different needs is one of our strengths, but is something we talk about on a daily basis and need to fine-tune for each and every project. We have a very experienced and talented staff so conversations around the office are always interesting!

The traveling exhibition field is changing. The role of interactives and technology integrated in exhibitions is having us all rethink how we conceive of and design exhibitions.

TEN: SITES has been around for 50 years, has this wealth of experienced continued to inform the work SITES does now?

MS: Actually, we are in our 64th year and will be celebrating 65 years and more than 1,800 exhibitions next year. Of course, that experience informs our work. Our registrars for example have deep experience in making sure rare collections travel safely. Museum on Main Street (MoMS) is now a 20-year collaboration with state humanities councils, providing exhibitions to rural communities across America. We are committed to the smaller and mid-size museums that have budget challenges and share our commitment to quality and excellence; they demonstrate over and over again how important Smithsonian content can be in their communities.

TEN: Has it changed significantly since it was founded in the 50s?

MS: SITES was originally established in part with a grant from the U.S. Department of State in 1951 with the mission to foster a growing appreciation of contemporary art and to assist sharing it widely. In our early years we brought major fine arts exhibitions from European collections to the U.S. and American collections to Europe. We have developed important exhibitions that supported cultural diplomacy – such as the first exhibition of American impressionist paintings ever shown in Paris, and we have brought major collections from the Russian state museums to the United States. We also presented more than 100 artifacts from the Islamic empires of the 13th to the 16th centuries Islamic drawn from collections in Egypt, Syria, England, France, Canada, and the U.S. With the 1976 bicentennial we started doing major history exhibitions.

Over the years we have touched on just about every subject in museum collections.
Perhaps equally important, we developed a commitment to those venues that did not have access to the same cultural resources as the large museums. The Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program and the many ethnic specific and cultural history exhibitions we have done over the years were each, in different ways, ground-breaking projects – drawing attention to aspects of American history and culture that communities did not always have the resources to explore. That commitment extends to providing opportunities for host venues to tell their own story in tandem with the SITES exhibition; whether it’s through a parallel exhibition or through programs.

At this point, our commitment to supporting the work of venues includes major museums to rural community centers and everything in between.

SITES has also reached audiences in unexpected and unusual places via train and mobile museums. SITES’ three-year tour of “Art in Celebration!” on Artrain stopped in 112 communities.

TEN: There have been an amazing 1,800 shows since then as well, in your opinion what, historically, have been some of the most influential or important shows that have toured?

MS: We have a lot of history to draw upon, and a lot of pride in what we do.

Some of our highlights include “The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collection” – a landmark North American tour of objects confiscated during the Holocaust – and “Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria”, an exhibition of 281 objects spanning 10,000 years of history, marked the first time that antiquities from Syria had been shown in North America. At the 1984 Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, we presented “Treasures from the Smithsonian Institution”. With 260 objects it was the largest exhibition the Smithsonian had ever sent abroad and the first to combine materials from all of our museums.

SITES has also reached audiences in unexpected and unusual places via train and mobile museums. SITES’ three-year tour of “Art in Celebration!” on Artrain stopped in 112 communities. The wide geographic range reached by the “Wade in the Water” Mobile Museum tour in 2001 convinced SITES to formally incorporate mobile museums into its program. The most recent mobile museum exhibition – “Animal Connections: Our Journey Together” – traveled to state fairs, county parks, natural history museums and zoos engaging children and, hopefully, inspiring some to become our next generation of veterinarians.

One of the programmes we are most proud of is Museum on Main Street (MoMS). We started it in 1994 to reach underserved rural audiences across America. MoMS combines SITES’ exhibitions with programmatic expertise from state humanities councils to help small and rural museums pair Smithsonian scholarship with local history and artifacts. The MoMS program has sent Smithsonian resources and exhibitions to more than 1200 communities in 48 states and Guam to date.

TEN: SITES travels such a variety of subjects – how would you describe the core philosophy that holds it all together?

MS: Our vision is to bring knowledge, discovery and experiences to people. We want our exhibitions and programs to inspire people and to stimulate conversations. This outlook provides us with a lot of latitude when it comes to selecting exhibition ideas. It means we can share the rhythms and beats that Latino artists have woven into American popular music in one exhibition and explore the depths of the oceans in search for the elusive giant squid in another. The world is a diverse and wonderful place filled with art, history, culture and science just waiting for us, and we look forward to sharing it all for many more years to come.

http://www.sites.si.edu

» Read more about SITES’ work in our company profile story.

 

// 29. Juli 2015