Episode 3: What goes where and how did it get there?

In part 1 of this episode we talk to two fabrication designers, Josh Doherty works at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver British Columbia. Stacey Winter works for the Royal BC Museum, also in Vancouver. They talk about what their jobs are and how they got into them.
In Part two, we introduce the idea of skeleton articulation - that is putting the bones of skeletons together. 

Meet the podcasters, read our blog and listen to our episodes at timetowonderpodcast.com

Chapters

• 1:20 How much of a museum's collection is on display
• 1:56 Who decides what goes on display
• 2:38 How they decided that they wanted to do become fabrication specialists
• 3:39 What they actually do
• 6:07 What they have to think about when planning an exhibit
• 8:26 What happens if they break something
• 9:04 How technology has changed their jobs
• 10:15 Their favourite exhibits
• 11:46 The most surprising thing they have learned in their jobs.
• 12:41 If a kid wanted to do this job, how they should prepare
• 15:11 How museums are a little like theatre
• 17:51 Part 2 Introduction to Episode 3

Transcript

Transcript Episode 3 What goes where and how did it get there?

1:07 Hi Winter, I'm Ava.
1:09 Hi Ava, Nice to meet you. 
1:11 Hi Josh, I'm Ava. 
1:14 Hi Ava, nice to meet you. 

 1:16 Ava
I have some questions for you. 

Winter
1:19 Fantastic. 

Ava
1:20 Okay, let's get started. Is everything a museum owns or cares for exhibited? 

Winter
1:29 No, I've worked with the Field Museum from Chicago and their logo is a square and it says "Field" and there's a tiny period. And the period is to represent how much of their collection is on display, and so that's quite often reflected in most museums. So maybe we have one percent or two percent of our collection on display. That's a really small number. 

0:01:56 - Ava
Wow, that's interesting. Who decides what goes on display? 

0:02:02 - Josh
It's a mix of people. Often there's a curator, who's the person who is coming up with the story and the ideas for an exhibition, and they often get to choose the objects that sort of help tell the story they want to tell, and sometimes that's in collaboration with the exhibit designers, and the designers have an idea about what they want to see in the exhibit too, and sometimes there's an invited guest or like an invited curator or an artist and they get to have some input on what goes on display and sort of shapes the exhibit and the story they're trying to tell. 

0:02:38 - Ava
How did you figure out that this is something you wanted to do? 

0:02:43 - Winter
Great question. I first started out doing set decoration in high school, in grade eight, and just painting the set for a play that we would do, and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a lot of fun to be able to do kind of everything to make something look like something else. So you start out with a piece of wood and you cut it and you paint it and you light it, and so it was really nice and magical and I thought that I would like to be involved in that after school. So I went into museums. The way that I still know that it's what I want to do - because this can change, you're allowed to change your mind - but the way that I know I still like this is my tasks change all the time, so I never get bored. Even if something is boring, it'll be over in a week and there will be the next project
0:03:39 - Sue
 So what part of putting together an exhibit is yours? 

0:03:43 - Winter
At the Royal BC Museum. My title is exhibitions fabrication specialist. Now, at this point in my career at the Royal BC Museum, I've only been there for a year, whereas some of my colleagues have been there for 18 years. Let's say they have a little bit more seniority over me and that means that I get the short end of the stick sometimes. So right now I am painting 100 pieces of wood white.
And sometimes I get to vacuum for two weeks. Am I making it magical yet? But then once in a while, you also get to do these crazy, creative, awesome projects that just are so much fun and you get to do it with your coworkers, and it reignites the spark for creativity and you're like this is why I'm here. 

0:04:41 - Sue
Cool. Josh. What about you? What is your part in all of this? Putting these exhibitions together? 

0:04:46 - Josh
So my role these days. So I've just left MOV [the Museum of Vancouver] and I've moved over to MOA [Museum of Anthropology] and I was more like a mix of design and tech over there and it's similar over here. I've only been here for a month and a half, but the process is there's an exhibit, there's the curators and there's a story, and then so it's working with the curators to develop the visual part of how the exhibition is going to go together, looking at the gallery spaces and figure out where things are going to fit and what sort of visual storytelling is going to happen and how do you paint the picture of what you're trying to do in there, which is five projectors going in. So there's going to be this huge projection thing going on with all these old photographs, and so I'm in the middle of that and coordinating between artists and designers and the fabrication team and the collections team who are bringing and taking care of all the objects. 

0:05:42 - Sue
Wow, that sounds very complex. 

0:05:44 - Winter
Who's painting all those pieces of wood white? 

0:05:48 - Josh
Right now it's Heather Painter (her last name is Painter) Heather and Evan and Shadie and Pippa and me and Skooker. So right now, everybody's doing a lot of things. We're all lending a hand right now 

0:06:07 - Ava
What things do you have to think about when you are planning and designing an exhibit? 

0:06:14 - Josh
One of the early things is thinking about what's the big idea. Is it going to be a fun exhibit? Is it going to be a serious exhibit? What's the big idea? Often people think about what are the things they want to see in the exhibit and how you want to approach the exhibit and what welcomes you into the exhibit. You start thinking about, do you have to build walls, is it going to be a big open room?  Is it going to be a dark room? Is it gonna be a bright room? And so all of those things how you experience the space and what the feelings you want people to have when they come into the exhibit, and how you get people to have those feelings. Then you start thinking about how you create space that people can explore and discover and make discoveries, and so that's the big ideas. 

And then there's how much wire do we need? How many projectors do we need? How many speakers? Do we need to build a bunch of boxes? How many aces do we need? Are there delicate things? Are there dangerous things that we need to protect people from? And then it's do we have enough time to let the paint dry? 

0:07:21 - Sue
 That part sounds incredibly practical, probably adding how many pieces of wood you have to paint white. 

0:07:27 - JoshSpeaker 2
Yeah, yeah. So we make a lot of lists and we make drawings, using computers to lay out the spaces as much as we can and have a good picture of what it's actually going to look like. So we can have a good idea of  how many pieces of wood do we need and how much paint is going to need to go on those pieces of wood. 

0:07:47 - Winter
As a technician, so you're not always a person that gets to make big decisions, but at the same time, it's really important to ask questions and sometimes I'm like, oh, maybe I shouldn't ask that because I should already know. No way. You might be able to see something that somebody else has missed. Hey, by the way, we actually don't have any more paint left. It's really basic, but you might see something that falls through the cracks of somebody who should be seeing it and it's very good for you to mention it. 

0:07:15 - Sue
That's a really good point. 

0:08:18 - Josh
 I really love it when people mention things. 

0:08:22 - Ava
This one is for Winter. What happens if you break something? 

0:08:26 - Winter
First of all, you have to tell someone. And that's difficult, but you've really got to tell someone, and especially if it's an object. That's why we always do care and handling training. It's really important to think about how you are moving and touching these objects that only exist for a finite amount of time. As museum people, we have been asked to hold on to these things and be as careful as we can. So, at the very bare minimum, if you break something, you got to tell somebody because maybe they can fix it. 

0:09:04 - Ava
How has technology changed your job? 

0:09:08 - Josh
From when I started in museums, there hasn't been a huge amount of change, but I think that lighting has changed. 

Lighting technology has changed a lot, and so LEDs weren't really a thing when I first started and now they're just everywhere and so you can get really little tiny lights into really interesting places and that's fun. You don't have to change light bulbs as often, and I think being able to use computers and projections and interactive digital stuff I think has changed a lot. I don't love digital and interactive stuff because it's always broken, as Winter will attest to. But I think there are some opportunities there that weren't there before, and I think people are still trying to figure out how to use things like virtual reality in museums. People are trying to use them, use virtual reality in museums and stuff like that and it's not working super well yet that I've seen, but it's getting closer and I think that in the next two years,  stuff like that is going to be a lot of fun and interesting. But it means we have to learn how to do new things that we didn't do before, which is fun and frustrating. 

0:10:15 - Ava
What's your favorite exhibit? 

0:10:19 - Winter
I really like the mid-century modern exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery that they had maybe 2021. I went and saw it three times because I just enjoyed it so much. I brought my friends and I really like to see what they looked at. That's part of my favorite part of going to an exhibit is looking at the exhibit, yes, reading the things, yes, but also looking at what other people are interested in and discussing that. And especially if you go with a friend talking about what's your favorite table in here and then they point and they say that one. You're like okay, why I'm interested, I'm curious, what gets you going, what art do you like? And so I think that the Mid-Century Modern exhibit was pretty spot on for that. 

0:11:04 - Ava
Josh, what's your favorite exhibit? 

0:11:07 - Josh
I really have a soft spot for Science World. I think all of the big interactive stuff is really fun and I think being able to touch stuff and see stuff and get behind things and crawl around and stuff is really cool. I think that's a lot of fun. 

0:11:25 - Sue
I'm with you. I love Science World. 

0:11:28 - Lesley
I'm obviously going to have to take Ava to Science World. 

0:11:31 - Ava
I've been there ... I  was more young. My mama went  there without me. And then after that she even showed me photos and was like"Oh, guess what? I went to science world." and I'm like, "Okay." 

0:11:46 - Ava 
What's the most surprising thing you've learned in your job? 

0:11:50 - Josh
One of my favorite things about this job is actually getting to interact with people and finding out all the cool things they know about stuff.Aand so every exhibit I learn something new and crazy. The last exhibit I did at MOV was an Indigenous tattoo exhibition and we're working with Dion Kazas and he's the guest curator. And one of the pieces in that was a blood painting. So when people are being tattooed, they use paper towels and stuff to blot the ink and the blood. And so they turned those into a piece and it was not something I expected or expected that I would find interesting. And once they were framed and mounted on the wall, they're quite beautiful.  That was quite surprising for me. 

0:12:41 - Ava
If I really wanted to do what you were doing, what should I start doing now to prepare? 

0:12:48 - Winter
Good question Make sure you like being creative. Yeah, If you want to be doing this type of stuff for work, you should also enjoy doing it in your free time and I do, which is great. I love that. What should you do now? Practice your drawing, Practice all of the creative things. Learning woodshop was super helpful. I wish I had done that sooner and just being interested in exploring and learning about things and not having to know everything. But just get good at tinkering. Don't be afraid to break something because you could probably fix it. And what Josh was saying too about the AV all of the AV that was brought into the museum 10 years ago is completely doesn't work anymore. Everything has been updated. 

You think you know everything and then it changes and so just being good at poking things really to figure out how to make them work or how to fix them.

0:13:42 - Josh
My route into the museums was, uh, I worked for a number of years in metal shops and woodworking and I built guitars and just generally liked tinkering and making stuff, just like what winter was saying. And I ended up doing the Industrial Design Program at Emily Carr, which is thinking about making stuff and designing stuff and thinking about how all the pieces of things fit together. And while I was doing that, I accidentally one of my classmates his dad is a conservator and conservators are the people who take care of objects and I got hired on to do some mount making, which is like little metal supports for artifacts and objects, and I really liked it and I kept coming back and they kept having me back and I slowly started coming in that way. So there's lots of design programs there's, I think people go through architecture into museums from carpentry yeah, love of making things and figuring things out and it's a really yeah, like what Winter said poking stuff and figuring it out. Every exhibit is something new that you have to figure out and everything is the first time it's made that way. So every step of the way is an experiment and so if you like experimenting and are going to get frustrated and then move through the frustration and try something new, I think the core of what I do is just keep trying new things. 

0:15:11 - Lesley
I did a little bit of work at the Children's Museum in Ottawa, at what used to be the Museum of Civilization, and I did some consulting on some pieces they had there. And one of the things that really struck me  - and I come from a theater background - a museum is like a theater. I don't know if you guys think about that, but you have front of house and you have behind the scenes and I fell in love with that. Like one of the best things I thought about working there was that you got to see what the other people didn't see and you saw the effort. So I was just wondering what you love about behind the scenes. 

0:15:49 - Josh
I really love when, like, what you're describing is that sort of that sense that you get to go in the back and sometimes I forget how cool that is until I bring someone through. I'm like, "Oh, let's just go back here." and they go, "Can we?" And it's oh, yeah, my job is really cool because I get to sneak around in the back and I get to use the freight elevator and seriously the freight elevator is great.  But yeah, in that and there is that sort of that theme that's like quietly in the background, fuzzes around and does all that work. All the conservators are repairing stuff and preparing things, and all of the techs are in there painting all the wood white and wiring things, endlessly wiring things, and like trying stuff out. And   you can be absolute chaos behind that closed door and then you step into this pristine gallery and everything is just where it should be. It is a bit like  Santa's workshop or the secret lab. 
0:16:49 - Sue
Winter, do you want to answer that same question?

0:16:51 - Winter 
It's funny you asked that actually, because this is part of the reason why I'm not in theater is because I feel like museums get to tell the same story or different stories that you get to see in theater, but in a museum it's there for longer and you get to go up close and you get to sometimes touch these things and you get to be immersed. It's going to the theater and seeing a play, but you get to take part in it and it stays for longer. You have more opportunity to see it again. More people have opportunity to see it. Most often than not, it's culturally important, you're learning something and it's way more green because, in theory, the show that you spent all this time making  is around for a year. 

0:17:41 - Ava
Thank you very much for answering our questions.

Part 2
0:17:51
Welcome back to Part 2. In the next episode, we're going to be learning about skeletons we see in museums. They might be dinosaurs or giant whales.

Ava, you know that in living things, bones are held together with muscle, cartilage, ligaments and skin. 

How do skeletons we see in museums stay together? Why don't they fall apart? 

People who are specially trained, we call them skeleton articulators, put the bones together.

 How do they do that? 

They use metal frames, wires, pins, and cables to make an animal look like it did when it was alive. These frames and pins act like the ligaments that hold bones together. 

Let's say someone finds a dinosaur. How do they know what bones go where?

 In the case of dinosaurs, paleontologists, those are scientists that study dinosaurs, know what the different bones look like and where they go.

 But it's still like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle. And sometimes there are pieces missing. 

What happens when a bone is missing? 

Great question. They'll make a bone that looks like the one that's not there. 
If you want to see some articulated skeletons, you can find photos at  timetowonderpodcast.com. These photos come from our series of books called Time to Wonder; A kid's guide to BC's regional museums. The books are a great way to learn about the history of British Columbia before and after settlement. They're also a great guide for when you're traveling in the province or if you're an arm chair traveler from home. All three volumes are available online or from your local bookstore. 
On the website, we've included a photo of a replica 60,000 year old walrus skull found on Qualicum beach on Vancouver Island. She's been named Rosie. In the photo you can see light coloured areas, pieces that were missing from the skull and created to make the skull complete. 
The original skull and most of the walrus's bones are kept in the Museum of Nature in Ottawa. 
Hey, that's where I used to go to when I was a kid.
 Next time you go back, you'll have to visit Rosie. 
In the Qulaicum Beach Museum you can see a real piece of Rosie's rib and a photograph of Rosie's skeleton.
Saahlinda Navy, the museum of Haida Gwaii has a fossilized walrus skull from about 42,000 years ago. Fossilized means it was covered with sediment that turned it into something that kinda looks like stone. Only the tasks and facial bones are left. When you look at the website you can see the differences in the two photos. 
Are there recent skeletons in museums or just old ones? 
It depends on the museum. At the Whale Interpretive Centre in Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island, you can see articulated skeletons of marine mammals that are very new, some as recent as 2021. 
You can hear of the people who have articulated many of the marine mammals for the Whale Interpretive Centre on our next episode.
Wow that's very cool. 
Thanks again to today's guests. Our music was written by Kevin McLeod and is licensed under Creative Commons. For complete information, see our blog post at timetowonderpodcast.com. 
For more information on this episode, visit timetowonderpodcast.com. A special thank you to our producer, Danny Reindeau. Thank you Danny. 
If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe. Remember, next time you go to museum, look, listen and wonder.