The Kodiak History Museum has made a selection for their temporary exhibit program after a call to the public for ideas. The program is part of an ongoing effort to get the community involved in what their museum looks like.
While the Museum is still in the early stage of planning the exhibit and has yet to announce the selection, it may be revealed as soon as Crab Fest weekend.
The call for entries closed on May 1st. According to museum curator Lynn Walker, the model allows for otherwise unexplored topics to be housed into the museum.
“Our temporary exhibit model is based in social justice exhibits, and the kind of idea of co-creating exhibits with community partners. So that our exhibits can be of Kodiak, by members of the Kodiak community, and for all of us to enjoy, not just museum staff picking a topic and deciding to do an exhibit,” Walker said.
Margaret Greutert, collections manager for the museum, says that the temporary exhibit program also gives the museum the opportunity to examine and display modern events.
“Let’s just take COVID, for example, collecting those experiences and memories as they’re fresh, 50 years down the line when we want to show those to our kids, it’s just so much more accurate and interesting. And so that’s what we’re trying to do here is foster that environment, kind of a proactive approach to collecting history,” Greutert said.
The museum recently wrapped up its Hunt, Fish, Gather, Grow exhibit, which explored food sustainability and subsistence gathering in Kodiak. The exhibit was proposed by the Kodiak Harvest Food Cooperative and Bounty Farms.
That exhibit was succeeded shortly after by the Kodiak Collective, an art exhibit of artworks and writing by Sarah Loewen-Danelski and Natasha Zahn Pristas. The new temporary exhibit is slated to be installed in August.
According to Walker, the end goal is to take the museum out of the role of exhibit selection, and eventually have a community advisory body select the topics of the exhibit. Museum staff would then design the exhibit.