Update: traveling exhibit on Alabama and the Holocaust

Birmingham Jewish leader Ike Abelson lead the Zionist movement in his city.

Sometimes the outline needs adjusting.

When Dan Puckett and I outlined the Alabama and the Holocaust exhibit, sponsored by the State of Alabama, we were sure that there would be 20 different panels. But what’s the saying about the best-laid plans?

There were other elements in our boilerplate. We wanted each panel to be about 350 words and each contain copious imagery. (It’s the same with stationary exhibits, right? You lead with the visual, that is, images and artifacts, and then entice visitors to read the didactic text.)

Those two parameters were like grinding gears. Twenty panels quickly turned into 21. That’s because one panel, entitled Victory and Liberation, ballooned to about 700 words. There was no information we could omit. None.

So we pivoted. That was the reasonable thing to do.

Exhibit panels do not need to devolve into book pages on walls. When a topic needs to be further developed, there’s programming and there’s your bibliography. The books we read might become the books the visitor eventually reads, too. As I’ve heard it put, the job of an exhibit isn’t to cover but to uncover.

So now we’re at 21 panels. That’s ok. I’m sure the various configurations we envisioned will still work with some tweaking.