Exhibits That Teach
WHAT IS THE EXHIBITS THAT TEACH PROGRAM?
Exhibit at Clayton Middle School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Since 2000, the Center for Documentary Arts has built traveling exhibits for use in Utah’s public schools. “Exhibits That Teach” displays are designed for use by K-12 students and offer visual portals to the larger world. Exhibits enable students and teachers to explore and discuss such critical contemporary issues as: Immigration and New Refugees, Discrimination and Racism, Cultural Diversity and Indigenous Cultures, Cross Cultural Communication, Resolving Conflict Nonviolently, and Environmental Awareness. CDA exhibits are designed to help educators and students enhance their understanding of Utah’s history, diversity, cultures, and environment.
WHAT DOES A PARTICIPATING SCHOOL RECEIVE?
- Detail from the Ceremonies exhibit in the Salt Lake City library.
CDA exhibits consist of museum quality, freestanding displays that can be contoured to fit different school spaces, including libraries, entryways, and media centers. Exhibits are accompanied by educational material produced by CDA staff and experienced Utah educators to help students engage with exhibit content. This material is introduced to schools at the beginning of a residency and usually includes a K-12 curriculum guide, an exhibit catalogue or brochure, as well as films that help students and teachers explore exhibit content. In instances where a school faces achievement gap challenges, CDA is available to work with faculty to create artist-in residence programs designed to address issues specific to that school.
EXHIBITS THAT ARE AVAILABLE
Currently four exhibits are available for school use:
Faces and Voices of Refugee Youth
Faces and Voices of Refugee Youth exhibit setup in Salt Lake County.
Faces and Voices of Refugee Youth is an exhibit of intimate portraits and touching interviews with youth who have endured unimaginable circumstances.
Jeremiah Atem tells of the enduring hope that kept him alive during his escape from religious persecution in the Sudan. Muna Ali, born in Somalia, describes the reality of being “homeless.” “Even though we have a place to live,” the teen states, “in our hearts we don¹t have a home; there is nowhere to go back to.”
Between 1994 and 1999, an estimated 1,850 youth, given refugee status by the U.S. Government, migrated to Utah from approximately twenty-two different countries in six geographical regions. This exhibit was created to tell their stories, so their acculturation into Utah life will not be made more difficult by a lack of tolerance and understanding.
Faces and Voices of Refugee Youth exhibit at Murray High School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Faces and Voices of Refugee Youth was awarded the Utah Education Association’s 2002 Charles E. Bennett Award for Human and Civil Rights and the 2003 National Education Association’s Applegate-Dorros Award for Peace and International Understanding. The exhibit contains 30 images with extensive wall text, which reveals the children’s flight from persecution; their finding temporary haven in refugee camps; and their efforts to acculturate into Utah’s educational environment. The exhibit is accompanied by a 62-page catalogue; curriculum guides for students in grades K-6 and 7-12; and a 30-minute film also called “Faces and Voice of Refugee Youth,” produced by Utah’s PBS affiliate KUED.
Sacred Images: A Vision of Utah’s Rock Art
Rock Art panel details.
Utah is nationally renowned for its spectacular landscapes. Less recognized are the state’s remarkable pictographs and petroglyphs, which convey the art of its pre-historic and historic native communities. Reaching back 6,000 years before the present, these remarkable images reveal the sensibilities of Utah’s first settlers and are among our nation’s oldest and most precious cultural artifacts.
Sacred Images: A Vision of Utah’s Rock Art brings together the documentary visions of Utah wilderness photographers Craig Law, John Telford, and Tom Till; the insights of Utah artist and art historian David Sucec; and the storytelling skills of Hopi, Paiute, Northern Ute, White Mesa Ute, and Northwest Shoshone people to convey the meaning and significance of Utah’s rock art.
Detail from the Peace Pipe panel. Photo by Craig Law.
The exhibit contains 45 color photographs and extensive wall text and is accompanied by a 112-page catalogue, available through the Canyonlands Natural History Association; a K-12 curriculum guide, accessible on the UEN website here and a 30-minute long film, produced by CDA, that features four easy lessons for art teachers wishing to use these images to inspire contemporary student art work.
“Sacred Images: A Vision of Native American Rock Art” Artists-in Residence program
Lee Madrid, forefront, is an artist-in-residence.
Ceremonies: A Tale Of Sister Cities
The Ceremonies exhibit on display at the downtown Salt Lake City Public Library.
“If we are going to take advantage of the assumption that all people want peace, then the problem is for people to get together and to leap governments—if necessary to evade governments—to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other.” – President Dwight David Eisenhower
Ceremonies: A Tale of Sister Cities celebrates the 50 years of friendship between the people of Matsumoto, Japan and Salt Lake City, Utah. Comprised of many little stories, the exhibit conveys this relationship through interviews, letters, journals, and memoirs. Photos in the display were pieced together from archives and scrapbooks in both cities. Most of the photos are snapshots, personal items never intended for public display. Their presence reflects the grassroots nature of the cultural interactions they capture and the importance of ceremony in American relationships with the Japanese. As a society rich with ceremony, the Japanese help us to appreciate ceremony as a way to honor and perhaps transcend our mutual differences.
The Matsumoto Delegation and friends celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Sister City relationship between Salt Lake and Matsumoto, Japan.
Salt Lake’s sister city program developed from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “People to People” Initiative. Originating in the wake of World War Two and during the early years of the Cold War, this idea sought to affiliate international communities by encouraging “people to people” interactions at all levels of society. Leaders in Salt Lake City and Matsumoto embraced this dynamic concept and laid a foundation that allowed the affiliation to expand and sustain itself.
Developed by the talented young documentarian Ross Chambless, the exhibit introduces us to ordinary people who utilized relationships to repair the wounds of war. Exhibit panels are loosely based on movable Japanese shoji partitions, which are made with a layer of paper over a wood lattice screen. Shoji screens are traditionally used in Japanese homes to filter sunlight entering a room and to separate interior and exterior spaces. The exhibit comes with curriculum guide for grades 4-12 that can be accessed here as well as a content-rich, foldout brochure. Ceremonies offers a unique vehicle for the study of Japanese culture, Japanese American history, American and Utah history, and the subject of resolving conflict nonviolently.
Reawakened Beauty: Tillman Crane’s Jordan River Photograph
The Jordan River at the 2nd South crossing.
In densely populated Salt Lake Valley, it is easy to forget that nature exists around and amongst us. This exhibit and its educational material are intended to increase awareness of Salt Lake’s natural landscape, its history, and our place in it.
Specifically, the exhibit and catalogue provide an opportunity for students to derive a sense of place—or what it is like to more consciously and knowingly inhabit a specific place—by knowing more about its human history, its ecology, and its environmental challenges.
- Railroad tracks cross the Jordan River.
Reawakened Beauty: Tillman Crane’s Jordan River Photographs is a photography exhibit displayed on nine mural-sized panels accompanied by didactic text that explores the past, present, and future of Utah’s Jordan River. Images and text are printed on fabric and displayed on three 14 ‘ wide by 7 ‘ high moveable panels. The exhibit uses images from photographer Tillman Cranes’ original 30 platinum print show at the Salt Lake Art Center.
A 30-page catalogue accompanies the exhibit. Designed as an accordion book, one side of the catalogue contains Crane’s images of the river and celebrates his encountering and discovering the river. The other side has a hand-drawn map of the river; illustrations of animals, birds, and vegetation found on the river; and essays written by former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson and Dr. Justina Parson-Bernstein, historian and former executive director of TreeUtah, that describe the river’s human and natural history.
- The Jordan River exhibit.
Overall, the exhibit acts as an entry point to the river, and the catalogue is a guide to students and teachers who want to get to know the river more deeply. Participating schools receive copies of the catalogue and will be able to keep them after the exhibit leaves to support their environmental studies.
HOW CAN YOUR SCHOOL PARTICIPATE?
To lease an exhibit for up to one month—the expected time frame for a school to engage with an exhibit’s content—please contact Kent Miles, CDA Coordinator of Exhibits and Collections, or Doris Mason, CDA Executive Assistant. They can be reached here and here or at 801-355-3903. Since schools book exhibits months in advance, it is best to call early in the school year. Public schools are not required to pay a leasing fee, but are asked to cover a one-time $185.00 charge to offset the cost of mounting and dismantling an exhibit.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TEACHERS
CDA also provides professional development classes for teachers seeking to explore the lives and cultures of Utah’s diverse peoples and to develop lesson plans and teaching skills that improve their classroom effectiveness. We recently completed the first phase of a multicultural website that showcases the accomplishments of this program and is intended to support teachers. The site is available here and contains lesson plans and research projects produced over the past seven years by teachers in CDA’s “Multiculturalism and Storytelling” classes.
HOW ARE TRAVELING EXHIBITS EVALUATED?
CDA traveling exhibits take several years to research, design, and produce. Each exhibit is designed professionally and combines the work of photographers, filmmakers, writers, researchers, and educational consultants to create an “exhibit package.” After an exhibit is built, we continue to refine it through an on-going, school-based evaluation program that helps us monitor the display’s impact and challenges. We consequently require participating schools to complete an evaluation form. These evaluations provide CDA the critical, up-to-date feedback needed to provide Utah’s students with effective, relevant, and exciting exhibits.
How to Bring an Exhibit to your School
To lease an exhibit for your school for up to one month, please contact Kent Miles, CDA Coordinator of Exhibits and Collections, or Doris Mason, CDA Executive Assistant. They can be reached at Kent@CDAUtah.org and Doris@CDAUtah.org or at 801-355-3903. Since most schools book exhibits many months in advance, it is best to call early in the school year to arrange an exhibit lease.
