Interior Museum Celebrates Platinum Anniversary: 70 Years of Interpreting History, Progress
By Deborah Wallis Wurdinger, museum technician, U.S. Department of the Interior Museum, DOI-U, NBC, OS
Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior Museum.
U.S. Department of the Interior Museum preparators assemble a model of the new Interior Museum in 1935 for a visual study of the area, elevation, exhibit, and space arrangement. The model’s scale is one half-inch equals one foot.
Seventy years ago, the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum opened its doors. It was the brainchild of Secretary Harold
Ickes, who believed the Department of the Interior had an identity problem due
in part to its name. Ickes’s goal for
the museum was to educate and present the story of the department and to help
the American taxpayer understand its important work.
To help start the museum, the Public Works Administration
allotted $100,000 for the museum but required the Interior Department set aside
half for staff salaries. In March 1935,
Ickes appointed Carl Russell, from National Park Services’ museum division, to
head the museum committee, charging him exhibit design, preparation, and
installation. Russell gathered a staff of curators, model makers, artists,
sculptors and preparators to begin work on the museum in mid-1935.
The construction in 1935 of a new building for the
department provided available space for the museum Ickes had founded. The
building’s architect set aside one entire wing on the first floor, 11,750
square feet, near the main entrance for the museum. However, the space, a long, narrow wing with
low ceilings and several load-bearing columns, was more suitable for offices. To
make the space functional, the museum staff used walls to divide it into
galleries and alcoves. They also added cove lighting above the exhibit cases to
make the gallery spaces feel lighter and more airy.
The staff also configured a floor plan that gave each of the
department’s bureaus a gallery to display exhibits on its history and current
projects. Museum curators worked with
each bureau to develop these exhibit story lines, illustrating them with
objects, photographs, maps, watercolors, drawings and interpretative panels. The museum staff also installed zinc
silhouettes in some of the lighting covers to further illustrate the work and
mission of the department.
Story in Miniature:
the Museum’s Dioramas
After a review of the museum’s collections, the museum’s
exhibit designers determined that dioramas would provide visually stimulating illustrations
for the visitors. A diorama is a
miniature group depicting an event or activity with the viewer looking through
a window-like opening to view the scene.
Artists achieve depth and perspective in dioramas by directing special
lighting through tilted glass and painting curved back walls that blend into
three-dimensional objects.
Construction of the dioramas started in 1935 at the National
Park Service Field Laboratory in Morristown,
N.J., which employed the period’s
most skilled diorama artists. Though numerous artists worked on each diorama, the
principal artist was superintendent Ned J. Burns, a master in creating dioramas. Upon completing the dioramas, the field
laboratory installed 11 large and numerous small dioramas in the museum in July
1937 to illustrate its exhibits.
The “Coal Mine Explosion” diorama was the first diorama to
take its place in the museum’s galleries.
Ralph Lewis of the National Park Service oversaw the design for the
Bureau of Mines exhibits. They illustrated the mine disasters that led to the
formation of the Bureau of Mines’ work to develop safety equipment. The “Coal Mine Explosion” diorama depicts the
heroic efforts of a recovery team to save workers who were trapped underground
when a mine exploded. The designers of the diorama modeled it on the 1929
Kinloch Mine explosion in West
Virginia. To ensure authenticity, they secured more
than 40 photographs of the Kinloch Mine and the accident. Designers obtained
the specifications of the recovery workers’ equipment and even gathered every
detail of the police officer’s uniform, including a fabric sample. When Congress abolished the Bureau of Mines
in March of 1996, the museum replaced the bureau’s exhibits with other
exhibitions. However, the museum did
retain one alcove of its original Bureau of Mines exhibits. There the mine
diorama serves as a record of the defunct bureau and as a time capsule of the
original museum exhibits from 1938.
To enhance the National Park Service exhibits, curators used
small dioramas illustrating the uses of the parks. For the diorama “Winter Use of the National
Parks,” Russell R. Fiore and Stuart Cuthbertson featured two skiers coming down
a mountainside with Yosemite in the
background. Fiore was an accomplished
sculptor who had exhibited his works with the National Academy of Design
Architectural League of New York and the Corcoran Art Gallery. He created many of the diorama figures and
sculptures the museum featured in the exhibit cases.
The Museum’s
Collections
The collections of the Interior Museum
include more than 6,000 objects of art; photography; minerals; and human-culture,
archaeological, and natural-history specimens.
The museum documents, preserves and manages these objects in ways to
enhance their long-term availability.
The museum uses the collections to interpret the history and to promote
understanding of the department and its activities. While doing so, it educates
the public, as well as employees, on the rich and varied work of the
department’s many bureaus.
Following the formation of the museum committee in 1935,
Ickes ordered the first purchase for the collections in 1936 from Helen Gibson
of San Francisco. The collection consisted of approximately 400
Native American artifacts and made up the majority of the museum’s exhibits for
the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The museum
has lent items from the collection to numerous organizations to help further
the understanding of Native American culture.
The museum made more purchases and received donations of collections in
the following years, including donations from photographer Ansel Adams and the
U.S. Congress.
Adams had a love of the
outdoors, and it shows in his magnificent photography. Ickes hired Adams to photograph the National
Parks, but the project ended abruptly with the U.S. entrance into World War
II. Adams
remained connected to the department and, due to this, had a special
relationship with many of the secretaries of Interior during his lifetime. During his career, he experimented with
photographic screens and only made 13 of them.
Ickes purchased one of Ansel’s screens, “Leaves, Mills
College, Oakland, CA,” in the late 1930s for his office and
later gave it to the museum for its collection.
In 1968, Adams presented the screen “Fresh Snow, Yosemite
Valley, CA” to Secretary
Stewart Udall as a gift to the department, making it a part of the museum’s
collection as well.
The painter Thomas Moran accompanied the Powell survey of
the Colorado River in 1873 and the Hayden’s survey of the Yellowstone
region in 1871. Following those
explorations, he painted “The Chasm of the Colorado”
and “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.” In 1872, Moran’s “The Grand Canyon of the
Yellowstone” had such influence on the U.S. Congress that it inspired them to
set aside land for the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. Congress purchased both paintings, which show
the grandeur and beauty of the West, from Moran and exhibited them in the U.S.
Capitol. In 1950, Congress transferred the paintings to the Interior
Department. They hung there until 1968 when the museum lent them to the
Smithsonian’s American Art Museum Renwick Gallery where they are on exhibit
today.
After three years of hard work, the museum opened on March
8, 1938, with 11 dioramas; 12 large wall maps; 100 models; and numerous
paintings, transparencies, charts, and specimens in 95 exhibits. Ickes held a formal invitation-only opening
party on the 89th anniversary of the department. Senators, artist William Henry Jackson, top
museum professionals, Interior Department officials and all of the National
Park Service staff who worked on the museum attended. The museum opened to the public the next day
and was an immediate success, with 3,000 to 4,000 people visiting the museum
monthly.
The National Park Service staffed the museum and cared for
the collection until 1939 when the department placed the museum under the
management of the Office of the Secretary.
For the past 70 years, the bureaus have lent and donated hundreds of
objects to the museum for exhibitions and collections. These pieces of history have helped the museum
record and enhance the vital connections between the people, places, and events
relevant to the department.
Through the years, the Interior
Museum continued to be popular among
visitors and remained open during World War II when many museums in Washington, D.C.,
had to close. Since its inception, the museum
has continued to be a communicator to the public, telling the Interior
Department’s story, past, present, and future.
In 1997, a departmental task force concluded that the Interior Museum was essential for preserving the
history of the department and for interpreting its current activities. However, the task force felt that the focus
should shift from bureau-specific galleries to exhibits on the department’s
mission and the history of the building.
While the Interior
Museum maintains many of
the original exhibits, it has updated others to include the current goals and
projects of the department.
Six years later, the National Business
Center moved the Interior
Museum under the management of the
Department of the Interior
University. Innovative
programs and exhibitions, which the Chicago Tribune, Town and Country Magazine,
C-SPAN, and others have covered, have characterized this chapter of the
museum’s life. Its current exhibition, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: America Responds,” opened on Veterans Day and
was featured on major broadcast and cable television news outlets.
Related Link:
U.S. Department of the Interior Museum
http://www.doi.gov/interiormuseum/