Cindy,
 
Sounds like you have done an exemplary job involving your stakeholders. Your
designers may need to develop a better framework for their questions about
the past 40 years. From your description, the last four decades seem to lack
thematic focus and have devolved into generalities, rather than
particularities. That can eviscerate an interpretive exhibit. One approach
to develop focus is to ask your advisory committees and historians what they
think are the most important trends, events, or people in the last 40 years.
You might also survey your target audiences, not necessarily the same thing
as your stakeholder committees. What has made Mississippi distinctive in the
past 40 years? What are the commonalities about living in Mississippi, as
well as the things that separate people? What has happened in the past 40
years to change, reinforce, or modify sense of place in
Mississippi--environmentally or socially?  You could approach the remainder
of the exhibit by using the traditional anthropological investigative
categories of work, family, and community. Individual people should be
integral to all of these stories, and opportunities for oral history are
abundant when the recent past is the subject.
 
As others have suggested, doing rotating temporary exhibits in this space,
focusing on different communities or themes, is also a good approach and the
process of changing exhibits will help you build a collection and develop
historical resources for the recent past.
 
Good luck.
 
Tom
 
Tom Woods, Ph.D.
President, Making Sense of Place, Inc.
1521 Grandview Ave.
Oconomowoc, WI 53066
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Phone: 262-569-1698
Fax: same

 

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