The Exhibit Developer’s Bible

This week, I was lucky enough to spend time revisiting a book that holds a place of honor on my shelf, the second edition of Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach by Beverly Serrell. I first picked it up for a class reading in undergrad. Since then, I’ve occasionally flipped through on a quest to find the handy-dandy interpretative labels chart and feel my heart sink when I see how few words I should aim for in an introductory, group, or caption label.

Reading through three of its chapters again, I definitely understand why many museum professionals call it “the Bible.” It is a treasure trove of a resource, pulling together personal experience, visitor studies research, and examples from museums of every kind, including even roadside panels like the ones I, without fail, made my parents stop at on road trips during my childhood.

Serrell’s exhibit development and label writing tips and tricks seem even more relevant to me now as I am working on building an exhibit for my practicum class (through the University of Missouri – St. Louis’s museum studies program) at the National Blues Museum in Downtown St. Louis. Usually, the class consists of a team of at least 10, but this semester it is only four other women from my cohort and I tackling the stories of traveling blues musicians in one relatively small exhibit space.

Collectively, we experienced the challenges of creating a big idea that, in Serrell’s words, is “owned” by every stakeholder, including those outside of the immediate team. In our case, we also had to bring the museum’s interim director and our advisory team, members of the local blues community, on board. Like Serrell advocates, our big idea development process was evolutionary, not static. It changed as our priorities changed, as we came across new information and considered the topic from different angles.

In her chapter on interpretative labels, Serrell quotes from Lisa Cron’s work Wired for Story: The Writers’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence:

“All story is emotion based – if we’re not feeling, we’re not reading.”

In Exhibit Labels on page 23

From the beginning, our advisory board stressed the importance of telling an emotional story, because their experience of the Blues and of travel during the Jim Crow era was fundamentally emotional. In the exhibit, we’re talking about the experiences of black travelers in general through the individual stories of different musicians. If a history museum’s job is to make history come to life, emotion rests at the cornerstone of that effort.

I particularly loved Serrell’s call to “let your labels be jumping-off places for people’s imaginations. Let them fill in many more words and feelings” (26). As much as it often pains me to cut out text that I’ve written, this quote serves as a reminder that I shouldn’t get in the visitors way. Sometimes, emotion comes from what is left unsaid – what the visitor creates in their mental picture.

Re-reading this excerpt from my personal Bible could not have been more timely as this week, I am working on finalizing all of the practicum exhibit’s text. Serrell implores us, as label-writers and exhibit developers, to keep the rich diversity of audiences that walk through a museum at the forefront of our minds. We write to enhance their experience , to facilitate their learning and spark curiosity, not to make ourselves look clever or cast ourselves as experts.

With this task ahead of me, I look forward to flipping through Serrell’s text as I go, making difficult cuts and sharpening language. Hopefully, we’ll end up with an exhibit that would make her proud, and more importantly, engages and excites visitors.