How to tell stories with Objects: Personal Museums and the making of meaning in exhibition design

Perhaps you would like to share objects and the stories about them with friends and family who are not nearby?

Maybe you work for a small organization and would like to do some in house displays about the history of your company or a special event?

Don't think you have the "eye" to do it?

Come and join this skillshare workshop where you will learn the foundational priniciples of creating exhibitions and learn about the history of placing objects on display as both an educational and leisure activity.

In this workshop you will brainstorm ideas, develop stories, and organize a sequence of images and texts into a coherent online exhibition. The online exhbition can contain as many objects as you like.  You will learn to format labels as museums do and create informational texts combined with images.

You will also be introduced to the online application known as museumbox which allows users to collect objects and arrange the objects in specific order to tell a story.

What you will take away

In this course you will achieve several objectives:

1. You will be the curator and select objects that you wish to display
2. You will then be given guidelines and tools to coax out the story you wish to tell about the object
3. You will then organize the objects in a sequence that tells a personal story
4. You will edit your work for clarity and length
5. You will have a finished product that you can print out for display and/or use to develop a full-scale exhibit

Prerequisites

Everyone can join.

However this course is especially relevant to those involved in the non for profit sector who wish to develop exhbiitions in house but don't want to spend tons of money on hiring a designer for a small to medium scale project. 

There are no prerequisites other than a love of art, culture and history or even just having some curiosity about the subject.    

Collectors and educators are encouraged to sign up!

With that said it would be helpful to have a digital camera, a laptop, or access to a desktop computer with the ability to run flash driven media files. 

A pair of headphones, notebooks, pens and paper are also helpful, but not necessary.

You are the connoisseur!

This course is first and foremost meant to be fun! 

To do this we must keep it simple and personal.

To this point, please keep in mind  that the first museums were not the impressively large places we think of today.  The origin of the first museums were personal collections or cabinets des curiosite filled with objects collected by an individual or group.  

Today  we call the stuff that museums collect, say like the Hope Diamond or the first Teddy Bear ever made, or even Dorothy's ruby red slippers from the Wizard of Oz, primary objects.  The importance of museums rests primarily on the importance given to these primary objects.  

About Abdul Michael

Abdul is an arts and museum education curriculum developer and learning facilitator based in Chicago, IL.  Abdul earned his BA in African and African American Studies from the University of Michigan in 1990 and completed his MA in Museum Professions focusing on museum education in 2003 from Seton Hall.  Abdul specializes in promoting cross-cultural awareness and opening up dialog regarding issues of race, class and representation in the fine arts and popular culture.

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Examples of Instructional Writing