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Exhibition Review
"Blue Ridge Parkway, America's Favorite Journey." Blue Ridge Parkway Visitor Center, Asheville, N.C. http://www.nps.gov/blri/.
Permanent exhibition, opened 2008. Patty Wissinger, former chief of interpretation and education, Blue Ridge Parkway; Peter Givens, interpretive specialist, Blue Ridge Parkway; Ann Childress, chief of interpretation and education, Blue Ridge Parkway; Van Sickle & Rolleri, Ltd., exhibition design firm; Lord bbbbck and Sargent, building design firm.
"Within a Day's Drive of Millions." Harry F. Byrd Visitor Center, Shenandoah National Park, Big Meadows, Va. http://www.nps.gov/shen/.
Permanent exhibition, opened 2007. 2,960 sq. ft. Karen A. Michaud, director and chief of interpretation and education; Howard+Revis Design Services, exhibition design firm; Color-Ad, Inc., exhibit fabricators; NPS Harpers Ferry Center, interpretive design center.
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| Two exhibits recently installed at national parks in the southern Appalachian Mountains illustrate a spectrum of possibilities for how historical and cultural interpretation get done within the National Park Service (NPS). Although the histories of Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway share many common elements, the two exhibits and the processes by which they were developed are starkly different. Both processes, however, illustrate that history-telling in the national parks is usually influenced by the same politics that have shaped the parks' histories. In the case of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a key dynamic from the 1930s onward has been the not-always-harmonious interaction between NPS and the regional tourism industry. Shenandoah National Park's early history was shaped substantially by the 1930s Park Service's decision to forcibly remove all five hundred resident families from within the park's boundary. Descendents of aggrieved families have for years pressured the park to acknowledge their perspective.1 |
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In the case of the Parkway, the tourism industry—supporters of which were the Parkway's earliest boosters—has perennially affected a wide range of Parkway policies and decisions, and that influence is still very evident in this exhibit. At Shenandoah, however, it was not until relatively recently that the descendents' voices were seriously heard, as they clearly were in creating this exhibit. Additionally, the abbreviated, collaborative, and, at times, frenetic process that produced a new exhibit in a $9 million, 13,000 square-foot Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)–certified building at Hemphill Knob near the Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, was quite unlike the lengthy, orderly, sustained, carefully focused, park-controlled process that led to the Shenandoah National Park exhibit, housed in an older existing structure. |
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There had been talk for years about building some type of Parkway-related facility at Hemphill Knob, but no firm plans emerged until 2004, when western North Carolina's longtime Republican representative Charles Taylor suddenly procured federal funds for what he insisted must be fashioned as a "destination center" designed to spur economic development and tourism.2 |
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Competition among regional commercial and nonprofit organizations for space in the building and (hence) a voice in designing the exhibit was intense.3 An early design actually allocated most of the space to commercial marketing purposes. Exhibit space was minimal. Indeed, early on it was unclear whether Blue Ridge Parkway would be involved at all in conceptualizing and creating the exhibit. Once they became involved, the Parkway staff members pressed to reconfigure and reallocate space to integrate commercial, educational, and exhibit functions—with the positive result that exhibit space enlarged considerably. |
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