Preparing the Salyer House for the Education Program

The current exhibition, past/forward, at the Orangetown Museum, was successfully launched by holding an opening reception last week.

The show is on view on Tuesdays (10am - 2pm) and Sundays (1pm to 4pm) at the DePew House.

Even when the museum is all done with exhibition installation, there are more things to set up for various purposes.

For 3 days in next week, the museum is going to welcome 7th-grade students from South Orangetown Middle School.

The students are visiting the Salyer House on their field trip and the museum's will give them a tour and a history lecture on site.

Prior to this educational program for the students, we worked on setting up the gallery in the house this week.

To enrich the exhibit, we picked a mid-19th CE dress from the museum's collection and added it to the Salyer House's gallery.

This dress is made of cotton fabric with flower prints.
The rich design formed with plenty of fabric and elaborate details, such as a number of pintucks and puffy sleeves, were all created by hand stitches.

The piping work was beautifully done all over the dress as well.
This lovely dress has been well preserved by the donor and the museum's collection management.

We placed the dress with other historical materials in one of the galleries at the Salyer House.

This section of the exhibit is going to give the students an image of the style in a domestic scene in 19th century America.

As it was introduced here before, the Salyer house contains a variety of historical objects acquired from this area.
In addition to the house's Dutch architecture, pieces of furniture, tools, craft works, fine art objects and documents create the atmosphere of the old America.

The Salyer House is not currently open to the public, but it will be next week, only for the students' field trip program.
Everything is installed and ready for it.

The museum is going to welcome the students.
We hope they will enjoy the lecture and take as much as they can from their visit.

Exhibition "past/forward" on View

The new exhibition past/forward is starting this weekend at the Orangetown Museum in Orangeburg, NY.

Beginning with the opening reception on Saturday, May 7, the exhibit will be on view on Sundays (1pm-4pm) and Tuesdays (10am-2pm) until November 13, 2016.

All the installation is done, and the museum is ready to welcome all the visitors, finally.

The exhibition is going to showcase historical materials which were collected from the town of Orangetown. These fragments of history exhibited will tell the audience about the stories of this historic town.

The show is organized based on a theme "preservation" of the town history and importance of passing it on to the future.

Archeological objects excavated around the historical Seth's House which has been currently under restoration finally, will welcome visitors in the first gallery.

Beside introducing historical materials, the museum is taking a new approach to this show as a history museum of the town.

The exhibition is containing contemporary artworks by a young Dutch artist, Nynke Koster.

Her works were created by casting architectural parts. Fragments of history obtained from those historical architectures are made into works of art with a new material while they remain reflecting the exact shape of the architecture. Her interpretation of history will play an important role in the exhibition connecting the past and the future.

Her mold work of the Gates of Paradise (The Baptistery in Florence, Italy) will be shown being juxtaposed with the museum's historical collections in the gallery.

Preservation is not only about activities done by professional people at special cites. This great collection (hats and wedding attire) of Lanzilotti family tells preservation happens at home with our family memorabilia.

The museum also introduces the record of preservation of historical houses. The text and the video shows how these irreplaceable architectures.

For the preservation in the town couldn't have been made possible without tremendous effort by historians, the locals and organizations which are supporting this area's preservation activities.

One wall of this gallery is dedicated to those people. The exhibition celebrates the most significant 28 personnel/groups from them as the heroes of the town history.
Also, the film of the project This Place Matters conducted by one of the interns of the museum will be introduced here.

The documentary film This House Matters will be screened throughout the exhibition time. More visual information of the preservation happening in Rockland County will enrich the exhibition theme.

Behind the doors, plates and glasses are standing by for fresh cook food for the opening reception on May 7. I am looking forward to seeing the show launched with celebration.

The show is now all ready with effort by all staff and volunteer members, and great support by all the people concerned.

Please come to see the exhibition at the Orangetown Historical Museum and Archives.


Exhibition Information:
Orangetown Historical Museum and Archives (The DePew House)
196 Chief Bill Harris Way,
Orangeburg, NY 10962
(845)398-1302
OPEN  Sundays (1pm - 4pm), Tuesdays (10am - 2pm)

Work in Progress: Framing

It's been more than 2 months since I talked about the frames as my second post here.

Time always flies...

It already became time to place printed panels to all these empty frames.

All the printed and cut materials were delivered to the Orangetown Museum.
Each panel talks about each historian or organization which has played a significant role in preserving history of the Orangetown and passing it on to following generations.

Under the instruction of Ms. Weischowsky, who is one of the museum board members and also a professional framer, we attached the panels to these frames.

As always, I enjoyed this framing project which required manual labor. It was very interesting to operate a framing nailer which was a gun-like equipment to shoot a nail into a wooden frame to hold a panel.

After all, the empty frames are filled with texts and pictures.

This wall is going to introduce 28 heroes (historians and organizations) of the Orangetown history preservation in the coming exhibition, past/forward.

The exhibition will be open to public from May 7th - November 13th.

Work in Progress: Painting Wires

In addition to the label making work from the last post, I also enjoyed working on painting small things.

What I painted were these wires which are hanging objects on a gallery wall.

The wires are thin, however, their reflecting metallic color was standing out against the lavender wall.

So, I got the fun work of becoming a painter and coloring these thin wires, in order to make the exhibit look better♪

Beginning with masking the objects so I wouldn't paint them accidentally,,,

I applied some paint which the museum's engineer had prepared, on to each wire by using this little painting brush.

Since I had to be careful not to dribble the paint on the objects or the floor, and also working mostly on a stepladder required more caution,　it took me a while to finish all the wires, in spite of the size of the painting surface...
However, I again enjoyed this physical task at the museum :-)


Now, the wires are painted in the same color as the wall, and blending in with the gallery atmosphere.

Color difference on such thin wires seems very subtle, but it makes a big difference in viewers' eyes.
It was one of the important processes to prepare a gallery to make the best of the exhibit.


And,,, I did a quick retouch on to another wall as well.

The Orangetown Museum is preparing its gallery to welcome all the visitors to the exhibition "past/forward" in about 2 weeks.

Installation is coming toward the final stage.

Work in Progress: Label Making

It is very fortunate that I have a lot of opportunity to satisfy my enthusiasm for creation at the Orangetown Museum.

One of the projects I have been involved recently, was label making for the new exhibition.

I enjoyed this manufacturing work in the museum's studio, so let me introduce what I did with some pictures♪

One day, all the printed materials arrived at the studio. 

These pieces of paper were going to be attached on a wall as exhibition sources. 

With rulers and a pencil, the paper with print was marked so that it could have excess part cut off.

Getting rid of excess paper with a cutter...

Adjusting to the size of each cut material, another sheet of paper was prepared. This was a special sheet made of glue substance which would be melt by heat.  

Placing pairs of cut paper and glue sheet on a large foam board, so we could cut the board efficiently.

Then the board was cut into the size of each piece with this big cutter.

The set of the foamed board, the glue sheet and the print, were sandwiched by release paper (light blue paper in the picture), and gently and partially pressed by the heated iron. This process was for quasi-fixing, so the next step would be easily and precisely done.

This is the heating machine to finalize this gluing process. This horizontal version of trouser-presser-like machine was to give certain heat to the whole labels and glue the paper fully to the boards.

Each pre-glued material sandwiched with large release paper, was pressed and heated in the machine for about 30 seconds.

Cooling down the glued pieces in between the tabletop and an acrylic board so that they could be firmly done without crooking or containing air bubbles.  

Finally, the printed materials were attached on boards. After that, all the excess part was cut off and the edges were filed.

The labels we made this time were placed in one of the museum galleries, which will become a film screening room for the coming exhibition.

How these labels are attached on the wall?

It's a secret family recipe of the museum♪ ;-)

Mr. Geist, One of the Museum's Great Volunteer Members

Orangetowm Museum is a small non-for-profit museum which is run by the town.

The number of temporary employees is limited, however, the museum is always supported by many volunteers, local historians and interns like me :-)

Some volunteers come to the museum constantly, for example once a week, and help with various museum tasks contributing their skill and knowledge.

This gentleman, Mr. Geist, everybody calls him Jack, is one of the volunteer members.

(I love his smile♪)

In the town of the Orangetown, there is a lovely village called Grandview along the Hudson River.

Jack was born at one of the houses in Grandview in 1920. He grew up there and worked as the mayor of the village, while he has still been living in the same house where he was born 96 years ago.

As a gifted child who grew up in an artistic environment with a professional photographer (father) and a creative artist (mother), Jack also had a career as a graphic designer at Life Magazine and Time Magazine.

He experienced not only WWII but also the Great Depression.

Recently, we had a conversation about Prohibition during lunch time! He is a primary source of the modern history of America.

Regardless of his age, his memories and skill toward visual material are still very sharp!

He knows so many local people of the town in history. It is a great ability that he can tell who is who by observing black and white archival slides which tell us the old days of the town.

That is something nobody else but he can do. He is the living archive!

Jack is also very open minded and positive about learning new things.
(As you can see, he manages his smart phone too♪)

I like talking to him over lunch :-)
I just found that he liked "origami" so much and has been involved with creating New York's annual "Origami Holiday Tree."
Maybe I can talk with him about origami next time I see him♪

Like Jack, every museum activity is made possible by generous effort of people supporting us.
The museum always appreciates such a good connection to local people.

Work in Progress: Installation, Research and PR Tasks

As I always tell people for sure that the best thing for me to intern at the Orangetown Historical Museum and Archives, is that I can get involve with so many tasks of museum work.

Since the last post, we have installed many of the new panels in the gallery and all the archeological objects found around the Seth's House were nicely placed with temporary labels on a table.

More objects, for example this antique clock, to organize the exhibition are brought from the Salyer House.

This is the wall with multiple frames which I hung with my supervisor.
All the frames are now empty. They are waiting for the panels to be done by our printer and come back to each.

The stacked chairs are holding a digital screen which will introduce a lot of information to our visitors at the exhibit.
The work tools on a side are the sign of "work in progress"♪

While this installation work, I keep researching some more pieces from the museum acquisition and organizing information about them on the digital archive software.

They are men's hats donated by the same family as the fabulous female hats. I would like to talk about them in my some other post.

In addition to that, I have been working on making a PR list and news release to pitch to various media recently.

The Orangetown Historical Museum and Archives is a non-for-profit organization run by the town of Orangetown. The museum is not holding an exhibition for a commercial purpose but always willing to welcome people from both local areas and outside the region.

Thanks to the museum staff who always let me try working on multiple projects regardless of department boundaries, I have been working for the museum doing as much as I can :-)

I hope we will have a large attendance at the new exhibition♪