When Virginia Was the Wild West

When exhibitors occasionally change up the conventional elements in museum installations—objects, graphics, captions, and texts—the unpredictable result can lay bear something startlingly unexpected about the subliminal process by which people learn by looking. From there, such revelations sometimes show scholars new ways to understand an often unrecorded past. This illustrated talk will revisit a 1999 exhibition at Colonial Williamsburg called “1699––When Virginia Was The Wild West.” The objects featured in the show were mostly archaeological artifacts—small, broken, and often unrecognizable by visitors. The graphics relied on giant, comic book pages drawn by an artist who had worked on Spiderman, Batman, and Captain America.   Finally, the text (such as it was) was captured in cartoon “balloons” spoken by the comic book characters. This topsy-turvy amalgam of unusual exhibition elements provoked various reactions from groups of people who brought very different learning styles to the experience—the historian-organizers themselves, the general public to whom the exhibition was pitched, and finally a number of professional historians who reviewed the show. This talk will draw on planning documents, an outside consultant’s audience survey, and several scholarly reviews to explore how different audiences use exhibitions to create their own understandings of the past.