Zoology senior Jennifer Ramsey, left, and zoology junior Anna Kilbourn look at art crafted from recycled materials while setting up an exhibit called “Going Spartan Green” Monday morning at the Union. “Going Spartan Green” is their final project for Arts and Letters 498, Learning in Museums, and was displayed Monday and Tuesday in the Union.
Students in associate horticulture professor Norm Lownds’ “Learning in Museums” class typically spend their semester creating an exhibit geared toward middle school students or younger audiences. But this year, they decided to create something new — a museum exhibit designed for the college crowd.
The “Going Spartan Green” exhibit, which ran all day Monday and Tuesday in the Union lobby, was the final project after an entire semester of planning for the students.
The idea for the project came earlier this semester when a student in Lownds’ class proposed the idea of creating an exhibit for museum patrons ages 18 to 24, a group typically underserved by museums.
The student questioned the last time he had gone into a museum and had it set up to his tastes and preferences, said Lownds, who also is curator of the Michigan 4-H Children’s Garden.
When it comes to planning a museum, most resources for exhibit-planning focus on designing for children’s museums or general audiences, he said.
“Once we decided on an audience, we decided to focus on the specific needs of that audience,” said Katrina Daniels, an art history and visual culture senior. “College students don’t have a lot of time or money, so we had to show them how to do this affordably.”
Even museums on campus aren’t designed for the students who visit them, Lownds said. Instead, they cater to a more general audience.
Sara-Rose Kite, an art history and visual culture senior, said the theme of going green seemed to be an appealing concept for college students since many are focused on environmental issues.
“It’s hard to draw in college kids as it is, let alone try to keep them there,” Kite said. “We pretty much tried to promote every aspect of being eco-friendly that we could.”
For the class, getting students interested in the exhibit involved giving away free T-shirts and seeds to grow trees — and keeping them there meant creating interesting things for them to see, such as a radio powered by an exercise bike.
“One of the big things was the bike. People could try it out, and see how much power it takes to make it run,” said Michael Hensley, an anthropology senior. “Plus, we saw that we had more people come over while the music was playing.”
Designing an exhibit that would appeal to college students meant a lot more work for his class, Lownds said, because college audiences are typically more demanding and harder to satisfy.
The exhibit also included an eco-chic dorm room outfitted with recycled storage crates and compact fluorescent lightbulbs in the desk lamps.
“We tried to make it so it would show that these products are available, and readily available at that,” Daniels said. “It doesn’t take a major life decision to become more eco-friendly.”
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