The Last Drop of Chicken Soup
Performance Counts: January 2017
The time has come. On Tuesday, January 17, the doors to the Feldman gallery will remain closed, even when the Museum opens at 10 AM, so that our ambitious exhibit, Beyond Chicken Soup: Jews & Medicine in America, can make way for the next occupant of the 2000 square foot space. It will also need to be made ready for its next venue, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Lest you think this is merely a matter of packing a box or two and heading to Cleveland, we thought we’d review some of the numbers of where Beyond Chicken Soup has been and what it takes to get it to the next step.
The exhibition consists of 229 artifacts, of which, 82 are on loan from other institutions or individuals. The artifacts from the JMM collection will be lovingly returned to their homes in our collections, until it is time for them to be meticulously packed for travel. Some of the materials on loan will be returned to their owners only to be re-borrowed. A conservator from the National Library of Israel will be traveling 6000 miles to oversee the removal of 8 volumes on loan from NLI. She will hand-carry her precious cargo, originally collected by Dr. Harry Friedenwald, the 6000 miles back to Israel. These volumes, while an important and impressive part of the exhibition, are too fragile to go on tour. Instead, we have hired an expert book binder to spend approximately 70 hours creating facsimiles of each of them. The facsimile copies will be created precisely to mimic the original volumes, down to the way they sit in their cradles.
Beyond Chicken Soup boasts 25 cases, 122 panels and 131 captions that will all need to be crated or palletized for storage and eventually to travel the 364 miles to the Maltz Museum of Jewish History. There are 10 screens (5 TVs, 3 touchscreen monitors and 2 iPad tablets), 8 hands-on activities, and 3 audio loops from oral histories. The technology will require its own special treatment as it makes ready for its new home. There is precisely one “slice” of a real ambulance with working lights that will need to be removed from the wall and prepped for shipping. Additionally, there are 26 images or quotes that are applied directly to the wall. These will need to be re-printed for each new venue at which the exhibition appears.
We anticipate that the deinstallation will take somewhere in the vicinity of 200 to 250 man-hours to complete. That will involve everything from the meticulous, white-gloved work of removing artifacts from their mounts to the dirty and dusty job of sledgehammering the walls that were created expressly for the exhibition. It will also involve a lot of cleaning, patching and painting to make the gallery ready for our next exhibition, Remembering Auschwitz: History, Holocaust, Humanity.
Once the dust has settled and the artifacts, furniture, technology, and informational panels make their 364-mile-journey, if Beyond Chicken Soup’s run here is any indication, the Maltz Museum of Jewish History can anticipate 4,749 total visitors, including 1,401 students and teachers, and 791 adults through scheduled groups. Of course, we had the help of more than 25 public programs we hosted while the exhibition was mounted.
If you haven’t seen this one-of-a-kind exhibition, yet, don’t wait! You have only 2 more days to see it here in Baltimore (this Sunday and Monday).