Role Call: Creating an Exhibit to Honor Utah Women
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The year 2020 marks the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ensuring that the right to vote cannot be restricted on the basis of sex. Inspired by this anniversary, we began to think about an exhibition drawn from the collections of the Utah State Historical Society (USHS) that would highlight influential women in Utah’s history. Two small venues were available for the exhibition: the downtown Salt Lake City Public Library and the spotlight wall at the Rio Grande Depot, also in Salt Lake City. We tossed around ideas related to the exhibit’s theme and agreed on the title Role Call: Fearless Females in Utah History. While deliberating on possible titles, we began with a list of words that communicated ideas about the women we had been researching. Once we had a working list, the wordsmithing began and we hit on an idea: that this exhibition called out individuals like a teacher taking roll call in a classroom or a roll call vote in the Senate. Both examples connected to the ideas of the exhibition. It was easy to make the play on words—role instead of roll—because each of our subjects was a role model. I imagined these women standing proud and responding “Here!” as their names were called. We then conjured up the idea of lining up large portraits of each person across the top of the exhibition, as if they were in a roll call. As I began my research, I was struck by the individual stories of a number of women, such as Martha Hughes Cannon. The artifacts, photographs, artwork, and writings of these women showcased their courage, drive, and talent. Then came the hard part: finding objects in the historical society’s collections that were at once connected with the women under study, worthy of display, and supportive of telling their stories. What’s more, the objects had to fit in small cases and cabinets. At this point, I had to narrow down the list of exhibit subjects based on the materials available in our collections.
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