5 November 2024 - How in the World Did You Get to Sun Valley?
Exhibit Receives 2024 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for Exhibition Excellence
Like many places in the American West, it is not easy to get to Sun Valley. It sits in the Rocky Mountains in the middle of Idaho, north of a rugged lava rock plain and south of multiple wilderness areas. Yet people do get here – from around the world. It is a common icebreaker question when people meet: “How did you end up in Sun Valley?” The answers reveal a wide range of stories.
We decided to make that question – How did you get here? – the cornerstone of an inaugural exhibit when The Community Library re-launched its regional history museum in a new location as the Wood River Museum of History and Culture in July of 2023. This past October, the Western Museum Association honored the exhibit, “How in the World Did You Get to Sun Valley?”, with the 2024 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for Exhibition Excellence.
Photo Credit: The Community Library
The Community Library is a privately-funded public library. It was founded in 1955 by seventeen women who believed that a library – open and free to everyone – was essential for a vibrant community. In the wake of the McCarthy Era, they wanted the Library to be independent from the government and accessible by everyone. So they raised money through private donations and revenue from the Gold Mine Thrift Store to build a library without dedicated tax dollars.
Now, nearly seventy years later, the nonprofit organization includes the Library, which holds a robust collection of books and presents a broad array of free educational programming; the historic Ernest Hemingway House and Preserve; and the re-imagined Wood River Museum of History and Culture.
The Library inherited the Ketchum/Sun Valley Ski and Heritage Museum a decade ago and continued until recently to operate the Museum at its original location in a series of Forest Service warehouse buildings from the 1930s. In order to improve the preservation capacity of the Museum, as well as to bring it closer to the main Library for operational efficiency, we seized an opportunity to move the Museum to a new building. This prompted us to re-imagine the infrastructure of the Museum, its focus, the exhibition schedule, and the visitor experience.
We were eager to develop more flexible exhibits – in pragmatic as well as thematic terms. We wanted to create an infrastructure that would allow for exhibit changes in line with our staff capacity and resources, and we wanted to develop an exhibit theme that would be expansive enough to accommodate many kinds of stories beyond conventional categories such as the “mining era” or the “sheep ranching era.”
We were thinking about how rural western towns often experience a tension between long-timers and newcomers. This tension had been exacerbated through the covid pandemic as the population surged and economic disparity widened. In this context, we were compelled to explore the community’s changing demographics over a longer period of time.
Photo Credit: The Community Library
In what is the historic homeland of the Shoshone and Bannock Tribes, people have arrived to this Central Idaho area over the past 150 years from a global variety of places, including Austria; the Basque region of Spain; Michoacán, Mexico; Huancayo, Peru; and many corners of the United States. We were interested in putting these contrasting journey stories in conversation with each other, in a way that is different from the narrative of manifest destiny that still often dominates the mythology of the American West.
Photo Credit: The Community Library
With the help of Alissa Rupp and a team from FRAME Integrative Design Strategies, we came to conceptualize the “How in the World Did You Get to Sun Valley” exhibit as a kind of public commons across time. The exhibit focuses on ten individual stories which will change over the three-year lifespan of the exhibit. Each profile includes a single object that represents that individual’s journey from somewhere else to here. A 1941 ski race trophy of Olympic gold medalist Gretchen Kunigk Fraser sits alongside an 1880s cabinet card portrait of Wah Kee Lea, a Chinese entrepreneur during the silver mining boom. The sweater of a contemporary elementary school teacher and soccer coach who immigrated from Mexico hangs across from the buffalo coat of a mercantile owner from 1879.
The FRAME design team inspired ways for the exhibit to be interactive. Each profile includes a flip panel to encourage tactile engagement with each individual’s story, and a large-scale lenticular panel encourages viewing the exhibit from multiple perspectives and invites consideration of the many reasons people may make the journey to Central Idaho. A “talk-back station” has proved to be very popular: each visitor is invited to write their own journey story on a luggage tag and add it to the exhibit.
Photo Credit: The Community Library
In the first year of the “How in the World Did You Get to Sun Valley?” exhibit, the number of annual Museum visitors increased from 4,000 to more than 25,000. The elastic template for this exhibit allows us respond to that enthusiasm. Over the coming weeks and months, we'll continue changing the exhibit to present profiles of new individuals as we work to reflect a dynamic metaphorical town square. We started with a common question – How did you get here? – and it has become a plot of common ground for talking about the diverse and changing nature of this remote western community.
Jenny Emery Davidson has served as the executive director for The Community Library for ten years. She earned a doctorate degree in American Studies from the University of Utah.
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