GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – After sixteen months of hard work and renovations, the Neville Public Museum reopened their core gallery to the public.
Up the stairs and to the left – you’ll see an impressive display spanning generations of Green Bay life and culture in the Generations Gallery.
“When you go through the space, you see things from a 10,000-year-old mammoth tusk, and then I use Donald Driver’s jersey or contemporary art. It spans that whole generational time period,” says Executive Director Beth Lemke, “Everything that we have done since 2015 we’ve been able to test – does it bridge? Does it connect? How does it do both?”
Children check out an exhibit at the Neville Public Museum’s renovated Generations Gallery. (PHOTO/WTAQ News)
The new gallery has about 250 more objects than it’s predecessor, and they’re all the real deal.
“We don’t have reproductions. We have the real, the authentic. We were able to upgrade the care of the artifacts after 37 years in how they’re displayed and how they’re lit with LED lighting,” Lemke says.
But the goal of the Generations Gallery isn’t just showing off interesting old objects. One area shows a decades-old wedding dress and ensemble outfit, contrasted right next to the Quinceañera dress that was worn just two years ago by a local teen.
A Quinceañera dress worn in 2018 is placed near a 1950s replica kitchen. (PHOTO/WTAQ News)
“What we want call out even more is the communities and how we better serve and bridge our communities within Green Bay…37 years ago, Green Bay’s demographics were very different. As we grow and change, the public museum – your public museum – should be growing and changing with that demographic and population,” Lemke tells WTAQ News, “We have now an endowment for the space, which allows us to do different phases. We will look at language and lingual gallery guides and bilingual, trilingual text…We want a 5-year-old to walk in and see something that they recognize and go: ‘That’s me! I’m here!’ – That’s the goal.”
But it’s not just the special events that Lemke is interesting in putting on display. The gallery also aims to show the ordinary that people may take for granted.
“We all collect something. Usually that’s tied to a story. The thing is, it’s about looking at what we use on an everyday basis,” Lemke explains, “Typically in the past when people say ‘I’m going to save that,’ or ‘I’m gonna give that to my grandchild,’ it’s something that was a special occurrence, not an everyday piece. We need to be able to tell the everyday story as well as a special stories.”
For more information about the Neville Public Museum Core Exhibit upgrade, click here.
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