Topic: Abraham Lincoln

Location: Illinois

It doesn’t matter where in Illinois you find yourself—it seems that every Illinois town promotes its connection to our state’s most celebrated politician—Abraham Lincoln. Oftentimes, the promotion is as simple as a couple of wayside signs. Other times, it is a small exhibit housed in a county courthouse. Sometimes, the promotion takes the form of an expansive museum, as is the case of The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

When Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois (the only town named for Lincoln during his lifetime), contracted Taylor Studios to design, fabricate, and install exhibits for a moderately sized Lincoln museum located in a newly constructed campus building, we eagerly awaited its start, for here was an opportunity in our backyard to design a historical exhibit about a very complex person.

Before the contractual ink had dried, Taylor Studios recognized the great challenge inherent in this project. Lincoln College, the location of Taylor Studios’ future exhibit, lies a mere 35 miles from Springfield, home of the of the expensive, cutting-edge Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

It was critical for Taylor Studios to design an exhibit experience that would create a compelling reason for Lincoln museum visitors to choose Taylor’s exhibit in Lincoln, Illinois over the exhibit in Springfield, Illinois. Or at the very least, encourage museum visitors to package both museums visits. We knew our exhibit budget did not compete with Springfield’s, so we needed to approach the design from a fresh, provocative angle. We would need to concentrate on engaging experiential elements that did require large budgets to transform visitors. We required an approach that was unique from all other Illinois Lincoln exhibits, especially Springfield’s.

We chose to focus our energies on the one thing that can render budget inequalities inconsequential—STORY.

Taylor Studios would portray the Abraham Lincoln story in a unique, unexpected, and entirely refreshing style. To achieve a story with these attributes, we would not focus on never before revealed content of Lincoln’s life (some 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln) 1, but rather on how the story unfolds for visitors.

Storyline Technique

Take a second to think about any Lincoln exhibit you have experienced. How did the story in this exhibit begin? How did the story in this exhibit end? Perhaps it ended with Ford’s Theater, a funeral train, or an exhibit showing Lincoln lying in state?

What if Lincoln’s story began where most others ended?

There are numerous great movies that start with the ending: Double Indemnity, Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Citizen Kane, Annie Hall, and Lawrence of Arabia. This reverse chronology leaves the audience to piece together cause and effect, often adding to the texture and complexity of the plot. We adopted a limited use of reverse chronology for the Lincoln College exhibit. Taylor Studios did so by starting the exhibit with the shooting at Ford’s Theater.

Where were we to go from there? We did not want the exhibit to be in reverse order for the sake of being in reverse order—that seems hardly provocative. We knew a Ford’s Theater opening sequence would temporarily jolt audience expectations, but a sustained, creative story was required to maintain the intrigue of visitors.

To address this challenge, the creative exhibit design would use Lincoln’s shooting to ponder the question: what if Lincoln had a life review? Lincoln inhabited the space between life and death for over 8 hours after the bullet pierced his skull—certainly plenty of time for a life review. (The exhibit does not maintain or even suggest that Lincoln had a life review, it simply asks the provoking question—what if?)

This life review structure would allow the remainder of the exhibit to flow almost as a stream of consciousness—encouraging plenty of artistic flexibility and creative liberty.

People who believe they have experienced a life review claim many otherworldly abilities of perception. Several of these extraordinary abilities would be quite profound, including: the capacity to ascertain the feelings, emotions, and thoughts, of those you had contact with during life; the ability to relive details of every second of your life, with every attendant emotion and thought simultaneously; and the ability to perceive your interactions with others as a third party. 2

In order to ground this potentially fantastical exhibit experience and persuade the exhibit’s consulting Lincoln scholars that a life-review need not exclude accuracy and scholarship, Taylor Studios, created an exhibit script composed entirely of first person, documented quotations. In other words, the life-review allowed Lincoln to experience or re-experience actual quotations attributed to him as well as others about him.

Exhibit Reception

Erika Holst, Curator of Collections at the Springfield Art Association captured the essence of what we were attempting to do with our creative museum exhibit design.

Visitors to the second floor are shown into a small room where they gaze at an image of the Lincolns at Ford’s Theater. The image dissolves, and suddenly you are seated behind the Lincolns, watching as the assassination takes place. Lincoln slumps forward, Mary screams, Booth tussles with Henry Rathbone before leaping away. A scene of Lincoln’s deathbed appears, a clock begins to tick, and a voice intones that, in the nine hours following the attack, Lincoln hovered in a twilight zone between life and death. 3

What follows is an interpretive experience that is arguably more cutting-edge even than the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum here in Springfield. While the ALPM’s use of technology is masterful, ultimately the viewer is still at arm’s length, observing life as it unfolds for the latex Lincolns scattered throughout. On the second floor of the Lincoln Heritage Museum, visitors are invited to become Lincoln as he undergoes a life review in the hours before he succumbs to Booth’s bullet.

Moving through the scenes of Lincoln’s life, from his early years to his time in New Salem to his law practice, political career, and family life in Springfield, and ultimately to the White House, visitors are invited to touch the objects scattered along the way, each one representing a facet of Lincoln’s life experience. Doing so activates an audio and occasionally video narrative drawn from Lincoln’s own words and the words of those who knew him. 3

Taylor Studios understood that an engaging exhibit need not uncover never before aspects of Lincoln’s life to create an intriguing exhibit. We knew that the originality of the story conveyance would be as significant if not more than the originality of the story itself.

If you must experience another Lincoln museum exhibit after visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois or you find yourself in Lincoln, Illinois, we encourage you to experience Honest Abe’s life review.

ANNOTATIONS:

1Forget Lincoln Logs | NPR 2The Life Review and the Near-Death Experience 3 Holst, Erika. “Lincoln Museum Is a Showstopper.” Illinois Times 24 Apr. 2014, History sec.: n. pag. Online.