How We're Organized

The Field Museum Exhibitions Department consists of five divisions, ranging in size from four to twenty staff members each.

Exhibitions Design + Media

An exhibition is a physical environment, explored over time, and designed to achieve a particular set of goals. Sometimes these are deliberate effects created for the visitor to notice: immersive or atmospheric environments, treatments of space that make a gallery feel like a church, or a tattoo parlor. But a large percentage of the exhibition designer’s job is to satisfy criteria that the visitor is unaware of. There are life safety requirements such as exit signage, maximum occupancy limits, and sprinkler coverage. There are artifact conservation requirements such as UV and light exposure, offgassing of materials, and the amount of space needed between objects in a case. There are accessibility requirements regarding width of space to maneuver a wheelchair, the height and size of wall graphics for the visually impaired, and the captioning of video for the hearing impaired. And there are visitor flow and usage requirements such as the width of an entryway, the arrangement of display cases or platforms in a gallery, and the screen dimensions, viewing distance, projector throw limits, and viewing space needed for media experiences.  These considerations have implications for the exhibition process because they need to be addressed at different times, and reviewed by different parties, with different priorities in mind. 

The Design + Media Division has staff devoted to three disciplines:

• Exhibition Designers are responsible for all aspects of three-dimensional design for an exhibition project, from case layouts and floor plans to finishes and elevations. With the Developers, the exhibition designer co-creates the different experiences to meet the exhibition’s visitor experience goals. They also coordinate and collaborate with contractors, like the lighting designer, or others, depending on some aspects of the design that need to be outsourced.

• Graphic Designers design all two-dimensional exhibition materials (including labels, graphic elements, murals, and wall-mounted graphics) as well as designing print and media materials for other internal clients in the Museum. They also coordinate and collaborate with contractors, like illustrators, depending on some aspects of the graphic design that need to be outsourced.

• Media Producers plan, shoot, edit, and do post-production for narrative and/or explanatory video programs that appear in an exhibition, as well as immersive, site-specific, and atmospheric video elements. They also coordinate and collaborate with contractors, such as CGI artists and animators, depending on the aspects of the media that need to be outsourced.

Exhibition Development

Most museums don’t have full-time exhibition developers on staff, so the position requires some explanation. Developers are storytellers who work with a content advisor (a scientist, usually on staff, sometimes an artist or a community co-curator) at their left elbow and an imaginary visitor at their right elbow. Their job responsibilities can be separated into two categories.

Content development includes work such as:

• interviewing Content Advisors and doing background research in order to create an overall message, structure, and storyline for an exhibition

• going through exhibition collections with Content Advisors and Collections staff to help select objects for display

• compiling the artifact database

• working with community members or other outside experts who are contributing objects or ideas to an exhibition.

Experience development includes work such as:

• establishing sensory-motor, affective, and cognitive visitor experience goals

• translating content into a variety of experience types to achieve those goals

• working with specialists in each of the other divisions to create concepts for digital and mechanical interactives, narrative or atmospheric video programs, immersive environments, imagery, replicated objects or scenes, touchable elements, and sound environments.

Exhibitions Planning + Traveling Exhibitions

The Planning Division has to ensure that the museum provides a balance of offerings: mission-based vs. revenue-generating shows; family-friendly experiences vs. presentations intended mainly for adults; and biological vs. cultural exhibitions, to name a few examples. The ticketed temporary exhibitions on display at a given time have to offer enough variety to encourage visitors to buy our highest priced ticket—the “All Access Pass.” (Currently, our least-expensive ticket is for general admission; going up to the next level, the “Discovery Pass” provides general admission plus admission to one of the two special exhibitions currently on view. The “All Access Pass” gives visitors entrance to both temporary special exhibitions, and to two permanent ticketed exhibitions, plus admission to one of our 3D-theater presentations.) Although we wish we could be free to the public, museums—especially those with sizable collections and research programs—need revenue to stay afloat, and the Exhibitions Department is one of the museum’s most important revenue sources. And we’d like to keep our jobs.

Wrapped into the Planning Division, Traveling Exhibitions essentially works with these same challenges, but from the opposite side of the fence. Any traveling exhibition that we put on the market has to satisfy the same complex and competing priorities for its potential venues that we have to consider when booking another museum’s traveling show. At the same time, traveling exhibitions that we create also have to address all of those requirements for our own museum as well, since we are usually the first venue at which the exhibition will appear. It’s complicated.

• Traveling Exhibition Managers, Sales are responsible for business development and client relationships. They oversee Traveling Exhibitions and intellectual property deals from client development to contract negotiation and work with Operations on tour logistics and ongoing client support.

• Traveling Exhibition Operations Managers work closely with Sales, Production, and Registration to coordinate all operational needs for installations and deinstallations, including team staffing assignments and work schedules, team travel planning, and exhibition maintenance. They, are responsible for Traveling Exhibitions budgets, supervise Production Supervisors, and manage strategic partnerships and business development.

• Traveling Exhibitions Production Supervisors create and review floor plans, make load plans, coordinate components shipping, lead teams of mixed Field Museum and host venue personnel during exhibition installations and deinstallations, and ensure Traveling Exhibitions are well maintained.

Exhibitions Operations Division

Project Managers:  It’s difficult to summarize everything that the Operations Division is responsible for; in a word, it’s their job to make sure that all steps of the process are followed. The Operation Division’s Project Managers create—and enforce—the overall schedule for each exhibition project. This schedule incorporates all the project milestones, as well as processes such as label writing, or case layouts.

Exhibitions Registrars: While sharing a common title with collections-based Registrars, Exhibitions Registrars do not catalog collections, but rather arrange the logistics of borrowing, transporting, and caring for objects in exhibitions, be they here at the Field Museum, or traveling to museums all over the world. As the objects cannot speak for themselves, it is the Exhibitions Registrars who ensure the safety of artifacts and specimens.

Production and Interactives

The Field Museum is fortunate in having an in-house Production Division capable of producing almost any type of exhibition element. The positions within the Production and Interactives division include the following. 

• Media Services install, maintain, troubleshoot, and de-install audio-visual equipment and control systems for permanent, temporary, and traveling exhibitions.

• Interactives Producers design and build new digital and mechanical interactives, working collaboratively with Developers.

• Interactives Technicians repair, update, and improve the several hundred existing interactives currently installed in our permanent, temporary, and traveling exhibitions.

• Exhibition Preparators (Levels I, II and III) build and install exhibition elements: except for the artifacts and specimens from our collections, they produce, in the shops described below, every single thing a visitor experiences in our galleries.

• Production Supervisors/Managers supervise/manage a team, and the installation of exhibitions

• Mount Makers fabricate mounts and install and deinstall temporary and permanent exhibits.

The organization of these divisions frames our approach to the process, with members from each division filling specific roles in the project team.

The creation and display of an exhibition requires collaboration with every department in the Museum, however the following departments are the most involved in the development of the exhibition 

Content Advisor Curators or other researchers who provide expertise to an exhibition.

Conservator  preserves, treats, and documents works of art, artifacts, and specimens.

Collections Manager responsible for the care, storage, and management of the Museum's collections.