Exhibitions Process Site

Not every museum needs a formal exhibition process. Most don’t create exhibitions large enough or often enough to require one. Others have established methods for creating exhibitions that tend to live as part of the institution’s culture, rather than in a formal document.

Museums that frequently create new exhibitions may need standardized and detailed processes, but these carry a double edge: they help things go more smoothly and predictably, but their formality, complexity, and uniformity can sometimes feel more burdensome than helpful. But although it may sometimes feel like a curse, having a detailed and official process document is much more often a blessing. 

The following pages represent one way of creating exhibitions at a large natural history and anthropology museum. It’s obviously not the only way, and who knows if it’s the best way, but it’s a way that works for us. For the last thirty years or so, our process has been written and rewritten continuously to address the individuality of exhibition projects and to reflect the changing nature of museum practice. 

The Field Museum is a natural history and anthropology museum located in Chicago, founded in 1893 by department store magnate Marshall Field following the World’s Columbian Exposition.  Our collections hold nearly 40 million objects; the building contains 283,000 square feet of exhibition space, and our average visitorship is 1.3 million people per year. Currently the Field Museum employs approximately 500 staff, and hosts 150-200 interns per year and roughly 600 volunteers. The Exhibitions Department employs about 60 full-time staff members. 

What we create

The Department works on a variety of projects.

We produce new exhibitions:

• permanent halls

• ongoing updates, additions, and renovations to permanent exhibitions

• small-gallery (unticketed) temporary exhibitions

• large-gallery (ticketed) temporary exhibitions

• large-gallery outbound traveling exhibitions.

We stage incoming temporary exhibitions from other institutions:

• incoming revenue-generating exhibitions 

• incoming mission-driven exhibitions

• temporary, event-related installations in public areas outside the exhibition galleries.

We work with other departments in the Museum to help create non-exhibition materials:

• marketing materials (including building banners)

• signage and wayfinding materials

• interior architectural renovations

• printed matter for events and programs.

And we serve as a resource for other museums:

• as advisors and consultants—in either a paid or volunteer capacity—to museums in the region and across the nation who seek our help as they create their own exhibitions 

• as vendors, licensing agents, or donors of intellectual property related to exhibitions we have produced.

Exhibition projects vary dramatically in scope. One project might involve a dozen people for three or four months. Another involves hundreds of people over three or four years. Some projects occupy nine square feet of floor space. Others will require nine thousand. One exhibition has a budget of less than a thousand dollars and is created, stem-to-stern, under this one roof. Another requires millions of dollars and involves the cooperation of a dozen museums from around the world.

Although this variation makes it difficult to create a process that works for all projects, the reason we’ve created this document has always been clear: an exhaustive process that provides guidelines for every step of a large project can be scaled down and adapted to organize our efforts for a smaller one. But a process that only addresses the issues that arise when creating smaller projects is of little help when you’re tackling much larger ones.

How We're Organized 

The Process 

• Divided into five phases

• Links to pages for each deliverable and milestone

Resources 

• Appendices

• Guideline documents

This is a live site that will continue to evolve as our process evolves and refines. Please feel free to contact us via the form below with any thoughts, questions, or suggestions you might have for improving it.