GLAMi nomination: Lithography Process

nominated by: Beth Redmond-Jones, San Diego Natural History Museum, USA
institution: San Diego Natural History Museum
category: Exhibition Media or Experience
http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/extraordinary-ideas/

In August 2016, the San Diego Natural History Museum (theNAT) opened the Eleanor and Jerome Navarra Special Collections Gallery, a new permanent space dedicated to showcasing the holdings of its research library and rare book room. The core exhibition of the new space, Extraordinary Ideas from Ordinary People: A History of Citizen Science, uses library collections to highlight the role of amateur naturalists in the history of science.

 

Best-known as the author of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Lear was a nonsense poet who also perfected the art of lithography in service of natural history. Our copy of Thomas Bell’s Tortoises, Terrapins, and Turtles (1872), which features 60 of Lear’s hand-colored lithographs of turtles and tortoises, is displayed alongside a flipbook of Lear’s famous poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” illustrated with his original lithographs. Visitors can touch a real lithography stone and watch a video of Jim Melli—an artist and NAT citizen scientist—demonstrating and explaining the process of lithography. The exhibit team felt it was important to show visitors the lithography process since a majroity of images in books prior to 1900 were lithographs. A Galapagos Tortoise is displayed for visitors to touch. Summative evaluation showed that this exhibit component was stopped at most of all the components in the exhibition.

 

Credits

Media production: Robert Rutherford

Content: Jim Melli, Margaret Dykens, Erica Kelly

Graphic design: Lydia D’Moch

Translation: Ana Martinez

Proofreading: Shelley Chung, Karen Levyszpiro, Claudio Luchina

Media housing fabrication: Kim Blackford

Project management: Beth Redmond-Jones, Bradley Tsalyuk