joan waltermire
What I do, where I work
Here I am at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, VT, where I’ve had the same job title since 1978. I’m called Curator of Exhibits for historical reasons—Montshire spun off from the former Dartmouth College Museum and at one time had a natural history collection to curate. We moved in 1989 from a former bowling alley with brown-and-white checkerboard lino floors to a beautiful building on 100 mostly wooded acres of Connecticut River-front land. We have an eclectic collection of physical science and natural history exhibits indoors, an outdoor science park, and trails.
Visitors have seen moose and bear here, and tracks of fisher, fox, weasels and coyotes are common in winter. Woodchucks live in Science Park. We battle invasive exotic plants but it’s discouraging.
We’ve been fortunate to belong to an NSF-funded exhibit collaborative with some other small museums. This has made a huge difference in how we make exhibits. In our most recent round of funding we tried to find out if there are certain design elements in exhibits that encourage discussion between adults and children. The answer seems to be that providing some obvious things—among them physical room for more than one person; clear, short labels; perhaps some isolation; and a subject laypeople feel confident talking about—might make discussion possible, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee it.
Our entire staff is great. People support each other, and we find a lot of things funny.
More about me
I have an undergraduate degree in art history and a masters in biology (plants). I got the Montshire job because I had briefly made book exhibits at Dartmouth’s library and I was willing to work for minimum wage ($3.25 an hour back then). Things have definitely improved.
I like including poetry in our exhibits where it’s relevant, and I like to be surprised by exhibits.
Thank goodness my mate and I built our own house, which gave me my first clue about how to attach 2×4s to each other. We live in a very beautiful place. In winter, Fish and Wildlife brings us a roadkill deer for our yard and we watch what feeds on it.
I’ve illustrated a few natural history books but gave that up as too hard on the shoulders, and anyway, why would I add more deadlines to my life?