Last week, our junior reporter Jonah, shared his review of the daVinci exhibit currently on at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. This week, he interviews Carolyn Holland the Officer of Exhibition Interpretation at the museum, who helped curate and devolop the exhibit.
Jonah: How do you decide on which topics to feature for special exhibitions?
Carolyn: Leonardo da Vinci: 500 Years of Genius is a travelling exhibition that the Canada Science and Technology Museum opted to rent for the 2019 summer season. Prior to the museum reopening, exhibition staff, including Sylvaine Champagne, Project Manager, developed a plan for our special exhibition line-up until 2020. Part of the plan included an in-house exhibition, which we showcased through the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019, but it also included travellers, like The Art of the Brick, which was on offer last summer and, now, Leonardo da Vinci: 500 Years of Genius.
Sylvaine describes that in terms of deciding on a travelling exhibition, many considerations go into selecting which one. There are some logistical and practical considerations like determining what exhibitions are available when and which are of a size that we can accommodate. Then there are the more nuanced factors that go into a decision—is this a topic our visitors are interested in? Does this topic align with our values, and the role we want to play as a museum? Leonardo da Vinci: 500 years of Genius checked all the boxes for us so here it is!
Jonah: How do you constantly maintain the interactive features of the exhibit?
Carolyn: We are very fortunate here to have a number of dedicated employees who check on, repair, and rebuild the interactive features as needed—I asked James Cram and Francis Audet, the museum’s Exhibition Maintenance Technicians, how they do it.
They say that in addition to constantly checking up on the features, they spend a lot of time rethinking, redesigning, and upgrading them to better suit the kind of use they are getting. This is made a bit more challenging for them because they need to keep the same look and feel as the rest of the exhibition and they can’t use materials and technologies that weren’t around 500 years ago—no easy feat!
James and Francis say that it’s a lot of work, but that it’s well worth it to ensure visitors to the exhibition have an enjoyable, hands-on, interactive experience. This is also why they (and all of us at the museum) appreciate when our visitors are gentle and respectful with interactive elements—keeping them working well is already a lot of work, having to fix them when they’re broken means that other visitors may miss out while they’re being repaired.
Jonah: What is your personal favorite invention of Da Vinci's?
Carolyn: I hadn’t really thought about that before so thank you for the prompt! It’s a challenging question in a way because some of my favourite things about da Vinci are not necessarily inventions but rather ideas or concepts.
I very much admire his anatomical studies and I am impressed with the detail and depth of his underlying understanding of body systems. That they influenced the way in which people came to—and still do—study anatomy and understand how the body works, to me, is really noteworthy.
I also am quite fond of da Vinci’s Citta Ideale, the Ideal City. Again, back to his understanding of how things work and are interconnected, that really speaks to me, especially in the context of my work at the museum. The elements of his ideal city were hundreds of years ahead of their time and are still relevant in urban planning today. That he used his knowledge and understanding to try to help improve lives is a notion that I think is as important today as it was 500 years ago. Society needs thinkers, tinkerers, makers, etc. who look to understand and solve problems for the greater good.
Jonah: Who do you see as a modern-day version of Da Vinci?
Carolyn: Great question! I have my thoughts, but I was actually curious to see what some of my colleagues thought … Kyrke Gaudreau, the museum’s Science Advisor had this to say:
“My favourite example of a modern day da Vinci is Elon Musk. Similar to da Vinci, Musk is a wildly creative genius who is changing in the world in a lot of great ways. What ways, you say? Awesome question! Well, he is the CEO of Tesla, the world’s best known and coolest electric car maker. He also created SpaceX, which is trying to build rocket ships to colonize Mars. Musk’s newest and coolest company is Neuralink, which is trying to turn humans into computers (what!). On top of that, Musk designs huge tunneling machines and ridiculous flamethrowers, and is working to ensure that artificial intelligence will not lead to robots rising up and killing us all.”
From my perspective in exhibitions, interpretation, and education, I think that at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, we go beyond showcasing individuals and their discoveries and contributions to STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art, and math—by encouraging our visitors of all ages and backgrounds to think, learn, ask questions, and to explore the world around them. We hope that we can inspire the next generation of innovators to do the same kinds of amazing things that scientists, inventors, and activists have done and are doing. Exhibitions like Leonardo da Vinci: 500 Years of Genius can help us to achieve this.
Jonah: Do you feel society missed out on more of Da Vinci's artistic capabilities since socio-economic factors pushed him more into military product development?
Carolyn: This is a really interesting question! From a personal perspective, his body of work actually strikes me as being quite diverse and varied and, from my interactions with visitors to the exhibition, it seems that, by and large, his art is what he is best known for. His military product development, as you aptly named it, actually seems to have taken a back seat to his personal interests despite it largely being what paid the bills (to put it bluntly) for much of his life.
I might ask myself more so if society missed out on seeing more of his potential because his desire to constantly improve on, finesse, and modify his ideas and works in parallel with his discoveries and insights made it that many, many of his ideas and planned projects never physically came to fruition.
This said, regardless of the small number of actual works by da Vinci, I think that his genius as well as his legacy of observation and understanding as a central part of both art and science still persist and resonate with people even 500 years after his death.
Leonardo da Vinci – 500 Years of Genius is on now at the Canada Science and Technology Museum until September 2, 2019.
