兔子先生系列麻豆

Wayland was graced with a new exhibit in The Jimmy Dean and Llano Estacado Museum: The Story of Wayland’s Integration debuted on December 1. This exhibit was put together by 2 Fall Practicum students this fall. Devin Davis is a history major with an honors minor, and Chloe Barham is majoring in Humanities with a triple minor in history, honors, and Chinese. The class and project were supervised by Melissa Gonzalez, the Director of Museums at Wayland. Gonzalez has a background in Museum Education. Her focus is in trying to engage museum goers, no matter their age, in the exhibits of the museum.

“When they started the practicum, I gave them a list of topics they could choose from,” Gonzalez said. “It was based on some old exhibits [from the museum] that we had already done conservation work for.”

The idea for an exhibit on the history of integration at Wayland took hold when the students realized a research foundation had already been laid by a previous Practicum student, Ethan Byers, from Spring of 2021 who did not get to share his work.

“They had decided to go with this one because my last practicum student was working on the research for this integration exhibit,” Gonzalez said. “It just, because of the pandemic, never manifested. It caught their attention.”

Over the last two semesters, hours and days have been spent collecting information and cultivating it to create this interesting exhibit.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize all the work that goes on behind the scenes at a museum,” Gonzalez said. “It takes a lot of work putting an exhibit together. For any exhibit you do, it’s an entire process. You have to do the research, get the artifacts, and come up with some sort of script. Even for a digital exhibit, something like this.”

That was certainly the case for Chloe and Devin.

“The research and collection of materials took all semester,” Davis stated. “But the actual setup of the exhibit took about 48hrs over the last 4 weeks.”

The exhibit opened in the perfect year, as 2021 is the 70th anniversary of Wayland’s integration.

“People talk about this all the time, but they don’t really know anything about it,” Barham said. “It’s a piece of our history that most people don’t know about that we think is really important to understanding our university and this region in general.”

On opening day, patrons enjoyed hot chocolate and snacks provided by the museum. Madison Amack and Madison Casanova, freshmen and writers for the student newspaper, perused the exhibit.

“It was really interesting,” Casanova said. “Going into it, I expected it to be like any other museum exhibit, but it was so much more.”

The section boasts a book of news articles from the time period, many artifacts, and photos from the movement.

“There are really cool interactive parts to this exhibit,” Amack added.

The exhibit can be found in the Llano Estacado building. Come out and enjoy the rich history of Wayland’s integration movement.