Immigrant Teens Tell Their Story

Immigrant Teens Tell Their Story is an article written by Douglas Simpson published in Exhibitionist that explains the process of creating a student-curated exhibit in the Newton History Museum in suburban Boston, MA. The idea came from the acknowledgment of immigrant population in Newton as well as the desire to expand on recent immigrants. The museum prompted the idea of a teenage-curated exhibit to draw in younger viewers and identify personal stories. Through an application process, they chose seven individuals representing Hong Kong, Russia, Korea, and Mexico. Those students worked for 6 months with museum curators to design and produce an exhibit. The budget was fairly small, so the team thought of ideas to represent their ideas in a low-cost way. Cut outs of each individual were juxtaposed with seven exhibit cases, full of personal items, photographs, and narrated by text. In order to give access to people of each nationality, translations were provided in a hand-out exhibit guide.

This article is almost exactly what I think we need when considering the East Lincoln Crossroads. A small budget, individual, story-telling exhibit. It's even about immigration. Working with a small exhibit in a local history context, it's important to have an exhibit theme that is outlined by personal narratives that the community can connect to. In Goshen, I think this theme is latino immigration. They kept the exhibit simple because they did not have the funds to do otherwise, but I like it that way. It gives the focus to the individual stories. I also like that this article is about a student-curated exhibit, because that also directly correlates to our own project.

Simpson, Douglas. “Immigrant Teens Tell Their Story,” NAME Exhibitionist, Fall, 2009, 51-54.