Installed and Permanent!

It’s been months since I’ve updated this post, and the install has been finished for a while now! My bad, my trip to Europe took precedence over blog updating, haha!

Anyways…we left off when we were in the middle of designing and installing. I will say that the install day was a full day of organized chaos. Everyone was on their toes, doing one thing or another. So I’ll just go through all of the major installations we did, followed by all the other things we added to the historic site.

This is a game coded in Unity, made by our Professor Miriam Langer and student Rebecca Sharp. Every year in December, Jemez has a public event called “Light Among the Ruins”, where they put candelarias all around the ruins and light them up for people to see. This is here so that whoever visits the site, year round, can participate in that event…whether it’s you placing and lighting your own candles, or take a virtual tour of one already lit up!

Here is another tablet station, with this showcasing 3-D native artifacts that are sculpted through Blender/Unity. This station gives people the ability to view a wide range of Jemez artifacts, while 1.) The artifacts don’t have to physically be at the site, and 2.) They can move the objects all around in 3-D space to get a full view.

This was one of our big projects for the video team…probably the bigger of the two, really. What you’re seeing here is a projected mapped story of the Jemez People. Composed out of high quality images and text to aid the story, it uses three ultra short throw projectors to cover the 36 feet of wall inside the visitor center. We covered the whole length of the wall plus the curve at the end, in order to give visitors a more immersive feeling while going into the story of the Jemez.

Another big project for the video team was a wall-mounted video showcasing the history of the Jemez People, with the narration being spoken in the Toa Language. Jacob Erickson primarily worked on this, while having interview assistance and creative editing advice to aid him with completion.

This poem is a very popular poem with the Native People of Jemez and with those of the public who visit the site. It was mentioned that a print out of this poem is nearly always requested by people who visit. We decided it deserved its own place on the wall.

This is definitely one of the bigger draws to the site, I’d say; a ton of love went into this wooden floor map. What you see is a map of the Jemez Historic site carved into wooden panels and placed on the floor. The map is surrounded by hand drawn native patterns provided by one of the site rangers, Brenda Ortega. Future plans for this include an installation of a whole new wooden floor, so you can imagine how that would make this piece look!!

With all of that covered, there’s still more to talk about. During many of our meetings, it was explicitly stated that they wanted an exhibit in the bathrooms. While I did take photos, none of them really came out…so I’ll tell you what we added to the bathrooms. In one of them are high quality images of the surrounding landscape, with nature sounds playing in the room. In the other bathroom, a few of our students constructed and installed a lava wall. So…imagine a wall of black, cut through with strands of red, yellow, and orange. Behind the strands are strips of LED lights, lighting up sporadically, to give the visitor the sense of flowing lava.

Other things done at the site include: painted patterns on the wall of the entryway, the whole front desk torn out and replaced, a redesigned junior ranger guide, a redesigned trail guide, newly designed time availability poster for the front, newly designed brochures, an added weekly newspaper featuring local events and art, etc.

Our main challenge of this project was to take a site that hadn’t been improved upon for 40 years…bring it into the modern era and to give honor to their story, through our work and what we present. We made the installation update friendly, so that anything new that comes to light for the site can be incorporated into the exhibition fairly easily. I’m happy with all that we did for the Jemez people and their historic site. The staff loved our work and would love to work with our class again!

One other quick surprise…a lot of places covered our work, check it out!

Seattle Post Intelligencer https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/New-Mexico-students-help-redesign-Jemez-Historic-13827644.php

Albany Times Union https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/New-Mexico-students-help-redesign-Jemez-Historic-13827644.php

My San https://www.mysanantonio.com/business/article/New-Mexico-students-help-redesign-Jemez-Historic-13827644.php

KRQE News 13 https://www.krqe.com/news/news-briefs/new-exhibit-opening-may-18-at-jemez-historic-site/1987034579

NMHU Panel Discussion at International Museum Conference in California https://www.nmhu.edu/students-present-jemez-historic-site-project-at-international-museum-conference/?fbclid=IwAR3vZTIMQS64Ejou_stRiEcO5EgISTgphsjw9hnwO9SAlTbjGm4etY9xMzg