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Utah State Parks - Antelope Island

Antelope Island Spider Fest is a collaborative annual August event teaching people about the important role spiders play in our ecosystem put on through the efforts of many museum, nature center and natural science partners around Northern Utah including Antelope Island State Park, the Natural History Museum of Utah, Thanksgiving Point, Hogle Zoo, Swaner EcoCenter, Ogden Nature Center, Friends of Great Salt Lake and others. The event has grown in popularity every year and drew nearly 2,000 people in 2019.  In April 2020, we made the decision to hold the event virtually because of COVID-19. Instead of a one day, in-person event, we promoted a month-long Spider Photo Contest in July and then had a week's worth of virtual guided spider walks, virtual educational presentations, and virtual craft demonstrations and offered citizen science and nature scavenger hunt activities that individuals and families could take part in on their own and report back to us about during the first week of August. All activities were a great success! People really enjoyed all offerings. It was a wonderful way to not lose the momentum of a very successful educational event that has been going on for almost a decade. Partners contributed items for a grab bag of goodies that families or individuals who completed challenges could pick up. You can view the schedule of activities here and view presentation videos and the public's interaction with the event here.

Brigham City Museums

The staff of the Brigham City Museums spent many long hours during the COVID-19 closure deliberating when, how, and even if we could reopen safely.   We moved the planned spring show to the fall, and then reopened the art gallery on June 20th with the annual art quilt show.  With COVID-19 protocols in place to protect our visitors and staff, we were touched by the many tearful thank-yous we heard from guests who were glad to have a safe place to visit and appreciate art.  Still, the show only saw about 10% of the regular visitation numbers.  Anticipating this, we tried to create as much virtual access as possible.  We moved the artists' reception and talks online, and created a fully interactive virtual walkthrough for those who could not make it to the gallery in person.  With the successes and lessons learned from this first hybrid exhibit, we plan to incorporate virtual tours and programming into all of our future events.   We also used our natural history collections to create a series of online lessons for students at home, and are reorganizing our history gallery to make it a safe, contactless experience.  Our "Make History" initiative is focusing on ways to preserve students' art and artifacts of the pandemic for future generations.

St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site

At the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site, the content we are most proud of creating during the COVID-19 shutdown is our virtual tour, with accompanying audio, of the exhibits. This tour was created by our fairly new team member, Tanner Lee Brunson. Tanner was able to take the 360-degree photos and string them together in a program that created a virtual space of those images, in just a few weeks. The audio tours were recorded several months prior by our Board Science Advisor, Dr. Jerry Harris, but Tanner added them to the virtual tour to help visitors understand what they were looking at in the exhibits. We are proud of this content because we have a fairly low-tech museum, but were able to create content that a lot of other larger museums with more technology had done.   

Hutchings Museum and Institute

During the shutdown we used Realestate tour software and 360. Amerasian to create interactive virtual tours of the museum. We also created virtual tours of all the field trips we have for elementary schools and made viewable on google cardboard. We had more students go through the field trips on google cardboard than usually attend in person. View virtual tour here.

Tooele Valley Museum

Tooele Valley Museum (TVM) is a small institution with one part-time employee that opened this season. While it was not able to afford the costs of opening some buildings, it did as much as it could to operate outside and online. Trains 101 was posted in June and supplies information and activities for ferroequinologists of all ages. Tooele librarians videoed storytime in our park to post online. The curator worked with the city using social media and our mascot, Danny the Digger, to play games with Tooeleites  that challenged them to learn local history and take the historic tour on the museum website. Finally, museum workers created a new outdoor gallery and a sensory garden.  To incorporate art and fun, it hosted two community art exhibits.  Lawn Gnomes 2020 is a drive-up exhibit and a collaboration with the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Tooeleites donated the artistic gnomes that were placed on a previously unused corner of museum property behind a fence and near a busy intersection.  Festive lights make the exhibit accessible at all hours.  It will be redecorated each month through January 2021. TVM also built a fairy village. Tooele Family Programs sponsored a craft activity that gave out fairy house kits to children. Kids brought their houses back painted for the village.  City staff and volunteers built the rest of the village, and city librarians will come back to record another storytime. As city staff and volunteers worked this summer, they frequently joked that they were becoming the best lemonade makers in the country. The work of volunteers and city employees willing to reach outside of their departments and comfort zones made these activities possible for museum visitors. They deserve recognition for their work and fun solutions this year.

Dixie State University Sears Gallery

Pivoting has made us dizzy, but what an opportunity to create an exhibition of COVID-19. Kathy Cieslewicz, DSU Sears Gallery Director/Curator, decided to "gather collective memory in a personal way, expressed through art" and "to share the stories fresh from the minds of the artists". She communicated with Stewart Seidman, a NY artist transplanted to the SW desert. Seidman was well into his series when he lost his sister to COVID-19. Eight paintings told his story, showing what is bound to be a historical perspective as a first-person experience. To expand this visual story artists created 12"x12" pieces of artwork. Artists were required to wear masks, sanitize hands, and hang their art. Hammers were sanitized, reinforcing everyone to sanitize their own environment. Following directive in an exhibition has become part of the artists' collective memory. Cieslewicz didn't do her careful and mathematical hanging as usual. Instead she thought the way artists placed their art would illustrate a somewhat disorganized, not to be controlled pattern; just as COVID-19 presented itself to the world as a kind of unwanted surprise to disjoint humanity's idea of normal. Chairs around the exhibition were placed inside taped squares to maintain social distancing. COVID-19 saying were placed on the seats, such as, "we are in this together". Artists illustrated a new normal through art and how we remember the pandemic. Viewers participated in this procedural ritual to become part of the art experience. This exhibition helped artists and viewers manage grief and fear.