Regional Museum Prepares to Open Long-Awaited Permanent Gallery on Local History
Twenty years of collecting, several years of planning, and a capital campaign that tested the museum's institutional relationships have produced what curators describe as the most significant addition to the museum's permanent collection in a generation.
The Regional Museum of History and Culture will open its new permanent gallery on local history next month, completing a project that has been in various stages of planning and development for the better part of two decades. The gallery occupies a newly constructed wing of the museum's main building and draws on acquisitions, archival materials, and oral history collections assembled over the same period to present what museum director Carol Wentworth describes as a sustained, serious account of the region's past — not a celebration of it, but an examination of it.
The gallery's approach reflects a curatorial philosophy that Wentworth has articulated since her arrival at the museum: that local history is not merely a supporting context for larger national narratives but a subject worthy of the same careful, critical attention that museums bring to other areas of their collections. "We wanted to make a gallery that asks real questions about this place," she said. "About who built it, who was displaced by it, who benefited and who did not, and how all of that connects to where we are now."
The gallery includes artifacts, photographs, documents, and recorded testimonies from community members across the region's demographic range, assembled through an outreach process that Wentworth said had been one of the most gratifying aspects of the project. Several community organizations contributed materials that had not previously been part of any institutional collection. "The history was out there," Wentworth said. "We just had to go and ask for it."
The gallery opens to the public on the first Saturday of next month. Admission to the gallery is included with general museum admission; a members' preview will be held the previous evening.