Maryland Center for History and Culture - Where To Next - A Travel Podcast With Francesca

On this week's episode of WTN, Katie Caljean, President & CEO of the Maryland Center for History & Culture, joins the show to give us the inside scoop on everything the newly rebranded center has to offer. Caljean provides some background on the new Jim Hensen exhibition, plus other popular exhibitions, their extensive library & more!

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Good morning, and welcome back toWhere to Next, a travel podcast with
me. Your host, my nameis Francisco Presti. Joining me today Katie
Calgean President and CEO of the MarylandCenter for History and Culture. Katie,
thanks so much for joining me,Welcome to the program, Thanks so much
for having me. Mdehistory dot orgis where you want to go online for
all the information and to start planningyour trip today. But Katie, let's
just jump right into it, theMaryland Center for History and Culture and tell

(00:22):
me all about it. Sure.So, we are a museum and library
located in Mount Vernon, Baltimore.So we're a few blocks west of the
Washington Monument. If you've visited MountVernon, there's a there's a monument at
George Washington. We're close by.We take up an entire city block.
People can come visit to either seeyour exhibitions or to do research in our

(00:43):
library. We also provide educational programsand we publish books and an academic journal.
So there's a lot of history that'shappening in the present where people can
come and discover their own stories andtheir own interpretations of the past. The
Maryland Historical Society has been an organizationsince eighteen forty four, and in twenty
twenty, we rebranded the organization tothe Maryland Center for History and Culture to

(01:06):
better reflect the current functions of ourorganization, being a place where people can
come together and convene and experience programsand events, but also to be able
to come and do history on theirown within our archives and to study objects.
So we want to be a placewhere active discovery is happening and community
is convening. So we wanted toconvey that with our new name and our

(01:29):
new identity, and so in twentytwenty we became the Maryland Center for History
and Culture. Very cool. Iknow that the museum has so many different
collections and exhibitions for we able tocheck out, but I know that Jim
Henson exhibition over there is new andvery exciting, So can you tell us
a little bit about that. Absolutely, it's very exciting for us too,
so we who doesn't, all right, So we launched the exhibition at the

(01:53):
end of May of this year,and we're working very closely with the Jim
Henson Legacy Foundation and Archives, aswell as the Museum of the Moving Image,
which is located in a story ofQueens, New York, and they
are the home of this very largecollection of Muppets, So it's everything from
Fraggles to the Muppet. We alsohave characters from Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

(02:22):
We have David Bowie's his very bedazzledoutfit and Jennifer Connelly as well, so
there's a little something for every generation. And so this has been a traveling
exhibition that has been to a fewsites on the West Coast in Middle America,
but the Henson family felt very stronglythat they wanted this exhibition to come
home to Maryland because Jim Henson grewup in Hyattsville. Not everybody knows that

(02:45):
fact, he grew up in highit's still He went to the University of
Maryland College Park and then he actuallygot his start on local public television in
the DC suburbs filming commercials. Sothere's some really very funny commercials that are
in the exhibition repping Wilkins Coffee andsk Meets. So there's some very early

(03:07):
characters. Kermit, he makes hisfirst appearance on Salmon Friends, which was
Jim Henson's first show, and sothey're very funny commercials and you could see
his humor throughout, and you know, it's more geared for an adult audience
rather than for children. And Ithink that's the beauty of this exhibition is
that it's intergenerational. That's something thatit cuts across decades. It's something that's

(03:30):
within us all and we have theframe of reference and we can connect in
a very deep and meaningful way.I think it's so cool. I mean,
again, as a Muppet fanatic,this just has my name written all
over it. I think you hitthe nail on the head when you say
it is multigenerational, because this issuch an exciting exhibit to be able to
do with the whole family. Absolutely, and there's some really fun interactives too.

(03:50):
There's a green screen where you couldtry your hand at puppeting. There's
a build a Muppet. They're builda wonderful build them Muppet. Why not.
There's some really fun video content thatyou can watch, and so it's
a very experiential show. And youknow my favorite Muppets, Grover, he's
here, Grover from the seventies.It's just so wonderful and thinking about programming

(04:15):
too. So we'll have the showthrough the summer and the fall and the
holidays. We wanted to have itfor different points in time where you know,
you might have family visiting over vacationperiod, and that we really wanted
to be thinking about school groups anduniversity classes coming in for the falls,
good point, and then for theholidays at the end of the year.
It will be a really great thingif you have in laws visiting, something

(04:38):
to get out, get out ofthe house, and there's always there's it's
always great of a lineup of activitieswhen the in laws come into town.
I know we've just been talking aboutthis Jim Henson exhibition, but I know
that you guys have so much happeningat the museum, So can you just
give this maybe a small handful ofyour favorite or the most popular museum attractions.
So we have many exhibitions that arecurrently on view. We recently opened

(04:59):
a exhibition on Claire mccartell, whois a fashion designer who grew up in
Frederick, Maryland. She eventually movedto New York and went to Parsons,
so New York also tries to claimher, but she's a Maryland girl.
She grew up here. She wentto Hood College for a little bit of
time, and she is responsible forgiving us ballet flats, pockets in our

(05:20):
dresses, nippers on the side,and leggings. So she is our hero.
She's our leading lady. She isour leading lady. She wanted to
have fashionable clothes that she could gofrom cooking dinner to hosting a party,
and she's amazing in nineteen forty nineteenfifties, so she really was pushing the

(05:41):
envelope. And so we have anamazing collection of hers that was gifted to
us by her family in the nineteennineties. And we've recently been in collaboration
with Tory Birch, who last springlaunched a Tory Birch and Claire mccartell line
for a fashion week. So that'sa very exciting partnership that we're hoping to
continue to grow. So we havean amazing fashion collection. Just very broadly,

(06:03):
we have around fifteen thousand garments thatspan all different time periods. It's
very interesting the materials that have beengifted to us over time because they often
have an amazing story connected or connectedto people within the Maryland narrative. And
that's one of my favorite things aboutthis place is because we're a library and

(06:25):
a museum. Oftentimes, if youfind something in the collection, there's usually
supporting evidence in the library, andso you can tell a more full story
rather than just an object as anart object. We also have an amazing
collection of oral histories that have beencollected over the years as well, spanning
from the sixties to the present.And we launched last spring an exhibition called

(06:47):
Passion and Purpose and it's the voicesof civil rights activists in Maryland. And
when we were conceiving of this show, one of the driving factors was the
request from teachers. We often wouldreceived inquiries about programming related to civil rights
movement, and we didn't have apurpose built space where we could take students.
We'd have to go to five tosix different places throughout the campus to

(07:11):
pull it together and then take astop in the library pull out some primary
sources, which we don't mind doing, but if that's something that's so requested,
we should build something purposely for that. And so we started to embark
on this exhibition and we realized thatthe heart of it really was the oral
histories. And we had these tapesthat we were so nervous to play because

(07:33):
they were so old, they're fromthe sixties, they were dried out,
they were crinkled, like we playedthis one more time, we might not
ever hear it again. And sowe got a grant to digitize them and
at about one hundred and fifty ofthem that were digitized, and we realized,
this is the center of this exhibition. But how do you display something
that you can't see right right exactly? The challenge that is very challenging.

(07:57):
Yeah, So we worked with anumber of partners throughout this to try to
illuminate some of the moments from thenineteen sixties into the presence. So it's
the long civil rights story. Andwe built a space in the back as
well that's a community gallery that wedisplay either modern photography right now, there's
images from the Preserve, the BaltimoreUprising Archive, so there's some photographs in

(08:20):
that space now, but it's alsoan opportunity to showcase local artists or other
work that's going on. And it'sflexible space if a group wanted to host
a meeting or have a lecture orhave a conversation. It's a gathering space,
like we really want to be aspace that can convene conversations and to
be able to learn from each other. Kenni Caljean, President CEO for the

(08:43):
Maryland Center for History and Culture mdhistorydot org is where you want to go
online for everything you need to knowand with over seven million books, documents,
manuscripts, photographs, the museum's libraryis quite impressive. Can you tell
us a little bit about that.The library is amazing for our members.
It is the the most valued pieceof their membership, for those that might
be coming back on multiple trips tobe working on genealogy or researching their family

(09:09):
home or their business, or aproject that they might be, a book
that they might be publishing. Sowe work very closely with universities and researchers
to be able to have them bepart of the discovery process. We have
so many materials because we've been collectingsince eighteen three four. We're one of
the oldest spent a long time,and so we're also constantly now in the

(09:33):
mode of discovery. When you knowa researcher might come to ask and ask
a question and then we're as staffin the two thousands say wow, like
we collected that in the nineteen forties. That's amazing. That they were thinking
that far ahead. And so ineighteen forty four when we were founded,
if you think about that moment ofwhat history they were valuing, they thinking
about leaders either in Revolutionary War,the war eighteen twelve, those veterans were

(10:00):
sing away and so okay, well, what's going to happen to that legacy?
And like that constant questioning for ourselvestoo, like what do we need
to collect today? That will beimportant for future historians forty fifty years from
now who will be asking questions likewhat was life like? So there's such
a treasure trove of materials and possibilitiesfor questions to ask. And like,

(10:20):
that's something we really want to drivehome, is like this idea that we're
not here to tell you the history. We want you to uncover it.
We want you to ask the questionthat's right and pull together the evidence.
For students too, a lot ofour school programs not only will they have
a gallery experience, but we wantthem to engage with our library materials as
well and to pose a question orto maybe look at something from a different

(10:41):
angle and see what emerges from thequestioning. And so that's just an important
skill that I think everybody needs tohave. So the library is just a
really wonderful place for discovery and workingwith authentic materials. We let you engage
with our all of our elections andso making an appointment with a special collections

(11:01):
archivist is usually the best way togo. We wanted your experience to be
the most meaningful and engaged. Wedon't want to say, oh, we
weren't able to find that, Sowe typically set up an appointment and we
ask what you might be interested in, and then we bring out the boxes
and go get to engage. Yeah, you get to engage hands on.
Very cool. Well, Katie,this was unbelievable. So much to do

(11:22):
and see, an experience and learnover at the Maryland Center for History and
Culture mdhistory dot org online is whereyou want to go for all the information,
to book your appointments and to startplanning your trip. Today, Katie,
I want to thank you again somuch for taking some time. What
an amazing treasure trove of information this. You guys have such a hidden gem
over there at the Maryland Center forHistory and Culture. I appreciate that so

(11:45):
much. Thank you