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Transportation museum hires Doe

Reprinted courtesy of The Grinnell-Herald Register October 23, 2006

Donald Doe of Grinnell has been named program development manager for the Iowa Transportation Museum. The art historian’s primary responsibilities will involve working with exhibit design consultants and architects in developing the physical buildings of the ITM campus, including shaping the facility’s content design and educational themes, as well grant-writing to support the cause.

John Swanson, director of the ITM and its sole employee until now, says the project has been a “one-man show” but has reached a level in its development where “the job is just too big” for one person.

“There are too many priorities, fundraising among them, and I need to focus on getting the dollars so that we can get the job completed,” Swanson says. “This addition brings strength to the museum operation and design configuration part of the equation.”

Swanson underlined Doe’s more than-30 years of museum operation and management experience and past success in grant-writing, as well as the relationship Doe has developed with the ITM board working on special projects in the last two years. “Plus he’s in Grinnell and he’s interested in transportation: what more could we ask for?” Swanson added.

The hire comes at a critical state in the project’s development. The buildings on the previously-neglected campus- former home of the Spaulding Buggy Works, and a National Register of Historic Places site – have been essentially stabilized. A comprehensive strategic planning process has been completed. Now, President Gerry Schnepf says the ITM team in the final stages of selecting an exhibit design firm to breathe life back into the buildings. Doe’s task is to work with the board and the designers and architects to make that happen.

“When you hire a design firm to execute the exhibit spaces in a museum of this character…the designer is in many respects functioning as the curator, in that they are generating the setting for, and in some cases the actual specific content of, the museum in question.” Doe said.

“The board wanted someone who had a lot of experience with not only a museum setting but with a museum functioning as an educational resource,” he said, adding one of the ITM’s highest priorities is to be an educational resource of “first-rate character.”

“I have had the opportunity to work with museum architects and to consider design issues for museums I the past, so my background rather fit in with what they need in the way of a source of advice.”

Doe says he relishes what will be an opportunity to work with “very, very gifted designers.”

“We’re about to wrap up the process of selecting the design firm we’re going to be working with. We’ve got it down to two finalists, and both firms are knockouts, so it’s kind of a win-win situation,” he said.

He is currently in the process of meeting with representatives of both firms as well as checking references on their work from across the country. “They both have national reputations. They both have reputations for being on-time and on-budget. They’ll do great work.”

Ahead lies what Doe calls, “very unglamorous but very necessary structural work” such as conceptualizing various exhibitions and how they will be clustered, focusing on the educational mission, and exercising “an enormous amount of care” in deciding what will be prioritized and what will be deleted from exhibition in the facility’s fairly limited space.

“This is a transportation museum that is going to be very, very different from what one might expect.’ Doe says. “It is not going to be a collection of old cars and trucks. It is going to be about the history of transportation in Iowa, primarily, but we also want to use transportation as a kind o window on a host of issues... economic, environmental, political, social issues.

“For example, to make a point which is perfectly obvious in Grinnell, the impact of the railroads, on the settlement, configuration and shape of Iowa is enormous.”

He says the process of putting together all the parts and pieces of a museum may seem like a simple task, but is in fact one that can be “enormously time-consuming- it’s just the nature of the critter.”

“But I’m increasingly convinced it is going to be a knockout.”

Doe grew up in Goose Rocks Beach, Maine, and after completing his undergraduate degree at Brown University, earned a masters’ degree in creative writing from San Francisco State and a doctorate in comparative arts at Ohio University.

His career as an art historian, focusing “broadly speaking,” he says, on modern art and American art, has involved working as director of the University Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and as assistant director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Since the late 1980’s, he has worked with a number of other Midwestern museums, most recently Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery where his wife, Lesley Wright, works as director.

Doe has taught several classes for the Grinnell College art department, including a course devoted to the art history of the Midwestern prairie states. He was involved in curating a show of contemporary Midwestern work for the Faulconer and he was co-curator of the gallery’s Japanese basket exhibition.

The ITM’s program development manager job is structured as a part-time position.

“I’m trying to grasp the concept of retirement,” Does notes, “but it seems to be an elusive concept.”

The formal announcement of Doe’s hire came after what President Schnepf called a “wonderful meeting” here last week, attended by board members from across the state. He said that while working with the state and federal funding sources for the project is not a rapid process that it is preceding while “an exceptional amount of work” is going on behind the scenes.

“We are pushing the process as fast as we can,” Schnepf said, adding that the retention of Doe on staff and the work toward selecting a design firm were key pieces of the process.

In addition, he said the board had retained the firm Public Communications, Inc. of Chicago to help develop the National Transportation Heroes Center, part of the federal funding provision, and was also spending time with the Grinnell Area Chamber of Commerce and it’ Convention and Visitors Bureau in an effort to “work more closely with the city of Grinnell.”

“It’s a two-way street. We have to do things to show the community that we’re moving ahead, and the community also has to kind of step up and support us.” Schnepf said. “So it’s a reinforcing kind of process.”

He said attendance at the annual meeting was “fantastic,” representing people around the state who take an interest in the ITM project.

“This museum, as we move ahead, will probably be unlike any museum that people in Iowa have ever seen,” he concluded.