Thelen: [Feedback] Now why does it doing that, is it because the mics are too close to each other? That seemed to be… Franz

If you tried to do - the show has a lot of text, I will not say it does not, but if you try to interpret every single piece, maybe that is just plain overwhelming and gets down to some small details while missing some much bigger ones or much bigger views. I am trying to look for a picture of - okay. There is an end exhibit area, which is here. It is down at one end of the exhibit, but these are cases with artifacts in them, Betty Hemings’ house, farm quarter, Stewart house, you are not seeing the artifacts in them, you are seeing the humidity controls, but the background here is what I wanted to point out. These cases come up in front of there.

We were struggling in this exhibit, we had so many little pieces and how do you tie all these little pieces together. An idea we came up with, if I can find another picture, is to do these huge background murals. This is one for one section, there is another whole wall, but I am not finding Bob’s floor plan which is kind of interesting. One long wall talks about agriculture, no his garden, his agriculture, his industry, and his house, all of which he is doing experiments. We are talking about the kind of Enlightenment experimentation and ideas he is bringing here. You have all this little stuff and lots of text, so to tie them together we came up with this idea, these great big background murals.

[inaudible]

Charles: It is also covering up some windows that the architects put there that drove us crazy. The slave ones are in effect doing that at this end. We actually came up with the idea of doing the slave ones. It is one of those things that you kind of hope, you are a little afraid if you say - how do I put it? Rather than suggest in advance we might do this, we just decide let us do it, see what it looks like, we thought it was going to work. Then we presented it to the client to say “hey here is an idea of how to sort of get slavery front and center without pushing it in everybody’s face.” It is there equal to all this other stuff that we are doing in this great big way with these great big lists. They loved it, they thought it was great. It was one of those days that you do not know when you are going into a meeting how it is going to work.

Staples: By that time we had a comfortable relationship with Susan and everybody.

Charles: We had a great relationship.

Staples: So you do not feel like you are going into a corporation board meeting, you go in with an opportunity to discuss.

Thelen: You are going to have a conversation.

Charles: Absolutely, it has been a fabulous relationship.

Thelen: That would be sort of a model of what you hope happens. When it happens it is pretty nice and it does not always happen.

Staples: Occasionally you have to back up to go forward.

Charles: Susan, it is an interesting story. I thought I brought some napkins, or I had them on the tray, but you took the tray away.

Staples: The tray is out there.

Charles: We had interviewed, we were talking yesterday about interviewing for jobs.

Staples: I hope you can explain this awkward discussion.

Thelen: Note, Barbara is now eating a muffin, end note.

Charles: It is very good.

Thelen: It is very good.

Charles: I am going to put it down. In the early eighties, I would say eighty-three, eighty-four, we were asked to compete on the Joslyn project, which was Views of Vanishing Frontier, the Bobmer exhibit going up the Missouri River and we won that competition and Ralph Applbom was another competitor. I know we all bring up Applebom, he is sort of the big gorilla in this whole exhibit world, has a huge firm now.

At this point we were all about the same size, about seven people I would say, or under ten, I do not know exactly how big his office was. We won that one, but I think a year later was the interviews for the first visitors’ center at Monticello. We had known Susan when she was at the Octagon here in Washington. She had invited us to be one of the people to compete. We lost that to Ralph and that was always a little bit of a disappointment, but Joslyn was pretty cool so we could not complain too much. In ’99 when we were invited to look at a visitors’ study, planning for a big visitor’s center, again the two finalists were our office and Ralph’s. Interestingly, the day of the interviews was the day that they announced; I think it was Nature Magazine, wherever the article came out about Jefferson’s DNA. It had come out that morning. I cannot say people were totally focused on the interview given the press that was swarming.

Eventually their site away fell, did not work out with the university. I think in the end it was good it did not work out. They put the visitors’ center on the old site of the old visitors’ center. So in a sense some land that was already polluted and that presumably if the architecture was kept low-level enough you would not see it from the view shed from the mountain. They picked an architect, Air Saintgroves. Our visitor interpretative study was given to the architects, we received a call saying, “you will be on our team,” which I probably mentioned yesterday that being under an architect is not the happiest place in the world.

We work going to continue to work on Monticello, that was exciting. We were already doing work on the dependencies, we had already done the Indian Hall. Then after a while we get a call from Susan saying that Dan Gerdin, the president, feels that they ought to, that they like Staple and Charles, they like our work, but they think that this is a very important project and they ought to be interviewing for it and not in effect make it a fate accompli. So we are one of the finalists. And Ralph Applebom was selected. We would joke we are on top on the mountain and he is down at the bottom of the mountain because we were still working up on the dependencies. That hurt, there is no question that hurt.

Thelen: How do you deal with that? I do not want to distract you, maybe find a glass of wine.

Staples: Exactly. You have to get over it, move on. Turn the other cheek.

Thelen: That must be tough. That sounds like a particularly tough one because you had…

Staples: A vested interest.

Thelen: And these were friends, so to speak or people that you had relationships…

Charles: Susan had always been great with us. In fact on this visitor study report, I really worked hard writing it and she called me one day and she said “Barbara, this is not your best work.”

Thelen: Well she is a friend in a certain way.

Charles: She is a great editor and we just knuckled down and went over the areas that she was concerned about and rewrote and rewrote. That was in September and I did a couple more drafts. That was the millennium New Years Eve and we were invited to Ohio and we did not go because I had to get this thing done. I am very proud of that report.

Anyway we heard, I think it was very early 2003 that Applebom was selected. Part of the archives will be our proposals, that we did not win. Then it was like April 2005, I got a call from Mike Merium who was heading up the project, from the point of view of getting it constructed and trying to figure out budgets and so on. He said, “can you update the budget you gave us a couple of years ago.” I said, “that does not make any sense, I do not have a clue what is going on.” He said something like “we do not either and your numbers are as good as anybody’s.”

They had never collated what hours of the day people are coming, when buses are coming, when families are coming. It is quite different during April and May, there is very heavy school group traffic. Summer you get families so it is a different kind of experience, people coming with their families. September is, I think this is true in almost every museum that has group tours, is one of the lowest months of the year because the kids have just come back to school so no bus trips have been organized yet. It is trying to think about how you are moving people through here and what should be the relationships of the spaces. We did bubble diagrams of the relationships of spaces, ideas for exhibits. At the very beginning are the three themes that we were talking about.

The plantation one we wanted to - one issue was to get across just even the breath of the plantation let alone the people. The people we have been talking about earlier. We had a huge bronze model, we designed it and suggested who could make it and so on that everyone can stand around and get a sense of Monticello house is that big on this six by nine foot model. It is really great and on it, sorry to keep walking away.

Part of the issue, of course, is who do you know anything about? Some slaves are much better documented. John Hemings who is literate and who is writing letters to Jefferson from Poplar Forest while he is down there finishing the interior woodworking is a pretty compelling character. And is he freed. That is another issue, who is freed by Jefferson and he says kind of why and so on versus who is not. Some do not live long enough, who runs away or is sold. There were a lot of discussions of who you pick and this is a discussion that at least for us has been going on for at least ten years because each of the areas in the dependencies, like when we first did the cook’s room in 2003, they picked the Faucet family. It is a very small room, not as big as this room. It probably has John Faucet, who is an iron worker, his wife Edie who is a cook and they had ten children, but maybe only five are still living with them in this space. We had already done the Faucet family, so do you do them again or do you do someone else? That has been one of the issues, they really have the riches of knowing a lot about their slaves because they have been doing all this research for so long.

We have been trying to pick different people different times. Burwell who is so important, is the maitre’d. He almost had to be in Crossroads because he is controlling the keys, he is the key person down here literally. Who is going to be saying now you get that done, we are doing this up here. He is also one of our important people upstairs. He is both a painter and the maitre’d. He is given his freedom. He is the only slave who buys things at the Monticello auction. He buys several things at the Monticello auction and they have the receipt for what he buys. You have got wonderful stories. Some of them, like Sally, it is much harder to make a story with them. Even though there is this whole side with Jefferson and we talk about that, when we are trying to actually show the documents which we usually try to do or have quotes, there is very little to show.

Great George and Ursula, Great George was the only black overseer, so he is an important person and he is near the plantation area. If you want to develop a story on somebody, I would say part of the real issue is what do you have to work with. I think increasingly what is really exciting that is going on is people are not using hypothetical information. They are trying to use real evidence.