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Beyond Brown Paper:

Traveling Exhibition, Educational Materials, and Permanent Installation

Project Team: Joan Chamberlain [St. Kieran Community Center for the Arts, Berlin], Dr. Catherine Amidon [Drerup Gallery, PSU], Student Assistant

Description: The Beyond Brown Paper web exhibition continues to be incredibly successful, often topping more the 7,000 site visits per day.  The Beyond Brown Paper CCOI project sought to increase access, add educational materials for K-12 students and their families, create a traveling exhibition, and design and execute a permanent interactive installation in Berlin.

  • Large-scale prints were made of dozens of the Brown Company photographs and the opening exhibition was at PSU.  The opening event included a panel discussion by former Brown Company employees.
  • Two interpretive guides were developed–one for “families and children,” and one for “secondary students and families.”
  • An interactive exhibition was installed at the St. Kieran Community Center for the Arts in Berlin, including the technology infrastructure necessary for accessing the online exhibition over a high-speed connection.  Visitors can view wall-mounted prints as well.
  • Visitors can annotate the images in a variety of ways, including typing, hand writing, discussion, and dictation.

Given that not everyone has a computer, and that high speed internet access is hard to come by in many parts of northern New Hampshire, having a permanent local installation provides ongoing access to images and stories that belong to Berlin.  The exhibition opened in April 2009 at the St. Kieran Community Center for the Arts.

 

PSU Project Leader: Catherine Amidon, Drerup Gallery
Community Partner: Joan Chamberlain, St. Kieran Community Center for the Arts [Berlin, NH]

Project Background
The Beyond Brown Paper online exhibition was launched in 2008 and features more than 11,000 photographs from the Brown Paper Company Photographic Collection, housed in the Michael J. Spinelli Jr. Center for University Archives and Special Collections at Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library.

Project Objectives
As a natural follow-up to launching the Beyond Brown Paper online exhibition, Joan and Catherine wanted to bring selected enlarged images from the Brown Paper collection back to Berlin for viewing an annotation in a non-digital format.


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