Cyd Johnson, 18 December 2017
After leaving the archives for the first time at the very beginning of the semester, I remember thinking to myself that working in a group with twenty-five other people with a time limit of just a few months to pull off an exhibition was going to be a nightmare. And honestly, for most of the early planning stages—it was, at least for me. Groupwork in an academic setting has never been my forte, and doing research without any sense of direction irks me to no end because I never feel like I’m being productive.
But now that it’s all over, I realize that those two concerns ended up canceling each other out, rather than adding together as I had expected. While I felt frustrated and unproductive in the planning stages, other people were excited about scouring the boxes of archival documents to search for photographs, letters, or news clippings that could help shed light on some of the objects from our list. The more concrete tasks like writing and editing labels and wall texts appealed more to me, and less to others, and so it goes. I have never worked with so many other people to create anything, and despite all odds, it was the best experience I have had functioning in a group setting.
It’s only now that the semester is coming to a close, and the gallery has been stripped of the Narratives of the Nationality Rooms, that I realize how well we operated as a team, each contributing different areas of knowledge and distinctive interests that helped create an amazing final product, and maintain a supportive work environment.