Utah’s Small Museum Landscape (Season 2, Ep. 11)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. My guests today are three small museum directors representing over 300 museums or historical collections spread out across Utah. Utah has many different museum types and collections and organizations. Just about every stripe or type can be found in Utah. Historic home museums and I should say not to mention the ubiquitous pioneer log cabin, humbly furnished with pioneer relics located in the center of just about every self-respecting town or city in Utah. But there's also historic villages, of course, history museums, art museums, archaeological museums, science, paleontology, life science museums, children's museums, and then zoological collections or better known as zoos. One aviary, a number of botanical gardens.
All of these are located in Utah and I hope as you look around your neighborhood and your community, you will see that you probably have one of these places not far from you, where you live.
We Utahns have an affinity for gathering and curating collections. We are truly a collecting and displaying lot we are.
Like little cabinets of curiosity and wonder, Utah has a veritable cornucopia of small museums, galleries, collections, and today we're going to talk about what goes on in these small museums. Who directs and cares for these places and what wonderful places they are for our communities, for our collective remembering or learning and discovery. My guest today is LeeAnn Denzer, retired curator and now on the advisory board of the Uintah County Heritage Museum in Vernal Utah. Diana Call, Executive Director of the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site, and Jami Van Huss, Director of the Hyrum City Museum. Jami kindly is serving as the co-producer of this episode of Speak Your Piece. If you notice, the three small museums are representatives who are speaking with me today, are from Northern Utah, one from Southern Utah, and one from Eastern Utah. This geographical reach and involvement was no accident. Welcome, friends.
How are you?

**Jami Van Huss** (2:56)
Thank you.

**LeeAnn Denzer** (2:57)
Thanks for having us.

**Brad Westwood** (3:00)
Yeah.
If you want to know more about these museum directors, their careers, what museums they work in, their accomplishments, and we also have a photograph of each of them, and they will be all included on our show notes today. I know I've said a little in my introduction, but it might seem like an obvious question, but it really isn't. What is a museum?

**Diana Call** (3:30)
Well, Brad, museums serve the dual purpose and role of education and preservation. Sometimes these two things can be at odds, but museums weave them together. Museums exist to preserve artifacts, images, and stories, and then we use these resources to educate our communities. We exist to teach, to develop exhibits, presentations, and activities, workshops, and other events, and we use our collections to teach about the past, cultures, art, science, and most importantly, the present.
We are inclusive, relevant, and provide a place for our community members to feel a sense of belonging.

**Brad Westwood** (4:12)
Please, Jami, please go ahead.

**Jami Van Huss** (4:15)
I'm just going to say, like Diana mentioned, I think preservation is at the heart of what museums do. Since there are a variety of museum types, I think it follows that there are many types of collections. I don't think a lot of people really think about the breadth of collections here in Utah. For instance, let's think about Hobel Zoo. They actually have living collections. Then there's Hill Aerospace Museum, which cares for dozens of enormous aircraft. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts houses an amazing collection with many pieces dating literally back centuries and made of all different types of materials. Then, like you mentioned, Brad, there are just lots of small pioneer museums throughout the state that hold thousands of incredible images and artifacts directly related to our pioneer history. Obviously, the types of objects that need to be cared for is very broad. Regardless of that, caring for them is a very serious ethical and legal duty.
As you might imagine, this requires a good deal of training, procedures, documentation, and materials because everything that we do in collections care is purposeful.
Now, ideally, all objects, except maybe the living ones, would live indefinitely in an archival storage box made just for them, tucked away safely on a shelf so they would just live forever. But that wouldn't do any good, right? I mean, even archives are open to researchers to come in. And so it's really important for museums to give objects opportunities to tell their stories. And so that's why, so first we preserve, but then we must educate so that, you know, we create interpretive exhibits and other educational components and programming so that we can also learn from the things we're working to preserve.