One of today’s speakers was the Director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI), Corine Wegener.  She is a Veteran of Army Civil Affairs and was one of the military respondents to the looting incident that affected Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad. My husband was in Iraq attached to the 3^rd ID with the 92nd Engineers, and who were assigned with the task of trying to come up with structural remedies to prevent further looting, and since then, he and I have followed the developments in the case since then.  I found it interesting to hear her first-hand accounts from her time on the ground as a soldier and then with SCRI. Furthermore, she works with the nonprofit US Committee of the Blue Shield that provides aid to cultural heritage sites worldwide that are in areas of conflict or are under immediate threat from other emergencies.  

Ironically, when I sat down to write Director Wegner a thank you note, my building’s fire alarm went off, and I and all other building residents had to evacuate. I was annoyed at first, but then it became clear from inside my own unit that the building was on fire, and I exited post haste. It turned out that the fire was on my floor a couple of apartments over, which explained how quickly the smoke got into the unit that I am renting.  Once outside in the cold, clutching my computer and cell phone amongst the other residents, I could not help but look around and think that this served as a visual reminder that emergencies do not care what you are doing.  Some people were dressed in pajamas while others were in regular street clothes. Many had their various pets with them on leashes, in carriers, or being held awkwardly in their arms. This juxtaposition of people in different states of dress also illustrated just how fast an emergency can happen which is why preparedness is important. Thankfully it was quickly extinguished, and we were all allowed reentry into the building.

Given that I am aware that desegregated communal dining was a flashpoint topic of the Civil Rights movement, the installation was smartly deployed and not lost on me as a concept. It was also unique since many museum dining facilities still appear as afterthoughts or have latched onto the trend of being a separate experience that acts as an attraction to themselves with their Michelin Star ratings. I loved that the Sweet Home Cafe is one hundred percent part of the museum and not a subset of muse-tainment whose only aim is to attract people through the doors. As both a Southerner and a former bakery chief, I also enjoyed that the Red Velvet Cupcake contained chocolate and had a large sticky crumb that would have passed my Granny’s discerning test of authenticity.

I could write literal tomes on everything that the National Museum of African American History and Culture got right in the construction and display of their subject matter. The amount of work put into making the collection accessible to people of different heights, mobility, visual, and hearing impairment could serve as a textbook example of how universal design improves the experience for all visitors. As an able-bodied person, had I not been looking for this type of design, I would have easily missed it due to the excellence of its deployment.

The museum’s conceptual design has visitors start at the bottom in a darker environment and ascend into the light as if rising up from the bowels of a slave ship is a stroke of genius. They did not waste a single space or opportunity to engage the visitor and did so while maintaining an aesthetic that allowed learning contemplation, and social engagement between visitors that guaranteed the differently motivated museum visitors types are all capable of engaging with the museum’s big idea and educational goals.