HOW TO WEIGH IN
Those with a suggestion for "Atlanta in 50 Objects" can fill out a short form and add it to the list at the Atlanta History Center's website, www.atlantahistorycenter.com/atlanta-50-objects.
One can see previous suggestions at the same site.
Rosebud, the sled.
The sword Excalibur.
Frodo’s ring.
There are objects that can speak volumes, all by themselves.
Atlanta’s tale could be told with just such totems, starting with the spike pounded into an Eastern Seaboard rail bed and continuing with a pink mechanical pig or a curvy 7-ounce glass bottle.
The Atlanta History Center is assembling a roster of these meaningful items to tell the story of our town, and it is seeking suggestions.
The project is called “Atlanta in 50 Objects,” and it is intended to be a sort of crowdsourced visual glossary. The center’s website says it is “actively engaging audiences in the creation of user-generated content to showcase the public’s own interpretation of what makes Atlanta ‘Atlanta.’”
Visitors to the center have been dropping paper suggestions into a Plexiglas box. Others are sending ideas in via the center's website.
“It’s not a unique idea,” said Don Rooney, the center’s director of exhibitions. Rooney mentioned a similar exhibit at the Smithsonian, “101 Objects That Made America,” which included a silver-plated compass from the Lewis and Clark expedition and an Apollo spacesuit. A history of the world, told in objects from the British Museum (starting with a 15,000 B.C. Clovis point and ending with a solar-powered phone charger), used the same conceit.
What’s new in the local effort is the chance for average Atlantans to influence the final choices of objects. “We are a lot more about letting the visitor speak their voice,” Rooney said. “We don’t have all the answers. We don’t even have all the questions.”
The history center offered 16 different categories to help organize the suggestions: architecture, arts, business, civil rights, the Civil War, events, food, geography, institutions, neighborhoods, people, places, politics, religion, sports and transportation.
“What we ultimately will do is select 50 things that the public has provided to us or guided us in,” Rooney said. “We may be drawing from our own collection.”
That collection, in the history center’s voluminous archives, is deep in Atlantiana, with 58,000 cataloged items and millions of documents, images and film holdings.
A few suggestions have already been posted on the center’s Tumblr page. One is an architectural remnant from the Owl Room at the 1913-era Hotel Ansley, a highly decorated bracket featuring an owl with eyes that glow red when lights are low. Another is a “charge coin” from Rich’s, a device that predated the charge plate and allowed customers to buy merchandise on credit at the venerable department store.
Some Atlanta eras and institutions will be easier to sum up than others. A “Maynard for Mayor” campaign button tells succinctly of the 1974 inauguration of Atlanta’s first African-American mayor.
But, asked Rooney, “how do you put the Chattahoochee River in the conversation?”
The history center will accept suggestions through March 2. Then curators will prepare an exhibit that will debut in January 2016. It will be an excuse to show off the history center’s new campus, which, by then, will have been transformed with $21 million in improvements.
(More improvements are ahead. One of the city’s most iconic objects, the massive, panoramic Battle of Atlanta painting called the Cyclorama, will move to the history center next year and is expected to open to the public sometime in 2017.)
“Atlanta in 50 Objects” will also serve as a drumroll for the center’s Atlanta exhibit, which has been rethought and redesigned for the first time since 1993, and opens in the summer of 2016.
About the Author
