Greetings and happiest of New Year’s, everyone! The professional staff and I have returned from the holiday break to re-open the Museum and Rowan Oak on January 2, which precedes the University’s Spring semester January start. Please feel free to visit any day Tuesday–Friday 10:00AM to 4:00PM—at the Museum itself we’ll re-establish our Saturday hours by Spring, as we await the return of fully-staffed status which has experienced a temporary hiatus. For broadest awareness of our exhibitions, programs, and events you are in the right place, the monthly 5th & University newsletter which compiles all that we are offering across all departments in the month ahead. For additional information and deeper background the website URLs as you may doubtless know are https://museum.olemiss.edu/ and https://rowanoak.com/.
I wanted to take this month’s newsletter opportunity to augment your awareness of some of our behind-the-scenes activity and personnel which may serve to shed further light on our operations—museums being unique environments with a very wide spectrum of functional components, many of which are non-apparent, non ‘front-of-house’, and highly specialized. Among these is the professional staff position known in the museum field as “Preparator”.
This job title is fairly unique to the museum world, and yet its word-formation carries its own degree of explanation: preparing the museum as a facility which installs and exhibits both long-term permanent collection exhibitions, and temporary shows of time-limited duration. In our case the Preparator also serves as the ‘Building Mayor’, a charming term coined by University Facilities Management to describe a staff member designated by all the major University facilities to represent shared awareness of facility-based needs and developments cross-campus.
Since March, 2022 the Museum has been exceptionally fortunate to have brought on board our Preparator, Ricky Way. A Seattle-born native of the Pacific Northwest, Ricky came to us from several years of co-ownership of artisan carpentry business Limber Timber, based in Oxford. Prior to Limber Timber, Ricky served as a propmaker in the film industry while residing here in Oxford with his wife Anna and daughter Julia.
Ricky’s base of operations inside the Museum is a space the public and museum visitors never see, but which is entirely fascinating–a fully-equipped carpentry workshop with a wide range of power and hand tools and an expansive range of work surfaces and supplies storage cabinets and shelving. As many of you may know, watching a highly-skilled carpenter at work is an extraordinarily interesting experience, and never more so than observing Ricky’s work in our-back of house shop.
To annotate all of Ricky’s roles and duties will exceed the parameters of this column, but suffice to say that if we’ve installed it or built it, Ricky has played a major role in not only the implementation and delivery of those projects, but often also the problem solving and fabrication detailing around them.
Organizationally, Ricky is part of the Museum’s Collections and Exhibitions team managed and supervised skillfully by our Curator and Collections Manager Melanie Antonelli. We currently also have a Graduate Assistant from the Southern Studies program (Greta Koshenina) on that team, and an unfilled but soon to be posted position of Assistant Collections & Exhibitions Manager. To note the exceptionally high productivity of this team would be a considerable understatement, since they are not only essential to all that we do but the acclaim we receive for our exhibitions, our collections care and research, and our handsome and well-appointed building and gallery interiors are assuredly a tribute to this museum department.
You will get a feel for this highly-valued Museum team member by a statement he provided at my request, which speaks volumes about why we so appreciate having Ricky as our colleague: “What I enjoy most about working at the museum is I have the opportunity to use my skills for the betterment of the community.” The next time you visit or attend a program feel free to introduce yourself to Ricky or catch me and I’ll ask him to come out from the shop to say hello—you will greatly appreciate meeting our Preparator in person.
As I often quote a mentor of my own career, museums are essentially about People, Place, and Program … in service to community. On the ‘People’ front we are honored to have Ricky with us, benefitting daily from his myriad skills and talents in construction, fabrication, carpentry, and facility care. Thank you, Ricky, for joining us and enriching the collegiality and collaborative spirit of our team.
Warmest regards of the season, everyone!
Robert Saarnio
Museum Director
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