THE CITY Exhibition Games

Fair Park is almost as big a thorn in the civic side as Central Expressway or Love Field. All have seen the city grow beyond their capacity to serve it and yet they’re too valuable to abandon. Should we double-deck Central? Should we allow interstate flights from Love Field? And what should we do about Fair Park?

Ask almost any city bureaucrat that last question and you’ll get a canned recitation of Fair Park’s wonders, its history, its Art Deco splendor, the diversity of its offerings, and most of all, its “enormous potential.” Ask about that potential and you’ll hear that it could become the city’s cultural, educational, and recreational heart.

Try pinning him down. Point out that the Museum of Fine Arts is buying up downtown land for a new museum building. That the symphony, opera, and ballet all want facilities they don’t have to share with one another. That the symphony in particular has been aggressive in rounding up support for a new hall, and will almost certainly be the next arts organization – after the Museum of Fine Arts – to leave Fair Park. That SMU’s football team is desperately bailing out of the Cotton Bowl. That Reunion Arena is going to make the Fair Park Coliseum obsolete.

Assuming all of this comes to pass, why would anyone bother to go to Fair Park except during the three weeks of State Fair?

Your bureaucrat will take you back full circle: history, Art Deco splendor, diversified offerings, enormous potential.

But the fact is, whatever the park’s potential, it’s never going to be what its advocates dream of-a Tuileries, a Kensington Gardens, or a Central Park. It’s in the wrong place-hemmed in by warehouses and railroad tracks, a freeway, and a slum. It has no natural amenities beyond a scuzzy lagoon. It is sprawling and unfocused and mazelike.

The only way Fair Park can be saved is to make what goes on there irresistible. Fair Park has to be hyped.

It was hyped a few months ago, when the Museum of Fine Arts hauled in the crowds for “Pompeii A.D. 79.” When crowds stood in line in wretched winter weather to get tickets for the art museum, all of the Fair Park museums were crowded. The Museum of Natural History had 100,000 visitors in January alone-normally that museum’s slowest month, when it’s lucky to have enough traffic to keep the guards awake.

Once the Museum of Fine Arts goes, the spinoff from a Pompeii show goes, too. Natural History, and the Health and Science Museum, will have to go it alone. And that means they’ll have to learn some of Harry Parker’s promotional tricks.

The Dallas Museum of Natural History is a bore for the casual museum-visitor, and that’s about 95 percent of us. Downstairs there are four rooms of stuffed animals in diorama settings. Upstairs there are some fossils and stuffed birds in display cases, and several more cases of porcelain birds by Boehm and Doughty. And that’s about it.

But in the work areas and storage rooms of the museum there are hundreds of specimens-dazzling trays of gem-like butterflies, extensive collections of fossils, shells, minerals, carefully preserved mammals, birds, reptiles, even a nearly complete skeleton of a prehistoric woman. Occasionally some of these collections are mounted for special exhibitions. But even then they are crammed in among the permanent displays as if they don’t quite belong.

The museum has a hard-5 working, dedicated staff of about 20. They know how to work on a shoestring. For the Pompeii crowds, they mounted a fine little show about volcanoes for only $5000 – small change in the era of museum blockbusters. It had all the things that a good contemporary museum exhibit needs – flashing lights, buttons to push, explanatory graphics. The staff assembled it under the direction of curator of exhibits Walt Davis; ornithologists, botanists, and geologists did the hammering and sawing and painting. But it was jammed between the Boehm birds and the ammonites, and wiring it was a hassle – the building’s electrical systems were designed for the permanent collection back in the Thirties.

The Natural History museum is Dallas’ oldest. The city owns it, lock, stock, and butterflies. It was created for the Texas Centennial in 1936 to house an exhibition of the region’s flora and fauna, and maintained as a curatorial institution. With no major university in Dallas, it served a valuable function. We can still debate whether there’s a major university in Dallas, but by now some of the museum’s curatorial functions have been duplicated by SMU and other local colleges.

The Museum of Natural History should by all means continue its curatorial function, but its major priority now should be to instruct and enlighten. It currently performs this task by cooperating with the schools, giving guided tours, holding special classes. But it needs to reach out and grab the walk-in trade, the tourist, the Sunday driver, the parent stuck with the kids for a weekend.

Since the museum is locked into the permanent exhibitions for which its building was designed, it needs to devise ways to make those exhibitions more interesting. The walk-through viewer needs to be told a lot more about the species on display-where they came from, which ones are endangered, which ones he’s most likely to encounter in his back yard, and so on. And the craftsmanship of the exhibits – the carefully rendered dioramas, which demand patient artistry and subtle technique to bring off their three-dimensional effects-is at least as interesting as the exhibits themselves. Unless they’re in the company of a museum staff member or a docent, most visitors haven’t a clue to what’s distinctive or important about the museum and its exhibits. The museum needs to communicate better, or it needs to scrap the permanent exhibits and start all over.

Now’s a good time for starting over. The museum has a new director, Louis Gorr, who has worked at the Smithsonian; as director of museums in Fairfax County, Virginia; and most recently, as executive director of the Dallas County Heritage Society, where he helped make Old City Park one of Dallas’ most attractive places.

Gorr is only the third director in the museum’s history, and the first one trained specifically to be a museum director. The first director, Frederic W. Miller, was a mammalogist from Colorado, who came to Dallas from the Denver Museum. He was succeeded by Hal Kirby, who died last year. Kirby spent 40 years at the museum; in fact, he was educated by it-his formal education never went past high school. He became an ornithologist, and knew his museum, which he directed from 1964 to 1978, inside out, from taxidermy to grounds keeping.

But the one-man-show approach can take a museum only so far. Gorr, who is not a scientist-his academic work has been in public administration, American civilization, and business administration-knows fund-raising and money management far better than the scientific and curatorial aspects of the museum business. His bookshelves are full of works on accounting and tax law.

Gorr insists that Fair Park “isn’t a white elephant,” and that the museums that remain there can “fill whatever void may be created” when the Museum of Fine Arts moves out. If anything, he’s looking for a little healthy competition. “It’s easy to say this in hindsight,” he says, “but if I’d been director of the Museum of Natural History when the bidding was held for the Pompeii show, I’d have put in a bid for it.” Gorr points out that Pompeii is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, that the Tut show was housed at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and that the Peruvian gold show will be at Houston’s natural history museum.

Even though Pompeii stretched the Museum of Fine Arts to capacity, Gorr thinks it could have been exhibited at the Museum of Natural History. “We might have had to dismantle some of the permanent collections to do it, of course,” he says. But the museum staff is less confident about the building’s capacity to hold a blockbuster show. They point out that even the fairly modest volcano show was an impossibility until the building’s backstage capacity was expanded a few years ago, that the wiring is inadequate, and that the ground-floor dioramas are too delicate to be disassembled. They pin their hopes on an additional wing for the building, which would be devoted entirely to changing exhibitions. The wing has been on the drawing board for years, but the politics of museum expansion have become complicated, especially since the voters shot down the arts proposal in last summer’s bond election. Gorr is cautious about expanding the building, however, and says he wants to study ways of making the best use of the space they’ve got.

The Dallas Museum of Natural History is a “sleeping giant,” Gorr says. At least he knows it’s asleep.



The Dallas Health and Science Museum is too busy to be asleep. If its claim to be the “most visited” museum in the city is valid, it’s because the place is a natural for grade-school field trips. A private, non-profit museum that gets its space, utilities, and grounds maintenance from the city, the Health and Science Museum has no curatorial function. It exists purely to educate. How well it educates is the question. It conducts classes for preschoolers and school-age kids (plus a few in gem cutting and mineral identification for adults) throughout the year. But the casual visitor is slighted. The museum’s exhibits are a jumble, and some of them look like leftovers from a junior high school science fair. Its Pompeii spinoff was ineptly mounted, featuring what appeared to be department store dummies in bedsheet togas. The labels and signs on the exhibits are confusing and sometimes ungrammatical (one display purports to be about “Womenhood”).

H. Dodson (“Dixie”) Carmichael, the museum’s director, says that its major problem is space, and that that problem will be solved by the departure of the Museum of Fine Arts from Fair Park, when Health and Science will move into the DMFA’s current building. That will double the exhibition space and make possible better exhibits, Carmichael says.

Carmichael’s dream is to have a museum like Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, with its Apollo 8 command module, its German submarine, its recreation of a coal mine, and its imaginative array of special exhibitions. Carmichael thinks he can bring the museum to that level by forming what he calls “a partnership with industry,” stressing technology’s impact on our lives with exhibits designed and provided by major industrial corporations.

Chicago’s museum, however, is currently under fire from a citizens’ group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, for just that kind of partnership. One critic says that the reliance on industry-sponsored exhibits has turned the Chicago museum into a “supermarket of corporate logos,” providing big corporations with a forum for propaganda.

Carmichael says he will expect corporate-sponsored exhibits in his museum to be fair and objective. Would, for example, an exhibition on nuclear power sponsored by, say, Texas Utilities be expected to put an emphasis on the dangers of nuclear power? Yes, Carmichael says, such an exhibit would show how the industry works to make nuclear power safe. That’s not quite the point.

“We view this museum as just a baby compared to what it could be,” Carmichael says, and insists that he doesn’t want a museum just for children. A University of Texas graduate with a background in public relations and administration, Carmichael has been with the museum for 23 years and has always, he says, been an advocate of Fair Park.

“We’ve gone through some tough years,” he admits. “Even my board members would say things against Fair Park.” But he views Fair Park’s problems, including last summer’s bond election defeat of the mall that would connect Fair Park with downtown, as a failure of public relations. “We haven’t done enough of a job of selling,” he says. “The minority groups thought there were more important things than a link between Fair Park and downtown. People just didn’t understand its importance.” The failure of the arts district proposal was a bad blow: “We just can’t get that building if the art museum doesn’t move out.”



Both Gorr and Carmichael see irony in the fact that Dallas, known as a tough-minded, business-oriented city, has begun to be generous to the arts while slighting museums devoted to science and technology. “Supporting the arts is socially the thing to do,” Carmichael says. But big-time society support of the arts is a fairly recent phenomenon. Far more important to the growth of arts institutions in the city has been the emergence of aggressive, younger leadership, men like Harry Parker and the symphony’s former head, Lloyd Haldeman. Parker and Haldeman were able to get backing for the museum and the symphony not only because they convinced Dallas that the arts were chic, but because they were shrewd business managers and good salesmen, able to convince Dallas business that the arts were good for the city. If Carmichael has that kind of drive, his museum doesn’t yet show it, even though his board includes such business big guns as W. W. Aston of DP&L, Jim Keay of Republic Bank, and Bill Seay of Southwestern Life. Gorr, a newcomer who has worked effectively with the private funding that built Old City Park, has a good chance to marshal community support for the Museum of Natural History, though he also has to deal with the city bureaucracy, that fearful labyrinth.

In the end, Gorr and Carmichael will have to sell Dallas on the idea that science and technology can be fun. Chicago has done it. The Smithsonian and New York’s American Museum of Natural History have done it. In Toronto’s Ontario Science Centre you can play tick-tack-toe with a computer and watch a laser beam cut a brick. That’s the big time. Dallas is a long way from it.