The Park City Museum has a new exhibit!
Two and a half years in the making, Park City Loves a Parade is an emotional journey through Park City’s history by exploring how Parkites have demonstrated our community’s various values and viewpoints with public outdoor gatherings of parades, processions and protests. The exhibit will help guests discover how our community has come together to celebrate our highest highs, support each other during our lowest lows, and practice solidarity during trying times to stand up for what we believe in.
Before we began the process of creating a new exhibit from scratch back in the summer of 2023, we had a date of February 2026 in mind (2026 because of America 250 and February because it would be after Sundance Film Festival ended.
The first step was to find a topic to cover. Our exhibit team spent a couple of weeks coming up with ideas and then met each month from September to November of 2023 to narrow it down to one. Some of the ideas that were fun but didn’t move forward included an exhibit on Wild West times and Prohibition in Park City; an exhibit on sports in Park City; an exhibit on Kendall Webb and his photographs; an exhibit that would compare 1876, 1926, 1976,and 2026 in Park City; and more! Obviously, we chose Park City Loves A Parade.
And that idea was fleshed out from beginning to end, right? Right!?
Nope. As with any project of a large scale, things change over time. Some elements were added, some eliminated, some transformed. Originally, we thought we would have four sections for the exhibit: Celebrates, Supports, Mourns, and Protests. Ultimately, due to limited space, we eliminated the Supports section. But don’t fret – many of its elements were folded into the Celebrates and Mourns sections!
Credit: Courtesy of Dalton Gackle
The scope of the exhibit was also narrowed to make it more manageable. We originally included all public gatherings for our initial list of topics within each section. Pretty quickly, we decided to only have outdoor public gatherings, which got rid of balls and dances, fundraisers, indoor funerals, etc. We decided we wanted to focus on the spectacle of larger gatherings – like parades, processions, and protests – and what those events said about our community.
Okay, now it would be easy – we could just include every parade and protest and funeral procession Park City has ever had. There couldn’t be that many. Wrong again! There are so many events and stories we wanted to tell within the framework we created, but could not due to the limited space for our Tozer Gallery. We could have taken over the whole Museum with this exhibit with how many things we could have included. Again, don’t worry – stay tuned for some Way We Were articles, social media posts, and programming over the course of this next year to catch many of those stories that we couldn’t fit into the physical exhibit!
Narrowing down the stories took about a year of research, figuring out which stories stood out, which had enough content to back them up, and which ones supported showcasing an item (or items) from our collection that have been in storage out of public view.
Then, we had to write the text for all the panels, descriptors, and captions, plus a short film. Cutting down stories to fit on a panel and still be impactful is tough! Oh, and we had to design the exhibit within the dimensions of our Tozer Gallery, choose color schemes, make props, and come up with interactive elements to keep people engaged and provoke thoughtful reflection for what they would be reading and viewing. That’s what took up the rest of our time.
All in all, we spent countless hours researching, writing, editing, designing, and building this new exhibit for you all to discover more about Park City’s past and present. Park City Loves A Parade will be open through March 2027 and is included with admission to the Museum.