Senior art major Jesse Kaufman, who is also Bethel’s web developer, came up with the initial design concept for the traveling exhibit “Voices of Conscience: Peace Witness in the Great War.”
Kauffman Museum is developing the exhibit, set to debut at the National World War I Museum and Monument in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2017.
Kaufman started the project last fall for Special Topics in Graphic Design, working with Pamela Pancake, assistant professor of graphic art and design, as well as current Kauffman Museum director Annette LeZotte and former director Rachel Pannabecker ’80.
Chuck Regier ’81, the museum’s curator of exhibits, led class sessions on the craft of building exhibits.
“Chuck taught [us] about the museum, the craft of building exhibits and the materials used in traveling exhibits, and showed numerous samples as inspiration,” Pancake said. “Jesse and I then met in our Design Library and conducted visual research, as well as research on timelines, graphs and charts, maps, costumes and gear, and so on.
“Jesse moved through assignments intended to build toward the final project—his plan for the exhibit’s final design.”
In addition to reading about conscientious objectors in World War I—particularly Mennonites, Amish, Quakers and Hutterites—Kaufman did a font study based on fonts of the time period. He worked on ideas for visually depicting poetry that focused on conscientious objection and stories of conscientious objectors (for audio panels), and on creating several timelines.
“Voices of Conscience” will be done in time for “Remembering Muted Voices: Conscience, Dissent, Resistance and Civil Liberties in World War I through Today,” a symposium scheduled for Oct. 19–21, 2017, at the WWI Museum (commemorating the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War). It will then be a traveling exhibit available to museums throughout the United States and Canada.
