This exhibition is a photographic comparison of select historical settings in Evansville with their modern-day counterparts. The historical settings range from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.
Did you know that in the horse and buggy age and in the early days of the automobile in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was another form of transportation linking our area?
This exhibition provides an overview of what Evansville and the country experienced in the 1920s. This includes entering the radio age, women voting rights, the unexpected death of a long serving mayor, the opening of new schools, changes in the city’s infrastructure, and other key elements of the decade.
Within this exhibition, is the opportunity to explore a myriad of documents generously on loan from the collection of David F. Brown signed by people who served as president of the United States.
Remembering Pearl Harbor provides an overview of the events surrounding the attack and shares personal stories of the era. Key to the telling of these stories is the collection of Rex Knight, a Hoosier who began collecting Pearl Harbor artifacts in 1999. The collection tells the lesser-known, intimate, and individual stories that occurred just before, during, and immediately following the attack. The Knight collection uses surviving artifacts from the attack to introduce some of these stories, of both Americans and Japanese. The collection is an ongoing study in matching a personal human history with a surviving artifact. Also key to the interpretation are items from the Indiana Military Museum in Vincennes, Indiana, and from the collection of the Evansville Museum.
On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment became part of the United States Constitution. This exhibition provides an overview of the decades-long efforts of those who worked for the cause of women’s suffrage—nationally, in Indiana, and locally.
Presented in Partnership with Rick and Janet Zeiher
Since the origins of the Evansville Museum’s collection in 1904, many intriguing historical objects have been collected by our institution. This exhibition features a selection of these with a focus on material that has been more recently donated and on ones that have not been exhibited in the too recent past. These objects range from the decorative, technological and utilitarian to the recreational, wartime and fashion. Artifacts for this exhibition were selected by the Museum’s Collection Manager Kaman Hillenburg and Curator of History Thomas R. Lonnberg.
Intriguing Objects is presented in memory of James A. Sanders (1938-2020). Sanders was a longtime supporter of the Evansville Museum serving both on its Board of Trustees and History Committee. An educator, administrator, antiques expert and appraiser, Sanders was generous with both his time and resources. He was deeply involved with the development of the Museum’s Rivertown USA exhibition in the 1970s and in later years was proactive in providing needed funding for history projects while serving as a friendly and welcome advisor to the Museum’s history department.
Based on the 2012 Evansville Museum exhibition of the same name curated by Museum’s Curator of History Tom Lonnberg.
This exhibition highlights Evansville’s historic tie to the production of refrigerators with an emphasis on the nearly 90 year period when units were manufactured in the city.
This exhibition will recall the career of architect and engineer Evansvillian William Wesley Peters, 1912-1991. Peters worked with Frank Lloyd Wright on such famous structures as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. After Wrights’s death, Peters produced designs ranging from the Kaden Tower in Louisville to the Pearl Palace in Iran.
Born in Terre Haute, Peters’ family moved to Evansville and he graduated from Bosse High School in 1929. He then attended Evansville College before continuing his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1932, he became Frank Lloyd Wright’s first apprentice joining the famed architect’s Taliesin Fellowship in 1932.
The exhibition will focus on Peters’ Evansville career—with a special emphasis on the Peters-Margedant House—a prototype for the development of the Usonian style of architecture—that was moved to the University of Evansville’s campus in 2016, his career with Frank Lloyd Wright, and his post Wright career. Images, drawings, and models will illustrate the work of an Evansvillian who established a world-wide reputation in architecture and design.
