NASHVILLE — The Tennessee State Museum’s plans for a statewide traveling exhibit on Lamar Alexander’s service as governor, initially scheduled to coincide with his U.S. Senate re-election campaign last year and then rescheduled, may now be canceled entirely.
Lois Riggins-Ezzell, executive director of the museum, announced in August 2013 that the museum was postponing the exhibit, probably until 2015. The move came after complaints the exhibit could be seen as using taxpayer dollars to promote Alexander as he sought re-election to the Senate during 2014 – though Riggins-Ezzell said she viewed the exhibit as “contemporary history” and politics never crossed her mind.
In response to an inquiry, museum spokeswoman Mary Skinner said last week that the development of plans for a new state museum means the exhibit will not go on the road this year and perhaps not at all.
The Legislature earlier this year approved $120 million in state funding for a new museum at Gov. Bill Haslam’s urging, and the museum is organizing a campaign to raise $40 million in private funds to go with the state money. The goal is to have the new museum open in December 2018.
“Museum curators and interpreters will be busy working on preparing curatorial packages for the exhibits design company, who will be hired in November,” Skinner said in an email. “This work will be ongoing for the next couple of years. Therefore we decided to cancel or postpone work on new traveling exhibits. This included the Alexander exhibit.”
Also included, she said, was a smaller traveling exhibit version of a display on the Civil War and Reconstruction in Tennessee that had been an exhibit at the museum itself until recently closed.
An Alexander spokesman said the senator was unaware of the decision, which Skinner said was approved at a recent meeting of the museum board, known officially as the Douglas Henry State Museum Commission.
“Sen. Alexander was honored when the state museum said it would follow up Vanderbilt University’s exhibit on his days as governor. He certainly understands the museum’s decision to put this exhibit on hold and focus on its new building,” said Alexander spokesman Jim Jeffries.
The traveling exhibit was to be a scaled-down version of “Come on Along: Lamar Alexander’s Journey as Governor,” a 2011 display put together by Vanderbilt University after the senator and his wife, Honey, donated 500 boxes of papers, photographs and other materials from his gubernatorial years to the university.
The exhibit would have cost around $45,000, according to estimates, though Riggins-Ezzell said private donations would have been sought to offset the costs.