ZENTX is passionate about helping our customers cultivate educational spaces for local learners. That’s part of the reason why we are so glad to have a working relationship with the folks at the Midland Center for the Arts. In a recent project for them, we designed and fabricated text panels, large fabric backdrops, and hanging signs that served as the skeleton for their spring 2019 Space exhibit.

Although our contributions weren’t nearly as cool as the exhibit’s artifacts themselves, they did provide the medium necessary to share facts about those artifacts and to tell the whole story behind the Space exhibit. Thanks to those signs and panels, we had a part in teaching visitors to the exhibit about the history of space travel.

After the exhibit opened, sales rep Sheena Lovitos Wildenhaus took the opportunity to visit and take a look at it for herself. She also got the opportunity to interview a couple of Midland Center’s staff members and hear their feedback on our contributions to the exhibit. We shared some of the highlights from their conversations in the video you’ll find below. (For more like it, check out our YouTube channel.) They had a lot more to say, though, so we thought it would be worthwhile to share more of their conversation now.

If you scroll past the video, you’ll find Sheena’s full conversation with Julie Johnson, Midland Center’s Director of Museums. To read Sheena’s interview with Midland Center Marketing Coordinator Jenny Bagnall, check out our previous blog post.

What is the Midland Center’s Space exhibit?

The Space exhibit is basically a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first Apollo landing on the moon, which is in July of this year. We put together the exhibit so that it has five sections. We have “the sun, earth, moon connections”—talking about how we interact with those two other bodies in our solar system. Then we have the “manned space flight”—obviously for Apollo and other space missions throughout our history. Then we have “the solar system”—it talks about some of the things that we find in our own solar system. Then “the universe,” and then finally the planetarium theater section that kind of gives you an extra activity to do to learn more about what’s out there in space.

What was your role in pulling the Space exhibit together?

My role here [at the Midland Center for the Arts] is as the director of museums. And for this specific exhibit, we actually curated it in-house. So I was the one that put it together and worked with other organizations to bring in objects [from places like] NASA and the Sloan Longway Planetarium and the Midland County Historical Society—and then individuals that also donated artifacts from their own collections. We put it together so that we could share how the history from 1969 is still a part of us today.

How was it working with ZENTX on this project?

ZENTX did a great job in the fact that we had a very short window of time to actually get all of this done. They helped us with signage. They helped us with text panels. The large backdrops in the exhibit. The hanging signs for each section. They did an awesome job with helping us with this.