The Real Story of Public Enemy John Dillinger

[M. Groshek] Herron students actually started planning the exhibit as a conceptual idea, with the people from the state archive--Vicki Casteel was very involved, and that happened in the fall of last year. And then what they did is they really helped take that conceptual material, those ideas, that have been collected through the archive already and start putting them into the framework of an exhibition plan. Students enter the visual communications program at Herron with the idea their senior year they take on one track or another. One of the tracks is called Exhibit Design and Planning . The other one is called Designing for Experience. So students signed up to do Exhibit Design and Planning, and that's basically I arrange relationships with community partners, so that students have applied projects to work on in the classroom, and so really, I brought the project to them. They had an opportunity to decide if they wanted to be involved with this exhibit, or other exhibits, or interpretive experiences that we had set up with community partners, and so that team decided they wanted to work on Dillinger, usually because they had an interest in Dillinger. Well the exhibit comes from a collection that's held by the state archive here. So it's really pretty homegrown material. I mean, it's a really valuable kind of experience to see what the archive holds and what that means for the history of Indiana, in particular. So the exhibit really traces the story o f Dillinger, in relation to his involvement with other people in Indiana, with his involvement with the place of Indiana. This is a really rich visual experience. We had resources through the generosity of the exhibit house, through the generosity of IUPUI, the Solution Center, to sort of maximize an opportunity of realizing an exhibition of this scale. It's really incredible. So the response has been very good. I think there's also an interest in Dillinger right now because of the movie (ed: Public Enemies). Indiana, Indianapolis, has some reall y incredible resources. I think IUPUI has some really incredible resources. I think IUPUI's commitment to civic engagement is really critical. Their support in funding is really critical. And that's the public; the public is paying for that. That's a resource they have that they can take advantage of. I think being aware of what you have available to you, for whatever you want to do, and finding people that are interested and involved is really critical, and there are some really great people working here in Indianapolis and Indiana. One thing this exhibit shows is those networks of people working together to make something happen can really make a very powerful statement about something. And this exhibit does that