KENNEBUNK — A tourist visiting the Kennebunks for the first time might marvel at its architecture and exclamatory coastline and consider the area ripe for representation in a postcard ”“ one of the oldest forms of casual communication in the country.
Evidence that the area lends itself to the medium will be on display at the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk until early 2010, providing some history not just to tourists, but to residents who want to take a step into the past.
“Mailed From Maine: Vintage Postcards of the Kennebunks” is the museum’s latest exhibit, and it has been a long time coming. Originally planned for last summer, the show opened this month and features photographs and hand-written messages from as far back as the early 20th Century.
The selections were culled from the nearly 1,200 postcards kept in the museum’s permanent collections. According to Museum Director Tracy Baetz, the idea for the exhibit began when a volunteer, Dick Carr, took interest in the museum’s postcard archives.
“He himself is a collector,” said Baetz. “We got interested in our own collection because of his interest in it.”
The postcards, which range from photographs to paintings, depict areas that, in some cases, look vastly different than their current incarnations. Buildings that no longer exist, cars no longer in vogue and clothing styles long gone are featured in their original forms, as well as in postcard art that has been blown up into large-format prints; these hang from the ceiling and stand as monuments to the rich history and beauty of the Kennebunks.
Baetz feels that sometimes the aesthetics can be taken for granted.
“We’re so used to the beauty of this area,” she said.
For intern Cynthia Walker, preparing the exhibit was something of an eye-opening experience. A graduate student working toward her Masters in Museum Studies at Cooperstown University in New York, Walker acted as the exhibit designer, arranging the postcards to best utilize the museum’s wide-open space.
“I didn’t really know any of the landmarks because I’ve only been here a couple of years,” said Walker. “It helped me to learn more about the places important to the people who live here.”
“We had themes,” said Baetz, “but not a specific layout. Cynthia made it work in this space.”
While the art on the front of a postcard is but one way to capture a moment in time, reading the message on the back is another. The insight into how people from a different age communicated with each other can be a fascinating part of any area’s history, which is why many postcard messages are featured prominently in the exhibit. A rotating spindle in one corner of the show space displays a bouquet of postcards, message-side up, inviting museum-goers to peruse notes that in some cases were written almost 100 years ago.
In an era when a lot of short-form communication takes place on Internet sites like Twitter and Facebook, comparing “tweets” to postcard messages can reveal the evolution of the form.
Katheryn Hussey, the museum’s registrar, pointed out how many of the postcard messages adhered more strictly to proper grammar than do modern e-mails and Internet messages.
“People wrote sentences,” she said. “They didn’t ”˜tweet.’”
Walker thought that modern messages are much more open, whereas postcards from early in the last century are more reserved. “People are more open about what they’re saying (nowadays),” she said.
Of course, the old saying goes: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“In some ways it’s amazing how little has changed,” said Baetz. “In a lot of ways, it’s very mundane. You’re writing ”˜cause you could.”
Few artifacts have such an ability to give interested parties such a three-dimensional view into what gives an area its historical tradition, said Baetz. That, ultimately, was one of the most attractive reasons for putting the exhibit together.
“You don’t always have that blend of a bunch of different disciplines put together,” said Baetz. “It personally gave me an appreciation of how diverse our collection actually is.”
— Staff Writer Jeff Lagasse can be contacted at 282-1535, Ext. 319 or jlagasse@journaltribune.com.
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