May 20, 2021
ABAC’s Polly Huff Receives Top Honor from Georgia Association of Museums
TIFTON—The Georgia Association of Museums (GAM) recently honored Polly Huff from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College with the Museum Professional Award, the industry’s top honor for a museum professional currently serving in the state of Georgia.
Huff, the curator at ABAC’s Georgia Museum of Agriculture (GMA) in Tifton, received the award at the virtual meeting of the Georgia Association for Museums Conference. “The Middleton Shoe Shop,” an original exhibition at the Museum curated by Huff, also won the Exhibit Award in Category 2, which encompasses project budgets below $25,000.
Nominating Committee Chair Virginia Howell, Director of the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, and members April Moon Carlson, Independent Museum Consultant; Christa McCay, Curator of the Marietta Museum of History; and Holly Beasley Wait, Director of the National Civil War Naval Museum, singled out Huff for “more than two decades of producing innovative exhibits, maximizing limited resources in incredibly creative ways, and being an advocate for the museum field.”
In her role as the ABAC curator, Huff oversees a collection of more than 100,000 GMA artifacts. She has designed and installed over 100 significant exhibitions at the GMA, the Art Gallery, and satellite locations; oversees the institutional archives on campus and at the Museum; handles the curatorial duties at ABAC’s Fulwood Garden Center; and is the staff liaison for Tifton’s Wiregrass Farmers Market.
“The Middleton Shoe Shop” project took the Museum’s curatorial staff on a journey across the country and back to the 1800s when a cache of mysterious shoe shop artifacts donated by an Indiana resident was discovered at the GMA 40 years after the donation had taken place.
Months of intense research with the assistance of museum colleagues from across the country eventually identified the shoemaker in the lone photograph stored with the artifacts as James Middleton, a Tifton shoemaker who lived and worked in the area in the late 1800s-early 1900s.
Huff and restoration specialist David King built an exhibit duplicating the exact scene of Middleton’s shoe shop depicted in that lone photograph. Working with local restoration photographer Charles Styer, Huff recreated a life size rendering of the shop complete with a wall mural of the Middleton wagon, a lifelike museum figure replica of Middleton himself, and a display of several hundred shoemaking artifacts.
The exhibit’s wooden shoe forms were treated with a special museum wax, which infused the nostalgic scent of shoeshine paste into the experience.
When the pandemic brought everything to a halt in 2020, Huff and her senior media intern, Tristin Clements from Tifton, filmed the exhibit installation and converted the opening into a virtual event, offering it to Museum guests in the early days of the pandemic to the sound of a nostalgic 1890s tune.
Huff was recently elected for a third term on the GAM Board of Directors. She is a frequent panelist and presenter for the state organization and its membership.
###
