LOUISIANA CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM - LOUISIANA CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM VISITORS JUMP BACK IN TIME IN THE INAUGURAL EXHIBITION

It started with a spark of inspiration when Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser envisioned a trail to honor our state's role in the modern Civil Rights Movement. Then in 2021, after 20 meetings and listening sessions with communities across Louisiana, the Louisiana Civil Rights Trail launched with 14 markers at historic sites across the state. Now, a second phase in the effort brings to life Louisiana’s role in the Civil Rights Movement at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans: The Inaugural Exhibition for the new Louisiana Civil Rights Museum. 

The project is produced and led by two firms with decades of embedded experience in the New Orleans community. Solomon Group, industry-leading experience producers, fabricators, and AV integrators, served as Exhibit Producer. Solomon Group is the experience development firm behind the recently opened International African American Museum, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the National World War II Museum, Sazerac House, and ESSENCE Festival. GMC Advertising, an impactful local PR firm, led the Museum’s content development as subject matter experts in partnership with the Museum’s Advisory Board.  

Exhibit design is led by Local Projects, the award-winning experience and exhibit designer behind memorial sites and museums such as the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and Greenwood Rising: Black Wall Street History Center. The new exhibition focuses on Louisiana-based stories and their intersection with and influence on the Civil Rights Movement across the nation, including the first and longest civil rights march.  

The exhibition organizes Louisiana's most important civil rights sites, landmark court cases, and events under three basic civil rights that many of us might take for granted: the right to assemble, the right to education, and the right to vote. 

The exhibition is organized along three parallel paths, each representing a civil right. Each path is intentionally interrupted by modules - physical structures that carry engaging and relevant civil rights stories - to evoke the obstacles faced by the movement. Scrims provide an atmospheric backdrop between the pathways, giving the visitors the sense of moving among crowds of protestors and providing a large-scale canvas for iconic story images. Openings between the pathways also allow visitors to move across from one to another at key moments where the stories connect and build on each other. 

The exhibition concludes with a dramatic interactive installation built for the DreamCube, an immersive environment created by Local Projects that uses projection mapping and motion detection. Visitors will walk alongside activities during the longest civil rights march, and join the first Black students to enter desegregated elementary schools amidst fierce protest and disapproval.  

The state-of-the-art interactive allows visitors to step inside, interact, and engage with historical figures such as Ruby Bridges and Leona Tate about their role in the desegregation of schools in New Orleans. 

To bring historic photos of these pivotal events to life as memory spaces, the team wove the original photos into digital scenes. The space evokes the feeling of being in a memory through sepia tones, brush stroke textures, and atmospheric use of light and shadow. 

The-Artery additionally artfully handled the transition of the still photographs that audiences first encounter into realistic and immersive video, using tools including Unreal Engine, Blender, Zbrush, Maya, and Autodesk 3ds Max. To achieve this seamless look, they expanded the environment of each photograph with video assets as an alternative to stretching the photograph itself, retaining the photo subjects front-and-center and keeping them the point of focus, even as animated crowds of people envelop each visitor.  

Visitors are prompted to move toward historic characters in the scene and hear their moving and powerful recollections through audio narration. ZED 2 Stereo cameras implemented by The-Artery combine advanced depth sensing with spatial AI to track body movements that activate stories from the protestors behind fiery demonstrations, or those students, teachers, and US Marshals who braved crowds during an elementary school’s desegregation. Each immersive film pairs with original audio interviews from central figures and original music by Antfood. 

Amanda White, Director of Content at Local Projects, shared, “With the DreamCube, we had the opportunity to create something that has never been done. Placing visitors at the center of these historic events, evoking emotion and sense of place through sound, interactive visuals, and firsthand recollections: it really changes the way you hear and think about the stories. It helps you imagine what it was like to be there and be part of something bigger than yourself.” 

Jake Barton, founder and Executive Creative Director of Local Projects describes the experience as “the kind of shared social immersion that a virtual or augmented reality headset simply can’t offer. The DreamCube engages our sense of shared space, which couldn’t be more important in the story of the struggle for civil rights, which relied on individuals coming together to make a movement exponentially more powerful and effective than the sum of its parts.”  

Gary Solomon, Jr., Co-Founder and CEO of Solomon Group, describes the DreamCube as one of the many standouts of this museum. “This immersive space is designed to transport you back in time. This isn't just history – it's a lived experience.” 

In addition to Local Projects and Solomon Group, the DreamCube experience team included Media Production by The-Artery and Original Music, Sound Design, and Audio Treatment by Antfood.  Notes The-Artery Producer Thurman Martin, “We at The-Artery and Local Projects were able to put together a fantastic team to come up with this interactive experience that tracks your movement. I hope it can reach a younger audience who may be a little more reluctant to interact with a traditional museum experience.”

CREDITS:

Client: Louisiana State Museums

Project Leadership and Fabrication: Solomon Group

Design: Local Projects

Media Production and Design: The-Artery 

Original Music: Antfood

Sound Design and Audio Treatment: Antfood

ABOUT LOCAL PROJECTS 

Local Projects connects people to stories through innovative design. The multi-disciplinary design studio has two decades of years of experience in culture, educational, and corporate experience design, and has won every major award in their field including the Cannes Gold Lion, Fast Company’s Design Studio of the Year and Best Design in North America Award, the National Design Award, and the Overall Excellence in Exhibitions from the American Alliance of Museums.  

ABOUT SOLOMON GROUP 

Solomon Group creates places, spaces and moments that connect with people in unforgettable ways. Our mission is to transform big ideas into culture-changing experiences. We do it by using our threaded specialties — experience development, live events, themed environments, and experiential technology — fluidly and creatively to deliver complex, high-impact projects that transform the human experience in high-stakes settings. 

THE ARTERY

The-Artery is a creative company; not a company with a creative department. With innovation baked into its DNA, The-Artery builds bespoke solutions across production, post, VFX, and XR for top-level studios and brand clients. We set the bar high, then pole-vaults over the top with culture-driving work that engages passionate people. We make creative things and then make even more creative things.

ABOUT GMC ADVERTISING  

GMc+Company is an integrated communications agency based in New Orleans, delivering strategic media and marketing solutions that set our clients’ brands apart. We are the leading multicultural agency in the state of Louisiana and have received  numerous local, regional and national awards, including the prestigious Mosaic Award and the “Best in Show Digital Media” ADDY Award.