Poly Huff honored for ‘Carver & Polk’ museum exhibit

TIFTON — Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Curator Polly Huff received the 2023 Exhibit Category 2 Award during the Georgia Association of Museums’ annual meeting and awards luncheon.

Huff earned the award for the Georgia Museum of Agriculture exhibit “Carver & Polk: Crossover of Agriculture and Photography in the early 20th Century,” which is based on the friendship of photographer Prentice Herman Polk and agriculturalist George Washington Carver.

“It is an honor that an exhibit so special to so many of us who worked on it merited recognition from our museum peers from across the state,” Huff said.

The “Carver & Polk” exhibit stemmed from another exhibit featured years earlier. In 2016, Huff and former intern Jackson Short began planning “The Photo Booth” exhibit to create a meaningful way to display the GMA’s collection of cameras and motion picture projectors dating to the early 1900s. The focus of that exhibit shifted over the next several years to Polk, whose work spanned the 20th century. Carver was not only Polk’s most famous photographic subject but also his favorite.

The exhibit portrays the well-known “Carver in the Greenhouse” photo, taken in 1938 at Tuskegee University where they both worked. Two life-like figures are placed in such a way that one half of the room portrays Polk’s photography studio and office, and the other shows Carver’s greenhouse exactly as seen in the famous photo.

In the middle of both settings, the men meet and are staged as if Polk is taking the exact photo, capturing the moment as it happened in real life in 1938. Using Polk’s story and timeline as a vehicle, the exhibit also displays a collection of cameras, motion picture projectors, and roll film from the same period.

Huff worked with a museum mannequin builder who used Carver’s height and eye color and did a custom hair implant to match his hairstyle and mustache from the greenhouse photo. The same process was used for Polk’s figure. The exhibit, installed with the help of intern Seth Williams from Sylvester, also features hidden bonus facts, or “Easter eggs,” scattered throughout the exhibit.

Huff also worked with GMA restoration specialist David King to create a replica of Carver’s greenhouse table from the photo. The table is custom-built, including the round sawmill cuts on the lumber which was rough-sawn on the museum’s 19th-century steam-powered sawmill. Huff said the Tuskegee University Archives were an incomparable source of information on Carver and Polk.

The Georgia Association of Museums is a private, nonprofit statewide organization dedicated to encouraging growth and improving professional practices of museums and non-profit galleries throughout the state. Huff is serving her sixth term on the Board of Directors and was a presenter at this year’s conference.

For more information on exhibits, events and attractions at the museum, visit gma.abac.edu.