UT Students Stage Exhibit at the Henry B. Plant Museum May 3–21

UT students in Associate Professor Charles McGraw Groh’s course designed and curated a temporary exhibit at the Henry B. Plant Museum.

“Mr. Skinner, at Your Service”: The Labor of Fine Dining at the Tampa Bay Hotel runs through May 21, with another special showing July 11, 2017, with a presentation at 10:30 a.m.

The exhibit is the culminating project in McGraw Groh’s Museums, Historical Sites and Archives course. To prepare for this project, the students studied different aspects of public history curation at the Henry B. Plant Museum, the Tampa Bay History Center and the Florida Holocaust Museum, working with museum professionals, McGraw Groh and Henry B. Plant Museum curators Susan Carter and Heather Trubee Brown.

“Mr. Skinner, at your Service” offers a look at the women and men who prepared and served the elaborate feasts that defined fine dining at luxury resort hotels between 1891 and 1932. The exhibit was designed as a companion to the Henry B. Plant Museum’s current exhibition Menus: The Epicurean Experience, which uses original Tampa Bay Hotel menus to bring to life the culinary experience at grand hotels during the Gilded Age.

The students’ seven panels will remain on display at the museum until May 21, and they will be back on view later this summer during Archives Awareness Week, an annual event organized by the City of Tampa Archives Advisory Committee.

For more information on the panel exhibit and Archives Awareness Week, contact McGraw Groh at cmcgraw@ut.edu.