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We've created a series of posts that discuss how we went about gathering the stories that will shape Sacred Places. This exclusive behind-the-scenes look at covers these topics:
1. The Challenge of Addressing Religion in an Exhibit Like Sacred Places
2. Using Artifacts to Tell Personal Stories
3. Stories Begin with Relationships
4. Weaving It All Together
After years of dreaming, countless hours of meaningful conversations, and visits around the world, it was time for our exhibit team to bring it all together into one cohesive space. The goal was to create a space where you, the visitor, can meet the communities that practice their faiths and spiritualities every day in these spaces.
Our exhibit team put a lot of thought into designing the layout of this exhibit. Exhibits like Beyond Spaceship Earth are more linear in nature. You basically start in one spot and take a journey through the exhibit along an established path until you leave the exhibit.
When planning Sacred Places, our exhibit team chose a more open, free-flowing format. While each experience within the exhibit has its own dedicated space, it is set up in such a way that you can move freely from area to area. There is no established path to follow as you explore the places and practices of different communities of faith around the world.
Concept design of bird’s-eye view of Sacred Places exhibit space
Sacred Places, like many of our exhibits, is what we refer to as a free-choice learning space. This layout gives families the freedom to take in the messages of the exhibit by choosing to focus on what resonates and is most appealing to their own family. Everyone has different interests and take in information differently. A free-choice layout encourages the freedom of individual exploration.
Making Sacred Places a free-choice learning space also serves another purpose. Our exhibit team wanted to make sure that they were not positioning one faith or spirituality over another, ensuring that there is no perceived preferential treatment within this exhibit space.
Let’s take a look at how it all comes together in one beautiful tapestry.
Sacred Places entrance
As you enter Sacred Places, you encounter a giant glowing globe. You can’t help but stop and look for specific spots around the world.
Concept design of the giant globe in the Sacred Places entry.
Many exhibits at the museum have a vision statement. This statement boils down the exhibit’s purpose into one overarching theme. This statement guides the exhibit team as they create the space, including the design of environments, what interactives to use, which objects to have on display, and how to shape the live programming.
The vision statement for Sacred Places says:
“When we learn about the religions of our neighbors here and across the globe, we’re better able to understand and communicate with one another.”
In addition to an introduction to the exhibit’s vision statement, visitors encounter a giant glowing globe, where they’re introduced to the six immersive experience guides—Shivesh, Aïssata, Merahi, Kaew, Jude, and Nathan—and the sacred places highlighted in the exhibit.
Inside the exhibit
After passing the giant globe in the entry, you’ll encounter five major components as you explore the Sacred Places exhibit:
- Immersive experiences
- Artifact stories
- Interactive experiences
- Projection dome
- Live programming
Through careful research and insights from our community collaborators and advisors, our exhibit team went to great lengths to ensure that the interactives, objects, and immersive environments were chosen with the sacredness of each space. They listened to what would and would not be appropriate to have visitors do and experience in this exhibit. Sacred Places was designed to show many different ways to be respectfully curious and appreciate both the difference and similarities from what visitors may practice themselves.
Each component helps to weave this massive story together.
Please note: as stated earlier, this exhibit isn’t designed for visitors to take a specific route through the gallery, but to encourage you to explore freely. For the purposes of this post, however, we’ll follow a clockwise path through the gallery, showing how the different exhibit components weave together into a lovely tapestry of the human experience.
Immersive experiences
Each immersive experience highlights a sacred place of one of the world’s major religions—Hinduism, Islam, Indigenous Spirituality, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism. As you explore each of these experiences, you’ll learn how our guides feel when they are in their sacred place. You’re also given the opportunity to share your own story with these prompts:
- What is your sacred place?
- What do you do there?
- Why is it important to you?
- How does your sacred place make you feel?
These are the immersive experiences you'll encounter as you explore Sacred Places.
Patan Durbar Square in Nepal
Early concept design of the Patan Dubar Square exhibit space.
In the space dedicated to Patan Dubar Square in Nepal, you’ll find a space designed to look like the Hindu temple where our guide Shivesh performs a puja every single morning.
Great Mosque of Djenné in the Republic of Mali
Concept drawing of the Great Mosque of Djenné exhibit space.
The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud structure in the world. The exhibit space is designed to look like the wall surrounding this Muslim house of worship where our exhibit guide Aïssata leads the girls in her neighborhood in the community’s annual replastering of the structure.
Rapa Nui
Concept drawing of the Rapa Nui exhibit space.
The moai figures that most people associate with Rapa Nui—also known as Easter Island—are carvings of the ancestors of members of the Rapa Nui community—including our exhibit guide Merahi. Rapa Nui spirituality does not involve a specific structure. It involves the entire island. Our team tried to reflect that in this area’s design.
Wat Arun in Thailand
Concept drawing of the Wat Arun exhibit space.
Experience the life of a Buddhist monk-in-training through the eyes of Kaew. This exhibit space is designed to feel like the temple where the monks perform daily chants inside Wat Arun temple.
Beheading of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Jordan
Concept drawing of Beheading of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church exhibit space.
In this area highlighting a Christian community, you’ll find an area designed to look and feel like the nave and sanctuary inside the Beheading of St. John the Baptist Church where our guide Jude leads prayers during Mass.
Mikvé Israel-Emanuel in Curaçao
Concept drawing of the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue exhibit space.
The columns and woodwork in this area are inspired by the oldest continually-running synagogue in the Americas, where our guide Nathan leads the Jewish faith community in prayer during morning Shabbat services.
Artifact stories
Throughout the gallery, there are artifacts—objects that are used to tell a story—from faith and spiritual communities around the world. These objects represent a significant role in people’s personal experiences at places they hold sacred. These artifact stories add a beautiful layer to the tapestry our exhibit team attempted to create.
Here's a brief overview of the artifact stories you'll find in the exhibit:
- Model temple chariot representing a full-sized chariot used in India.
- Hijab— head covering worn by many Muslim girls when they leave their homes.
- Lobandan—a container that holds burning embers of coal and wood that are sprinkled with incense—used by Zoroastrian worshippers to purify their homes.
- Food vessels used by the Sikh community Gurdwara Sikh Satsang in Indianapolis.
- Bell, jewelry, and drum used by the practitioners of the Yorùbá spirituality at the Osun Sacred Grove in Nigeria.
- Maria Rapanui statue—a statue of the Virgin Mary, a central figure from Catholic tradition, with the face of the indigenous Rapa Nui deity Makemake.
- Daruma dolls similar to those left by temple visitors in Japan.
- Prayer rug from a carpet from Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
- Dungchenhornslike the ones used by Buddhist monks call to prayer, processions, dances, and to support other rituals.
- Stained glass windowdepicting Jesus being visited by an angel in the Garden of Gethsemane from the Trinity United Methodist Church in Ventnor City, New Jersey.
- Model of a toriigate that marks where the ordinary world ends and the sacred space begins in Japan.
- Bahá'í prayer beads and prayer books recommended by the BaháΚΌí House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois.
- A panel shares the story of St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis. Celebrated at the center of Indianapolis’ civil rights movement, this building is also one of the spaces highlighted in the Sacred Places Theater.
- Study Bible from St. James African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in Ithaca, New York.
- Kachina dolls that serve as teaching tools and reminders of the kachinas that connect humans with the spiritual world in Hopi Native American culture.
- Challah board from the United States that was used to display a braided bread that's eaten during Jewish holidays and Shabbat.
- Wood carving of Ganesh—the Hindu god of beginnings—featured on a blind window from Nepal.
Our previous blog post Using Artifacts to Tell Personal Stories gives more detail about these artifacts.
Interactive experiences
You will also have the opportunity to participate in several hands-on interactive experiences throughout the exhibit. Sometimes they’re interactive digital experiences. Other times, they’re touchable objects. In another spot, you get to build things. All of these interactive experiences help you understand what it is to experience daily life in these sacred places.The exhibit offers a variety of ways to interact with the exhibit because our exhibit team knows that people take in information and learn in many different ways.
Patan Durbar Square
Vendors sell items on the walkways and at merchant stalls in Patan Durbar Square. The items that are sold are then used by Hindu worshippers as part of rituals and offerings to the gods that dwell in the area’s many temples. In this interactive experience, you can touch different items to learn more about how they are used in this sacred place.
Visitors also have the opportunity to watch and hear Shivesh perform a puja offering in the Keshav Narayan Temple.
Great Mosque of Djenné
In this digital touchscreen interactive experience, you can race against someone else to see which neighborhood can plaster their section of the wall first. Who will win?
Rapa Nui spirituality
Explore key concepts of Rapa Nui spirituality—mana, tapu, haka ara, hua’ai, re’o, and mo’a by placing different pucks on a giant interactive screen.
Visitors can also hear Rapa Nui artist Tomás Tuki Tepano tell the story in the Rapa Nui language of the first moai kavakava—wooden representations of mischievous spirits. The panels are beautifully illustrated by Gustavo Borquez Paoa.
Wat Arun
Visitors can listen to the chant Kaew performs every morning and afternoon. They can follow along by reading and touching an interactive book designed to look like a Buddhist prayer book.
Madaba mosaics
Madaba, Jordan, where The Beheading of St. John the Baptist Church is located, is known for its mosaics—pieces of art created by arranging small, colored pieces of glass, stone, or other materials in a pattern. One of the most famous mosaics in Madaba is what’s known as the “Madaba Map” at St. George Orthodox Church. It’s the oldest-known map of Jerusalem.
Visitors can touch, feel, and explore a modern reimagining of the ancient mosaic map of Jerusalem.
Then they can make a mosaic with multicolored tiles. They are invited to either recreate a Madaba-inspired symbol or create a meaningful symbol of their own.
Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue
As part of morning Shabbat—the Jewish sabbath day—the community comes together in the synagogue for a prayer service. Visitors can watch and hear Nathan lead the congregation in opening prayers and song.
Another part of the Shabbat service is the kiddush blessing that is said after the morning prayer. The blessing reminds the community to keep Shabbat holy by praying and resting. Visitors can hear Nathan lead the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel community in the blessing. Upon conclusion of the blessing, he helps lead the community in a birthday celebration as they sing “Happy Birthday” in six different languages.
Sacred Places Theater
In this area, you can encounter the beauty of some of the world's most magnificent sacred places on an epic scale.
Many sacred places involve a large amount of space—features like high ceilings or wide open, natural vistas—and our exhibit team wanted to capture some of the feeling you get when you visit these spaces. So they created a projection dome where visitors can step inside and be surrounded by the sights and sounds of different sacred places.
Live programming
We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it—our live interpretive programming is the backbone of the museum experience. Interpretive programming was created to enhance the content in Sacred Places by fostering awareness and respect for religious and cultural traditions through formal and informal explorations of places using images, objects, and artifacts that explore the many ways that people around the world express their faith. Our gallery interpreters encourage conversations and help you make connections with your own feelings and experiences.
Photojournalist host
In this live interactive program, you’ll meet a photojournalist who is traveling the world to document sacred places and stories. The host can generally be found near the exhibit’s entrance, sharing stories from all of the featured locations.
Up Close and Personal: Sacred Places
Visitors can journey along with a photojournalist as they discover the compelling stories, deep history, and traditions hidden within the walls of one of the sacred places highlighted in the exhibit. This takes place in the Nepal, Rapa Nui, and Curaçao immersive experiences at different times throughout the day.
There and Back Again
This program takes place inside the Sacred Places Theater and was inspired by our relationship with CyArk. Visitors can meet an American field photographer who has traveled the world making long-lasting relationships with the communities the photographer has visited. Participants are transported to different sacred places through the use of panoramic and 360 video while hearing the story of one person’s journey of self-reflection along the way. This program takes place at specific times throughout the day.
It’s your turn
As you can see, a lot of thought, consideration, and dreaming went into the planning of this exhibit. Building on their own expertise in creating amazing exhibits, our exhibit team spent countless hours consulting our team of advisors, our colleagues at CyArk, our partners with the Lilly Endowment, and the religious communities themselves to weave together something beautiful.
Now it’s your turn.
When you visit the Sacred Places exhibit and explore the locations, examine the artifacts, and hear the stories, you can join this beautifully woven tapestry. When you listen to other people’s stories and share your own, you become a vital part of the universal human experience.
Hear their real stories.
Tell yours.
Spark a conversation.
Sacred Places is open through April 7, 2024.
Sacred Places was made possible by Lilly Endowment, Inc.
Lilly Endowment Inc. is a private philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. While those gifts remain the financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion and maintains a special commitment to its hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana. The principal aim of the Endowment’s religion grantmaking is to deepen and enrich the lives of Christians in the United States, primarily by seeking out and supporting efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations and strengthen the pastoral and lay leadership of Christian communities. The Endowment also seeks to improve public understanding of diverse religious traditions by supporting fair and accurate portrayals of the role religion plays in the United States and across the globe.
