Reece Museum to open with new safety guidelines

The Reece Museum will open its doors to the public again Aug. 24 with many new safety precautions in place.

The museum will be enforcing new operational guidelines all with the hopes of keeping visitors, as well as employees, safe amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

“We are not doing any opening receptions this fall,” said Reece Museum Director Randall Sanders. “We are going to push everything online.”

Visitors to the museum must wear a mask at all times inside the building, with the reception desk providing disposable ones to guests without one. A sanitizing station will be situated at the main entrance for the public. The museum will have enhanced cleaning of public spaces and restrooms, and water fountains will be closed.

The museum plans to reduce its capacity limit substantially, from 280 to 58. The key to this will be utilizing one-way directional hallways to control traffic flow while visitors navigate the galleries. No more than three student workers are allowed inside the museum at one time, and they will be placed at physically distant workstations throughout the museum. Employees will work both remotely and in-office.

Many exhibitions are still being planned at the museum throughout this semester. The first will be “Suffrage in Southern Appalachia”, an exhibit that follows the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s. This exhibition celebrates the centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment and features the bottom portion of a mural highlighting the 1916 suffrage parade held in Johnson City, displaying portraits of key players in the area’s suffrage movement. The exhibition also includes unique artifacts owned by those involved in the movement, such as the Harris family. This exhibition will be on display from Aug. 24 to Jan. 22, 2021.

“This sort of all got started when I joined a community group that was really interested in documenting this history,” said Becca Proffitt, Reece Museum collection manager. “No one really knows what the story is, and so we’re finding out that this area, in particular Johnson City, was really integral to the passage of that amendment.”

The Reece Museum will also be featuring the “From the Collection” exhibition that showcases artifacts pulled from the museum’s private, permanent collection, which will run from Aug. 24 to Sept 25.

The annual “FL3TCH3R EXHIBIT,” displaying social and political art, will be hosting an online reception and award ceremony from Oct. 5 to Dec. 11.

Despite all the new guidelines, the Reece Museum will open with the same hours as before the COVID-19 outbreak.