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| Profiles. | |
| Profile: Melanie Ide | |
 When Melanie Ide was growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, visiting museums was an important part of her family and social life. "For me, a love for museums came early. Going to an art or natural history museum with my family or with friends became a ritual. I always knew museums were special places." Now Melanie helps design museum exhibitions. She is an architect who works for the design firm of Ralph Appelbaum and Associates in New York, and she was the Project Director of the new Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History.
"I think it's very important that young people see museums as places that belong to them," she told us. "It has been my own experience that museums never stop giving. As I grew up, I found that I was experiencing them on different levels, always discovering more." After studying architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Melanie found a way to blend her love of museums with her professional skill and training. "I believe that when people are entering a profession and trying to find their way, if they follow what they really care about and don't compromise on that, they will find themselves where they want to be. That is certainly what happened for me. "For as long as I can remember I have been interested in how space affects what people experience. That combined with a mother who is an educator and a father who is a social worker made me very aware of what education means and how it can be used to provide access to good things for the greatest number of people." Exhibit design, in Melanie's view, is not just about designing a space, however. "It's about communicating ideas and information and cultural values and identity," she said. "And it is important to think of it as an entire experience for many different kinds of people who come to it at many different levels." Other exhibitions Melanie has worked on include two for the Japanese-American Museum in Los Angeles: America's Concentration Camps , which focused on the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, and Fighting for Tomorrow , which was about Japanese-American soldiers who fought in that war. "As a Japanese American myself, these were very interesting and meaningful projects for me," she said. She has also helped put together exhibits at the New York Public Library, including one called What Price Liberty? , which concerned 20 authors who paid a high price for their beliefs. "The idea that libraries are places that promote freedom of expression and freedom of access to information for all people is an important one, and this exhibit communicated that." |
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