Creating a collection: Inside OKPOP archives as staff inventories a growing collection of artifacts
December 1, 2022 | In the PressA massive new building has been constructed across the street from Cain’s Ballroom that will someday be full of visitors learning about the many contributions to popular culture by numerous Oklahomans.
Passersby can peek in the floor-to-ceiling windows and see lots of empty space at 422 N. Main St., but beyond the visible staircase and tall white walls inside the archives there is a lot of work being done to inventory, preserve, digitize and prepare thousands of artifacts for future use at OKPOP Museum.
“It’s starting to smell like history in there,” says OKPOP Deputy Director Meg Charron. “You can smell the oldness of some of the objects and it’s really cool.”
Inside the museum’s archives are boxes of audio recordings, VHS tapes, costumes, props, posters, documents, musical instruments and everything else imaginable that will highlight the work of Oklahomans in film, television, music, theater, literature and even politics.
Overseeing the work is Collections Manager Emily McKenzie, Collections Coordinator Abigail Young and Curator Mark Dempsey.
“It is a massive, massive job they are doing. We’ve got an incredible team working on the archives right now, and it is like a small percentage of what we have,” Charron says. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff in Oklahoma City at the (Oklahoma) History Center that is ours. Our collection is huge. We continue to collect stuff every single day. New things come in all the time ... It’s like Christmas every day.”
Museum staff and volunteers will spend countless hours working to preserve and document the collection. The process also is a treasure hunt because the staff has no clue what all is stored on the recordings or written on pages. There are over 5,000 hours of audio recordings from the Leon Russell collection to listen to, plus he videotaped sound checks and concerts throughout his career.
“He recorded everything,” McKenzie says as she turns a lever on the archive shelves that opens them to reveal rows and rows of boxes of Russell recordings. “We’re very excited about what we will discover as we go through everything. Do you want to see his hat?”
A few rows over inside a white box is Russell’s iconic top hat, which is stored on a shelf above the drum set Jim Keltner used on Bob Dylan’s 1980 Shot of Love Tour. Nearby is Jamie Oldaker’s drums. There’s also Jimmy Markham’s trumpet and many more iconic pieces that will tell the story of the Tulsa Sound.
When it comes to film production artifacts, there is movie producer Doug Claybourne’s megaphone he used on the set of “Apocalypse Now” and his production binder from his work on “The Fast and the Furious,” which has since gone on to become one of the biggest movie franchises in modern cinema.
With the exterior finished, there is now fundraising the $35-$40 million needed to finish the interior buildout, as well as the work to determine what artifacts will help share the story. Museum staff is working with New York City and Australia-based museum design firm Art Processors to create a unique immersive experience for museum goers. Charron says they are looking at a 2024 opening, and that the wait will be worth it.
“This is going to be a really cool mixture of traditional museum in the sense we do have artifacts and collections, and we’re sharing those with the public and we’re educating people, but kind of a new spin on a museum in that people’s attention spans have changed a little bit over the years, and people are really into things that they can see and touch and feel and experience on another level,” she says. “So we’re really trying to make the experience of OKPOP come to life.”
