Help wanted: Wichitans to get personal for upcoming WSU exhibition

Vivian Zavataro is going to get personal, and she hopes others in Wichita will too.

Zavataro, the executive and creative director of the Ulrich Museum of Art, is curating an upcoming exhibition that will feature objects that hold personal meaning to their owners or have a connection to Wichita.

While “Getting Personal” will go on view Aug. 19 at the Wichita State museum, Zavataro will continue to take submissions and add to the displayed items through the end of the exhibition on Dec. 6.

“We will take care of it the same way we would if we had received a piece on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she said.

“Getting Personal” is the fourth phase of a two-year project in which Zavataro has involved both artists and community residents to “make the Ulrich more relevant to the people who live in Wichita.” Called the Ulrich Co-Lab, the concept and research into creating museum exhibitions outside of traditional methods is the basis for Zavataro’s dissertation project.

“The idea with the Ulrich Co-Lab with these four phases is to really make and gather data and create a museum that serves the folks that are in Wichita so that it’s a museum for Wichita and with Wichita. ‘Getting Personal’ is really gathering those personal stories and the stories that are related to Wichita so when folks come to the museum, they can see themselves being represented within their walls,” Zavataro said.

By mid-June, she had received submissions for about 30 items, ranging from a camera that connects a daughter to her father, an early model of a laparoscopic liver retractor used by a Wichita doctor, and a hockey puck that reminds its owner of the many hockey games he watched growing up in upstate New York.

Zavataro herself is loaning an item that holds deep sentimental value: “a really cheesy Styrofoam strawberry that I received on the first day I met my now-husband.”

A woman at the Strawberry Music Festival, a longtime annual event in California, had handed the strawberry to Zavataro with the advice that she should hang on to it.

“You need to remember this day,” the woman said to her.

“Here we are 13 years later, and it’s such a significant object in my life that I’ve kept for so long and that I’m now sharing with everybody in Wichita,” Zavataro said. “And I think those are the kind of personal stories that we can share with each other, that we can maybe find common ground to connect and to belong in a place where we feel safe and we feel safe sharing our stories.”

For Sonia Greteman, the founder of creative agency The Greteman Group, there’s personal sentiment attached to the 1941 Pontiac Bloc Métal camera she’s loaning to the Ulrich for “Getting Personal.”

It had been part of her dad’s collection of around 100 cameras. Kenneth Greteman, who died in 2024, had spent 40 years shooting photos for Boeing. He also took action shots at Wichita’s 81 Speedway and documented weddings and high school graduations.

“This was one of my favorites,” Greteman said of the foldable camera. “I can’t look at a camera, especially an old one, without thinking about my dad and being just flooded with memories. He always had cameras hanging off his neck, and he was always shooting.”

The items in “Getting Personal” have the potential to create meaningful connections, Zavataro said.

“When people donate their collections to museums it’s a way of keeping their lives, their background, their stories alive,” Zavataro said.

“Instead of waiting for people to pass away or for people to donate those objects to historical societies, how about we interact with those folks right now and tell stories that are relevant to all of us so we can identify with each other?”

To lend an item for consideration in “Getting Personal,” visit ulrich.wichita.edu/ulrich_exhibition/the-ulrich-co-lab-getting-personal. Items will be returned to owners in January 2025.