Her recently announced Education Center won't open until 2014, but starting this week, visitors to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum will see a lot more of Taylor Swift.
A new exhibition, Taylor Swift: Speak Now - Treasures from the World Tour, will open at the museum Wednesday and run through Nov. 4, featuring costumes, instruments, props and set pieces from the country/pop superstar's 2011-12 tour. The exhibit opens as country fans stream into downtown for the CMA Music Festival, which runs Thursday through Sunday.
Museum director Kyle Young says the Swift exhibition is potentially the first in a series of short-run exhibitions the museum would open in the summer in years to come.
"Taylor is at the forefront of what's going on now in music, and we strive to be relevant. This lends itself to a large exhibition, simply because of how elaborate the tour itself was. It's sort of tailor-made for us to jump off and start looking at summertime, limited-run (exhibitions.)"
The exhibition will re-create 10 scenes from the Speak Now production.
Swift's new exhibit comes on the heels of the museum's May 17 announcement that she had pledged $4 million - the largest monetary donation by an artist in the museum's history - to finance a more than 7,500-square-foot education center in conjunction with a major expansion taking place at the museum. The new Taylor Swift Education Center will serve five to six times its current number of guests, offering three classrooms and a state-of-the-art children's exhibit gallery spread over two floors.
Young said the exhibition isn't connected to Swift's donation but was a separate idea that grew out of their conversations. Dedicating an exhibition of this size to a contemporary subject is a new move for the museum, which reported that 38 percent of its visitors in 2011 were 34 and younger.
Source
