Under Construction: How Monticello Makes Exhibitions

How Monticello Makes Exhibitions

From the Fall/Winter 2025 Monticello Magazine

Monticello's David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center, "a 21st-century gateway to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello," opened to great fanfare in 2009. Nestled into the natural landscape of Monticello's southern slope, the 42,000-square-foot facility was designed to combine educational, exhibition, dining, shopping, and service features in one location. Since then, millions of people have passed through its doors.

Since the 2009 opening, exhibitions in the Gallery Pavilion at the end of the courtyard have served as a robust introduction to Thomas Jefferson's world. As the United States approaches the important semiquincentennial of Jefferson's world-changing Declaration of Independence, a multidisciplinary team has embarked on an ambitious project to update and reimagine these galleries for the next generation of Monticello's visitors.

Laying the Groundwork

The work began in earnest in mid-2024. As with all projects for public audiences, the process began with trying to understand the expectations and needs of Monticello's visitors. Surveys and studies confirmed that new exhibits should provide a strong orientation to Jefferson and a deeper understanding of the revolutionary world in which he lived. Visitors expressed particular interest in gaining a clearer picture of the American Revolution and Jefferson's political career.

With this feedback in hand, Monticello engaged design partners G&A Strategy and Design to shape a plan. Together, they envisioned three new exhibitions for the Gallery Pavilion, scheduled to open in early 2026. The orientation timeline on the first floor will weave together interconnected threads of one American story: the history of Monticello mountain, Jefferson's personal biography, and the broader context of national and international history in which these stories figured prominently.

The reimagined "Griffin Discovery Room", which has been temporarily hosted in the Woodland Pavilion since 2022, will be moved to the first floor's north gallery. Installed in a more prominent and accessible location, this space will encourage families to roleplay as archivists, curators, historians, and archaeologists to learn about the important processes of recovering and preserving the past.

A central installation focusing on the pivotal year of 1776 is planned for the second floor of the Gallery Pavilion. While it is often easy to look back upon the Revolution as an inevitable event, Monticello historians encourage visitors to consider the perspectives of those living through the trying and uncertain days that preceded Jefferson's submission of his "rough draught" of the Declaration to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

The Creative Process

Exhibitions don't emerge overnight. For the past 18 months, Monticello's cross-departmental project team has met on most Friday afternoons to advance these exhibitions from rough concept to reality. After establishing goals for primary audiences and aspirational learning outcomes, colleagues drafted rough storylines and began the process of identifying artifacts and images. Along the way, the creative partners at G&A presented and refined design concepts. Similar to the process that produced the final version of the Declaration of Independence, there were multiple rounds of feedback and revision. As the designs for each exhibit space became clearer, exhibition scripts and artifact selections became more precise. Colleagues finalized image and artifact lists and submitted loan requests for objects they hoped to borrow from other institutions. Then came the painstaking process of editing and proofreading exhibit scripts to ensure the text remains within specified word and character counts.

In fall 2025, Monticello's project team began to work with Gropen, an exhibition fabrication firm located in Charlottesville, to bring its vision to life. Installation of all three exhibitions will take place starting in November and continuing over the quieter winter months. The refreshed Gallery Pavilion is scheduled to reopen by Presidents' Day 2026, when it will be ready to serve as a resource to help Monticello's many visitors have a better understanding and appreciation for its special place in United States history.

Griffin Discovery Room — Learning by Doing

"The Griffin Discovery Room" is designed especially for families with young children. Originally located in the Smith Education Center, it relocated temporarily to the Woodland Pavilion in 2022. This move gave staff an opportunity to prototype activities, test ideas, and gather extensive feedback. "We used the space to see what really resonated with families," says Rachel Baum, the Hunter J. Smith Director of Education and Visitor Programs. This iterative process helped refine Monticello's plans for the new Griffin Discovery Room.

The redesigned space will facilitate learning experiences for families with young children to make the past tangible. "A primary goal is building civic skills, like collaboration, evaluating evidence, and analyzing different perspectives," Baum says. "To achieve this, families will explore how we know what we know about the past by becoming historical investigators like archaeologists, curators, and restoration specialists."

To further develop this approach, Monticello joined a nationwide community of practice and benefited from the knowledge and expertise of consultants and peers at other historic sites and museums. "The focus of the group was fostering historical curiosity through play," Baum explains, "and that became another guiding goal."

Biography as a Lens

To foster historical understanding through biography, Monticello's cross-departmental project team introduced four profiles of people who once lived there: Thomas Jefferson, his granddaughter Cornelia Randolph, and enslaved people Isaac Granger Jefferson and Edith Hern Fossett. This biographical approach helps children envision multiple perspectives of the past and understand daily life at Monticello in early America. Children will be kitted out with a field guide to the Griffin Discovery Room, so they can write and respond to primary documents, study reproductions of objects from Monticello, and analyze audio clips. In this way, visitors will organically receive multiple viewpoints and can look for evidence throughout the exhibition to uncover clues.

One challenge faced by Monticello staff is how to represent people who are not represented in historical images. While images exist of Thomas Jefferson, Cornelia Randolph, and Isaac Granger Jefferson, no image survives of Edith Hern Fossett, an enslaved cook. Monticello partnered with artist Jabari C. Jefferson, a renowned painter and a descendant of Monticello's enslaved families, to imagine Fossett's appearance. Jefferson paired methodical analysis of primary sources and oral histories with descendant engagement to create his stunning portrait. Ultimately, Jefferson's depiction of Fossett is an opportunity, as Baum says, "to show visitors where gaps exist in the historical record, and how 21st-century artists can illuminate aspects of historic lives."

Hands-On History

Anchoring the Griffin Discovery Room is a Monticello peek-in, a diorama of the main house where visitors find cutouts of museum professionals working as curators, gardeners, guides, and restoration specialists studying and preserving the UNESCO World Heritage site. "Young visitors are captivated by the house and its 'stuff,'" Baum says. "The peek-in appeals to children's innate curiosity and love of discovery."

Monticello's guides and curators are long accustomed to reminding visitors not to touch historic objects in the house. But, in the Griffin Discovery Room, it's hands-on!