Olympic Legacy Rethinking Atlanta History Center’s exhibition

By John Ruch

Fresh from debuting a major exhibit reinterpreting the Cyclorama painting of a Civil War battle, the Atlanta History Center is hard at work on a similar “reinvention” of the display about another city cultural touchstone: the 1996 Summer Olympics.

The original Olympics exhibit, which opened 10 years after the Games, was largely celebratory and packed with artifacts and memorabilia. The new version – set to open in July 2020 to coincide with the next Summer Olympics in Tokyo – will take a wider view. In part, curators say, that means highlighting lasting legacies like Centennial Olympic Park and the city’s global reputation. It also means giving space to previously underplayed protests about lack of transparency and equity, and a time when the Olympics world is shaken by corruption scandals and criticism of financial and social impacts.

“As we’re looking 20 years down [the road], it’s a different story,” says Sarah Dylla, the curator of the new Olympics exhibit. The concept will be less about the “day-to-day or medal count” and more about “social and cultural change,” she said.

“The historical perspective is different,” said Dan Rooney, the History Center’s exhibitions director and the curator of the original Olympics exhibit. “We recognize as time passes, perspectives change.”

Exhibitions Director Dan Rooney and Curator Sarah Dylla.

The former Olympics exhibit in the History Center’s 130 West Paces Ferry Road museum, featuring a wide range of artifacts and memorabilia ringing an artificial running track, is already gone, disassembled partly to make way for the new Cyclorama wing. For now, the space serves as an oversized corridor between the gift shop and the Cyclorama. Its walls are sparsely hung with a note about the forthcoming exhibit and some images of Atlanta Olympics venues, and even that took some careful thought, the curators say, as they didn’t want to commit to a particular narrative or angle early on.

But as the work continues and the 2020 deadline looms, the theme is boiling down to one of the favored buzzwords of the International Olympics Committee, the Switzerland-based nonprofit that controls and runs the Games.

“In the Olympic world, they talk a lot about the word ‘legacy,’” said Dylla, referring to the IOC’s jargon for buildings and programs that are supposed to provide lasting improvements to a host city. In the broadest terms, she said, the exhibit will look at “what it means to be an Olympic city,” a status that puts it in a “small group of Olympic cities around the world looking in terms of legacy and impact.”

The sheer number of stories to tell about the Atlanta Olympics is daunting for an event that sprawled across metro Atlanta to such venues as rowing on Lake Lanier and horse events in Conyers – among places that the History Center may coordinate with, Rooney says, so the exhibit may “grow beyond four walls here.” And there was the international bidding process that included Atlanta defeating Athens, Greece, the historic home of the original ancient Olympics, in internal voting.

“Really, I’m struck by the breadth of connections the story has,” said Dylla. “You can see so many parallels to things happening in other Olympic cities and thing happening in world history in the 1990s.”

Part of the new exhibit, Dylla says, will be putting the Atlanta Olympics in the context of the “lack of participatory planning” that’s become a global issue, and the inclusion of “more different stories of resistance and dissenting voices.” The bombing of Centennial Park by a rightwing terrorist during the Games will also be tackled in the new exhibition,and Dylla says they’re looking at how other museums are dealing with “diffcult history and making appropriate space for victims.

Rather than relying solely on the existing collection, Dylla is speaking with some of the residents involved in Atlanta Olympics protests, including from the anti-displacement activism. Another movement she’s studying is Olympics Out of Cobb, an LGBTQ protest that successfully got that county shut out of all Games venues and programs after its commission issued a resolution condemning gay people. “They made a bunch of cool schwag,” she adds.

The remake of the Olympics exhibit bears similarities to the History Center’s reinterpretation of the Civil War-themed Cyclorama painting: a public entertainment that became a lens through which Atlanta saw itself, and which the museum is now putting in a deeper context, along with puncturing some of its pernicious myths. It’s the last of the center’s permanent exhibits scheduled for a major makeover, but Rooney says the real point is how “permanent” never is.

“People talk about permanent museum exhibits, but we want to correct that,” says Rooney, explaining that long-term but subject to inevitable change is more accurate. As the History Center preps a new look at post-Olympics Atlanta, he says, “museums don’t have all the answers, and maybe there was a time museums presented themselves as being the authority, and maybe sometimes that was delivered without community dialogue and community participation.

“Communities need museums,” Rooney said, “but museums need the community as well.”

“I’ve been involved with the community since 1960 and I was on the very first board here at Saint Anne’s Terrace. It’s a beautiful part of town and the best part about living here is the wonderful family atmosphere in which everyone gets along.”

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