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Historic Saranac Lake shows ‘Pandemic Perspectives’

Sara Diaz and Lisa Keegan attended the opening reception at the Saranac Laboratory Museum. (Photo provided)

SARANAC LAKE — A local museum is putting on display an exhibit that connects this current pandemic to those past.

“Pandemic Perspectives” is the newest exhibit at Historic Saranac Lake’s Saranac Laboratory Museum. The exhibit features 12 panels throughout the museum relating the coronavirus pandemic to Saranac Lake’s history with research and treatment of tuberculosis.

Each panel features a word that describes a feeling that residents may have felt over this past year. This word provides the theme for the panel.

“Unity has to be the panel that resonates with me,” said Historic Saranac Lake Public Programs Coordinator Chessie Monks-Kelly. “We connected with so many through this experience.”

The panels also have a quote related to the theme selected by Columbia University Professor Arden Hegele, who teaches a class called “Epidemic Fictions.” The panels contain a connection between the coronavirus pandemic and tuberculosis as well.

“People were so eager to talk about the connections,” Monks-Kelly said. “That was the inspiration behind it.”

However, what may be the most interesting part is at the bottom, the panel features a question asking for viewers to reflect on their own pandemic experience.

“This gives a way for people to process what they’ve experienced,” Historic Saranac Lake Public Programs Coordinator Mahala Nyberg said.

At the end of the museum, in the John Black Room, visitors are encouraged to write a postcard describing their own experiences and hang them on the wall as part of the exhibit. Some people might connect to a more positive end of the spectrum in words like “resilience,” while others focus on more negative parts, connecting with words like “fear.”

“Hopefully, visitors get comfort knowing that others have gone through something similar,” Nyberg said.

“Our collective experience in the last 16 months has exposed and exacerbated the fault lines in our society, but it’s also revealed our personal and collective strengths,” said Amy Catania, Historic Saranac Lake’s executive director.

Local nurse Lisa Keegan provided present-day photos for the exhibit to be paired with historical photos from the Historic Saranac Lake collection. One of the photos Keegan provided for the exhibit is of Sara Diaz, who also works as a nurse at Adirondack Health. Diaz and Keegan attended the opening reception, held for members of Historic Saranac Lake on July 13.

“I am so grateful to this community for the warm welcoming, the support, and the acknowledgment for my hard-earned achievements. This is my home, and I am so honored to give back by helping others regain their health, and with COVID-19, it was no different,” Diaz said.

With the coronavirus pandemic not over yet, and as uncertainty still lies ahead, the exhibit must be able to adapt to ongoing issues.

“We really see this as an exhibit that can evolve and change alongside the COVID-19 pandemic,” Nyberg said.

Complementing the new exhibit, Historic Saranac Lake will host a series of public programs supported by grants from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, Humanities New York, and the New York State Council on the Arts. The public programs will explore four topics as they relate to Saranac Lake’s history as a tuberculosis sanatorium community: The roles of women in medical history, patients’ stories, cure porch architecture and the healing power of occupational therapy. Each of the four talks will inform four temporary exhibits for our mobile exhibit space, the Cure Porch on Wheels. HSL will take the exhibits off-site for history day visits in the summer and fall of 2021.

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