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PAUL:

There's a bathrobe in Jackson right now that belonged to Elvis Presley. It's sitting a few feet from Eudora Welty's typewriter, a NASA flight jacket, lab samples from the creation of a life-saving antibiotic, and cleats worn by a Mississippi State player when they won the College World Series. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to Conversations on Culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. Today's episode is a Soul Sessions Extra, a shorter conversation with Jessica Walzer, curator of collections and exhibits at the two Mississippi museums about a brand new exhibition called “Mississippi Made.”

The timing of this exhibit isn't accidental. 2026 marks America's 250th anniversary. The, let me see if I can get this right, semi-quincentennial, yes, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History built Mississippi Made around that milestone. 250 artifacts spanning from the early 19th century to the present day. Agriculture, manufacturing, music, fashion, science, literature, film, the breadth alone tells you something about what this state has produced. But what makes an exhibit like this work isn't just the range, it's the curation, the decisions about what gets in, what story those objects tell together, and who they're meant to speak to. That's where Jessica comes in.

When you were pulling this exhibit together, what was the organizing principle for it with 250 artifacts spanning two centuries? How did you decide what belonged?

JESSICA:

Yeah, it's such a broad exhibit, which is really fun to be able to kind of spotlight so many different things coming out of Mississippi. But yeah, there's definitely that question of what goes in and what doesn't make it. I think for me, it was a really good opportunity to really dive into our historic object collection that we have at MDH. We have over 20,000 objects. So it kind of just gave me a good opportunity to jump in and see what we have. And our whole goal with the historic object collection is to have artifacts that are very representative of Mississippi as a whole to find where we have maybe some gaps in that, which for the exhibit we've, you know, reached out to other institutions. Really, we just wanted to try to get a widespread gap of various different topics and see how much we can kind of squeeze in.

PAUL:

The objects in Mississippi may do a lot of different kinds of work. Some are about global icons that Elvis Bathrobe we mentioned, BB King, Jimmy Rodgers, but others point to things most people, even Mississippians, probably didn't know came from here. Nystatin, the antifungal medication used by

millions worldwide. The original lab samples are in this exhibit. Toyota and Nissan vehicles assembled in Mississippi. Hey, there's a Nissan Frontier pickup that you can actually sit in. A Lindsay 8-wheel log wagon that helped shape the state's timber industry in the early 20th century. You've mentioned wanting visitors to find things that they already knew about Mississippi, but also some things that maybe they didn't know came from here. So which artifact do you think is going to surprise people the most?

JESSICA:

Well, I took some people through the other day and I was surprised that nobody knew that pine soul was made in Mississippi. I thought that one was a little bit more obvious. Yeah, from the pine forest of Mississippi. You know, we have had movies filmed here that you don't expect Hollywood props and things like that. Also, you know, things like medical advancements, you know, we talked about in the exhibit of the first human lung transplant happens in Mississippi.

PAUL:

So one thing that struck me in talking with Jessica is how intentional she was about who this exhibit is for. There's the history crowd, the people who already know about Faulkner and Leontyne Price and Eli Manning. But she also talked about younger visitors, kids and teenagers who might walk in and see themselves in those 250 artifacts in a way they didn't expect.

Yeah, you said that you hope young Mississippians find something in the exhibit that they can look to, an astronaut, a fashion designer, a scientist. How consciously were you thinking about the younger audience when you were building Mississippi Made?

JESSICA:

I think it's surprising how many people from Mississippi have kind of branched into these areas that you might not expect. You know, it's super cool that we had an astronaut, Fred Hayes from Mississippi, he's from Biloxi and he was on Apollo 13. That you can kind of see these paths that people can take through Mississippi to get those big things. And you know, we have sports stars and, and, you know, people that are making inventions and manufacturing things and yeah, it just, all kinds of things that you can kind of see in your daily life that you may or may not realize.

PAUL:

Mississippi Made is on display through November 6th at the two Mississippi museums in downtown Jackson. It's open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 to 5, and on Sunday, 11 to 5, admission is free. There's also a full calendar of gallery talks and events that run through October. Those links are in the show notes.

Yeah, for someone visiting Jackson with only a few moments to spend with the exhibit, where do they start and what are the things that they absolutely cannot miss?

JESSICA:

Okay. I personally really love, we have on loan from the Boston family, Ralph Boston's three Olympic medals. He was an Olympic long jumper, first man to jump over 27 feet. And he won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. We have that medal and the shoes that he wore to win that medal. And as his subsequent two medals, 1964 and 1968, which is where we're so lucky to have those on loan as well. The other one that I kind of keep coming back to is also on loan from UMMC. We have an original drawing from Dr. Arthur Guyton's textbook of medical physiology. So that's really cool. Yeah, and we have amazing things from our own collection. The Lindsay Eight-Wheeled Wagon is a big hit. It's right when you enter the exhibit, and we're really thrilled to have that. I think what's great about this exhibit is it is very broad. And if you don't have a lot of time and you kind of just want to walk through and, you know, check out things that pique your interest, that's very easy to do. You know, there's little bite-sized pieces that you can focus on if you're You know, if you're into the history of industry in Mississippi, you can focus on that. Or if you want to go and look at art pieces, you can do that. Everything you could possibly imagine.

PAUL:

That's Jessica Walzer, whose work on Mississippi Made is about something bigger than curation. It's about proof; proof that Mississippi's contributions to American life have always been here and they've always been extraordinary. Not hidden, exactly. Maybe just underestimated. 250 objects that say, ‘We made this,’ ‘And this,’ ‘And this too!’

Mississippi Made runs through November 6. We'll have a link in our show notes to plan your visit at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

This podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. There's always something great going on in Jackson and you can keep up with it at VisitJackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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