Tayloe sees new job as link between past and present

SIKESTON - Delilah Tayloe sees her new job as curator of the Sikeston Depot as an opportunity to engineer a link between past and present, art and history.

"I hope to help the Depot Museum serve as a place of learning and interaction for all people of all ages to experience our world and learn," Tayloe explained.

"The past is our cultural hearth," she continued. "It's more than mere nostalgia. We can use the past to illustrate our evolution as a people. With the past to anchor us and tell our story, we can chart the course to an even better future. Museums can be user-friendly portals to the past, present and future."

With the Depot's focus on fine art and local history, in concert with other local museums, Tayloe said "our children's education can be really enhanced by utilizing all the museums because they are the greatest teaching tool ever created."

As the new curator, Tayloe will oversee the display of paintings by five artists through Nov. 30 at the Depot. "Five Views of the Midwest" features landscape art by Time Anderson, Michael Dubina, Jeff Aeling, Ahzad Bogosian and Jeffrey Vaughn. The Missouri Arts Council provided financial assistance to bring this exhibit to Sikeston.

Also local exhibits will blend culture and art with the continuing displays of works by John Jacob and Nellie and Lynn Shepard during November. Jacob's lathe-turned containers are made from woods from all over the world and award-winning handmade dolls and wood items by the Shepherd are featured at the Depot.

A 1999 magna cum laude graduate with a bachelor's degree in historic preservation, Tayloe will soon complete her master's degree in history at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, where she has worked at the University Museum for two years as collections manager and exhibit director.

In 2002-03 she was a graduate assistant to Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast. Her main task was to design an outdoor history exhibit for Southeast's Friend Family Farm in Oran. She later assisted Dr. Bonnie Stepenoff, coordinator of the Historic Preservation Program, where she gained additional teaching experience and edited and published a book about Cape Girardeau medical history.

As a graduate assistant, she worked on the Old Town Cape, a Missouri Main Street program in 2000-01 in downtown Cape Girardeau. In addition to her work on various promotional and outreach events, her duties included conducting a solo field inventory of 130 square blocks of commercially zoned property. The goal of this project was to help the city and Old Town Cape better utilize the potential of the district's commercial property.

She was recently involved with the exhibit development and installation for the Red House project in time for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration set for Nov. 21-23. The reconstructed home of Cape Girardeau's founder, Don Louis Lorimier's Red House on the riverfront is nearly complete. Tayloe arranged for archaeological survey work to be conducted to find the site of the original Red House of Lorimier and his half-Shawnee wife, Penampeh de Bougainville, using ground-penetrating radar. The Red House Interpretative Center is expected to open around mid-November.

Tayloe chaired the development of the permanent display "Show Me Missouri" in 1998 at the Cape Girardeau River Heritage Museum. Also in 1998, she began working as curator and exhibit director of the Stars and Stripes Museum and Library in Bloomfield. Tayloe designed all the exhibits at Stars and Stripes as well as several off-site exhibits for groups needing patriotic displays.

In addition to these accomplishments, Tayloe said she is excited about the grassroots work being done at the new Will Mayfield Natural History Museum in Marble Hill, where the only dinosaur ever found within 1,000 miles was discovered in nearby Glen Allen. "That museum is another regional asset," she said. "Just think. Our kids will not have to travel to a big city where another area's story is told, but will learn right in our area about their own remarkable heritage."