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Monday Morning Brief: Tips from an ANA exhibit winner

In June at the American Numismatic Association Summer Seminar, Coin World editor-at-large Steve Roach caught up with exhibitor Larry Sekulich. Larry teaches a class on how to exhibit and has won multiple Howland Wood awards at the ANA World's Fair of Money. Here, he tells us some of the secrets to an award-winning exhibit (and here’s a hint: it doesn’t necessarily involve spending lots of money). 

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Full video transcript:

Steve Roach: Hey, everyone at Coin World. It's Steve Roach, editor at large, and I'm here at Summer Seminar, American Numismatic Association's week-long immersion in coins. I'm teaching a class this week on numismatic publishing, and it's designed to help people who attend the class become better and more effective communicators and writers about numismatic topics.
 
I'm with one of my friends, Larry Sekulich. Larry's going to be teaching next week on the art of exhibiting and how to put together an award-winning numismatic exhibit.
 
Larry, what are three hints that you would give to people looking to put together an awesome, award-winning exhibit?
 
Larry Sekulich: Well, I think the first thing is you want to be really enthusiastic about the coins that you're using to exhibit. That tends to be reflected in the quality of the writing and the way everything's assembled. If you're not excited about what you want to tell a story about, I think that's going to come across in the quality of the exhbit. So be really enthusiastic about what you're doing.
 
SR: What about clarity? How important is clarity for exhibitors?
 
LS: Well one of the problems is, who's your audience? So, frequently when you're putting together an exhibit, you need to make a point of defining terms, typically in the context of your writing, so that someone who is not a numismatist, like a general population, would find your exhibit interesting. You don't want to lose them with the jargon of the coin-collecting world.
 
SR: Do I have to have a lot of money to put together an exhbiit? Sometimes when I go to coin shows I see exhibits with just amazing material that looks really expensive. Is that necessary to win an award?
 
LS: Absolutely not. My theory of exhibiting is, what's the story? To me the story is more valuable than the monetary value of the object at hand. I think you could put together an award-winning exhibit with a minimal amount of money tied up into the actual coinage.
 
It's nice to have super-rare coins, super-beautiful coins, but again to me it's the story behind the coin that's really the most important thing.
 
SR: Great. Thank you, Larry. And thanks, everyone at Coin World.

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