Intern playing key role as Longmont Museum works to roll out 150th anniversary exhibit

The Longmont Museum and Cultural Center for the past two months has been gearing up for its summer exhibit celebrating Longmont’s 150th anniversary, which is slated to open in early August. 

Museum staff is working to create a comprehensive showcase depicting Longmont’s history since its founding in 1871. Among their efforts is the work of University of Colorado Boulder student Ainsley Watkins. An intern at the museum, Watkins has taken on a key role in designing and building a lowrider for the “cruising” portion of the exhibit, which will pay homage to Main Street as an avenue for car aficionados. 

“I saw the word ‘fabrication’ and that’s what drew me in,” Watkins said of finding the internship. 

Although Watkins is only a sophomore at CU Boulder, she has years of woodworking under her belt. During her freshman year of high school, she took her gym class online, creating a free period during her day. After seeing what her school had to offer, Watkins decided to take an introductory woodworking course. And, since her school only offered two semesters of woodworking, Watkins decided to do an independent study in which she could take woodworking throughout her high school career. 

Watkins found the internship with the museum through mentors in the CU Boulder Environmental Design program. 

“I’d definitely give tops to CU for developing this internship program,” said Jared Thompson, curator of exhibitions for the museum. 

Thompson has been working closely with Watkins and said he has been impressed with what the young designer has accomplished at the museum — especially in creating the lowrider, which he said takes a certain kind of skill. 

“I think one of the challenges with this is cars tend to be very smooth and curved, so you have to take a curved object and then make it onto flatter planes,” Thompson said of the construction of the wooden lowrider. “Ainsley had done a really excellent job in doing it and actually translating those curves to flat planes.”

A lowrider model that willl be included in the exhibit celebrating the city's 150th anniversary, which is being designed by intern Ainsley Watkins. By Courtesy Longmont Museum

Cruising culture, also known as “dragging,” dates as far back as the 1930s in Longmont, said Erik Mason, the museum’s curator of history. 

“It was a really big part of Longmont’s youth culture for a long time. High school and older kids would cruise up and down Main Street and not just people from Longmont, but people from all throughout Northern Colorado,” Mason said. 

The summer 150th anniversary exhibit will focus on six main topics curators feel speak best to Longmont’s history: natural disasters in the West in the past 150 years; pandemic, reflecting on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and where we are now; transportation, including the railroad, and cruising culture; technology; beer and beverages; and racial equity. 

It is important to be able to look back at Longmont’s history and see how some things have changed but in many ways stayed the same, Thompson said. 

Full details on the exhibit are not yet available, but when they are, they will be posted at the museum’s website.