Vanderbilt Cup Races

Hemmings has posted an article on the Savoy Automobile Museum with a shout-out to Tucker 1044.

Enjoy,

Howard Kroplick

How to Attract 100,000 Visitors During a Car Museum's First Year

The new Savoy Museum in Georgia keeps its displays fresh

Ken Gross

03/23/2023

When you open a new automobile museum, you want to do it in a big way and perhaps offer something different from the many car museums scattered across the country. You need the right blend of great automobiles and intriguing art, an impressive physical location, and recurring exhibits that bring people back again and again. Entertaining public programs are a must, and a top-notch restaurant is a plus. The new Savoy Automobile Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, has all of that and much more.

It starts as you approach the museum. There’s an enormous sculpture in front called “The Spirit of Speed” that resembles a giant hood ornament. It’s 42 feet long, 20 feet high, and you can see it from a mile away. The architecture is futuristic, with a wheel-shaped rotunda at one end and a low silhouette. The predominant colors are silver and bright red.

Inside, there are five galleries, nearly all of them with curated exhibits that change every four months. There’s a permanent gallery for the Savoy Collection, but even the cars in that space are rotated occasionally, so you won’t see the same cars in the entire museum each time you return.

A little more than a year ago, when the museum was just under construction, I was invited to come down and meet the senior staff. Regrettably, I never met the late Frank Bergman, the Savoy’s principal architect and interior designer, but Frank had attended my exhibitions at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2010 and 2014. Frank told the Savoy’s team to ask me to be involved.

I came to Cartersville for the first time in February 2021 and met Savoy Director Macra Adair, Development Director Tom Shinall, and Curatorial Director Bruce Patton, along with the staff at the Savoy and the management of the companion Booth Western Art and Tellus Science museums. I was very impressed. I believe I said something to the effect that the Savoy Automobile Museum was much better than I’d anticipated, and arguably better – in comparison to many automobile museums nationwide – than the team could imagine.

We elected to create themed exhibitions in the galleries using cars from the museum’s existing 75-car collection, along with cars that we’d borrow from other museums and collectors. From my experience with both automobile museums and fine art museums, I knew you could convince visitors to come once, but you had to give them good reasons, like a major gallery update, to return again and again. Once that idea was approved, I set to work outlining the exhibitions, curating their content, and then calling various car owners to arrange to borrow them for four or five months.

This was a challenge. No one had ever heard of the Savoy, and we were asking them to loan us some very valuable cars. Fortunately, in my capacity as a museum director and guest curator, and my work on selection committees for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and several other concours events, I have a pretty decent Rolodex and the trust of many people in the collector car community.

For our first exhibitions, we borrowed cars from the prestigious Richard H. Dreihaus Collection in Chicago (special thanks to its Director, Stephen Murphy). From New York, Howard Kroplick loaned his award-winning Tucker 48. Wayne Carini, popular star of “Chasing Classic Cars,” trusted us with his very original Studebaker Starliner hardtop. Wayne kindly came to the Savoy’s opening and together we gave gallery tours to a growing number of museum members. Jeff Lane, Founder of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, kindly loaned his rare 1948 Davis three-wheeler.

Local collectors provided several NASCAR racers -- the1969 Dodge Daytona #71 K&K Car (Tim Wellborn), the 1970 Richard Petty Superbird #43 (Todd Werner) and the 2018 Ford Fusion #66 driven by Mark Thompson, the oldest driver to start and finish the Daytona 500. Reliable Carriers, Inc., the country’s largest transporter of vintage and manufacturer vehicles, has helped us with shipping, adding to the Savoy’s credibility among collectors.

Previous exhibits have included Art Deco Cars, with help from the Nicola Bulgari Collection in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the ACD Museum; Big Blocks, with support from the Wellborn Musclecar Museum; Front Runners – a display of ‘50s-era Indy roadsters, with cars from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, Brumos Collection, and the Unser Museum; Fast Brass, with cars from Corky Coker, Rob Kauffman, Howard Kroplick, and the Audrain Museum; Microcar Marvels from the Lane Motor Museum; and a special exhibition celebrating 150 years of Pirelli.

Thanks to creative programming, changing exhibitions, and all the great cars on display, visitors have flocked to the Savoy. The first year was a great success with more than 100,000 visitors.

Currently, museum visitors can see the British Invasion display; a tribute to Porsche’s 75th anniversary with cars from the Ingram Collection; Fabulous Fins, including loans from the Dreihaus Collection and the General Motors Heritage Center; Locally Owned, with some surprising cars from area collectors; and Built for a Crisis, small cars that were sold during the fuel crises of the 1970s. There are always at least a dozen cars on display from the Savoy’s own collection.

Working with Bruce Patton, Director of Curatorial Services, we’re planning the next rounds of gallery changes. The goal is to intrigue, inform, entertain, and educate Savoy Automobile Museum visitors, now and in the future. Enthusiasts won’t want to miss seeing what they have in store as exhibitions evolve. Already they have collectors who have heard about the Savoy and have asked about the museum displaying their cars.

I enjoy working with the team and I look forward to more exciting exhibitions. Miles S. Collier, a respected voice in the collector car community and the founder of the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, has said that “…the automobile is the single most important invention of the 20th Century.” Look to the Savoy to display the history of the automobile in exciting ways that will encourage visitors to return again and again.

Ken Gross is the former Executive Director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. His exhibitions of fine cars in fine art museums have entertained and informed more than one million art museum visitors nationwide.