Pass value of a field to another content type in Drupal 7
I think it would make sense if your 'exhibit' content type references sections, which are themselves nodes (through nid reference fields) or through a reference field on the section that points back to the exhibit.  Then you can build the view with relationships to look however you want.  

The point of having everything be a node is that you can take advantage of a lot of built-in functionality, as well as a lot of contrib modules which are geared towards nodes.

So if you create the structure as I mentioned above, you can add sections to exhibits with this module: Node Reference URL, which allows you to automatically fill in the nid reference field.

Does that work?