Penn Museum African Galleries | 2017

While I love archives, and esteem them as a treasure trove of information, there are always points in research where the discoveries plateau. I feel like I am at this stage, and it is very frustrating. Today, I switched between reviewing the Sierra Leone Expedition files and returning to files I had previously marked for scanning in the African Section Collection Boxes. I realized very quickly that the Sierra Leone Expedition files had been tagged already for scanning, and assumed Dr. Zuberi had already found documents of interest. In an effort not to potentially affect which documents had or had not been tagged, I moved back to scanning (on my phone) the files I had tagged earlier in the month. Now that I have a greater understanding of the history of the collections and the vision for the curatorial narrative, I was able to cull documents I thought, previously, were significant. However, combing back through the folders I had already searched through made the day, I must admit, f...

Today, I felt very privileged to see the progress of the exhibition through the lens of the stakeholder meeting! Seeing a detailed framework of the foundational narratives of the exhibit, as well as the initial design concepts for the aesthetic components of display and lighting, made me realize, even more viscerally, how many moving parts are involved in developing an exhibition of this magnitude. Especially at the beginning of the meeting, when Kate Quinn displayed a slide with a calendar detailing the progress and end-dates of multiple projects throughout the museum, it hit me how much work is planned and undertaken to both develop and maintain the museum's gallery space across the institution for years in the future. I can't yet imagine the full logistics involved in the running of all of these operations, let alone the entire organization itself, but I feel I have gained a more visceral understanding (and sympathy) for the limitations of the institution and appreciation ...

For today, I was able to work through all of the correspondences between G.B. Gordon and W.O. Oldman in the Director's Office boxes. As I shifted through Oldman's inquiries about the different collections he attempted to sell, I was able to discover several stories linking the Benin Collections to the British Punitive Expedition of 1897. In one letter to Oldman, Gordon writes that he wishes to know more about how the Oldman obtained the objects as he is interested in "tracing the specimens backwards." This is lucky for us, as Team Archives can trace the specimens backwards through their correspondences. Oldman comes in possession of Benin tusks and Benin bronzes and manages to sell this collection to Gordon. Gordon inquires about how these artifacts were collected and Oldman replies, " The Benin Bronzes were collected by Colonel Maximilian John De Barthe while he was attached to or had something to with the 1897 Expedition. I meet (?) some time ago to try to ge...

With each week, the Team seems to be revealing even more exciting information from within the archives! While I could not say that my investigations today added much to the growing narrative, the information that Isabella revealed regarding the acquisitions of the Benin Bronzes, especially as the our objects relate to the military leadership in the Punitive Expedition, was extremely interesting and thought provoking. While the Penn Museum itself was not involved directly in the looting of the Benin material,  their relationship to the products of that destruction leave me feeling icky. These items, for all intents and purposes, are spoils of war, on par with the looting of artworks in WWII and the massive looting operations in Iraq in 2003 and the present.   In context of the Penn Museum, it's ironic that during our archival sessions where we uncover the complicity the museum had (and still does) in harboring stolen material, there is an exhibition upstairs justly scorning s...

Today, I had much better luck going through the archival material in the Gordon boxes as I focused on his correspondences with W.O. Oldman. By going through their correspondences between 1908-1913, I was able to track the Penn Museum's purchase of a +2,000 collection of African objects as well as a separate purchase of the Benin Collection. The most important piece of information that I found today was that the Benin collection stems from the Benin Expedition of 1897. In a letter to G.B. Gordon, Oldman writes, "“The important pieces such as the Bronze Head, plaque, masks, Aegis armlet, Dagger, Key, Vulture staff, small rattle staff and Execution Sword. Were all brought over by several officers of the British Primitive Expedition under Admiral Rawson in February 1897. They were sold by Auction in London end of 1897. And most were bought by Welster (a member of these pieces are illustrated in his Catalogues). He sold a lot to a private collector and there I was able to purchase ...

Thirty down and ten more evaluations to go! The progress we have made on conducting visitor evaluations has been very exciting, considering that we still have a month left in this leg of the project! So far, the substance of the evaluations has been very enlightening. Participants have ranged considerably in age, sex, and race and the same questions have elicited extremely diverse responses across those we have surveyed. An interesting observation that came up when I was surveying both on Friday and Saturday was the question of how different individuals responded to the request of being surveyed. I have always found that men who are alone are far more interested in participating in a survey than women who are alone, and men and women respectively with children almost always turn down the opportunity to participate in a survey, from my experience. I engaged in this same conversation separately with Maeve and Isabella, and think that these observations go to the heart of the consider...

On Friday, Maeve, Lara, and I spent the day conducting our first round of visitor evaluations and we ended up collecting twenty interviews. I was really pleased with how many interviews we managed to get because I was under the impression that the Imagine Africa hallway and the Penn Museum in general had low traffic, but I pleasantly surprised to see so many people stopping by the Africa galleries. From the experience, I became much more comfortable with the idea of stopping Museum-goers and I was able to get a lot of valuable insight from these brief conversations. For example, I realized that the majority of visitors (at least from the small selection that I was exposed to, so maybe it is unfair to make this generalization) were students, professors, and people who work in museums themselves. Therefore, they had came to the Penn Museum with a specific academic purpose and consumed the exhibition more carefully and critically than the average passerby. One of the most interesting in...

The past two days have been very different, and both very rewarding. On Thursday, Maeve and I continued pursuing information held within the archives. Continuing that work has been very helpful for further contextualizing the diverse nature by which the collection came into the institution, however, there seems to be a strong basis for missionary engagement in the acquisition and ultimate donation of material. Later on in the day, I decided to begin compiling the object lists shared with us in a google drive spreadsheet (which should be available for everyone to add to in the folder). So far I have seen a large preponderance of material, especially the ivories, coming from Oldman and Umlauff. By continuing to compile, add to, and clean the data we are gathering about these objects, I believe that it will become even more clear where to search in the archives for relevant contextual sources and what the collection of these objects says about the institution and its mission at a certain ...

Wednesday pulled back the curtain for me for what the future African galleries might look like. After seeing Dr. Zuberi's reaction to the mention of "punitive expeditions" in the archives, I feel confident that he will be able to create a powerful narrative for where these objects came from and how they were able to be in front of the Penn Museum's audience.  I was really impressed with Lara and Maeve's finds. As for myself, I want to reorganize my search and stray away from sorting through the Gordon files. Although I was able to build a foundation for Gordon's relationships and figure out the different ways items were acquired by the museum, I think it would be more useful to turn my attention towards the Moroccan diaries or files that focus on specific expeditions. I want to be able to find information that will be essential for the future African galleries and to do so, I believe I have to turn elsewhere. On Friday, I will talk to Alex about where I can...

Today I continued going through the archives, this time with more help from the digital collections. I made folders in our Google drive folder corresponding to each folder in my box, so that I could track everything by donor. The folders I've explored are Ladislas Szecsi (1932), Charles Thomas (1892-1898), Talcott Williams "Morocco" (1897-8),  J. Noble White (1928-1931), Lena H. White (1928-1949), and Mrs. T. W. Woodside (1930). All of my notes from today are up in those folders, but my main experience today was frustration with Mr. and Mrs. Talcott Williams's handwritings. They sent long, detailed letters home from their Moroccan expedition (the museum commissioned them), but they both write in incredibly loose cursive that's almost impossible to read. It was very difficult to positively identify any relevant words. Two of the objects they collected are definitely going on display, but I couldn't figure out whether they were actually discussed anywhere in the...

Witnessing Dr. Zuberi's reaction today viewing our progress on the archives hit home the power the human story has to excite, but a conversation while I was waiting for a late train at 30th Street station made me realize how few opportunities are given to people to really have them feel invested in engaging in history, anthropology, or archaeology. In this conversation we exchanged pleasantries and facts about our work. The passenger told me that he worked in business strategy, and when I told him that I research archaeology and anthropology in a museum, he unequivocally told me he didn't like history, nor did he find it relevant. I was really saddened by his comment (I wasn't surprised by his comment as I have heard it before many times), but it also made me zealously eager to try to convince him to rethink his stance. I told him that it was my mission to make learning about the past and the present engaging and relevant to all, and that the way social-sciences are taugh...

While walking into the museum this morning, I met Salas (?), the consulting scholar Dr. Zuberi was meeting. He was very friendly and told me that he worked at the Penn in the African collections as a student when there was no curator or keeper! After I led him to Dr. Zuberi, I met Lara at the cafe, because I couldn't swipe myself into the closed museum. We went to the archives and met Alex and Isabella. Alex gave us a quick refresher on how to hold our places/mark things for copying and then we got to work! I started with the Umlauff collection, most of which documents a 1912-1913 purchase of Kongo objects. Without the actual object list, I wasn't sure what to search for in the catalogues, which were entirely in German. The letters were mostly asking for confirmation of payment or shipment, with Umlauff trying to convince the director to buy some of his Oceanic collections as well. It seems the museum managed to get the Kongo collection (they go back and forth on the spelling a...

As always, archival research is incredibly eye opening and is critical for establishing a fuller narrative of an event, person, objects, or in this case all of the above. Reading through the archives casts the objects in a completely different light, changing their significance from articles of diverse and disparate cultures, to witnesses of dynamic and, largely, intrusive change occurring among the populations of colonized Africa. In fact, a variety of objects were gathered directly through the missionary work of Propst and Whight for the Africa Inland Mission to British East Africa. The collectors even note that "We are pleased to find that collecting specimens for you is quite a help to our missionary work . . . the buying of curios brings many people around whom otherwise we would not come in touch with" (Wight to Gordon June 8th, 1915). This correspondence demonstrate the direct link between the gathering of ethnographic objects and the cultural/religious intrusion of ...

Today, alongside Lara and Maeve, I spent my morning and afternoon on archival research. Keeping in mind the spheres of Cultures, Function, and Materials (my focus), I began my research in the Gordon Boxes, looking through Gordon's documents from 1910 to 1928. I was able to make my way through each document in six folders, tracking his correspondences with Kirkor Minassian, James A. Montgomery, S. Weir Mitchell, H. Khan Monif, Warren K. Moorehead, and the many collectors involved with the Mohammedan Art Exhibition. Without the objects list, I aimed to spend today familiarizing myself with the archives and I attempted to figure out leads for the creation of the African exhibition. Out of all the correspondences, the most meaty and relevant documents were the Kirkor Minassian letters. Based on my research, Minassian and Gordon had a year-long battle over two African wood carvings (of a head and stick) from the French Congo. The original price listed for the wood carvings was $1,400,...

Friday's meeting with Dr. Zuberi in archives gave me a greater sense of the direction of the curatorial mission of the project. Understanding his vision as oriented around the provenance of the objects and the stories engrained in the history of their collection by various persons and dealers reminded me of an exhibition concept I had been introduced to by a former internship supervisor, Paul Davis.  His project ReCollecting Dogon seems to me to parallel Dr. Zuberi's vision of highlighting the ways the Western gaze and associated collecting practices by European and American actors has affected the long-term museological interpretation and perception of African peoples. The effort of the exhibit ReCollecting Dogon " strives to destabilize the authority of ethnographic display" of  Dogon material culture and highlighting the collection as a result of " how people in Europe and America perceived and valued objects than the artistic practices of people on living o...

Unfortunately I do not have much to update the team on regarding my activities on Thursday. My day was focused on inputting as much response data into the Imagine Africa Comment cards spreadsheet as I could. I am very hopeful that the data will ultimately be useful for the project, especially in terms of the what visitors saw as lacking in the Africa exhibitions (both in terms of Imagine Africa and the older Africa gallery). One particular highlight of my day was the ability to meet interns and other professionals of the museum. For instance during lunch, I struck up a conversation with an intern working for Academic Engagement, who is from Boston. Recognizing that students from across the Northeast come to the museum to participate in an internship at the museum (especially one that is unpaid) hit home that the Penn Museum really is a central figure in the study of archaeology for students locally and regionally. Later on in the day I met one of the conservators and an individual ...

I had therapy this morning, so I missed the aborted attempt at piloting our interview questions. In the library, I worked on my missing blog posts and the meta narrative, writing up a lot of the information I read last night. Around 3:30, Lara, Isabella, and I decided to meet in the cafe and discuss our game plan for getting our evaluation project up to the Penn's standards. We need to write a mission statement, which will probably just be an adaptation of the research objectives Monique already gave us. We also need to clarify exactly how many surveys we're doing: we have to fill out their forms for all of our preliminary research, so the mission statement for that will include determining what more we need to ask about visitor's perceptions of Africa. It's a bit unclear whether we're evaluating visitor's perceptions of the current exhibit or focusing on what they'd like to see done in the future--is this a front-end or back-end evaluation? Where will we be...

Today, I divided my time between working through the article, The Art of Anthropology: Questioning Contemporary Art in Ethnographic Display in the morning researching objects on the Penn Museum's digital collections and familiarizing myself with the objects in the Africa Galleries in the afternoon. I'm actually very happy that I choose to organize my time that way because I found that the things I read in the Geismar article set off little bells in my head as I walked around the galleries and could immediately see the connections. Admittedly, I found the Geismar article very dense and I want to go back through it again/discuss it with the group because I had trouble following some of the author's points. However, what I understood from the readings was that when contemporary art is incorporated into ethnographic museums, Euro-American ideas of modernism are so tightly linked to what is "contemporary" that they influence contemporary art in a way that negates c...

The way museums function as institutions is so dependent upon the collaboration of the people who work in them. The most interesting moments I have experienced throughout my work in museums has been, hands down, the inter-personal dynamics of museum professionals. I think I find this aspect of museums so interesting because, coming into museum spaces, the most immediate and accessible elements are final products that intimate that there is absolute cohesion between the many actors involved in the conceptualization and execution of galleries and exhibitions. Working in museums has shown me that the opposite is true. The final exhibition is just the tip of the iceberg that is a long and arduous process of negotiation between numerous people, departments, and interests that starts years in advance of instillation. As a result, the curatorial process is understandably an undertaking that people invest heart and soul into because of the level of work and effort involved in making an exh...

Today, we were the given the opportunity to sit-in on a brain-storming meeting for the reinstallation of the Africa galleries. I was immediately struck by Tukufu's command on the room and his vision for the future exhibitions. There so much of what I heard that I loved.  I could already see how the shrine might look in my mind or how the display of the burned tusk might look in the center of the gallery and the potential is unbelievable. I understand how much of this vision is theoretical (which can create difficulties for upcoming marketing deadlines), but I was really caught up with Tukufu's connections to Joseph Conrad and how he wanted to tell a new story around the objects. Instead of presenting the objects as the story of traditional Africa, he wanted to show how these objects don't depict African tradition at all. Instead, they were objects "bought at a time when Africa was being undone." Using the objects to tell a story of this "undoing" sounds ...

After doing a little research, I discovered the Odunde Festival is the largest African American Street Festival in the country and I can believe it as the vendors and the performance spaces stretched down street after street in South Philly. This huge celebration of the African Diaspora had an infectious, overwhelmingly positive energy that seemed to touch everybody at the festival. Everything from the music to the food to the art was awe-inspiring and I really want to explore how to bring this level of celebration of Black identity to an exhibit dedicated to Africa and the continent's connections to the world. What was so special about this event (coming from an outsider, proximal to whiteness perspective) was how this joyous space was for the Black community. Through my readings, I have learned so much about how museums have been structured to reinforce imagined racial hierarchies, constantly excluding Black artists and using their exhibits to promote the false claim of white...

Today, I worked mainly on inputing responses of comment cards into a copy of the master excel sheet of the Imagine Africa data-set. Reading the comments is at times interesting, on occasion its entertaining, and, unfortunately, in a few instances it has been disturbing. In general, the comments have been helpful in understanding the overall types of suggestions that visitors have made regarding the Imagine Africa and African Section galleries, but it has also opened a window into the more direct social role I think the future gallery should take to address unconscious and conscious prejudice regarding the popular Western impressions of Africa. One particularly disturbing comment that stuck in my mind was "Africa smells like black people and monkeys." The comment was written on the back of the response card with the respondent's demographic information also filled in. The respondent, not shockingly, identified as caucasian. Another comment form contained the comment ...

Experiencing the Odunde festival was absolutely critical as a point of comparison for me to reflect on distinct differences between the vibrancy of cultural expression of a social, festive space and the static, still, and didactic environment of the museum. The Odunde festival was an altogether visceral experience where no matter where you turned your senses were engaged in an environment that was alive and celebratory. The current Penn Museum galleries cannot live up to said vibrancy, but I think the question that I have asked myself throughout this reflection is whether that is the role of the museum. I am heavily attached to the view that museums are social spaces, where fostering dynamic engagement in an exhibition and its content is a necessity instead of a luxury. However, what does that engagement look like in practice, and is engaging the visitor effective? "Imagine Africa" illustrates a great example of an exhibit that aims to create a festive environment that enga...

Today, I spent a good part of my evening finishing up the Exhibiting Blackness readings. I thought the readings were an incredibly interesting dive into the history of Black American art in museum exhibitions and into the powerful relationship between racial hierarchies and museum representation (in that aesthetics and "high art" are shaped by the standards of white supremacy and how museums reinforce and proliferate white supremacy through their exhibits). The article spoke of how African American art is caught in an either/or paradigm between the anthropological approach (that serves to "other" Black Americans in order to strengthen white culture) and the corrective approach (that serves to correct for the misrepresentation and absence of Black American art in art institutions). In other words, the work must be either an artifact or an artwork. Through this paradigm, Alain Locke's idea of creating artwork inspired by African tradition would be seen as impossi...

Today was a great leaning experience in navigating moments when plans do not turn out as one might initially expect. While I had expected the day to be oriented around testing questions and survey methods, knowledge and newly articulated considerations related by the exhibitions team demonstrated the further work that was necessary before a testing phase for the survey instruments could begin. The realization of next steps was informative, especially in terms of understanding the institutional factors involved in regulating internal and external audience research of the institution,which, understandably follow specific and delineated procedures. As a result, the rest of my date centered around gathering sources to investigate standardized methods of evaluation utilized by the Penn Museum and other institutions. Unfortunately, the volumes I was most enthused in acquiring (specifically Serell's Paying Attention: visitors and museum exhibitions and Diamond's Practical Evaluati...

Over the course of the day, I was able to get a feel for how surveying our audience might be like, even though the interviewing time was cut short. I was also able to work through the Art/Artifact  and Exhibiting Blackness readings and make concrete plans alongside Lara and Maeve. Together, we brainstormed ways to clarify our mission statement and establishing our methodology. It was good to sit down with Jess and go over how to get our plan approved, and even though I was disappointed we couldn't jump straight into surveying, I appreciated the lesson on how to operate within a complicated bureaucracy. I'm unsure if this interview will be able to be included in the final research, but I really enjoyed my first conversation. I was able to talk to an older man who works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was in the middle of his first trip to the Penn Museum. In our discussion of what he would like to see in future African exhibitions, he emphasized the importance of vibranc...

I started Tuesday morning in the library with Isabella, each of us researching some of the links and articles Monique sent us. I read the "Penn Museum 2017 Exhibition: Overview" first, which was quite similar to what Jessica told us of the exhibition plans on Monday. It mentions the thematic clusters and threads, saying they want visitors to "experience several narrative paths" and "a rotating survey of the extensive presentation of Penn Museum's entire African holdings." I'm intrigued by the idea of rotating displays--I'd want to know more specific plans for this, as they mention they intend to rotate some of the thematic clusters and lend things to other museums. This overview is also from last January, though, so this plan may have been abandoned. The "African Collection Statement" was pretty straightforward, though I did wonder how the museum is going to highlight that the bulk of their collection is from 14 completely different c...

On Wednesday, I came in a bit late because I had to take my friend to the hospital the night before, so I met everyone at lunch. We discussed the metanarrative of the museum and the African galleries before moving to the library for our weekly meeting. Monique, Lara, Isabella and I began the process of developing our visitor study methodology, going over the differences we might see if we interviewed within Imagine Africa vs somewhere else in the museum. We planned to pilot a five-minute interview on Thursday, asking visitors fairly simple questions like "what brought you to the Penn Museum today," "have you had a chance to see any of the African exhibits," and "what were your thoughts." We'll be testing a handful of different ways to extract more thoughts from people on what they'd like to see in the future and how this exhibit compares to their expectations. We hope to make use of the intro wall as an interesting prompt. At 3, Alex gave us a tou...

Today the workshop and brainstorming session offered another fruitful day of ideas and insights into the trajectory of the project. The metanarrative exercise was very productive preparation for the crash course in the museum's mission and history  as an institution that we received in the intern morning workshop. Alex Pizzati was as entertaining as ever, giving an overview of the museum's narrative that not only highlighted the historical progression of the museum and its collections, but an understanding of the many personalities that influenced the character of the space. While I have visited the archives before, I always feel that I am able to pickup on something I never fully appreciated previously, For instance, the archaeological illustrations that were out on the table really stood out to me, not just for their quality,but for the level of artistry that captured both the image and essence of the artifacts copied. The brainstorming session regarding the initial surve...

The Penn Museum has the most beautiful archival space that i have ever seen. Underneath the black iron spiral staircases, the long, ever-evolving history of the Penn Museum was revealed to us. After listening to Alex's incredible wealth of institutional knowledge, I feel like I'm overflowing with energy and inspiration for my individual research project. When I begin to dive into the archival materials myself, I intend to track the evolution of the Penn Museum's African exhibitions since the creation of the museum. How did different generations represent the same objects? How did the collections themselves change in response to the institutional demands of new directors and new trends? How can exhibitions of the past inspire positive change for a current exhibit that is riddled with Disney-fied gimmicks and misrepresentations? Speaking of misrepresentation, I was blown away about the story Alex and Monique shared about the Baltimore man (must get his name as soon as...