Day 1 at the Penn!

Monday was a whirlwind of introductions and scheduling details! I already knew Lara from a class this fall, but it was great to meet Isabella and start getting to know each other. We also met Jessica, who showed us the new plans for the African galleries. I'm glad that they're going to attempt to draw connections between Africa and other areas of the world, because it's often treated as its own isolated continent. This past year, I was helping a professor research contemporary connections between Africa and China, and I did some historical research that revealed how many African countries have been trading with China and other Asian countries for centuries without these relationships really being acknowledged in the West. It also reminded me of the textile exhibit at Creative Africa last summer, which painted a more global picture of what constituted "African" art and prompted a lot of interesting conversations with visitors. The Penn is also rearranging the African galleries according to new categories of these themes:

    • CULTURES (how did these things get here, who made them) - people
      • Kongo, Sierra Leone, Benin
    • CONNECTIONS IN DIVERSITY - places (apparently)
      • sculpture, masks, ivory, cloth
    • FUNCTION - purpose
      • healing/power, currency, music, weapons
There will also be "threads" throughout the exhibit connecting these groupings: craftsmanship/who made it, provenance/how did it get here, and spirituality/meaning/what is it for. When Isabella and I visited the African galleries after our meeting, we were struck by how nothing in the exhibit seemed to draw us in to get more information. Everything was grouped according to function and few connections were visible--they might have been written on the multi-paragraph labels, but we couldn't really be bothered to go read them (and I'm sure not many visitors find them appealing either). Hopefully the new exhibit will also be mounting the objects differently, because they were all just shoved against the walls in overcrowded cases. Walking around the rest of the museum, we noted how most of the other halls are well-lit, filled with artifacts in more interesting arrangements that encourage visitors to walk through and around the exhibit, and have benches in places where visitors can sit and read information. There were a lot of primarily aesthetic changes I would make to the exhibits, especially after spending so much time in art galleries last summer. I just think the museum should really make use of all of their wall space, because they could have larger panels of text with brighter colors that might draw visitors into certain groupings of objects. As it is, most of the galleries barely draw connections among objects. The most recently updated were obvious as they used contemporary art and stories to highlight that these cultures aren't static and to bring the visitor closer to objects which are unfamiliar due to age and location of use. "Imagine Africa" was about as laughable as I remembered it from last summer. Isabella pointed out that it claims to spark conversation, but the big wall at the entrance includes words that it's just putting into everyone's minds instead of actually leaving the floor open for visitors to say their thoughts. Some of the activities, like the stamps for the gold weights, were fun, creative, and informative--the decorations around the box of gold weights clarified the meaning of each shape in an accessible way that didn't detract from the objects themselves. Others, like the piece of bone with a magnifying glass attached, were just a bit confusing. Hopefully the new exhibit makes use of successful interactives.

At the end of the day, Isabella and I went to the library to try to print out our readings and do our blog posts. It turned out that we needed a PennKey to log into the computers or print, so we wandered around for a while trying to figure that out without much luck. Today, we learned that we'll have to set that up through Jessica and Monique at some point, and that there was actually a public computer in the library the whole time that the man we spoke to yesterday forgot to point out to us! I managed to print out some of the readings at Bryn Mawr but we still can't print here yet. I'm excited to start all of the fascinating research this summer and see how the Penn works to represent Africa!

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