Isabella: First Round of Visitor Evalutions

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 interviews was with a man who worked as a curator for the African Art exhibit at the University of Virginia. His criticisms and comments of the galleries aligned in some ways to Dr. Zuberi's vision as he spoke of the importance of divulging how the objects came to be at the museum and how connecting the early history of collection to the current exhibit is essential. However, I was also curious about his emphasis on connecting Egypt to Africa. He believes that you need to draw direct ties between Egypt and African countries in an African art exhibit, sometimes by physically placing the exhibitions next to each other or mixing the objects. However, the relationship between Egypt and the African continent seems to have a long contentious history in museums and African art does not have to be validated through Egypt.

In the future, I want to talk more about the question, "What do you think are Africa's connections to the rest of the world," that had been changed to, "Do you think Africa is connected to the rest of world? If so, how and if now, why not?" In almost all of the interviews, this question came off as random and almost too broad to answer. Many of the guests struggled with this question and gave vague responses even when prompted. I feel in many ways the guests' discomfort could be useful for the research; however, I also feel it could be useful to narrow the question down even further in order to get more concrete, interesting answers.