Lara: Sunday June, 11, A reflection on the Odunde Festival

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 engages multiple senses for the visitor, and fails. On the other-hand, in a recent visit to the Museum of Transatlantic Slavery in Liverpool, I was blown away by the exhibit, which I feel successfully combined clear, impactful, and poignant story-telling with engaging and interactive didactic content. Thus, with the space given in the Penn Museum, what are the options to successfully produce a robust exhibition that attracts visitors, keeps their attention, fulfills the instructional purpose of the institution, and leaves the visitor feeling impacted?

I do not have any clear answers to these questions, but their significance to my continued curatorial reflections, especially as I contemplate what makes a successful exhibition and what is the responsibility of an exhibition to the public, is something I cannot understate as I move forward with the project.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Isabella: Exhibiting Blackness and an Exploration of African Exhibitions Across the US

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...
Read more

Lara: Thursday, June 9th

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...
Read more

Friday, July 14, 2017 + Monday, July 17, 2017

I am thankful to say that data entry is over, and all responses have been recorded on the excel sheet! Now, the real work begins! Friday consisted mostly of completing data entry, cleaning the data, and investigating best methods for analysis. In fact, that same day I conducted an informational interview with a freelance Visitor Studies consultant who forwarded me some very helpful sources to aid me in approaching analysis and structuring the eventual report.  One such source is, Informal Science, a website that was introduced to us at the begging of the summer with our informational/introductory materials that provides educational, cultural, and science institutions free, online resources in support of program evaluations: http://www.informalscience.org/. This website has been great help to me this morning/afternoon in my continued exploration of understanding the data we gathered. In a meeting with Jess Bicknell today, she summarized some general standards for coding con...
Read more