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Isabella: Summary of Archival Research

Although I only had a day and a half in the archives this week, I was able to find an incredibly comprehensive resource to help supplement my own research. It is called African Sculpture from the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania by Allen Wardwell. He provides a brief history of the museum's acquisition of the African collections and I have been using to create a clear, neat summary of how all of the objects came into the collection, who was involved, and when did the objects arrive in the museum. It has also helped me figure out which folders would be most useful to find richer information about the provenance of these materials. Bellow is a collection of my notes thus far that I will polish up into paragraphs later today: The book was published in conjunction with a cooperative exhibition between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Penn Museum. It was called "Treasures of Ancient Nigeria," and the bulk of the objects in the exhibit were purchased from ...
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Lara: Wednesday, June 28

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 ...
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Lara: Tuesday, June 20

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 ...
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