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Isabella: First Deliverable

For today's update, I am providing the summary for Team Archives' first delivarable. I spent today preparing to submit a first draft to Dr. Zuberi and below is a comprehensive summary of what our work looks like so far: For our first deliverable, we are submitting the History of the Collections reference sheet, spreadsheets for the objects picked out for the exhibition,  an object spreadsheet for each of the objects in the African Sculpture in the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania book, and a specific timeline for the Gordon-Oldman correspondences. From the spreadsheets, each object intended for the future exhibition is included with culture, country, material, donor information, and specific provenance information. The spreadsheets are intended to go hand in hand with the History of the Collections reference sheet. If there is any object in the collection that you interested in learning more detail about its provenance, you can refer to the reference sheet for mo...
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Lara: Wednesday, June 7th

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...
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Isabella: Photographs from the African Collections

On Wednesday, my day was divided between attending the lecture on public programs in the morning and going through the photograph boxes from the African Section in the afternoon. The lecture on public programming was really interesting because it was focused on how to best engage young students with the museum. Growing up, I loved attending interactive museum events and it's really interesting to hear about the Penn Museum's programs and imagine what I would have thought about them as a child. One interesting part from the lecture was the idea that for children with disabilities, the programs aim to give them skills that they carry with them into future careers (such as emotion recognition) rather than content-based information. The focus is to give these children in particular skills that will help them become "productive citizens who can hold a job" later on. I understand the sentiment, but the whole idea sounds capitalistic (let me mold you into the ideal worker) a...
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