Penn Museum African Galleries | 2017

At this point in the research, it's becoming more and more difficult to figure out where to put my energies. I am proud to say that our master spreadsheet is complete and I have fully compiled all of the Oldman correspondences, biography file, and uploaded the important PDFs from his boxes. We are really near complete and I have to stop myself from diving into new projects, like cracking open the Hall Correspondences files or getting too invested in researching more minor donors. Today, I spent my time finishing up the ethnographic photo boxes from the African Section. I was less successful today, but I did find interesting photographs of old exhibitions that showcased models of Somali men in glass cases. I included the pictures in the deliverable file and perhaps it will be something to look further into in the future. The photographs did not include labels so I didn't have much information to go off of. After I finished those boxes, I spent the rest of my time beefing up t...

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...

Today, Maeve and I were in crunch-time mode in the archives attempting to have the master objects list as complete as possible for our final check-in with Dr. Zuberi tomorrow afternoon. By crunch-time, I mean I spent the day plugging in individual object lists in each donor file, hyperlinking each donor folder next to the object they donated that will be included in the exhibition, and making sure that the donor files are as informative and as comprehensive as possible. This process involves a lot of pulling from previously developed folders and constant organizing. It's a little tedious and a little exhausting, but once it's complete, I believe it will be extremely useful and accessible for Dr. Zuberi. Already, the master list is 75% finished and it will definitely be done either by tomorrow or Thursday. If we complete it early, I will spend time beefing up the donor files with additional research and by uploading more pdfs into the Deliverable folder. I am hoping to hear what...

On Friday, I wanted to clean up the Gordon and Oldman Correspondences for the final deliverable. I went through and began taking pictures and uploading PDFs of all of the important letters and forms that would be interesting for Dr. Zuberi to see firsthand. Then, I went through the letters and made sure I had all of the important information included from their correspondences from 1908 to Gordon's death in 1923. Then, with Alex's assistance, I went through the Registrar's Office boxes to examine the African Section receipts and began taking pictures and uploading PDFs of the receipts that I thought were particularly interesting, from Oldman, Jack Buck, G.B. Gordon Estate, and the John Quinn Estate.  Through this process, here are the major questions that came up: Would Dr. Zuberi be interested in pdfs of the receipts of purchases (specifically, of the Oldman Benin Collection) or of shipping papers of the objects arriving from the Philadelphia Trans-Atlantic Line? ...

Today, I started testing the coding structure I had developed for the collected visitor data, and the inconsistencies in my initial structure became apparent. While I felt like I had a good grasp on the general trends of the data (i.e. a a sense for the typical responses informants put forth) while I structured the coding rubric, actually going through and matching the coding structure to the answers revealed its deficiencies, especially in-terms of addressing ambiguous answers. It was, however, a great lesson in the need for checking an double checking assumed knowledge, and I am glad I went back to address the coding. A big change to the coding will come from the way I split up the art vs. artifact question i.e. " What do you think of when you hear something described as African art vs. African artifact?" Initially my codes divided answers between the following content themes prominent in each response: geography, time, found vs. made, and f unctional vs expressive. Afte...

For today, my morning was dedicated to hearing lectures from representatives from the Development, Marketing, and Visitor Services departments. Each gave really interesting, in-depth looks at departments I was very unfamiliar with today. After listening to the lectures from the representatives at Development, I became more interested in considering development as a potential career path. In this position, I would be able to support the survival of the museum and its future projects while getting to travel and meet new people all the time. Continually, I was fascinated by the presentation given by the Visitor services department. One comment that really caught my attention was the idea that language is essential for visitor services in order to make the museum experience as accessible as possible for every guest. The importance of specific, accessible language goes beyond just the labels beneath the objects. The incredible intentionality of language can be seen on every sign, map, and g...

Over the course of Monday (today) and Tuesday, the three of us will be consolidating all of our research into useful guides for Dr. Zuberi. As of now, I plan to submit a complete history of the African collections as a reference guides with in-depth information of each donor and major figure in the collections. I also plan to include two objects: one for Dr. Zuberi's objects of interest and one for the objects from the African sculpture book. Finally, I plan to submit a separate timeline/reference sheet specifically describing the Gordon and Oldman correspondences and Oldman's relationship with the African collections. I chose to concentrate on Oldman because of how the bulk of the African Collections comes from his dealings with art collectors, missionaries, and colonial officers.

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...

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...

On Friday, I continued working on my creation of the African Sculpture objects spreadsheet and the History of the African Collections Reference sheet. The intensive data collection has been both interesting and really useful as already I've unveiled many new stories and I have a much stronger, more comprehensive grasp on the collections. Out of the stories I've found so far during this data building, the stories of John Quinn's patronage of Joseph Conrad, the white supremacist racial theories of ex-African section/Oceanian section curator Carleton S. Coon, the obssesive love for collecting African art by composer Harold Rome, and Alaine LeRoy Locke's appraisal of Lena H. White's collection have been the most compelling to me. Slowly, we're creating larger and larger webs between the Penn Museum's collections and the colonial history/racial history of the time of each object's accession.

Discussing the ROM's "Into the Heart of Africa" exhibition with Dan Rahimi was a great cautionary tale of how things can go spectacularly wrong when you do not seek community or public engagement when developing stories for a museum to tell. It's rather jarring to recognize that even with the curator's intentions of using the exhibit to subvert the racist narrative perpetuated by colonial discourse, their execution in no way matched their intention, but rather perpetuated it. I think what struck me most about Dan Rahimi's talk was that the curators were so oblivious to the ways in which their work would be interpreted, especially in regards to the image of the British officer brutally stabbing a Zulu warrior. I would have expected  that the sheer brutality of the image would lead to more in depth  consideration of whether displaying such violence is warranted or necessary.. If the reason for the use of the image was for sheer shock value, then it's use i...

Another intern workshop, and another learning experience! This week the interns were met by the Registrar's office composed of 5-6 staff. While I did not think I was going to be interested in the topic, I was pleasantly surprised at how their duties and responsibilities aligned with experiences I have had in the past at the BMC Special Collections and other institutions. I soon realized that when I walked into the presentation that morning, I honestly had not considered what a registrar does and why they do it. I found, however, that their work within the institution, especially in terms of the record keeping and information management of objects, acquisition history, and donors, has direct bearing on the work we are undertaking presently for Dr. Zuberi. Without institutional record keeping of who gave to the museum and what they gave, our project would be much more difficult. Later on, when we caught up with Dr. Zuberi, I was excited to see how much work we had undertaken over...

On Thursday, I spent the bulk of my day working on a three part project for Dr. Zuberi. Part one is the creation of a MyFinds list based off the objects in the African sculpsture book. Part two is the creation of an object spreadsheet that lists the object number, donor, date, provenance of each object, etc. Part three is the completion of a "History of the African Collections," reference list. I hope that all of these parts will inform each other and that they will of use to Dr. Zuberi as he completes the final object lists. My vision for the final product is that we will have an extensive and well organized objects list and a detailed reference list for each donor. This way, Dr. Zuberi or anyone on the team can look for the object they want on the objects list, find basic information on what material it's made of, who donated it, etc. on the spreadsheet and if they want deeper information on the provenance, they can find that on the reference sheet. Hopefully, in th...

Today I continued my archival research into Sarah Frishmuth and the ivory trumpets she donated to the museum. Though there were one or two cursory references to these trumpets made in some letters between her and Gordon, I'll still need to go through Gordon's side of the correspondence to clarify what was being asked. Frishmuth was the honorary Manager of the Department of Archaeology and Paleontology for a few years before being made the Honorary Curator of Musical Instruments because Culin and Wanamaker (a department store owner who took an interest in the Museum's early years) so appreciated her generous gift of a massive collection of instruments. In 1905, she wrote to the museum giving detailed directions for how she wanted her cases of instruments displayed, but she made no mention of the African materials. Frishmuth and everyone else who followed her seemed much more interested in the Asian and European instruments in the collection. An article about her I found in t...

This Tuesday, I continued entering data from the surveys. As I work with the forms, I continuously realize how different the dictation styles are between myself, Isabella, and Maeve. I have found that Maeve and I tend to record direct quotes, while Isabella summarizes and structures responses in third person. The individuality between the ways in which visitor data is gathered feels like it can be a study in and of itself, i.e. a meta-study on the responses to visitor responses to the gallery. While the usefulness of such a study could be debated, what that example attempts to demonstrate that I am fascinated by the various filters that information passes through even between individuals interacting directly. Almost like a game of telephone, what I hear (and ultimately record) when I conduct a survey is not a loss-less conversion of the speakers thoughts to paper. So how can one factor in all of these filters when analysis begins. And as another form of filtration, how does analysis ...

This Tuesday, I decided to focus my research on Amandus Johnson, prominent Swedish scholar and the director of the African Educational Expedition to Angola, 1922-1924. I first learned about Amandus Johnson in Allen Wardwell's book African Sculpture in the Penn Museum. Amandus Johnson aimed to make an expedition to Africa to escape his troubles at home, which included the loss of several his manuscripts after two library fires and a looming divorce. He received funding for the expedition from Henry C. Mercer, a benefactor of the Penn Museum, making it the first ethnographic expedition to Africa that was sponsored by the Penn Museum. All objects in the African collections up to this point were either donated or bought from collectors. Johnson also promised Gordon that he would collect ethnographical and archaeological materials for the museum, confirmed in a letter Gordon wrote which says, "I am writing you this letter to confirm the sense of our conversation i which it was ag...

Thursday was my first visit to the Barnes and I was absolutely enthralled by the setting, curation of the pieces, and the art itself.  I felt that the Barnes exuded an unusual intimacy that is not replicable in other art museums, let alone most anthropological institutions. The notion of the ensemble and the complete neglect of labels really struck me as novel techniques, and in a sense was also freeing from the constraints that context can sometimes impose on enjoying the aesthetic qualities of the objects. However, the lack of any and all labels still perturbs me. As an archaeologist/anthropologist who really gives credence to the information that context provides, the absence of accessible grounding to the work I observed was unsettling. While, I appreciated the intentions of that specific absence, I don't think label-less displays should be a practice that is widely accepted. I do understand that for the Barnes the removal of context provides the freedom to assess form and figu...

Our last day of visitor research felt incredibly long but was still fun and fulfilling! I had a lot of interesting conversations with visitors today, including one man who friended me on Facebook because our conversation about his art took such a fascinating turn (he was an artist, our conversation drifted pretty far from the survey questions after I gave him one of the reward dolls). Kids were excited to answer the questions alongside their parents and show off how much they'd learned at the museum. One little girl told me the Penn is her favorite museum because no other museum has Africa in it and she likes learning about things that she doesn't get to learn about elsewhere! Most of the visitors I talked to were very interested in engaging with the survey fully and really thinking about the questions, so hopefully they produced some interesting responses.

Today was an extremely productive day for guest evaluations as Maeve and I were able to collect over forty interviews on a relatively slow day. I was able to talk to plenty of really interesting guests and collect even deeper information for the art/artifact and the interest in the collections questions. Many people spoke of their personal African art collections (such as shields, masks, and wood carvings) and even a store in Wilmington, Delaware that specializes in African decor for (what I assume to be) white households. Most people today also expressed great interest in finding out the provenance behind the collections, comparing the African collections to the other collections in the museum and they seemed disturbed by the fact that this gallery did not describe how the objects were excavated, donated, discovered, etc. One woman even complained about the smallness of the African exhibition and said that it should be the largest exhibition in the museum to reflect its importance. I ...

The Union Methodist Church archivist emailed me back about Rev. Dr. Durbin (the owner of the bound figure, but not the man who gave it to the museum). All she included was an obituary I'd already seen and a throwaway reference to him in an article about someone else, but she invited me to visit to comb through the rest of the archives. Of the remaining items in their records that pertained to him, only 4 of a few letters could possibly be relevant (they're dated 1850, 1865, 1869, and 1870, all years in which Durbin was secretary of the Missionary Society). They also have some minutes of the Missionary Society, some of which could have information about the statue's origin. I'm unsure if it's worth it for me to go down there to read all of their material, but I think it would be interesting, and I could see if she's available on a Monday. In the meantime, she pointed me towards some other places that would have Rev. Dr. Durbin's records, which I am interested...

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 ...

Back at it after a nice long weekend! SEPTA made me miss part of Katie's talk but I still caught her powerpoint on how they judge exhibitions to be successful: considerate of the audience it hopes to reach makes the subject come to life makes its point quickly has something for all ages is memorable  makes it clear where one should begin and how one should continue uses modern display techniques to help one learn uses familiar things and experiences to make its points includes a comprehensive display of objects and/or specimens She and Dan Rahimi also talked about how the museum was focused on bringing in special blockbuster exhibitions for a while but has pivoted towards solid permanent exhibitions, which is why we're seeing the long-term focus on renovating all of the galleries instead of things like their silk road exhibit. The Israel & Canaan exhibit was supposed to be temporary in 1994, which blew me away. I was also struck by something Katie said about t...

Today's internship workshop was extremely eye opening, as they all have been, but this morning's session stands out in particular because of the nuances that were discussed in regards to the process of content development involved in gallery and exhibition creation.  The session was a collaborative presentation between Dan Rahimi, Executive Director of Galleries and Kate Quinn, Director of Exhibitions. Before their presentation, I had always wondered the reasons behind the administrative difference between galleries and exhibitions. Thus, it was fascinating to learn the distinct differences between the two. I had not even appreciated on a foundational level before that a gallery and an exhibition were not synonymous. Now I recognize that in the vocabulary of the museum, galleries refer more to permanent fixtures int the institution while exhibitions are more ephemeral. Of course there is great overlap between the mission and intention of galleries and exhibitions, as well as...

The last day of data gathering was both relieving, and a reminder that the work has only just begun. Once 12:00pm rolled around and 100 surveys had been officially collected, I took the remainder of the day to start logging the responses. It is arduous and monotonous work, but absolutely necessary to make a preliminary assessment regarding visitor thoughts and feelings. Logistically speaking, the three iterations of the survey instrument has made it somewhat difficult to align everything on the same spreadsheet. The changes to and additions of questions across the instruments has made me begin to think about how we can effectively, and meaningfully assess the data as a whole, or if it will be necessary to break the responses apart by the instrument they were gathered under. I expect to go into more detail with Jess when she returns regarding the most useful format for the spreadsheet's structure to query information effectively. In the meantime, I am structuring my current spread...

This morning, we were able to sit in on a lecture by Kate Quinn about her path towards becoming the Director of Exhibitions and the creation of an exhibition from beginning to end and a lecture by Dan Rahimi about future gallery renovations. From Dan, we were able to see a sneak peek into the future Middle Eastern galleries and what the museum will ultimately look like in a couple of years. The lobby will open up, glass hallways will connect the gift shop to the lower Egyptian wing, and more elevators and bathrooms will be built to make the museum more accessible. Instead of seeing the gift shop as soon as you enter the museum, you will see art and artifacts. To me, all of these sound like important and exciting changes for the Penn Museum. As for the Middle Eastern galleries, I enjoyed the focus put on defining the physical and cultural boundary lines of what is "the Middle East" and the creation of the modern city as the compare elements of Neolithic cities to Philadelphia ...

Even more visitor research today! We passed out Hopi (?) cuchina dolls as rewards, which people seemed to enjoy. Isabella and I laughed about the irrelevance of the dolls to our surveys and how some visitors seemed a bit thrown off by the culture shift! The new questions about African art were interesting. Most people told me things about the art/artifact boundary that I think we'd expected to hear--artifacts are tools, art is aesthetic value--but a few visitors, once asked to think about the division, stopped their categorizing and said things about the categories being artificial, fluid, or overlapping. A surprising number of today's visitors didn't speak enough English to do the surveys--I had two aborted attempts, a handful of denials, and one full interview with a woman who spoke in French while her friend translated anything she or I didn't understand.

I was sick this Friday, and I didn't think I'd be able to handle a high visitor flow on top of my illness, so I didn't go into work. Instead, I spent more time looking into the Rev. Dr. Durbin (the man who owned the bound figure), trying to dig up anything that possibly would've mentioned the figure. I traced down a lot of dead ends and found nothing, unfortunately. A lot of this research is frustrating, but I know it's still worth it to look.

I spent all of Thursday attempting to track any record of Umlauff and Gordon's discussion of the purchase of the African collection in 1912. I searched Gordon's letter books from 1911-1913 and read every piece of their exchange, everything in which Gordon planned his 1912 trip to Europe, and every relevant thing I could find in between those years--including all of Gordon's letters to Oldman as well. This turned up....nothing. Practically nothing. There is no mention of Umlauff before the collection was purchased--their first exchange deals with how the collection will be shipped to the U.S. I finally found something from Gordon's secretary at home to Gordon's secretary in London while he was there on a conference in the summer of 1912. Some Mr. Savage had written about an auction house in Germany with a large African collection, and she sent the letter to London so that Gordon could go there. I searched his entire box of "S" correspondence, and the file f...

Today, Lara and I did 10 more interviews, bringing our grand total to 30!

Today in the archives, I attempted to make some more headway on Umlauff's catalogues, using Dr. Zuberi's object lists to inform my research. I struggled to read the catalogues as they are not only old, they are in German, and handwritten. After a long time struggling to make out the letters and translate some words I saw over and over again in the catalogues, I discovered that German has its own cursive alphabet written quite differently from the English one. After lunch, I was finally able to identify the words for "wood" and "ivory" a few times. Hardly anything is noted in the catalogues, and a translated version of them I found online lists their date of publication as 1914, two years after the museum made the big 1912 purchase. I'm not sure Umlauff's catalogues are going to be productive at all, so I'm going to move onto his correspondence with Gordon to see if Gordon describes the objects he wants to purchase anywhere.

Today we really started visitor research! I think it's more difficult to ask people questions while taking notes than it was to simply interview them with a recorder. I'm glad we're only asking a handful of questions. After a few interviews, it became clear that the 4th question, "how is Africa connected to the rest of the world?", seemed to perplex visitors. Hopefully, we'll be able to change it to a more productive question. It was difficult to get back in the swing of interviewing people about a subject they don't always think about. People are very comfortable just shrugging and giving one-word answers, so I had to really work to engage them in the surveys.

Because it was a sunny Sunday morning, the museum's huge flow of visitors from Friday had slowed into a trickle. Luckily, we were able to fulfill our quota of 100 visitor evaluations and I was able to have many interesting conversations with museum guests. Almost everyone I spoke to today was incredibly thoughtful about the collections. One father was talked to me extensively about the ways that slave trade impacted Africa's connections to the rest of the world and how more space needs to be dedicated to the African collections in the Penn Museum. One woman I spoke to who travelled extensively around the continent of Africa was adamant about including specific dates and times and provenance information on the labels. In fact, after our interview, she hunted me down again just to stress its importance. Finally, another man I interviewed was telling me about his large African art collection. He was a white man who used to work in the Canaan section and he owned African shields, s...

On Friday, the museum was overflowing with visitors and I was so happy to see how many people were visiting the African galleries. I was able to talk to so many different visitors, from different cultural backgrounds, age, and interests, and I was able to become extremely comfortable in my interviewing. I also realized that it was much more easy for people to say no to an interview when they're not the only ones in the hallway. In any case, it was a great experience to see the Penn Museum on a busy day and to see people taking the time to carefully look at each object in the collection.  One major improvement from this round of interviews was the question, "Do you consider Africa as being very connected with the rest of the world? If yes, how and if not, why not?" This question, instead of confusing the visitor, actually elicited a wide variety of interesting answers. Many people said yes, citing Africa as the cradle of humanity. One man I spoke to who was of African d...

Following on the coattails of a quiet day in the archives, Friday's survey extravaganza was a welcome change, full of dynamism. The free admittance to the museum and advertisement of the institution's Independence Day Weekend Events on its the museum and local websites tripled visitor attendance and definitely benefited our collection of data. Attendance was diverse, but from my perspective, school groups and families dominated the gallery space, with many families traveling with small children in strollers. As a result of the inconvenience it would cause to have young parents with very young children stop with their families in the middle of the hall to answer questions, I focussed on conducting interviews with adult visitors who were alone, in groups of their peers, or with independently mobile family members (i.e. children w/o the need for strollers). By and large the most successful surveys I conducted were with lone individuals older than 60. One man in particular took t...