Isabella: Joseph Conrad Connection in the Archives

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.

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