maeve friday june 30th

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.

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

maeve: tuesday june 6th

I started Tuesday morning in the library with Isabella, each of us researching some of the links and articles Monique sent us. I read the "Penn Museum 2017 Exhibition: Overview" first, which was quite similar to what Jessica told us of the exhibition plans on Monday. It mentions the thematic clusters and threads, saying they want visitors to "experience several narrative paths" and "a rotating survey of the extensive presentation of Penn Museum's entire African holdings." I'm intrigued by the idea of rotating displays--I'd want to know more specific plans for this, as they mention they intend to rotate some of the thematic clusters and lend things to other museums. This overview is also from last January, though, so this plan may have been abandoned. The "African Collection Statement" was pretty straightforward, though I did wonder how the museum is going to highlight that the bulk of their collection is from 14 completely different c...
Read more

Lara: Tues. June 6

This morning, I was introduced immediately to the work that needed to be done with inputing the data collected from the comment cards collected from 'Imagine Africa.' These 'Leave us a note' response sheets can be accessed throughout the gallery at multiple stations, and allow visitors to complete and leave handwritten responses and demographic data in deposit boxes. These responses have been collected throughout the tenure of the exhibit, but currently are not represented in the evaluation written by Elizabeth Tinker, which focuses on the in-person interviews and survey data. In fact, 'Leave us a note'/Comment stations are mentioned in the evaluation as the least utilized form of feedback seen during observation periods. There are, however, around 1000+ responses from comment sheets inputed on excel spreadsheets housed within the main folder of analyzed data collected throughout the tenure of the gallery. Two further cardboard boxes of responses were found ...
Read more