Penn Museum African Galleries | 2017

I had therapy this morning, so I missed the aborted attempt at piloting our interview questions. In the library, I worked on my missing blog posts and the meta narrative, writing up a lot of the information I read last night. Around 3:30, Lara, Isabella, and I decided to meet in the cafe and discuss our game plan for getting our evaluation project up to the Penn's standards. We need to write a mission statement, which will probably just be an adaptation of the research objectives Monique already gave us. We also need to clarify exactly how many surveys we're doing: we have to fill out their forms for all of our preliminary research, so the mission statement for that will include determining what more we need to ask about visitor's perceptions of Africa. It's a bit unclear whether we're evaluating visitor's perceptions of the current exhibit or focusing on what they'd like to see done in the future--is this a front-end or back-end evaluation? Where will we be...

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...

On Wednesday, I came in a bit late because I had to take my friend to the hospital the night before, so I met everyone at lunch. We discussed the metanarrative of the museum and the African galleries before moving to the library for our weekly meeting. Monique, Lara, Isabella and I began the process of developing our visitor study methodology, going over the differences we might see if we interviewed within Imagine Africa vs somewhere else in the museum. We planned to pilot a five-minute interview on Thursday, asking visitors fairly simple questions like "what brought you to the Penn Museum today," "have you had a chance to see any of the African exhibits," and "what were your thoughts." We'll be testing a handful of different ways to extract more thoughts from people on what they'd like to see in the future and how this exhibit compares to their expectations. We hope to make use of the intro wall as an interesting prompt. At 3, Alex gave us a tou...

Monday was a whirlwind of introductions and scheduling details! I already knew Lara from a class this fall, but it was great to meet Isabella and start getting to know each other. We also met Jessica, who showed us the new plans for the African galleries. I'm glad that they're going to attempt to draw connections between Africa and other areas of the world, because it's often treated as its own isolated continent. This past year, I was helping a professor research contemporary connections between Africa and China, and I did some historical research that revealed how many African countries have been trading with China and other Asian countries for centuries without these relationships really being acknowledged in the West. It also reminded me of the textile exhibit at Creative Africa last summer, which painted a more global picture of what constituted "African" art and prompted a lot of interesting conversations with visitors. The Penn is also rearranging the Afric...