Penn Museum African Galleries | 2017

While I love archives, and esteem them as a treasure trove of information, there are always points in research where the discoveries plateau. I feel like I am at this stage, and it is very frustrating. Today, I switched between reviewing the Sierra Leone Expedition files and returning to files I had previously marked for scanning in the African Section Collection Boxes. I realized very quickly that the Sierra Leone Expedition files had been tagged already for scanning, and assumed Dr. Zuberi had already found documents of interest. In an effort not to potentially affect which documents had or had not been tagged, I moved back to scanning (on my phone) the files I had tagged earlier in the month. Now that I have a greater understanding of the history of the collections and the vision for the curatorial narrative, I was able to cull documents I thought, previously, were significant. However, combing back through the folders I had already searched through made the day, I must admit, f...

Today, I felt very privileged to see the progress of the exhibition through the lens of the stakeholder meeting! Seeing a detailed framework of the foundational narratives of the exhibit, as well as the initial design concepts for the aesthetic components of display and lighting, made me realize, even more viscerally, how many moving parts are involved in developing an exhibition of this magnitude. Especially at the beginning of the meeting, when Kate Quinn displayed a slide with a calendar detailing the progress and end-dates of multiple projects throughout the museum, it hit me how much work is planned and undertaken to both develop and maintain the museum's gallery space across the institution for years in the future. I can't yet imagine the full logistics involved in the running of all of these operations, let alone the entire organization itself, but I feel I have gained a more visceral understanding (and sympathy) for the limitations of the institution and appreciation ...

For today, I was able to work through all of the correspondences between G.B. Gordon and W.O. Oldman in the Director's Office boxes. As I shifted through Oldman's inquiries about the different collections he attempted to sell, I was able to discover several stories linking the Benin Collections to the British Punitive Expedition of 1897. In one letter to Oldman, Gordon writes that he wishes to know more about how the Oldman obtained the objects as he is interested in "tracing the specimens backwards." This is lucky for us, as Team Archives can trace the specimens backwards through their correspondences. Oldman comes in possession of Benin tusks and Benin bronzes and manages to sell this collection to Gordon. Gordon inquires about how these artifacts were collected and Oldman replies, " The Benin Bronzes were collected by Colonel Maximilian John De Barthe while he was attached to or had something to with the 1897 Expedition. I meet (?) some time ago to try to ge...

With each week, the Team seems to be revealing even more exciting information from within the archives! While I could not say that my investigations today added much to the growing narrative, the information that Isabella revealed regarding the acquisitions of the Benin Bronzes, especially as the our objects relate to the military leadership in the Punitive Expedition, was extremely interesting and thought provoking. While the Penn Museum itself was not involved directly in the looting of the Benin material,  their relationship to the products of that destruction leave me feeling icky. These items, for all intents and purposes, are spoils of war, on par with the looting of artworks in WWII and the massive looting operations in Iraq in 2003 and the present.   In context of the Penn Museum, it's ironic that during our archival sessions where we uncover the complicity the museum had (and still does) in harboring stolen material, there is an exhibition upstairs justly scorning s...

Today, I had much better luck going through the archival material in the Gordon boxes as I focused on his correspondences with W.O. Oldman. By going through their correspondences between 1908-1913, I was able to track the Penn Museum's purchase of a +2,000 collection of African objects as well as a separate purchase of the Benin Collection. The most important piece of information that I found today was that the Benin collection stems from the Benin Expedition of 1897. In a letter to G.B. Gordon, Oldman writes, "“The important pieces such as the Bronze Head, plaque, masks, Aegis armlet, Dagger, Key, Vulture staff, small rattle staff and Execution Sword. Were all brought over by several officers of the British Primitive Expedition under Admiral Rawson in February 1897. They were sold by Auction in London end of 1897. And most were bought by Welster (a member of these pieces are illustrated in his Catalogues). He sold a lot to a private collector and there I was able to purchase ...

Thirty down and ten more evaluations to go! The progress we have made on conducting visitor evaluations has been very exciting, considering that we still have a month left in this leg of the project! So far, the substance of the evaluations has been very enlightening. Participants have ranged considerably in age, sex, and race and the same questions have elicited extremely diverse responses across those we have surveyed. An interesting observation that came up when I was surveying both on Friday and Saturday was the question of how different individuals responded to the request of being surveyed. I have always found that men who are alone are far more interested in participating in a survey than women who are alone, and men and women respectively with children almost always turn down the opportunity to participate in a survey, from my experience. I engaged in this same conversation separately with Maeve and Isabella, and think that these observations go to the heart of the consider...

On Friday, Maeve, Lara, and I spent the day conducting our first round of visitor evaluations and we ended up collecting twenty interviews. I was really pleased with how many interviews we managed to get because I was under the impression that the Imagine Africa hallway and the Penn Museum in general had low traffic, but I pleasantly surprised to see so many people stopping by the Africa galleries. From the experience, I became much more comfortable with the idea of stopping Museum-goers and I was able to get a lot of valuable insight from these brief conversations. For example, I realized that the majority of visitors (at least from the small selection that I was exposed to, so maybe it is unfair to make this generalization) were students, professors, and people who work in museums themselves. Therefore, they had came to the Penn Museum with a specific academic purpose and consumed the exhibition more carefully and critically than the average passerby. One of the most interesting in...