What I learned at the ACUMG meetings in Boulder (Katy Blanchard)

A lot of people are capitalizing on the Darwin anniversary this year: Northwestern's book of the year is The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.

Listening to the conference, this year entitled: Interdisciplinarity and the Empowerment of the University Museum, I started jotting down ideas that I thought we could bounce around:

-Programming in unusual places
-Can we do a science of conservation show?
-A crosscultural myth show? Students on campus could all read a book, ties into history, different cultural departments, art history, etc.
-We could pick a year, or a century and showcase material from that time in each gallery--a new case per gallery?
-Outdoor film series in the Warden Garden
-Video walk throughs
-Show involving children, easy tie in to the visitors
-With the presidental election, a propaganda show?

Just throwing ideas out in the forum in which we have for now

Why can't we do that: What I think we can take from the Denver Art Museum (Katy Blanchard)

This year's AAM took us to Denver; and a free afternoon was spent discussing modern art with Maureen. We noticed a lot of interesting things that while might not fit into our own museum, I think the ideas can get transformed for our space.

Their use of large scale photo murals, to me, really helped delineate space. I returned to find that it was done really well in Penn in the

World, and here you see it done to differentiate

the different North American Tribes in one large space.

Here you see a listening station. You can hear a variety of poetry, stories, and songs in several Native American languages;

your choices are outlined on the angled "menu" and you can follow along in the binders.

And my favorite, was a children's interactive program.

Throughout the entire museum were spaces just for children: In the African section, there was nook between case units, and a small video installation with cushion on the floor. In the Oceanian section, you could make your own sculpture. It was simple, yet obviously, I got on the ground to organize some magnets. I call it Untitled (Memorial to a Fallen Prince) But how simple an introduction to a gallery.

Sure, the DAM has enough money to hire Libeskind to create their new wing, but it was the simple points that I think we can try to use in existing galleries, before we ever redo one. Or before we add a giant Oldenburg trowel out front.

Two Neat Ideas from UBC Museum of Anthropology (Jim Mathieu)

While attending the recent Society for American Archaeology meetings in Vancouver, I had a chance to visit the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology. Besides being impressed with their extensive collection and display of totem poles, I really liked two elements found in their galleries.

The first were these drawer blocks that housed various artifacts. On top of the block were large catalogs where one could look up the specifics of each of the artifacts on display. It seemed like a really intriguing way to store and display many more artifacts than one might find in a glass case, and at the same time it allowed the visitor a sense of discovery as they opened the drawers to find what was waiting within. Here you can see a room full of these drawer blocks with numerous visitors exploring their contents.

The second element that I found to be really intriguing was the location of their Digitization Studio...right off one of the main galleries...and visible through a glass window. Although we visited on a weekend and therefore didn't get to see any digitization being undertaken, the description printed at the right of the window explained what would be going on during the day during the week. This seemed to solve two problems that any Museum might have: (1) creating a space where digitization work could take place (i.e. carve it right out of your gallery areas) and (2) showing visitors how the Museum actively stewards their collections.

Oh, and if you look closely at the lefthand side of the studio window you can see a third neat feature: an Object of the Day. Here it is close up....

Scroll housing, thangka display at Asian Art Museum SF (Allison Lewis)

Just a few observations from a recent trip to The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco:

The museum has a nice scroll housing system. While some scrolls are housed in traditional paulownia wood boxes, others are stored in archival metal edge boxes with ethafoam cradles that support the rolled scroll.


They make the cradles for the box interior by perforating blocks of ethafoam with this apparatus, then cutting the perforated foam squares in half. Super efficient!

Up in the thangka section of the Tibet gallery, there is a fun chart that lists/explains the attributes of peaceful and wrathful deities. Visitors can refer to the chart, then decode the imagery on the thangkas in the adjacent case.

Perusing the PMA (Steve Lang)

pe · ruse

-verb (used with object) -rused - ru · sing

1. to read through with thoroughness or care

2. to read.

3. to survey or examine in detail

I visited the PMA to look at their Tibet gallery. It was small but nice and had some interesting features. As mentioned in the MET entry, they are actively using laminated cards in the galleries to explain iconography and the science behind conservation and dating techniques:





They also had a few maps on the wall. One showed where Tibet was located. I really liked the smaller map in the left corner, showing you where the larger map is within Asia. This is good for locating the geographical closeness of Tibet to India and China but also shows site specific locales that may be important to the context of the objects.



Another map on the wall took a small excerpt from a painting and broke it down, identifying what the images were within the actual painting itself.



There was also a Tibetan charm on paper with a number of objects in front of a deity. The text panel tells you that these objects are on the altar as well. I enjoyed the fact that they had a pictorial representation of the object, followed by an actual example of that object. This way you can get an idea of what the image represents in real life. I think this is important because often times the painting of the object doesn't capture the detail and beauty of the object itself. I am particularly interested in how artists portray objects in different mediums, so this was a welcome feature.





As mentioned in the Reading Public Museum entry, they also had a little area stocked with books and a video for learning more about the objects in the gallery itself. I am a fan.

Cross-cultural exhibits (Lynn Grant)

The British Museum had two thematic galleries featuring materials from more than one area of the world, unlike their (and our) usual monocultural galleries.



One was in the former Reading Room, a space I'd always loved. They'd taken advantage of the ambience for an exhibit titled Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the 18th century. To quote their intro, "The Enlightenment was an age of reason and learning that flourished across Europe and America from about 1680 to 1820. This rich and diverse permanent exhibition uses thousands of objects to demonstrate how people in Britain understood their world during this period."

The "Religion and Ritual" section showed Maya, Egyptian, and Buddhist deities all chumming together.













It was an interesting display, almost like open storage but it relied on a lot of text to make sense of the juxtapositions and I noticed that few visitors were reading labels; most just grazed one or two and moved on.
For more info, click here

The other cross-cultural exhibit was less ambitious but seemed to be easier on visitors: "Living and Dying" in the Wellcome Trust Gallery. From their intro: "People throughout the world deal with the tough realities of life in many different ways. The displays in Room 24 explore different approaches to our shared challenges as human beings, focussing on how diverse cultures seek to maintain health and well-being. "

The center piece of the gallery was a contemporary artwork, "Cradle to Grave", incorporating a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs knitted into two lengths of fabric, illustrating the medical stories of one woman and one man. To see a detail, click here.

While I'm not usually a fan of contemporary art, this was very attention-catching and led people to spend time looking at the other exhibits that made up the gallery, some of which are shown below. It probably helped that it was fairly light on text.

The Wellcome Collection - exhibit ideas (Lynn Grant)

I did not have much free time in London, but I did get to see one museum besides the BM, the Wellcome Collection, which just opened its new exhibit space in June of this year.



I really enjoyed their permanent exhibit Medicine Man, featuring the collections of their founder, pharmeceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome. During his lifetime (1853-1936) he made a huge collection of art and artifacts relating to health.





The objects themselves were fun (Florence Nightingale's mocassins!) but they also used some interesting display ideas. Labeling for the artifacts themselves was minimal: a number, object name, materials, date, accession number; some cases didn't even have that much. To find out more, you had to explore...


Text labels were 'hidden' in cupboard like this in the adjoining walls (note the little white knob on the right-hand door). Inside there was a thematic label (left) and detailed artifact labels (right), with the basic object information (as above) augmented by more background information on the specific object (for instance, the Florence Nightingale, a pioneering nurse, had worn those mocassins while working at Scutari during the Crimean war.) This way, the visitor could experience the artifacts with whatever level of info they wanted.


What I really loved, though, were these little drawers below the wall cases, such as this one showing a collection of amulets. (The individual object labels were in an adjoining cupboard). The right-hand drawer is labelled with a hand, and included a reproduction of one of the amulets that could be handled, along with braille labeling. [In another of these drawers below a Durer etching was a three dimensional relief version of the scene in the etching with braille labels]

The left hand drawer had three push-button recordings of various people talking about what the objects in the case meant to them. In the case of the amulets, there was an anthropologist talking about the meaning of amulets in various cultures; a prominent Islamic author talking about how amulets had been a part of her everyday experience growing up and how strange it was to think of them in a museum context; and a well known British author talking about how he put more faith in amulets than in modern medicine. I could imagine lots of applications for the idea of using different voices to discuss the same objects in our galleries. These were pretty low-tech interactives, but they worked really nicely, much better than the more ambitious 'speaking chairs' that they had in another gallery that were already on the fritz only 2 months after opening.

Musings from the MET (Steve Lang)

I visited the MET last weekend and saw some good things and some bad. First, I saw that they have a laminated card to the left and right of their wall painting. You could take the card and then stand back from the actual painting and read what it had to say.


The card had a diagram of the painting itself and identified the figures in the painting:


Our paintings in the Rotunda are very similar and could benefit from a similar set up. Currently you have to read the label close up and then take a step back to see the whole painting. Would people walk off with them?

I went through the rest of the Asian section, impressed by the collection. However when I got to the end of the Asian galleries, what did I see? This:

Objects in an elevator! That must be one smooth ride.

I also took a look at the Ur-nammu Stele:

I blew right past it because I thought it would be bigger having seen the 10 ft. reproduction, but eventually I found it and took a picture of it. Looking at this photo, I wish the steles in the Rotunda had enough lighting so you could see the inscriptions, but we also have paintings hanging in there so that could be an issue.

We originally had lights on the back of C284 but they actually blinded you from reading the inscription instead of illuminating it. Lesson learned: Lighting is crucial. Perhaps we could have laminated sheets with the inscriptions? But scholars really want to see the actual inscription, I'm still thinking about it.

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Asia Society (Steve Lang)

Here is 29-64-248 at the Asia Society. Things went smoothly, so there is nothing really to report. I thought I would just show a photo of one of our pieces in situ. On another note, I recommend checking out the Reading Public Museum. I went and saw the Degas and the Art of Japan exhibit which was very good. I liked the events that they tied into the Degas exhibit, not only at the museum itself but also at surrounding Universities and institutions in the Reading area. One thing that I LOVED, was a little area with books related to the exhibit. There were books about Degas and Japanese Prints, and various sources to learn about some of the things you were looking at. They set up a table and chairs and had books all over the place, from children's books to art catalogs, to how-to guides. They also had a video running that talked about how you make an exhibit and what went into the planning of this specific exhibit. The curator talked about who they had to hire to hang the pieces,the configuration of the catalog and how much shipping and packing adds to the cost. They probably did this because you had to pay extra to see the exhibit and wanted to educate the public that "it's not just about putting stuff on a wall."

I was also impressed with their range of collections as all of our sections were well represented. They got their start at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and had a little display about the history of the museum. They also had an animatronic curator, we need one of these. Who is most robot-like......



"Oh, hello, I didn't see you come in, welcome to the....."