Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal. (Steve Lang)

We should steal the Brooklyn Museum of Art's website. It's incredible, and not just because they have a feature on Michael Jackson's Ebony shoot in their galleries. They have blogs. Lots of them. And pictures. In fact they have a whole community section with all kinds of cool stuff. Now, it's in Brooklyn where all the cool kids are so maybe we don't have that base around here, or the ICA is taking that demographic with their hip art. But I still think we should look into this type of thing.

Also we need painting racks, going to the CHF reminded me of the ones at the Brooklyn Museum. I hope we get one just like the Brooklyn Museum's through the master plan. If James Cahill says our paintings are good then we should have a rack to keep them out of harms way.

At the British Museum - some new ideas (Lynn Grant)

This was my first trip back to the British Museum since they'd done their major renovation: filling in the central hollow square and turning it into a reception/special exhibit/shop/cafe space - something like what the masterplan envisions for the inner courtyards, I think. I liked it. The Xian warriors exhibit was due to open two days after I was there and the hype was enormous. One neat new idea was stations like these in the galleries. Manned by volunteers, they gave visitor a chance to directly experience artifacts similar to those exhibited in the gallery.

Can you believe a conservator is actually almost encouraging artifact handling? But, with the right artifact choices, it's an idea worth considering.

The BM had its collecting philosophy prominently displayed in its Egyptian gallery:

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.

Gallery extras (Lynn Grant)

Both the Fitzwilliam and the British Museum had large scrims in many of their galleries that detailed current research and activities. I (naturally) noticed that many of these featured conservation, while others were about scientific analyses. The first two are from the Fitzwilliam; the others from the BM (clicking on the photos will enlarge them for better legibility).

Mounts (Lynn Grant)

Mount makers in Britain still seem to be using a lot of plexi rather than the brass mounts we've switched to. One mountmaker I talked to told me the Fitzwilliam was thinking of switching to brass. The plexi works well for some things (I like the ring mount) but overall I prefer the less obtrusive painted metal.

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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As a side note, if you want to subscribe to the blog as an RSS feed, you can go to the bottom of the page where it says: Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) Right click on the Posts (Atom) part and click copy link location. You can then paste that into any RSS feeder. I am using the one in Thunderbird, my mail client, but you can use others.

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....."