Second Bank/Portrait Gallery (Katy Blanchard)

THE SECOND NATIONAL BANK





There is a chance that I enjoy a good strong doric column more than other museum goers. That being said, The Second Bank right here in Philly (built by Wm. Strickland, who also built the nearby Merchant's Exchange), currently houses a colonial portrait gallery. The building itself is impressive, even for those that don't find the doric the finest of the column choices. But I will admit that the entirety of the museum was impressive. You enter into the lobby and you can proceed straight through, or through some rooms to the left or the right. There is a room with two computers on which you can search the portraits in the collection by historical activity, person, or even donor.

Portraits are everywhere. High on walls, in groups, and hung singularly. Each time they are accompanied by a small number to the lower right corner and the text can be found below. This allows the eye to not be so cluttered by the text. One example is below:








In the main section of the building, under the central vault, the architecture of the room is mirrored in large steel structures. [reminescent of the Ben Franklin House across the street]

I found this incredibly striking. It allowed the architecture to speak for itself, tied the history of the historic structure to the modern form of exposed steel, gave space to the room without using thick walls to obscure the images, and really kept the flow of the space. [disclaimer: i really like exposed steel]

In the back gallery, there were portraits surrounding the top of the gallery, again with the small numbers to lead you the text below.

In between the portraits and the text was a series of window panels and scrims that were lit with varying degrees of light that created a mosaic of period imagery.

I must say that though I am not a portrait person, the display of the material in this building was incredibly eyepleasing.

The Mummer Museum

The Mummer Entraceway with the most recent winners

The Mummer Museum opened in 1976. If you open another window with the website, you can actually listen to String Band Music while you read this. I don't really know the difference between String Bands and Fancy Brigades and the Comics. So I will admit that while I went to the Museum to entertain a teenage cousin, I was indeed hoping to learn something new. However, I don't really think that it has been updated, other than the substitution of a newer costume here and there, since 1980. I won't lie: I enjoy putting on a costume that has been bedazzled with countless sequins and feathers as much as the next guy, but if you wanted to actually LEARN about the Mummers, I'd steer clear of the text panels.












At the top of the stairs, you enter a small hallway and are greeted by a figure in costume that looks kind of dated, but you hope its not a portend of the rest of the space.

Inside the warehouse like space, similar to the spaces where these creations are manufactured, there are photo murals on the walls and random snippets of costumes with no real labels all over a room with lots of natural lighting. I know these are pirates. But I don't know which club made them, what year they were worn, if they won awards, or if they belong to a fancy brigade [let alone what a fancy was]. Arrrrgh.






This the first text panel you see out of the giant warehouse-like space. And the light has burned out the panel: The Origins of Mummery. I *know*. I was disappointed as well.

It kind of looks like a Fun House, and really, why shouldn't it? What you are really seeing is that not a lot of the lightbulbs work. On the left? A series of "questions" and you can hit a button to see the answer. 2 of the 8 worked.

I don't know what was 5 degrees in 1918 and 62 in 1973, I just know that information stopped around then.

"these" are Mummers. There is a chance that one of the lit up featured folks was working on a Pan Am plane

Though they seem fancy, in that different images light up at various times, its obvious there once was a third of these outlines that no longer works at all. And while I like a period mustache as much as the next museum visitor, it seems like this part could be easily updated.

The highlight, of course, is being able to don a costume seen in a recent parade. I still have no idea if a Fancy Brigader, a String Bander, or a Comic wore this, but with those feathers and that hat? I can't say that I didn't have a good time.

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.

Museum Pubs Authors (Walda Metcalfe)

Fascinating Authors I Have Known

Museum publishing fills a unique communication niche among researchers, collection and exhibit curators, and serious appreciators (aka intelligent lay readers and consumers) who interpret the human past. In my academic publishing career of seeing more than 2,000 titles (and many that got away) into print archaeologists and anthropologists have contributed nearly half—from now-classic works on Onondaga pottery to shell mound dwellers on Florida’s Gulf Coast to Potano and Taino and other first peoples in the Caribbean to Pannonia and points north in Eastern Europe to fire worshippers in the Caucasus and Paleolithic nomads in the steppes of Central Asia, sometimes as part of the press’s publishing program, sometimes in partnerships with museums like the Everson in Syracuse, the Florida Museum of Natural History and Harn Museum in Gainesville, Daytona Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg (FL) and the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia), the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the National Gallery in Washington,, Mucsarnok in Budapest, and the Institute for Ancient Manuscripts in Tbilisi. The University Museum is part of a select group!

The University Museum’s richness of representation never fails to fascinate, and its publishing program, soldiering on since 1893, with Hilprecht’s first book on Ur, is an illustration of world-class values in microcosm, with 70 books produced since 2000.

I would like to share a little background on three recent University Museum authors, who are no longer with us but have enriched both our editorial experience and the Museum’s published contribution to international scholarship. Each was a fierce individual, no question of mis-identifying one with the other or anyone else, but they share traits of intense curiosity, perseverance, meticulous attention to detail, and the highest standards of scholarly inquiry.


Jes Canby, author of The Ur-Nammu Stela (cloth 2002, pbk 2006), spoke truth to power (the men in the British Museum, no less!) when she insisted on patiently piecing together the disparate chunks of a shattered memorial column discovered in Mesopotamia. She told me the stela deserved her decades of excruciating regard and attention. She read the narrative registers, tirelessly puzzled out the elements, large and small, posited possible reorderings and interpretations, and questioned continually, long after other experts had given up in exasperation. She had a cheerful, disarming, sometimes acerbic and scrappy manner that just wouldn’t quit. She was delighted in seeing her book sell out its hardcover edition—and because of reader demand be reissued in paperback (a first for a Museum Monograph), which continues to sell steadily, with its new cover of dancing red bulls taken directly from the stela. At several dinner visits during the year of her final illness, she was just as vibrantly interested in learning what customers were buying her book as any new author would be.

Bill Davenport, author of Santa Cruz Island Figure Sculpture (2005), didn’t live to see his book published, but we can only hope he would have been pleased with it. He had called on me when I joined the Museum in 2000 to say his ms. was nearly complete, and it was clear he had been on a major quest over many years, from the Solomon Islands through the major art repositories and collections of tribal objects in Copenhagen, Geneva, New Zealand, New York, Australia, Glasgow, and France and Germany. Bill died with manuscript variants on his computer, later teased out by the Museum’s Senior Archivist Alex Pezzati and especially Nancy Davenport. Jennifer Quick, our Senior Editor, and Judy Voelker, our graduate student worker, pieced together iterations of the manuscript with Nancy Davenport, who spent hundreds of hours checking, rechecking, and thinking about how she remembered Bill’s talking about how he wanted the story to be told. A professional photographer, Bill had amassed hundreds of ethnographic slides and prints of his travels in search of the ritual figures, and Nancy and Jennifer selected several dozen as photo journalistic essays we carried on an accompanying cd. Tracking the credits for all the images I learned of the warm regard rights holders felt for Bill over the years, and in spring 2005 I presented a copy of the book to one of his oldest collector friends in Geneva, who recounted some of the conversations he had had with Bill nearly 60 years before.

Keith DeVries, my first caller after I joined the Museum, despite his recent illness, also did not live to see his transformative book on recalibrated Gordion chronology completed, but he knew we will produce it as soon as we receive the finished manuscript from his colleagues who will carry it through. Keith—who also served on our editorial committee and provided some of the most cogent advice and steadfast support I’ve received from any member of the nearly two dozen committees I’ve worked with in multiple houses—had worked as an apprentice editor years ago at a New York academic press and so knew the protocols of scholarly publishing and the importance of peer review as well as the unique personalities and expectations of his fellow authors on Museum projects. He was intrepid and unswerving, tireless and understanding of all the challenges, eyes clearly on the prize of communicating well-considered assessments and interpretations, not just piles of undigested data, and incredibly patient with himself and his fellow authors. He had, with no irony, the long view of the Gordion site (along with a wry take on King Midas) and was one of its most faithful stewards.

These three University Museum authors, members of the larger scholarly community, set the highest of bars for intellectual and research integrity and made it a privilege to work with them.

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.

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.