Maeve Day 28 Reflections

On Thursday, we started the day with a meeting with Laura and Kerry. We ironed out the details of data input and what we'd be doing for the rest of the summer. Dani and I made a list of every object and prompt in the exhibit and numbered the cases so our spreadsheets would have the same basic structure. We also decided to each do one set of tracking maps: they took the maps for June and I took the ones for July. June and July were going to have to be separate anyways because of the new ArtSplash activities and the different behaviors we tracked.

At 2 PM, we led a tour of the exhibit for the Penn interns! I thought it was really interesting how overwhelmingly positive all the interns were about the exhibit. They thought it was interesting that the works were displayed as valuable works of art that mattered, which was contrasted with the Penn's exhibit, which feels like an afterthought. A few of them noted the vastly different use of lighting and color in Look Again, which has always been one of my favorite aspects of the exhibit as well. They liked that there was more space for individual objects and visitors could walk around them to see them from many angles.

Their positivity was interesting at first, but it started to get frustrating when it began to feel as though none of them were willing to critically engage with the exhibit. Stephanie was asking some pretty leading questions, and the same voices kept jumping into the conversation to defend the exhibit. A few things they said were particularly amusing to me in light of all of the conversations we've been having this summer: someone said that art museums don't create a narrative about a progression of art, and another intern said that she thought that the technique "works really well for objects, but I don't know about art." Some of the things Stephanie was asking were really intriguing to me, like when she took the narrative of progression statement and asked why the timeline isn't applied to the ethnographic arts, and whether it is the job of the curator to draw connections and individualize time periods/styles/groups within the greater idea of Africa. I was shocked that none of them had any issue with the amount of information provided in the exhibit, except for one intern (maybe two, it's difficult to hear on the tape) who wished for maps. They all gave the "oh, it's an art museum" excuse we've been hearing all summer, without stopping to complicate what it means to be an art museum. Only two interns agreed to be interviewed, which was also frustrating. They all seemed to be so bowled over by the atmosphere of the museum that they didn't really want to engage. The few critiques that were voiced were very helpful, though.

That evening, we went to Monique's to watch the Barnes documentary! I feel like I still have a lot of questions about how the Barnes Foundation operated as an educational institution (who they let in, what they taught, etc), how their education program runs now (is it at all faithful to Barnes' vision?), and how the "public" is defined (for Barnes, for the people who moved it to the city, etc). It was a really fascinating glimpse into the museum politics of the city, and I've caught myself rolling my eyes at the Annenberg name when I see it all over Philadelphia.

Maeve Day 27

Wednesday we worked from home! Dani and I communicated via googledoc to organize what we would say on our Thursday tour for the Penn students. I also started messing around in excel and trying to see how data input would work, but I realized I didn't really know what I was doing and decided to wait to determine how we'd arrange everything.

Maeve Day 26

I used Tuesday morning to write blog posts at home. I met with Monique, Dani, and Summer at the Penn Museum a little after 1 PM for lunch and a chance to catch up on what we'd been doing. After lunch, Dani and I had some free time to walk around the museum. The labels contain far more information than is available at the art museum, of course, but many of them also acknowledge the artistic process by which the objects were created. For example, two large ceramic lions sit by one of the entrances to the Chinese gallery, and their description included historical/contextual information (what lions symbolized, when they were commissioned, why the female and male lions were different) as well as an explanation of cloisonne (the technique that produced their designs). I recognized the word from seeing it in the Chinese galleries at the PMA, but I realized that I'd never actually seen an explanation of what the process was, at least not one that I understood. The Penn's labels often took into account the artistic history and procedures that might be seen at the PMA, only they had ethnographic information as well. One of the things that really bothered me about the Penn was how the galleries are organized. It's pretty difficult to find your way around the museum, it's hot and dark and dusty, and many objects are tucked away in strange corners and tiny rooms. The Egyptian and Asian galleries felt weirdly empty, even though they were full of objects. The exhibits just had a vaguely disorganized feeling to them, as though they were undergoing renovations, and the massive vaulted ceilings emphasized how little there was to look at besides the objects themselves. The Penn feels outdated, dusty, and almost painfully academic, which is a shame because many of their labels are quite transparent about the museum's involvement in obtaining the objects. The Iraq/Ur exhibit, which was obviously more recent, mentioned the looting of the museums in Baghdad and the failures of the U.S. army to protect the objects, the complicated relationships established among international museums on exhibitions, and so on.

At 3:30, we met back up with Monique and Summer and went to the tour of the African collections. I didn't catch Dwaune's last name, but I thought it was really interesting that she is only the keeper of the collection and there isn't currently a curator. Though I think the fact of the solitary expedition had been mentioned to us before, it continues to strike me as outrageous that the Penn Museum only conducted one African expedition ever. It was to Sierra Leone in 1937, which is surprisingly late for a museum expedition. That collecting bias on the museum's part can be seen in the collections, but it just reminded me of how evident it is in the show at the PMA, where pretty much every object is from west and central Africa. I thought it was really interesting that many of the objects were (probably? definitely?) made to be sold to colonists and museum expeditions rather than being made for everyday use, and I wanted to know more about how that is dealt with in terms of seeking accuracy. I also wish I knew more about the African collections at other museums, just so I'd have something to compare it to in my mind. Dwaune mentioned turning down things like paintings, which made me realize I'd never heard of anyone saying anything about African paintings before, and I want to know more about that. When we walked through the collections, I couldn't help wishing I could compare some of the textiles they have (which are older and produced in Africa according to actual African tastes) to the Vlisco patterns. I still want to know more details of how the objects in Look Again were chosen (and why they left out baskets, musical instruments, and masks), but I thought it was fascinating that they were apparently copied almost directly from the book about the 1986 exhibit.

After the collections, Steph gave us a brief tour of the Africa exhibit. It was interesting to look at it again after my first trip through, way back at the beginning of the summer. I was shocked that Imagine Africa has been up since 2011--it's so obviously a temporary thing, but that kind of permanence is really frightening to think about as what five years of visitors have been "learning" about Africa. The Africa exhibit is tiny, especially in comparison to most of the other exhibits. That one room is about the same size as the Etruscan gallery upstairs, and Africa is an entire continent, not one specific culture from one specific country. The themed cases are interesting in that they disrupt the idea of people being tied to their land, but I felt like they homogenized the continent and were just confusing for when I was trying to place things in my head. The African objects were lacking a lot of context--the other interns pointed out that not only did they generally not tell you where a culture was from, the objects weren't dated, they didn't tell us much about how objects were made, and it was all very generalized. Someone said that the visitor is left to piece the exhibit together on their own, which I thought was a really great observation. I have no idea what I was supposed to take away from that, other than the idea that a lot of stuff was made in Africa. It made me wonder if the Look Again exhibit is really as different from the Penn exhibit as they purport themselves to be. There are definitely good aspects to the Penn exhibit (I think I was far more positive the last time I visited), but at this point, it's kind of shameful how static it is.

Dani Day 25 Reflections

July 9th, 2016


Interview Questions
10am-11:30am

Maeve and I worked together to edit the interview questions so that they were appropriate for the art splash audience. In addition to asking the visitors to provide feedback on the prompts, we also asked about their experiences with the new activities/interactives in the room.


Interviewing
11:30-12:30pm

I interviewed a family where one parent used the interactives and had a background in historical African art and the other didn't. The one with the background used the prompts and the other did not notice they were their. They also had two small children. The parents explained that their kids were significantly more interested in the artifacts than they were the interactives.

Lunch
12:30pm- 1:15pm

More Interviews

Maeve and I continued to conduct interviews. Most of the visitors I interviewed did not read the prompts. Some just weren't interested and others could not because they were with children who weren't interested/needed to be watched closely.

Maeve Day 25

On Saturday, Dani came back to work! Yay! We spent a little while adding new questions to our interviews and trying to make them flow well, and we started interviewing visitors around 11:30 AM. I did 15 interviews, some with children and some without. One of the visitors I interviewed was an African man (he didn't specify country) living in Paris who had been in New York for the week and took a detour to Philadelphia after hearing about the Creative Africa show (in the New York Times article). He said he was blown away by the exhibit, which I thought was really cool. It was interesting to finally talk to visitors with children, as most of the people I interviewed last time kept saying how they thought the prompts in the exhibit would be helpful for children or young people.

Maeve Day 24

I also spent all of Friday doing observations. I added another behavior, "F" for pointing (with fingers--P was already taken), because I kept seeing visitors point out specific details to each other while looking at objects. I classified this differently from B, bring to object, because it happened when visitors were already looking at objects together. They would trace the carvings on the ivory, for example, or point to specific objects within the divination kit case. As per usual, most of the visitors came in between 11 AM and 4 PM. I tracked 15 groups of visitors, bringing my total to 34 for the week. I started thinking about possible changes we could make to our interview questions--I wanted to get at how people were reading things together and how they were making use of the interactive elements of the exhibit.

Maeve Day 23

I spent all of Thursday doing observations in the exhibit. I tracked 11 groups of visitors, most of whom were visiting with children. Many visitors seemed very enthusiastic about the Kota figures, probably because of the ArtSplash activity (which is a make-your-own version of the Kota figures). Parents often seemed to be bringing their children into the exhibit to look specifically at the figures, but they would get sidetracked by the tusk, power figures, and sometimes the divination kit. Visitors are much more talkative and actively engaged this week than they were before ArtSplash began--even if they visit without children.