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.

Dani's Day 23 and 24 Reflections

July 7th and July 8th


I spent these two days at home with Monique's permission.

Dani's Day 22 Reflections

July 6th, 2016


Self-care
10am-12pm

I woke up to the news of Alton Sterling and decided to take some personal time before heading to work.

Methodology
12:30pm-1:30pm

I filled Maeve in on what she missed from the Evaluation Team meeting. Maeve and I debriefed on what we'd been observing with Art Splash so far. We then specified which visitor behaviors we wanted to take note of during timing and tracking.


Timing and Tracking
1:45pm-4:30pm

Maeve and I began our first round of timing and tracking. Many of the families I observed were rushing through the exhibit. I rarely saw families split up. In most cases, families went through exhibit together regardless of the children's' ages. I also saw parents having to leave the exhibit because their child began to cry and disturb the other visitors. Parents were also pointing out specific artifacts and features to their children.


I also followed a tour during this time. There was on one white family in this tour. The tour only looked at the power bundles and divination kit. The children were instructed to point out things in the kit that they recognized. They were then instructed to select something from the kit that the would take with them on their journey and explain why. The tour then moved to the Vlisco exhibit. The kids were asked if the fabrics looked "African" and the children unanimously responded saying, "No!" The tour guide did a good job explaining the origins of the fabrics. The children were instructed to prepare for a journey throughout the tour. Their grownups were pretty involved in helping them find objects in the art that they would take with them on their journeys.

I observed 7 families.

Dani's Day 21 Reflections

July 5th, 2016

Journaling

10am- 11am

I updated my journal from home.

Deeper Art Splash Observations

12pm- 3:30pm

General:

I saw few children and families of color in the museum. All of the books in the nook have been changed to children's books and are all related to Africa. 

Look Again:

Quotes
- "Look at the different poses. Some are sitting and some are standing." (Parent to child about Power Figures)
- "What do you think these figures are? Why do you think there are nails in there? How would you stand to look powerful? Can you imagine waking up to something like this in the house? Yuck!" (Parent to children about Power Figures)
- "These kind of look like elephants. Elephant people!" (Parent to child about Reliquary Figures)
- "It's kind of scary." (Parent to child about Power Figures)

Observations
- Parents reading prompts to kids. Parents who enter the exhibit reading the prompts to the kids usually stop halfway through the gallery because few children seem interested in the prompts.
- Parents are choosing specific objects to show children instead of bringing them to every object. They're pointing out specific features, leaning in and motioning with their figures.
- Parents are allowing children to play with the activities in the space while they take time to look at the artifacts on their own.
- Families sometimes do the activities together, mainly the puzzle and the cloth pattern activities.
- Parents translate the objects to the kids and explain what they're looking at.
- I saw a parent do the Power Figure activity with her children. As a family, they were striking "powerful poses."
- The Look Again exhibit is still under-visited.
- Children misuse the interactive table.
- There's only one context card in this exhibit. It contains supplementary material about the Power Bundles.
- Children seem to enjoy the Reliquary Figure puzzle the most out of all the activities.
- One of the security guards has been instructed to count how many people visit the exhibit.
- Parents' behavior and ability to engage with the artifacts and prompts largely depends on the behavior and desires of their children.
- Many times, I saw parents rush through the exhibit with their kids and go straight to the Reliquary Figures and leave.
- I heard a few parents decide to leave the exhibit to go do the larger Art Splash activity and come back to the exhibit if they had time left.
- I saw a parent come into the exhibit with their kid after finishing their mask and hold it up to the Reliquary Figures in the back.

Photography:

Observations
- There are a lot more contextual cards in this exhibit than the Look Again exhibit. These context cards explain facts about photography and/or the artists.
- Children are playing around in the open space of the gallery.
- Children are given the option to draw a place they've been or want to go.
- Individual adults visit this gallery more than families/children.

Vlisco:

Quotes
-"That one looks the most western, like something you'd see walking down the street. What do you think this one means? What's your favorite?" (Parent to child)

Observations
- Children and families are instructed to locate the patterns and images on a card on the textiles around the room.
- Children are trying to touch the dresses in the center of the room. The security guard keeps having to tell them to stop.
- There are many context cards in this room.
- No one seems to be engaging with the larger activity posts in the room.
- Children tend to run in and out of the gallery because of how close it is to the larger Art Splash activity in the lobby.
- Child brings mom to look at specific dresses.
- Parent lingers by some dresses while their children run around.
- Children are using their parents' phones to take pictures of the dresses, while the parents reads.

Kéré:

Observations
- Someone from the Education Department was giving a small group of adults a tour of the features in the exhibit. They explain that there is something to touch at each island and that the larger hanging screen area was purposely modeled in the style of a classroom. This was interesting to me because of the Education team's insistence on not wanting people to "learn."
- A security guard is counting how many people visit this exhibit as well.
- A child was lying down and watching the screen on the ceiling with their parent. The mothers says, "What do you see?"
- A child is running around and playing with the chairs in the room.
- Most children  struggle to sit still and watch the videos.

Meeting with Evaluation Team

4pm

- 1,892 people in Look Again on opening Sunday
- We're instructed to focus on the self-touring groups
- We should go on a tour
- Make note of when self-touring groups interact with mediated tours
- During timing and tracking, take note of kids' ages, number of children and number of adults

Maeve Day 22

On Wednesday morning, I finished up my blog posts before heading downstairs to lurk around the galleries. I marked all of the new ArtSplash features in Look Again on the map of the exhibit. It was 11 AM, so there was an ArtSplash tour going through the exhibit. I followed them to get a sense of what they're doing on these tours. At first, it seemed as though the families on the tour had just been brought in to look at the Kota figures as an explanation for the studio project, but then I realized it was actually an organized tour. The tour guide repeatedly stressed that she didn't really know much about anything in the exhibit, focusing her talk on the materials and aesthetic properties of the masks--she actually had to read the tombstone label on the wall to tell the group where the masks were from. She also brought the group to the power figures and the power bundles, where she basically repeated the information on the plaques and flip labels in the sections. She asked the children to guess what the different sizes of power figures might have been used for (or who they would have been used by), what kind of animal they would use in a power bundle (to "harness its powers"), and what they thought the different pieces of the divination kit might mean together. The last stop on the tour was the Vlisco exhibit, where she stressed the story of the Mama Benz, the motif of travel, and the range of expression allowed by the prints. She acknowledged that the company is European, and when a mother asked, "so it's not really even African?," she pointed to the fashions in the center as being African designs and said, "I think that's why it's so interesting to have them here, because they're such a huge part of African fashion, and it makes you think about what counts as African!" Throughout the tour, she emphasized the importance of reading labels to both children and parents, saying that if they ever wanted more information, the labels had "more of the story than I could tell you."
After the tour, I walked through the other galleries to see the ArtSplash activities and check out how many families were in each exhibit. I had lunch around 12 and then went over to the main building to photocopy the maps. I waited for Dani for a little bit because I wanted to make sure we agreed on methodology and were covering everything we needed to cover as I'd missed the Tuesday meeting. I hung out in the reading room for a little bit while a family with three kids read some of the books, and overheard one of the mothers talking to her daughter about the book she was reading. The book featured houses with the same type of corrugated metal featured in the photography exhibit, and the mother talked to her daughter briefly about the photographs they'd seen.
When Dani arrived, we came up with codes for the new behaviors we wanted to track:

PQ - parent asking child question

K - kid asks parent question

B - bringing someone to an object, either physically or by pointing to it and calling to them

We went back into the exhibit around 1:45, though the first person I tracked came in at 2:08. We decided to keep tracking all visitors to the exhibit and not just families, as there were still a lot of childless visitors coming in--many of whom used some of the ArtSplash additions! It's really difficult to track families. We usually decided to represent the path of the mother on our maps, adding notes when parts of the group split off or did completely different things from their family members. I tracked 9 groups/individuals, three of which were families. 

Maeve Day 21

I stayed home and worked on blog posts because I was sick (and my apartment flooded).

Maeve Day 20

On Saturday, I worked on transcribing interviews and then went over to the museum around 1:30 PM. I lurked around all of the exhibits for a few hours, trying to listen to conversations and observe behaviors. There are four new additions to the Look Again gallery, only three of which are really noticeable. There's an activity by the cups and cloths that asks visitors to design a pattern similar to the Kuba fabrics, a small prompt by the power bundles asking visitors (children) what they would combine for a power bundle, five flaps with more information about the power figures, and a puzzle activity by the Kota masks. While I was there, there weren't a lot of families in the Look Again exhibit, but adults seemed to be making good use of the activities (especially the puzzle--people really love the Kota figures). The behaviors I wrote down were pretty much exactly the same as the ones Dani observed, but I'm really interested by the childless adults (of varying ages) who were using the interactives designed for children and families. The studio activity that day was to make a paper version of a Kota mask--I'm unsure if this will be changing. There were more families in the other exhibits, which could be because the other exhibits are directly adjacent to the ArtSplash studio in the middle of the building. The activities dotted throughout the ArtSplash studio were also interesting. I also noticed that the reading room has many more chairs (most of them child-sized) and is now filled with African fables and children's books, which people were actually reading with their children.

Maeve Day 19

I used Friday morning to transcribe a few more interviews before heading over to the Barnes Foundation for lunch at 12:45 PM. I thought the building was absolutely beautiful, though it didn't look much like a museum. I'd be interested in finding out more about how that whole transition from the original building to the new one went down, but it doesn't have much to do with our research.

Around 2 PM, we met with Blake Bradford, the director of education. I liked his point that not all visitors are going to museums to learn or even to look at the art--I think it's easy to forget that, but it will be especially relevant with ArtSplash approaching. He also talked a bit about context, and how the context for the African artworks is now how they function as part of the Barnes collection. While this was an interesting point, I couldn't help but wonder if it's really true. Do the van Goghs and Renoirs and Matisses lose their context in the space of the Barnes? Of course, there's no information about their importance or movements, but that's not really enough. Especially in the cases of van Gogh and Matisse, their styles are so distinctive that they couldn't ever really blend into a wall, and people are still coming to the Barnes specifically to see "The Postman" and "The Joy of Life." None of the art is emphasized over any other kind, but the African art is relegated to a few rooms upstairs, which does place it in a new context: a context in which it is still separate and strange.
One of the things we've been looking at that Bradford also touched on is how different institutions will give the visitor different ways of learning about objects. This is very obvious in Look Again, where we've already noted the many ways in which the Penn presented objects differently from the way the PMA is displaying them. I really liked the way Bradford described the Barnes as "exploding" traditional museum categorizations by location, time period, or type of art. It was also very interesting to hear about Barnes' involvement with African-American artists and his fixation on the "authentic" or self-taught artist. It reminded me of the jar Summer showed us in the American art wing of the PMA, which was made by a slave and is one of the few things on display created by an African-American artist. I was really glad Bradford touched on the way African art is treated as mastery without masters--it's been lurking in the back of my mind, and I just couldn't figure out how to phrase it.

I loved exploring the Barnes and could have probably spent many more hours there, especially if I turned off my museum studies brain and just soaked in the art. It really challenged me to look more closely at the art and try to find connections between the pieces--it's a much more active, involved style of looking than we've previously encountered. I did find it a bit frustrating at times, as I often felt like I wasn't "getting it" as much as I should be. The African art pieces don't really seem to be in dialogue with most of the collection, but I did love the placement of a Kota reliquary figure next to a Modigliani in room 22--the faces had a shocking similarity to them, and it was really interesting to go back through the rooms and see how the African pieces could potentially be connected to the paintings and other artworks. I overheard a security guard telling two visitors that the white material making up the walls in the in-between hallways contained fossils, and I was fascinated by this subtle play of ancient material in a very modern design. It seemed very true to the goal of the Barnes as an institution. I found myself questioning the placement of paintings throughout my visit, and noticed that the symmetric designs employed in some rooms really brought out more detail in each painting. I also noticed that the paintings hanging over the doorways in the first few rooms were all seascapes, which kind of made me feel like I was going on a long journey through a mystical chain of artistic islands.

The Sun Splashed exhibit was powerful, captivating, gorgeous, and fascinating. I loved the wide range of topics Nari Ward's art explored, and wished I'd left myself more time to really soak it all in. I thought the citizenship piece was really interesting and I wish we'd been able to see how visitors interacted with it when it was interactive (it didn't seem to be at the time, though maybe I was wrong). I thought it was particularly intriguing that the Barnes was hosting this exhibition--of course, it goes well with their collection, but it was really fascinating from a museological point of view. Here is this collection that is incredibly dependent on context, on the artist as a person, and on long, detailed labels in the same building as room after room of aesthetically recontextualized art. It made me wonder about that obsession with authenticity and self-taught artistry that Barnes had, and how Ward's art explores what it means to be authentically American, Jamaican, and black. It was striking to go from the dearth of information in the Barnes galleries to the density of information in Sun Splashed.

Dani's Day 20 Reflections

July 2nd, 2016

Art Splash

The activity that is associated with the Power Figures provided context for the figures and asked probing questions related to function. The activity that's associated with the cloths and cups asked visitors to assemble patterns that resembled those on the artifacts. The reliquary guardian figure activity was missing its pieces, but it seemed to have the same objective as the cloth/cup activity. When I was at the museum, majority of visitors weren't interacting with the activities much. Families tended to spend most of their time doing the larger Art Splash activity in the hall outside. Many people still walked past the Look Again exhibit but I also found that the larger Art Splash activity actually drew people's attention away from all of the galleries. I walked through the other galleries as well. All of the activities either provided context or prompted the visitors to focus on patterns and feel. People didn't seem to interact them much either.

Some notable behavior that could be added to timing/tracking include:

• Parent asking child questions about the artifact or activity
• Parent answering a question about the artifact or activity
• Parent motioning child to look closer
• Parent physically bringing a child to look at a specific artifact or activity
  
  
  
  
  

Dani's Day 19 Reflections

July 1st, 2016

Barnes Foundation Trip

Lunch

12:45pm-2pm

Meet Blake Bradford, Director of Education

2pm-2:45pm

I found Blake Bradford's description of the institutional vision to be very interesting. In many ways, his description helped me view the PMA and the Penn Museum from a different perspective. Blake explained that an institution can only tell one story at a time. I wonder what role representations of Africa play in how these institutions tell their stories. Although I felt that Blake made a good point about the importance of story-telling, I'd like to push back on the single-story narrative a little bit. Although each of these institutions may feel that they each have a unique and single story, visitors interpret the story based on their experiences and positions in society. In this way, numerous stories can be derived from the collection and how it's represented. I think this notion challenges the Barnes' seemingly less heavy-handed way of representing art. I think Barnes' categories are unique and very interesting in the ways that they force visitors to look at art differently by disrupting their assumptions; however, that doesn't mean that the visitor experience is as "unfiltered" as Blake stated. For example, most of the non-western art were placed in the side rooms, not the large main rooms. The non-western art shared these side rooms with western art; however, even in these seemingly diversified rooms, most of the non-western art was grouped together in large cases, making them distinct from the other art in the room. When placed with Barnes' essentialist ideas of African artists, I think this complicates the story of the Barnes Foundation.

Touring the Barnes Collection

2:45- 3:30


Believe it or not, I really liked this museum. I loved the feeling of being challenged to draw new connections between different works of art. Due to the fact that I was forced to focus on form and tone, I began to be able to recognize the works of specific artists as I walked through the galleries. Although I've never studied art formally, I felt like the way the Barnes represented art taught me how to look at art in a deeper way. A security guard literally had to tell me to step away from the art 3 times because I kept getting too close. As opposed to what's being done in Creative Africa, I didn't have to be prompted to look closer. The way the art was represented in the Barnes drew me in. I liked the use of symmetry and disruption. I also liked the ways Barnes didn't prioritize notable artists and their works, in terms of representation.

Nari Ward

3:30-4pm

Wow. Wow. Wow. I loved this exhibition so much. I love the Barnes for having it. Nari Ward's work touched on everything. Gentrification, citizenship, the American Dream, police brutality, mass incarceration, criminalization, Black masculinity, corruption, healing, hypervisibilty/invisibility, slavery, beauty, resilience, etc. I found his take on citizenship to be the most striking because he seemed so ambivalent. Becoming a citizen really means nothing in a country where people like you are treated as second-class citizens. At the same time, coming from a Caribbean background also complicates his position in the African American community. The exhibition was so powerful. I'm really happy I was able to see it.

Dani's Days 17 and 18

June 29-30th, 2016


I spent these days transcribing the shorter interviews. By the end Thursday afternoon, I only had my 18min long interview left.

Dani's Day 16 Reflections

June 28th, 2016

Transcriptions
10-12pm

I worked on transcribing the interviews at home.

Team Meeting
1-2:30pm

We all met with Monique for lunch and to discuss what we found in our interviews. Summer shared what she found in her readings and research.

Touring the Main Building
2:30- 4pm

Summer, Maeve and I toured the main building of the PMA and paid a lot of attention in the new Sachs show.

Meeting with Evaluation Team
4-4:45pm

We met up with the evaluation team to discuss our major findings in the interviews. For the most part, visitors want more context in the prompts. A few visitors also expressed a need for audio and tours of the exhibit.

Dani's Day Fifteen Reflections

June 25th, 2016

Journal

10am-11:30 am

Maeve and I caught up on our blog posts.

Interviews

11:30-1:30


It took a while fore Maeve and I to find people to interview. Although there were more visitors in the museum than usual, many of them did not even notice the Look Again Gallery. By noon, we reached our goal of 30 interviews.

Artist Talk: Ananias Léki Dago

1:30pm-3ishpm

I really enjoyed the talk. Although some of the questions were reductive in some ways, Ananias' responses were thought-provoking. He seems to have been very inspired by James Baldwin and quoted him saying, "The role of the artist and the lover is the same. If I love you, I must make you conscious of the things you don't see." In many ways, his work forces viewers to question whatever they think they know about what they're viewing. He explained this saying, "Who told you that in darkness, there's no light? Who told you that if I'm smiling, I'm happy? Being fragile doesn't make you weak." He also talked about how his creativity was largely the result of isolation. He is left-handed and, in his culture, that is viewed as an abnormality. He felt shunned from an early age. His isolation made him question everything. He used photography to heal himself.

Ananias also gave an interesting description of his experience as an African-born artist. He explained that although he travels to meet other parts of himself in other places, traveling as an African is difficult. This made me think about the privilege of mobility and how borders, as tools of social control, regulate who has the ability to take advantage of certain opportunities. It's interesting to think about how inaccessible the world is for some Africans and how accessible the continent has been made for the West. Ananias also described that, as opposed to western artists, African artists are truly self-made. They have to be there own artist, curator, organizer, museum director, conservator, etc. Lastly, I'm really interested in learning more about his work in restoring and archiving the work of Paul Kodjo. He feels that Kodjo's work is vital to preserving the history of Côte d'Ivoire.

Interviews

3ish-5pm

Maeve and I continued interviews.

Maeve Day 17/18

Wednesday and Thursday are both transcribing days (as is Friday morning). I had to type up all of the interviews I'd transcribed, so that ate into a bit of my time. Yay, transcribing!

Maeve Day 16

Today was the first of the transcribing days. We (being Dani, Summer, and I) met with Monique for lunch at 1 PM. We caught up on what we'd been doing, though we didn't have much to say as we'd only transcribed a few of our interviews.
Summer, Dani, and I explored the contemporary exhibit around 2:30 or 3, which was interesting. We then met with the evaluation department at 4 PM for our weekly meeting.

Maeve Day 15

We spent the first half-hour or so of Saturday catching up on blog posts. Visitors started arriving in droves around 11 AM, though the majority of them seemed to miss "Look Again" as they have to walk past it to purchase their tickets. I didn't get an interview until noon, but it was my 19th interview. Dani interviewed someone around the same time, and we were both pretty excited to have reached the goal of 30 interviews in such a short span of time (until Monique told us to get more, which we were happy to do, of course).
The Ananias Léki Dago talk started at 1 PM and lasted a little over an hour. We sat on a bench in the exhibit as the event had been sold out and the chairs were supposed to be reserved for the paying visitors. As a photographer, I loved Léki's discussion of his process for approaching people and making them more comfortable around the camera. It's interesting to me how photography is a lot like participant observation--he said that giving the subject the feeling that you're on the same page is what gets you access, and that his ultimate goal in photographing situations like the shebeens is to disappear while documenting. The curator asked him a clumsily phrased question about the difference between photographing in America and Africa, but he spun it and discussed the differences between the Western art scene/artist's experience and the African art scene/artist's experience. He refused to homogenize Africa, but pointed out that Western artists are born into a society that has an established art scene, while he has to fulfill the roles of photographer, organizer, developer, promoter, curator, and everything else. For African artists outside of Nigeria and South Africa, they must set up their entire art worlds and markets for themselves from scratch. He briefly touched on the difficulties of using technologies that weren't designed for African climates, which intrigued me as well. I thought it was very interesting that being left-handed had had a huge impact on his life (as he put it, "that seriously fucked me up!").
Around 2, I got lunch with my family in the main building and then returned to the exhibit. I only managed to get three more interviews that afternoon--it's really strange how few people were going into the exhibit, even as the Perelman was more crowded than I've ever seen it! It seemed that many of the visitors had come to see the photography specifically, though, so that may have played a role. I even had to point the exhibit out to my family, who knew I was working on that specific part of Creative Africa (though I hadn't really told them much more, as Dani planned to interview my parents).

Dani's Day Fourteen Reflections

June 24th, 2016

Journal

10am-11am

Maeve and I updated our journal entries.

Interviews

11am-12:15??pm

As usual, the morning was slow. We were only able to interview a few people.

Lunch

12:15pm-1:20pm

More Interviews

1:20pm-4pm

More visitors were in the museum at this point but it was still pretty slow. By the end of the day, Maeve and I had conducted 28 interviews. One of my interviews today was 20 mins long. The two older women I was interviewing were members and had a long history of visiting the museum. Although they liked the exhibit, they critiqued the way the museum had been dealing with African and African American art. They were disappointed by the fact that the museum wasn't holding tours of the exhibit and didn't feel that they had done enough promotion. They also suggested the PMA using docents from the Penn Museum to give tours of the Look Again exhibit since they would have more knowledge about the artifacts. Other visitors were disappointed by the museum's failure to provide an adequate amount of cultural context.

I was also able to meet Ananias Léki Dago, one of the photographers who's featured in Creative Africa.

Transcriptions

4pm

By 4pm, no one was in Look Again so we went home to transcribe.

Maeve Day 14

I was a bit late on Friday, but I spent the first half hour or so writing my blog post from Thursday. Dani and I then set about interviewing visitors at about 11 AM. I only got two interviews before we ate lunch around noon, and nobody came out of the exhibit until my next interview at 1:22 PM.

In total, I interviewed 9 people/groups, doubling my interview count from Thursday. One of these visitors was Dani's friend Noura who goes to Bryn Mawr, but she didn't really know what we were looking for, so it shouldn't really be biased. When I asked her if she disliked anything about the exhibit, she remarked that the hanging figures who apparently symbolize punishment were a really terrible and alarming choice (exactly as Monique had noticed on the first day). A later visitor I spoke to remarked that she'd been very impressed by the skill of the "primitive tribes" of the 15th century.

Around 4 PM, there hadn't been anyone in the exhibit for about 20 minutes, so we decided to go home and transcribe some of our interviews. I transcribed two more of my interviews, both of which had been with 3 visitors, which was kind of difficult to transcribe. The people in these interviews all liked the textiles, power figures, and masks. One of them asked me if my job as an intern was "to make the prompts," which I thought was hilarious. When I told them that, no, that was not my job, they seemed more comfortable.

Maeve Day 13

As per usual, Dani and I spent the first hour or so of our day catching up on blog posts in the library. Monique asked us to go lurk around the contemporary exhibits to hear what we could hear and capture quotes from visitors. So starting about 11 AM, I walked through all of the galleries to see which one had the most visitors. This was pretty easy as there was only one group of visitors in any of the exhibits--a pair of older white couples were in Vlisco, so I decided to hang out in there. Unfortunately, they spent the first 10 minutes talking about their chickens (and they hadn't even seen the cloth printed with chickens yet) and then didn't speak much to each other after that. They seemed to find humor in the exhibit, pointing out the changes made to updated patterns and exclaiming, "that's hysterical!" The men teased each other about which color of suit they would get made from these fabrics, and they all laughed a lot. I lurked around a pair of white women in their 60s who seemed to be rather informed about the exhibit until I realized that one of them worked for the museum. She kept pointing out the display techniques (like dim lighting and magnets used to hold up the fabrics) and noting that "this is really a collaboration between countries." She also said "it's such a different way of thinking about fabric," a sentiment we heard echoed in our community conversation. The final group I followed was a white mother in her late 30s or early 40s with her daughter who was probably about 6 years old. The mother was very knowledgeable about fashion, pointing out the pleating and structures of each design to her daughter. The little girl was excited to read many of the labels out loud. Her mother asked her questions about the patterns, pointing to the wood blocks and trying to help her daughter understand the printing process, as well as asking her to point out similarities among the many designs in the center. The daughter's conclusion about the designs was that "they make them nicely fit, and another thing I have to tell you is they're very nature-y, pretty nature-y."
Dani and I took a lunch break at 12:30, but when we returned to the exhibits at 1 PM, they were almost completely empty. There were a few lone stragglers, but the only conversations that were happening were people reading labels to each other or talking about totally unrelated things. We decided our time would be better used by getting a head start on transcribing our interviews from the day before, so Monique let us go around 1:20 PM. I got back to my apartment a little before 2 (because I didn't have anything on me I could use to copy down the interviews, I had to go all the way back), and set to work transcribing. I only completed the first 3 of the 9 interviews I did, because the third one was incredibly difficult to hear and had involved more than one visitor. One of the things I noticed while transcribing was how flat my tone was in the first few interviews--I listened to some of the later ones to make sure I'd sounded more comfortable asking the questions, and I hope to continue along those lines because those visitors seemed more comfortable giving me more detailed answers. My first three interviewees all strongly agreed with all three statements, had all read the prompts, and all had some level of familiarity with historical African art and/or looking closely at art. Their favorite sections were the ivories and the masks. Every interview I transcribed was with women, though their ages ranged from 21 to 60 and they were African-American, Hispanic, and Native American. One of the younger women (who were interviewed in a pair) said that it seemed a little bit "in the past" and that "I guess you can get more people intrigued if you can sort of do a correlation between the present and the past," which I thought was interesting especially in light of what John Vick was telling us about the goals of the exhibit. I'll make sure to scan in my transcriptions sometime this weekend when I add photos to some of my earlier posts.

Dani's Day Thirteen Reflections

June 23rd, 2016

Journal

10am-12pm

Maeve and I updated the blog.

Lunch

12:00pm - 12:30 pm

Observations

12:30pm-2:30pm


Maeve and I observed/listened in on the visitors in the other galleries. The other galleries were fairly empty. While in Vlisco, I overheard an older white women providing context for her friend. She described the wax prints as abstract because they didn't always obviously aesthetically match the meaning that was defined on the labels. She informed her friend that the clothes weren't usually displayed like they are now because they're still worn. The woman also explained that the dresses weren't meant for everyday wear but for special occasions. They both seemed really intrigued by the Vlisco show.

After I started feeling like it was becoming too obvious that I was listening in on their conversation because we were the only people in there, I left and paid a visit to the Kere gallery. A group of older white people were reading the labels out loud to each other. They were shocked to read that Kere uses parts of pots for ventilation and lighting purposes. They also admired what they believed to be his deep desire to pass knowledge down from generation to generation. In general, the visitors seemed to engage and interact with this exhibit the most. This could probably be due to the gallery's use of multimedia. This gallery provided multiple ways for visitors to engage with Kere's work aesthetically and contextually.

Transcriptions

3:00pm-5:00pm


I returned to my apartment to work on the transcriptions. My first interview was twelve minutes long and literally took two hours to transcribe. I plan to transcribe at least one interview a day, given how much time it takes. I don't want to spend the entire analysis week translating the data instead of analyzing it with the help of literature and other resources concerning representations of Africa in museums.

The first interview involved two white women between the ages of 60 and 70. One of the women was an African Studies professor while the other knew virtually nothing about African culture or history. In many ways, their differences in experiences made the entire interview more well-rounded. They were able to bring a variety of perspectives to the conversation. The woman who is an African Studies professor was happy to see that the PMA was using prompts because she knows it's not in the museum's nature. She felt it was important to provide the audience with the context necessary to understand the pieces. Her friend felt that without the prompts she would have been lost. They both felt that the prompts were helpful but could have provided more context. The woman who is an African Studies professor felt that the use of interactive technology and prompts was a sign of progress but understands that the museum must balance the desire to represent art in aesthetic and informative ways. They both asked me questions as well. One was mostly interested in how many visitors have come to the exhibit because she suspected that the attendance rate was low given that it's in the Perelman. The other was curious about whether or not any effort has been made to return the artifacts to their countries of origin. She compared the acquisition of most of the artifacts in the exhibit to the Nazi acquisition and destruction of art during WWII.

I really enjoyed interviewing people. I feel like I need to learn to shut up though. I get too excited and forget that it's an interview. It felt more like a conversation, but I don't want to influence their responses.

Dani's Day Twelve Reflections

June 22nd, 2016

Journal

10am-11:30am

Maeve and I caught up on our journal entries.

Tour/Meeting with John Vick

11:30am-1:30pm

I found it interesting that John Vick stated that the object is the primary source in this context because of the ways written/oral histories have been destroyed by colonialism. I don't think he understands how continuing the practice of reducing these artifacts to their aesthetic value contributes to the erasure of the meaning it held for those who created them. Since these artifacts were so closely linked to social life, allowing the audience to focus on the aesthetic is another way of simplifying African cultures for western consumption. It's easy to consume something when it's only ever viewed as something dead and irrelevant to the living. In this way, museums continue enact violence against the dead.

His description of their process in deciding how to represent the artifacts in the space was exactly as I had suspected. By promoting "close-looking" he and his team wanted the audience to focus on the artifact first. The ability for the audience to leave more informed about the cultural context of the pieces and how they were "acquired" is secondary. He explained that this was the result of the museum's tendency to view aesthetic pleasure and learning as mutually exclusive. He felt that it was more important to "peak the audience's curiosity."

Similar to using colonialism as an excuse for why the exhibit lacks cultural context, John and his collaborators assumed that the audience wouldn't read anyway. If you assumed that your audience wouldn't read anyway, why go through the trouble of formulating 300-word prompts? Were the prompts solely experimental or lazy? Furthermore, who is the audience? From his description, one would assume that the audience comprises of specialists who already know the cultural/artistic context and the rest are people who only want to focus on the form of the artifacts. From my experience in observations and interviews, both the specialists and general visitors want facts. They want a narrative because they are interested in what they're viewing. Of course some visitors will want to only focus on the aesthetic. People don't need to be prompted to do that in an art museum. It's redundant. Providing context challenges the audience to "look again". To me, the act of looking again means using the aesthetic to create an access point for understanding the meanings and functions the artifact served for the culture that created it.

I'm interested in how/if the ideas and desires of the community advisory board are integrated into the process. In general, I want to know more about how the galleries in Creative Africa connect. Why are there two shows on textiles? When discussing creativity in Africa, why do we need an exhibition about artifacts? Africans are still creating and are greatly contributing to the world in artistic ways.

I was happy to hear that dialogue about who is qualified to represent art of different cultures is happening in the museum; however, the fact that they still continue to make the same mistakes signifies that conversation and ideas are not enough. The museum needs to hire people who are qualified and reflect the diversity of the art in the collections.

Also, is there a way that we could be given access to see the rest of the museums collection of African/African American art in storage???

Lunch

1:30pm-2:00pm

Interviews 

2:00pm- 5:00pm

I loved doing interviews! So far it seems that most people expected the prompts to provide cultural context. One person  told me that they stopped reading them once he realized they didn't have any useful content. Another women told me that she had been to several African countries and thought that it was interesting to see the artifacts displayed as they were since many of them are still being used by people today.

Maeve Day 12

From 10 AM to just before 11 AM, Dani and I caught up on our blog posts. We then went downstairs to meet up with Monique and the other Bryn Mawr professors (I don't know how to spell anyone's names!) crafting the 360 for a tour of Look Again with John Vick. He mentioned that this was the fourth time the PMA had collaborated with the Penn's African department for an exhibit, but that the last one had been in the 1980s. He said that the goal of the exhibit was to be "noticeably different" and encourage visitors to look closely at objects to come to their own conclusions, but he apparently meant the exhibit should be noticeably different from the Penn Museum's displays. This stems in part from a key difference between anthropological and art museums: the former (in John's opinion) uses objects to illustrate points about culture, while the latter wants to treat the objects as primary sources that speak without text.
I'd be interested to know more specifics about how the objects were chosen for this exhibit by the so-called "expert users" John mentioned. I also want to know if his statement that the visual aspects of the works are often overlooked in exhibitions on Africa holds any water--though it might be kind of difficult to do a comprehensive survey of exhibits of historical African art/ifacts in art museums. I appreciated the thought that had gone into the exhibition design. On the first visit to the exhibit, I was struck by the openness of the exhibit as well as the choice of blue, white, and grey as the main design colors, as this is definitely unusual for exhibits on Africa. I liked that the design team had made the conscious choice to avoid dark, "earthy" tones and theatrical presentation, because apart from the labels, the exhibit looks quite similar to what you might find in any room of an art museum--especially a contemporary gallery. I like how the unusual presentation sets visitors up to have their expectations of African art disrupted, but I'm still not convinced that the exhibit itself follows through.
I thought it was interesting when John elaborated on the internal struggle of art museums as they try to balance academic information and aesthetic appreciation, not wanting to be a 3D textbook but also wanting to get the public invested in art. It seems that all museums have been juggling learning and enjoyable experiences, and I'm glad he believes that they can and should go hand in hand. I'm just not sure museums exist to pique people's curiosity. It was interesting that John said this exhibit was supposed to have an inviting approach that could be used for any other time of work, and I loved how Monique immediately asked him if these kinds of prompts would ever be used for Monets. While I still want to watch the Penn Museum's "What in the World?" TV show, I'm not sure it was really the best basis for an exhibit--the guests on that show were experts who knew how to look at objects and were bringing their knowledge of the cultures to the table, while the average museum visitor doesn't have a background in African anything.
The conversation with John provided a lot of insight into the museum's inner politics. It intrigued me that the main reason they were able to experiment so much with display practices was because nobody at the museum had any ownership over the collection, but it was also dismaying to know that nobody at the PMA has any investment in African art or in changing up their exhibition style. They don't have a very diverse staff, their community outreach committees aren't always relevant to the exhibitions and rarely seem to have any effect on the outcome, and the majority of higher-ups at the museum don't seem invested in changing any of that. After the tour, we briefly discussed some of what had been shared with us. Carrie (?) mentioned that the prompts all seem uncomfortable and like they're trying to justify their presence, while Monique pointed out that nobody seems to know who their audience is or what to do with the Penn collection. Look Again is physically presented as the historical context for the contemporary exhibits, but it's barely emphasized in their marketing, visitors are always walking right past it, and it doesn't actually contain much historical context at all. It's not really tied into the other exhibits. I was reminded of my visit to the East Asian galleries, which contain far more contextual information about the objects (without sacrificing aesthetic/formal information) and actually do a spectacular job of integrating contemporary and global art without privileging outside voices. In one of the Chinese galleries, for example, they've included some prints by an American artist who was inspired by the shapes of the Chinese tables and the cracks in the pottery. His art is presented in the same hall with labels explaining which pieces he drew from and what his vision was, but it all hangs above the Chinese art, so that visitors could easily pass through the room only noticing the ancient works. In Creative Africa, the Vlisco exhibit has been promoted as the must-see, and it barely contains any work done by actual African designers, which raises a lot of questions we've discussed many times.
At about 12:45, we took lunch, and Dani and I set up our recorders and wrote out neater versions of the interview questions. We started doing interviews around 2 PM. I did 9 interviews, many of which were with 2 or 3 visitors who had come together. While it was definitely difficult to balance 3 people (and one person would usually start to answer more of the questions than the others), it was interesting to see how the visitors would interact with each other and draw out more information. I'm also not sure how to get people to separate and if it's even worth it. I was rejected by five of the visitors (or pairs of visitors) that I approached, and it got especially difficult to get people to come with me after 4 PM because they wanted to finish their visits before the museum closed. Almost everyone I interviewed said they liked the prompts or thought they should stay, even if they'd admitted to not really reading them or being frustrated by them. It got a bit repetitive hearing visitors tell me that they thought the prompts were useful for children before backtracking and admitting they'd also found them helpful. I was also fascinated by how many visitors told me they thought it was helpful to have more information about the history or cultural context of the objects--I'm not convinced they were telling me the truth when they told me that they "strongly agreed" with the statement "I understood what the prompts were asking me to do." I did get one visitor who said she appreciated the prompts because she thought they helped people look more closely at art and appreciate it aesthetically, which is exactly what they were designed to do. Many visitors seemed wary of saying anything negative to me, as they believed I worked for the museum and had had something to do with crafting the labels. I look forward to transcribing them and having more concrete things to share.

Maeve Day 11

Tuesday morning was spent catching up on blog posts in the library. Around 12:30, Dani and I went over to the main building to get food. We had lunch with Monique in the sculpture garden at 1 PM and we all reviewed how things have been going. Summer met with us around 2 PM and shared her research findings. It was cool to hear more about other art museums like the Menil and the Barnes that have incorporated permanent collections of historical African art into their exhibits thoughtfully.
At about 2:45, Summer took us on a brief tour of the American and contemporary exhibit halls so we could familiarize ourselves with the museum's practices. It was really interesting to see the exhibits through a racial lens, because even though I'd never been in the American art section before, I know I wouldn't have picked up on the things Summer was showing us. Even the decorative arts started to make more sense to me--I've always found them vaguely interesting, but getting more background on how and why they're displayed helped me understand how they play into what we're looking at. I wrote one of my admissions essays to Bryn Mawr about Alexander Calder's mobiles, but I had no idea his family had been so prominent in Philadelphia sculpture (his studio was in Paris and many of his works are titled in French, so I honestly had no idea he was American). The contemporary gallery was interesting as a contrast to the Kere exhibit, which could have gone for a much more installation style than the community-oriented, information-based presentation of his works. However visually intriguing Duchamp might be, I think we all preferred the approach used for Kere, as a lack of information can be really frustrating.
At 3:30, we met with Laura and Kerry (?) to discuss progress on our interviews. We cut the question asking visitors what they think the prompts are supposed to do and decided to focus our questions on the individual experience. We still need to continue piloting the questions to see if we should add or cut anything else, which we will start doing on Wednesday. We all left around 4:30 PM.

Dani's Day Eleven Reflections

June 21st, 2016

Journals
10am- ???
Maeve and I spent the morning catching up on the blog posts. At around 12:30 we headed over to the main building to meet up with Monique for lunch/to catch up.

Lunch with Monique
1:15pm-2:30pm

We discussed the trends that Maeve and I have been noticing in the observations. We also discussed how the pilot interviews have been going and what to expect from our interactions with the PMA staff.

Catching up with Summer
2:30pm-3pm

We shared our findings with Summer and she informed us of how her research has been going. I'd be super interested in doing the readings as well.

Main Building Tour By Summer
3:00pm-3:45pm

Summer gave us a personalized tour of the PMA that focused on how the museum has dealt with African and African American art. She also shared stories of select pieces that I found very interesting. I feel like the collection would be more interesting to a broader audience if the stories of the pieces were integrated into how they were represented and translated to the audience.

Meeting with Evaluation Department
3:45pm-4:30pm

We met with the Evaluation Department to update them on our findings and review the drafted interview questions.

Dani's Day Ten Refelctions

June 18th, 2016

Research

10am - 12pm

While conducting research, I stumbled upon an African art museum in Tenafly, NJ that is maintained by the Society of African Missions. Apparently, it is one of five museums around the world that a Roman Catholic international missionary organization has built to respect and preserve the cultures of the people they serve. The African Art Museum in New Jersey was established in 1980 and has a permanent collection of African art which is exhibited on a rotating basis. The museum also serves as a center for research related to sub-Saharan sculpture and painting, costumes, textiles and decorative arts, religion and folklore.

On their site, they describe the connection between African art and society. In short, they make the claim that because African art had functional and aesthetic purposes, it is impossible to understand the culture without understanding the art. The organization seems to stress that the arts were deeply woven into social life and artists/craftsmen worked within the parameters that had been defined by their societies.

I find the historical and current motivations of missionaries very disturbing. However, it was interesting to read about how this organization functions, especially in terms of historical African art. Although I disagree with missions as a concept and in practice, the way this organization viewed the connection between art and social life was beneficial for me in how I've been making sense of what we've been observing in the PMA and the Penn Museum. I think the PMA failed to give the audience the opportunity to look at the art in the way that it should be looked at by focusing mostly on form and craft, not involving actual human beings in their instructive videos, and giving the audience too much room to imagine what the artifacts meant to the people who created them. As a whole, I think the experience would have been more meaningful and evocative if the connection between the artifacts and the lived experiences was more clear. Since these artifacts were utilitarian in the societies to which they belonged, I don't think displaying them in a way that encourages the audience to just look and maybe look again, adequately represents the works. It's not just aesthetic and that's okay.

I'd be interested in checking out this Art Museum.

Lunch

12pm-1pm

Notes on the Main Building (aka "The Big House")

1pm - 2:30pm

While looking through the East Asian section of the museum, I kept thinking about the connection between representation and history. I think the reason many institutions, like the PMA often fail to adequately represent African art is because African history has been misrepresented. The East Asian section was full of detail. I think this could also be due to the tension between oral and written history. In museums and other institutions, cultures that have written histories are often prioritized because they most closely resemble the ways we choose to represent European cultures and understand the world. By prioritizing these cultures, we erase and minimize the contributions that other cultures have made to the world in terms of art, science, etc. I think it's fair to say that you can't represent the art of different cultures in the same way, but the same amount of effort should be made to ensure that the art of each culture is represented in the right way.That requires a lot of research and planning, and even more when the museum isn't familiar with representing art from some cultures. Due to the historical and violent processes that have discounted or completely erased the cultures of mostly non-white people, it is valid to have supplementary materials and information about their cultural objects that you choose to represent in museums. Not providing the cultural context enables
museums to participate in their erasure. The PMA is no exception. I don't think the PMA understood/understands how much of a role they play in allowing people to construct their views of different peoples and cultures through art. It's a huge responsibility that should be taken more seriously than I feel it was in the Creative Africa exhibition.

In the interpretation team's presentation, they stressed the importance of pushing the museum to try something different. In my opinion, the museum will continue to make the same mistakes if they don't start asking different questions. If you want to attract a more diverse audience or diversify your permanent collection, you have to ask a diverse set of questions. As I walked through  the East Asian galleries, I saw many people there who were of Asian descent. I kept thinking about the experiences they were having in the galleries? What did the art mean to them? What did it mean to people who weren't of Asian-descent? What experiences were they having?

What experiences are people of African descent having in Creative Africa or in the museum as a whole where art related to their histories and cultures is rarely represented? What does this mean to them? What does it mean to people who aren't of African descent? How is this informing the ways people view art from these cultures?

Detailed description that connected the art to the culture in the Mexican Modernism Exhibition:

Detailed descriptions that connected the art to the culture/function in the East Asian section: 

Supplementary Materials:

Educational/Instructive video with a human being in it:

It looks like Vlisco wasn't the only mistake that the museum has made of this caliber. Another contemporary Dutch artists is featured in the East Asian section. 

The transition from historical to contemporary Asian art was done seamlessly and beautifully for the most part. The contemporary and historical are are both part of the permanent collection.

"Apparent artlessness"

Prompts and supplementary materials in the Middle Ages section

Observing the rest of Creative Africa

2:30pm - 3:30pm

While listening/observing in Vlisco, I hear a white women explain the exhibition to her grandchildren.

"The exhibit is promoting the women's businesses in Africa".

Another women pointed out familiar symbols in the prints to her toddler.


In Vlisco, I spoke to two Black women about whether or not they noticed that most of the works were made by Dutch designers.

"On the one hand, I'm grateful to see anything Africa-related in the museum, and I wonder why there isn't a permanent collection of African art."

In Look Again, a young white couple respond with faces of disapproval when they notice the hanging figures.

Last of the Look Again Observation Maps

3:30pm - 4:30pm

We filled in the rest of our maps.



Works Cited:

http://smafathers.org/museum/resources-ebooks/the-african-art/

Maeve Day 10

On Saturday morning, I decided to do some research on the African art/artifact situation because much of my earlier research was specific to Native American and Alaska Native works. I found a booklet that the British Museum created for teachers titled "What is African art?" that I thought was an interesting glimpse into how an ethnographic museum (other than the Penn) might treat the subject. The booklet began with two sections on "What is African?' and "Who defines Africa?", going on to pose the question, "is Africa really a cultural entity at all?" These first sections elaborated a bit on how ancient Egypt and other North African cultures are often grouped with the "classical" civilizations and separated from Africa as a cultural entity. They really skim over the impact of the slave trade (it is referred to as "the greatest emigration" from Africa, and though it is acknowlegded, it is made to sound like a mildly unpleasant situation instead of actual slavery) in the section titled "Where does African art come from?", but they claim that anthropologists were the first people to start treating African artifacts as art. Unfortunately, this section was kind of confusingly worded and extremely brief. The booklet seems to struggle with its messages, with sentences like "colonial adventurers continued to bring new surprises" contrasting with a long section explaining why "primitive" is an inappropriate word to use to describe African art.
One of the most interesting things about the booklet was the section "what does the West see in African art?" which addressed the myth of the primitive and basically scolded Western artists and art historians for their exotification of African art, saying it exposes more about Western culture than it does about African culture. After noting that "to give their subjective impressions an apparently objective value, some [art historians] even proclaim universal standards of art criticism and good taste," the booklet points out that knowledge of a work's culture of origin always enhances appreciation of art, therefore appreciating and displaying African art should involve some information on the cultural background. One of the most interesting things about this second half of the booklet was how it challenged me to think about African art--though I knew on some level that European/Western cultures place far more value on the visual than on other senses (especially in art), the questions "is African sculpture really the kind of art which Europeans take it to be?...in viewing such things in this way, are we not indulging peculiarly Western fantasies of African art and culture?" made me realize what had felt so strange about the display of the "power figures" from Look Again. The main takeaway that I had was that these things are seen as particularly African--more so than textiles or other artistic creations--because they can be used to mentally confirm a contrast between European and African styles and used to support exotic or primitive imaginings of Africa. Another interesting note, especially for museum display, came from a quote about how "we take [the objects] out of the dark, still their movement, quiet the music, and strip them of additions, we make them accessible to our visual culture, but we render them accessible to our visual culture, but we render them unrecognizable or meaningless to the cultures they come from" (Susan Vogel, African Art in Anthropology, 1988). The booklet went on to expound upon the ways that art historians treat African art differently from Western art, even though this is clearly founded on centuries of racist ideology. The final question the booklet asked that really intrigued me asked, "is art for the gallery really less 'applied' to the social purposes of its time than earlier traditions of African or European art?" Basically, if a divination kit and a Calder mobile were both created to serve a specific social purpose, and they both happen to also be excellent examples of how people can bring materials together creatively for a purpose, are they both art? Or are they both artifacts?
As the exhibits still seemed fairly deserted, Dani and I had lunch in the main building before giving ourselves a quick tour of the regular exhibits to familiarize ourselves with the normal labels. I can't seem to upload my pictures right now, but almost every work we saw had paragraph-long labels. They usually described something about the artist and a brief description of the artwork, but they also sometimes elaborated on the motifs in the work or even the cultural history that inspired it. In the Mexican Modernism gallery, most of the motifs were somehow divorced from any cultural relevance and presented as either universal art trends or an individual artist's experiences. However, the ancient Chinese gallery contained actual explanations of what the materials and symbols meant, cultural context for production and design, and bits of historical information about the various Chinese dynasties. I noticed that a few labels presented the concept of images representing ideas as a particularly Chinese touch to art, just like how the Vlisco exhibit implies that Africans are the only people who recognize symbolism in fashion and fabrics. Why is it not exotic that a Netherlandish painting of a religious scene includes a pelican, which represents devotion to one's children and Christ's sacrifice to humanity? The label on that particular painting explains that "according to legend, the pelican pierces its breast to feed its offspring its own blood." When other cultures use imagery in their art, it is treated as a surprising thing instead of being treated as how art works.
Even the contemporary Korean art gallery contains labels contextualizing the art, because while it's all fine and dandy to appreciate art on a purely aesthetic level, it cannot be ignored that visitors bring a certain history with them to museums that informs how they view the art. When I look at a painting of a girl all in white floating in a pool of flowers, I think of Ophelia--but as a painting in the Mexican Modernism gallery showed me, that is not always what is being referenced. When I look at medieval art, the fact that I grew up in a Catholic household in a country that prioritizes Christian imagery informs my understanding of the scenes--and when I look at a vaguely labeled power figure in an African art gallery, it is my assumptions about Africa that inform my thoughts. I think the prompts are a really cool idea, but it seems a little questionable to have implemented them in an African art gallery, where people already don't know much about the subject. The medieval European galleries have just as much explanation on their labels as the Asian galleries, and it doesn't come across as a studiously anthropological display method, so it just seems to me that the absence of information in the Look Again gallery serves to further the othering of African art.
Around 2:30, we returned to the Perelman to lurk around the contemporary exhibits and hear what we could hear. I went down to the Kere exhibit because it seemed to have the most visitors out of the five exhibits. There were a bunch of families with children of various ages who were watching the videos and playing with the interactive straw activity. It was pretty difficult to hear in there, in part because of the children, but also because the Perelman is generally an echo-y building. While sitting in one of the video viewing areas, I overheard both of the couples near me discussing how sustainable, community-based architecture could be applied in the United States. Everyone seemed to enjoy walking through strings.
After lurking for a while and determining that it wasn't really going anywhere, Dani and I decided to use the last of our exhibit maps to do some final visitor tracking. The visitor I followed stayed for over an hour, talking about each exhibit with her companion and really getting in close to each object. They left around 4:15, and I went to lurk in the photography and Vlisco exhibits for a little while before deciding that the emptiness of the exhibits meant it was time to go home.

Maeve Day 9

Friday began with a meeting with Laura to teach us how to conduct interviews. She reminded us that our main goal in this section of research is to find out the answer to the question: "to what extent are the panels promoting close looking behaviors?" We're doing open-ended interview questions, as opposed to the multiple-choice style interviews she conducts with her team. When writing questions, she cautioned us to avoid biasing, double-barrelled questions, and really wordy questions. One of the things we might need more help with is defining need-to-know, because we're trying to balance the research inquiries of two different groups (the museum and our own research for Monique). It's really difficult to stick to vague, unassuming questions that also don't come across as condescending but still prompt the kinds of answers we need. Laura also explained how we can best make the visitors comfortable and build rapport with them if we try to keep things short, open with softball questions, and let the visitor fill awkward silences (which is definitely going to be the most difficult part in my opinion). We remained undecided on whether we'd do paired interviews and a handful of other things which we thought might be easier to determine once we've begun piloting our questions.
After our meeting with Laura ended around 11:30, Dani and I set to work drafting our interview questions. I believe Dani has already posted our finalized set on their blog, so I'll just include some of the things we scrapped to give a sense of what we were juggling:
Have you been to the Penn Museum?
Did you read the prompts before or after looking at the objects?
Who did you come with today?
What do you think the objective of the prompts is?

Dani and I then took lunch around noon. We began observations at 1 PM. Since tracking was getting boring, I decided to try a participant observation approach if I saw any visitors reading the prompts at 1:40 PM. I stopped a woman by the gold weights and asked her the four questions Monique had texted us:

1. Did this encourage you to look more closely at the object?
2. Did it help you to understand the objects better?
3. Do you think the museum should use more of these types of labels?
4. Did you use any of the others? What did you think?

She was very excited about the prompts, responding quite enthusiastically to the third question and saying that while she'd originally thought the questions would be designed for younger people and children, she'd found that they were interesting and helpful to her as well. She specified that "it's a good method for historical art in museums, it makes you stop and pay attention," though she prefers human guides in general.

After a little while without seeing Dani in the exhibit, I went to the cafeteria and met with them and Laura. She helped us reword a few questions and told us we should pilot them in small batches that afternoon to avoid clashing with her department's exit interviews scheduled for Saturday. Starting at around 2:20 PM, we piloted the first handful of interview questions:

1. How familiar are you with historical African art?
2. Did you have a favorite section of the Look Again exhibit? What was it? Why did it stand out to you? 
3. Did you notice the prompts in that part of the exhibit? If so, did you read them?
4. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with me about your experience today?

One of the visitors I spoke with started off by telling me he "liked to look at art" and had "seen more than I could count" but that he wouldn't say he had much experience with historic African art. He then backpedaled and said that he'd seen many shows of historic African objects but that he didn't know much about the culture. His favorite part of the exhibit was the Kota mask display because he loved the design of the exhibit and thought the display "worked together very well to tell a wider story." He said he "liked looking at [African art] and getting close" because of how "African art tends to have an intimate, delicate quality" due to the level of detail rendered by manual art. Another visitor told me she had loved the exhibit because "I brought all my friends and I'm glad we all got exposed to this body of art we aren't used to seeing." Though she mentioned she had trouble remembering things she read, she told me her favorite part of the exhibit has been the embodied objects because she found it fascinating to think of how objects shaped to look like humans were used by humans and what it meant. 

Dani's Day Nine Reflections

June 17th, 2016

Meeting with Laura

10am-11:30ish am

The meeting was much less formal than our previous meeting about observation strategies. Laura apologized for the meeting on Tuesday and clarified that every Tuesday meeting will focus more on sharing our findings. She then reminded us to focus the interview questions on discovering whether or not the prompts promote close-looking.

She feels that a semi-structured model for interviews would be best for our project because it would allow our interviewees to have more freedom in their responses. Nonetheless, she wanted us to be careful not to have biased/leading questions and to focus on what we need to know. She informed us about how important it is to establish a sense of physical and mental comfort with our interviews and not to overwhelm them. It shouldn't feel like a test (which is ironic because we will literally be discussing how they used the prompts in the exhibit). According to Laura, the basis structure of the interview should resemble this:

1. Friendly Introduction of Interviewer and Project
2. Soft Ball Question: An easy warm-up question
3. Deeper Questions
4. Demographic Questions
5. Any Additional Thoughts
   

Drafting Interview Questions

11:30-12pm

After the meeting with Laura, Maeve and I drafted prompt-specific interview questions.

Intro: "Hi! I'm so and so, and I'm an intern here at the museum doing research on the ways visitors are engaging with the prompts in the Look Again exhibit. Would you mind doing a quick interview with me? It shouldn't take longer than 10 mins and we can sit down if that would be more comfortable.

1. Is this your first visit to the museum? If not, are you a member? Is this your first time seeing the Creative Africa exhibit?
2. How familiar are you with historical African art?
3. Did you have a favorite section of the Look Again exhibit? What was it? Why did it stand-out to you?
4. Did you notice the prompts in that section of the exhibit? If so, did you read them?
5. Do you remember if you read the prompts before, after or while looking at the objects in that section?
6. In terms of the entire exhibit, did the prompts enhance or detract from your overall experience? Why?
7. Did you dislike anything in the exhibit? If so, why?
8. Please rate the following statements from 1 to 5, 1 being that you strongly disagree and 5 being that you strongly agree
   
   • I'm glad the prompts were in the exhibit.
   • I understood what the prompt was asking me to do.
   • These types of prompts belong in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
     

9.Why do you think the prompts were included in the exhibit?
10. May I ask your age, gender and race?
11. Are you a local?
12. Is there anything else you'd like to tell me about your experience?

Lunch

12pm-1pm

Observations

1pm- 2pm

Maeve and I did continued to observe visitors.

Reviewed Interview Questions

2:00-2:20pm

Laura made a surprise visit and reviewed our interview questions with us. Apparently she needed to return to the building to drop something off and thought that she'd check in on us as well. She suggested taking out question #5. She was in favor of everything else.

Pilot Interviews

 2:20pm- 4pm

Maeve and I piloted the first three interview questions with visitors. One of the visitors I interviewed made an interesting comment about the prompts. He is an an art teacher at the Tyler School and said that he felt that the prompts were othering because they aren't used to describe art from other cultures.

Dani's Day Eight Reflections

June 16th, 2015

Journaling

9:30am- 10am

I finished yesterday's journal entry.

Research

10:25am- 10: 45am and again from 11:10am to 11:25am (I met up with Maeve while I was researching)


In 1981, the Montclair Museum of Art held an exhibition of Turkmen tribal carpets. The New York Times wrote a response article that focused on the tension between representing an object as an art versus an artifact. The article stated:

"Perhaps the simplest, yet most appropriate, distinction would be that an artifact is primarily the product of craftsmanship and skill, while a work of art is invested with an emotional, philosophical, spiritual or esthetic quality that reaches beyond. It has an ambiguous something that is not always easy to define, perhaps a special element that elevates it from the realm of workmanship to a more-significant level."

"One does not need a rigorously academic education to appreciate these works. Response is immediate and intuitive."

Interestingly, this response to the Turkmen tribal carpets resembled the conversation we had with the Education and Evaluation Departments on Tuesday. In the case of the carpets, cultural artifacts become art when their aesthetic value evokes a response from the audience. As Marla expressed about some of the artifacts in the Look Again exhibit, if an object is compelling or evokes an emotional response, that can be enough. Educating  the audience on the "philosophical or spiritual importance they had for the peoples who created them" is not the only goal.

At the PMA, "Look Again" is truly open-ended. It can simply mean looking closer to recognize unique features in the craftsmanship of an object. If that is the goal, I guess some of the prompts could be successful when they are actually read. I've noticed that the curators clearly struggled to find the balance in educating visitors on the cultural origins of the objects and focusing on the aesthetic of the objects.

More Observations

12:00pm-2:30pm

Interpretation Team Presentation

2:40pm-4:15pm

This was, by far, the most interesting presentation I've seen thus far. Although I support the team's desire to create various access points for visitors to engage with art, I found some of the things they said to be contradictory, which could signify the tension that they must have in choosing to facilitate learning and design spaces in aesthetically pleasing ways.

In relation to Creative Africa, I was most interested in the idea that museums should not assume that their audience has a substantial amount of prior knowledge about the art. Similarly, the ways in which people engage with art is largely informed by their own lived experiences. They don't leave their identities at the door.

I'm also interested in learning more about what the team may have to sacrifice in order to design exhibits that "blow people's minds". The team described one of their goals as "challenging you to understand the concepts." They may very well have done that with Creative Africa. The concepts that I would have hoped to have been challenged in Look Again may not have been the concepts that the team had chosen to have the audience explore (and clearly weren't). In terms of historical and contemporary African art, I think it's so important that you have a curatorial and interpretation team that has substantial background knowledge in the cultures being represented and understanding of how cultural information could best be translated to a diverse community. I think there's this prevailing idea that art is neutral. I think the museum completely missed the idea that by representing African art and placing it on a public platform, they are also participating in the ways people construct meaning out of the art and the people who made it, often times, in relation to their own place in the world. The way they chose to represent African historical art has become increasingly problematic to me, especially after talking to visitors. I don't understand how the museum could have felt that it was appropriate to have hanging artifacts on the wall. The inability to see a problem with that makes me question what part of the audience they  are catering to and who they are neglecting to see as valuable visitors. I think the Interpretation Team's use of living labels could have been a perfect way to balance aesthetic and learning. Given that special exhibitions, like this one, make up 8 million dollars of the budget, I don't understand why Creative Africa was only planned in a year. I don't understand why so may culturally insensitive and careless mistakes were made. So far the exhibit seems more sensationalizing and exoticizing than educating.



http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/15/nyregion/art-vs-artifacts-in-montclair.html