Thursday, June 30, 2016
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
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).
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).
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Dani's Day Fourteen Reflections
June 24th, 2016
Maeve and I updated our journal entries.
As usual, the morning was slow. We were only able to interview a few people.
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.
By 4pm, no one was in Look Again so we went home to transcribe.
Journal
10am-11amMaeve and I updated our journal entries.
Interviews
11am-12:15??pmAs usual, the morning was slow. We were only able to interview a few people.
Lunch
12:15pm-1:20pmMore Interviews
1:20pm-4pmMore 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
4pmBy 4pm, no one was in Look Again so we went home to transcribe.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
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.
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.
Friday, June 24, 2016
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 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
Maeve and I updated the blog.
12:00pm - 12:30 pm
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.
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.
Journal
10am-12pmMaeve and I updated the blog.
Lunch
12:00pm - 12:30 pmObservations
12:30pm-2:30pmMaeve 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-5:00pmI 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.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Dani's Day Twelve Reflections
June 22nd, 2016
Maeve and I caught up on our journal entries.
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???
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.
Journal
10am-11:30amMaeve and I caught up on our journal entries.
Tour/Meeting with John Vick
11:30am-1:30pmI 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-2:00pmInterviews
2:00pm- 5:00pmI 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.
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.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Dani's Day Ten Refelctions
June 18th, 2016
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.
12pm-1pm
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?
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.
We filled in the rest of our maps.
Works Cited:
http://smafathers.org/museum/resources-ebooks/the-african-art/
Research
10am - 12pmWhile 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 - 2:30pmWhile 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 - 4:30pmWe 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.
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.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
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:
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:
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:
- Did this encourage you to look more closely at the object?
- Did it help you to understand the objects better?
- Do you think the museum should use more of these types of labels?
- 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:
- How familiar are you with historical African art?
- Did you have a favorite section of the Look Again exhibit? What was it? Why did it stand out to you?
- Did you notice the prompts in that part of the exhibit? If so, did you read them?
- 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
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:
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.
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?
Maeve and I did continued to observe visitors.
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.
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.
Meeting with Laura
10am-11:30ish amThe 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:
- Friendly Introduction of Interviewer and Project
- Soft Ball Question: An easy warm-up question
- Deeper Questions
- Demographic Questions
- Any Additional Thoughts
Drafting Interview Questions
11:30-12pmAfter 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.
- Is this your first visit to the museum? If not, are you a member? Is this your first time seeing the Creative Africa exhibit?
- How familiar are you with historical African art?
- Did you have a favorite section of the Look Again exhibit? What was it? Why did it stand-out to you?
- Did you notice the prompts in that section of the exhibit? If so, did you read them?
- Do you remember if you read the prompts before, after or while looking at the objects in that section?
- In terms of the entire exhibit, did the prompts enhance or detract from your overall experience? Why?
- Did you dislike anything in the exhibit? If so, why?
- 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.
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-1pmObservations
1pm- 2pmMaeve and I did continued to observe visitors.
Reviewed Interview Questions
2:00-2:20pmLaura 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- 4pmMaeve 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
I finished yesterday's journal entry.
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.
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
Journaling
9:30am- 10amI 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-2:30pmInterpretation Team Presentation
2:40pm-4:15pmThis 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
Maeve Day 8
On Thursday, we didn't get any visitors until it was almost noon. While Dani went upstairs to research, I lurked around the exhibit, not wanting to miss any visitors. I thought a group of little kids might come in, but they seemed to visit every other exhibit in the show. There was a whole tour that entered, but they didn't make it past the circular room as they were only talking about the architecture of the building.
After visitors finally started showing up, I tracked about 6 or 7 people--there were a lot of people doing really fast exhibit visits all of a sudden. One visitor I wasn't tracking stopped me while I pretended to write things down about a pile cloth and asked me about what I was doing. It turned out that he was African and he thought he might be able to help me if I was studying African art and culture. He seemed really excited by the exhibit and said it was wonderful I was studying it. Another visitor later asked me about the power figures--she wanted to know what "power figures" meant.
At 2:30 (ish), we went over to the main building for a panel discussion on interpretation in the museum. I thought all of the things they shared were really interesting: the ways they were using technology to make art more accessible, their goal of making the museum a place that changes the way people think about the world, and their commitment (however confusingly worded) to providing visitors with the tools they needed to direct their own learning. I just didn't like their attitudes, and I also didn't like the emphasis they placed on money. After the talk, we took an excellent team selfie in front of a model of the museum.
After visitors finally started showing up, I tracked about 6 or 7 people--there were a lot of people doing really fast exhibit visits all of a sudden. One visitor I wasn't tracking stopped me while I pretended to write things down about a pile cloth and asked me about what I was doing. It turned out that he was African and he thought he might be able to help me if I was studying African art and culture. He seemed really excited by the exhibit and said it was wonderful I was studying it. Another visitor later asked me about the power figures--she wanted to know what "power figures" meant.
At 2:30 (ish), we went over to the main building for a panel discussion on interpretation in the museum. I thought all of the things they shared were really interesting: the ways they were using technology to make art more accessible, their goal of making the museum a place that changes the way people think about the world, and their commitment (however confusingly worded) to providing visitors with the tools they needed to direct their own learning. I just didn't like their attitudes, and I also didn't like the emphasis they placed on money. After the talk, we took an excellent team selfie in front of a model of the museum.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Dani's Day Seven Reflections
June 15th, 2016
Physical Anthropologists are strange. I was not a fan of some of the ways Janet was referring to once living people. Her ability to dehumanize them was definitely off-putting, especially from a cultural anthropologist perspective where we are most interested in a person's/peoples' stories. I did enjoy the brief description of the public classrooms that Penn will be hosting in the fall surrounding race and physical anthropology. I think, if done correctly, public classrooms could be an effedctive way museums could better translate their materials for public consumption. Learning about NAGPRA was pretty interesting. I was a little turned off my the Act's ability to decline claims made by Native American groups if they're lacking specific documentation. If we think back to the time that many of these artifacts were taken, I can imagine it being pretty difficult to find documentation that something belongs to you or your community. I was also disturbed by the fact that none of these rules apply to private collections. I'm interested in seeing how Native American groups push to make the Act more comprehensive.
The tour of the storage rooms was mostly interesting because the "agreement" between Penn and PMA was brought up.
I returned to my apartment to eat
I caught up on my journals.
NAGPRA/Collections/Keepers Presentation at the Penn Museum
10am-12pmPhysical Anthropologists are strange. I was not a fan of some of the ways Janet was referring to once living people. Her ability to dehumanize them was definitely off-putting, especially from a cultural anthropologist perspective where we are most interested in a person's/peoples' stories. I did enjoy the brief description of the public classrooms that Penn will be hosting in the fall surrounding race and physical anthropology. I think, if done correctly, public classrooms could be an effedctive way museums could better translate their materials for public consumption. Learning about NAGPRA was pretty interesting. I was a little turned off my the Act's ability to decline claims made by Native American groups if they're lacking specific documentation. If we think back to the time that many of these artifacts were taken, I can imagine it being pretty difficult to find documentation that something belongs to you or your community. I was also disturbed by the fact that none of these rules apply to private collections. I'm interested in seeing how Native American groups push to make the Act more comprehensive.
The tour of the storage rooms was mostly interesting because the "agreement" between Penn and PMA was brought up.
Travel/Lunch
1:30pm- 3pmI returned to my apartment to eat
Journal
3pm-4:30pmI caught up on my journals.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Maeve Day 7
As today is a Wednesday, we went over to the Penn Museum to hear their guest speakers for their internship program. The first speaker was Janet Monge, curator and keeper of physical anthropology, whom I'd previously met during our class field trip to the museum this semester. She is definitely something. I actually thought her talk was really interesting, and learned things about physical anthropology that I'd never known before. I have a lot of frustration with the fact that I feel like I have no concrete knowledge of what can be gleaned from human remains and what is useful about it, and this brief talk felt like it cleared up more than a semester of biological anthropology did (not to mention an old obsession with the TV show Bones--it's easy to understand the applications of the science in a forensic context, but it's much harder for me to justify the extensive collections of human remains without being given more explanation as to what they are used for). Before the talk started, I overheard her mention to Monique that the Penn has never given a person of color the title of curator (she said minority, but I assume she was referring to race, rather than minorities of gender/sexuality/disability/etc.). I wondered how this compared to other institutions--especially the PMA. She mentioned that she tries to make sure that all remains on display are "as appropriately contextualized as possible," which I thought was an admirable goal that also represents a huge difference in approach between the two museums we've been at.
Though she seems dedicated to using the collection to dispel misconceptions about a scientific basis for race, she also seemed like she was genuinely frustrated by NAGPRA. This was confirmed by Stacey Espenlaub, the NAGPRA coordinator, who gave the second talk. I'd already learned about NAGPRA this semester in Museum Anthropology, but to be honest, I'd run out of ADHD medication that week and would not have been able to recall much about the readings. This refresher course was helpful more for my own knowledge than anything else--though it was definitely interesting that they chose to schedule it immediately after the human remains presentation. The third and final speaker was Lynn Makowsky, keeper of the Mediterranean section. She mainly explained the difference between keepers and curators, which was nice to know in that I'd never heard of keepers before. She then took us on a quick tour of the Mediterranean collection, which was cool.
At around noon, we split up, and I decided to take a closer look at the "Imagine Africa" exhibit and the African section in general. With all the talk about labels and prompts, I wanted to make sure we knew what we were comparing--and it turned out that our assertion that the "Imagine Africa" labels hadn't contained much more than the basic information was a total falsehood (I guess we both just remembered incorrectly?). Almost all of the labels in each exhibit contained full paragraphs of information about the objects or photographs on display, and there were also larger panels nearby summarizing cases or groups of objects.
I went home around 1 PM and ate lunch before doing a little work on blog posts and delving into research. I noticed that the PMA's press release about "Creative Africa" describes the "Look Again" gallery as its centerpiece, which is interesting given the promotional materials are all Vlisco and many visitors don't even seem to notice the gallery on their way to the other exhibitions. Many of the other articles I read about the exhibitions also describe "Look Again" as the "most exciting" of all of the exhibits. I also noticed that the "season" of Creative Africa will be ending at different times: "Three Photographers/Six Cities" and the Francis Kéré exhibit are both slotted to be removed mid-September, "Look Again" will leave in December, and the Vlisco exhibit and "Threads of Tradition" will both be up through January. I assume that this has to do with loaned materials and inter-museum politics and so forth, but I did find it striking that of all of the exhibits, it appears that the Vlisco one will have the longest run. The press release barely uses the word "artifacts." While the press release put out by the museum specified which African countries were represented in each of the exhibits, most of the articles I read did not get any more specific than "Africa," which I found disappointing as it would be more appropriate not to treat 54 countries as a monolith. One of the articles I read (6abc) quoted John Vick, the project coordinator, as saying that "this is a show about making visitors feel empowered to look at art," and I have to wonder what on earth that actually means. The Newsworks article actually provided more information about some of the things on display than the actual exhibits--particularly Francis Kéré and the complications of making clothes out of Vlisco fabrics.
Though she seems dedicated to using the collection to dispel misconceptions about a scientific basis for race, she also seemed like she was genuinely frustrated by NAGPRA. This was confirmed by Stacey Espenlaub, the NAGPRA coordinator, who gave the second talk. I'd already learned about NAGPRA this semester in Museum Anthropology, but to be honest, I'd run out of ADHD medication that week and would not have been able to recall much about the readings. This refresher course was helpful more for my own knowledge than anything else--though it was definitely interesting that they chose to schedule it immediately after the human remains presentation. The third and final speaker was Lynn Makowsky, keeper of the Mediterranean section. She mainly explained the difference between keepers and curators, which was nice to know in that I'd never heard of keepers before. She then took us on a quick tour of the Mediterranean collection, which was cool.
At around noon, we split up, and I decided to take a closer look at the "Imagine Africa" exhibit and the African section in general. With all the talk about labels and prompts, I wanted to make sure we knew what we were comparing--and it turned out that our assertion that the "Imagine Africa" labels hadn't contained much more than the basic information was a total falsehood (I guess we both just remembered incorrectly?). Almost all of the labels in each exhibit contained full paragraphs of information about the objects or photographs on display, and there were also larger panels nearby summarizing cases or groups of objects.
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| A mask in "Imagine Africa" |
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| Objects in the regular Africa exhibit |
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| Lots of information |
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| These brass weights are the same as the ones on display at the PMA--huge difference in layout and amount of information provided. Instead of asking visitors why different shapes might suit different sizes, these labels explain that the different symbols represented a variety of sayings. |
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| While not every object has a paragraph of information, the majority of them do. |
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| "Imagine Africa" also includes small maps of Africa in the labels so visitors can easily reference where in Africa the objects originated--this struck me as particularly helpful/educational. |
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| Even the photographs have explanations! |
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| These objects didn't have individual paragraphs, but they were added in response to visitor data that asked for more information on farming and food production, so they had less time to flesh out the details/they (supposedly) won't be on display for as long. |
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| This is the panel from the above photo. |
I also spent some time looking at the tensions between "artifacts" and "art," and when I revisited the articles I'd read about the exhibits, I found a few interesting things. The Newsworks article described the exhibit as ranging from "ancient tribal art" to "fresh contemporary design," which sounded to me like the writer was merely putting new phrases in place of artifacts and art to further separate the two based on chronology. Visitors are invited to "inspect" the objects in the Look Again gallery, but "experience" the works which were more recently crafted. I looked back at some of my notes from when I wrote a paper on a similar topic this past fall--it was about the shifting value of Alaska Native artwork as it is often subject to similar tensions in museums, but I was more focused on the souvenir trade and commodification of art AND artifact--and I found a pair of definitions from a 1981 New York Times article that I'd luckily saved the link to: "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." The main thing there is to know about what separates art from artifact, apparently, is that art has a certain wildly frustrating je-ne-sais-quoi that is usually attributed to some deeper level of meaning. I couldn't seem to find anything shorter than a book that might explain the distinction between religious artwork and religious artifacts, even though I'm pretty sure they both carry a lot of meaning. I was also reminded of the way that other terms are used to separate "art" from "artifact" (and usually white peoples' creations from those of people of color around the world): "carvings" has a different tone than "sculpture," "wall hanging" is different from "tapestry," and so on. One reading I revisited (from my paper's bibliography) posited that in terms of souvenir marketing, words such as "carvings" lead (mostly white) tourists to believe that it "belies a more 'truly Native' touch to an artwork." This reminded me of our confusion surrounding the phrase "power figures," and a quick google informed me that they would usually be called nkisi. Would the use of this term be dangerously close to having the audience learn about African cultures? I still have a lot of questions relating to this idea, but it's pretty obvious that the relationship between art and artifacts would take far more than just one afternoon of research.
The articles I looked at (not counting things I accessed through JSTOR because of my paper, which I can provide if it would be relevant or helpful--since it's really about Alaska Native souvenir art, though, I don't know how necessary that would be):
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/15/nyregion/art-vs-artifacts-in-montclair.html
http://www.philamuseum.org/press/releases/2016/1083.html
http://www.phillyvoice.com/philadelphia-museum-of-art-debuts-creative-africa-featuring-five-exhibits/
http://www.uwishunu.com/2016/05/philadelphia-museum-art-debuts-major-new-african-art-exhibition-summer/#sm.001yrzgo710yrfmfyww2db1e82itc
http://6abc.com/entertainment/video-creative-africa-at-the-philadelphia-museum-of-art---6abc-loves-the-arts/1335385/
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/arts-culture/93699-penn-and-philadelphia-art-museums-collaborate-on-creative-africa
Maeve Day 6
Tuesday! We started the second week by observing visitors. And then observing them some more. I forgot to bring my badge, but it wasn't a problem at any point. Dani and I chatted with one of the security guards in "Look Again" about our project, her experience with audience reactions to the exhibit, and museum representations of Africa in general.
The first visitors started to come in around 11:15, which is when we got started tracking them. Dani and I had agreed to add two more behaviors to our list: imitating (the power figures seemed to provoke a lot of mimicry on Saturday) and dwelling (we later learned we'd been defining this differently, with my understanding of it referring to dwell time at an object and Dani recording it as time spent dwelling in between objects or on phones). My first visitor was a very purposeful looker who generally ignored the labels in favor of getting as close as possible to the objects. I followed two more visitors--one of whom stayed for only a single minute--before we decided to take lunch.
After lunch, I followed a couple around for an hour and fifteen minutes. I couldn't help wondering what they could possibly think I was doing--the clipboard felt a lot more obvious than the coloring book had been, and spending that amount of time in the same areas of the exhibit as them couldn't have gone unnoticed. The good news is that they were definitely engaging with the prompts, asking each other questions about the objects, and generally being invested in learning things from the exhibit. They were especially interested in the ivories (neither of them mentioned the plight of elephants), the power figures, and the bronze weights, though they obviously spent considerable amounts of time at almost every single thing in the exhibit. The only things they didn't stop to look at were one of the power figures and a case of cups by the entrance. The woman mentioned potentially visiting the Penn Museum to learn more about the artifacts, and I wondered if that could be considered achieving the goals set for the exhibit by both museums.
At 4, we had our weekly meeting with the other museum staffers, which was a bit frustrating. There might just be too many people at the table, but it seemed like nobody had really listened to the part when Dani and I explained our methodology and our findings. I've been conducting research with the goal of seeing how people are using or not using the prompts in the gallery and whether they are engaging in close/directed looking at the objects. This does not seem like it will change. It was definitely interesting that the head of education said they don't really care if people learn anything from their museum visit--I wasn't sure if she was talking about the museum in general or this specific exhibit, but either way, it was certainly a revealing comment.
The first visitors started to come in around 11:15, which is when we got started tracking them. Dani and I had agreed to add two more behaviors to our list: imitating (the power figures seemed to provoke a lot of mimicry on Saturday) and dwelling (we later learned we'd been defining this differently, with my understanding of it referring to dwell time at an object and Dani recording it as time spent dwelling in between objects or on phones). My first visitor was a very purposeful looker who generally ignored the labels in favor of getting as close as possible to the objects. I followed two more visitors--one of whom stayed for only a single minute--before we decided to take lunch.
After lunch, I followed a couple around for an hour and fifteen minutes. I couldn't help wondering what they could possibly think I was doing--the clipboard felt a lot more obvious than the coloring book had been, and spending that amount of time in the same areas of the exhibit as them couldn't have gone unnoticed. The good news is that they were definitely engaging with the prompts, asking each other questions about the objects, and generally being invested in learning things from the exhibit. They were especially interested in the ivories (neither of them mentioned the plight of elephants), the power figures, and the bronze weights, though they obviously spent considerable amounts of time at almost every single thing in the exhibit. The only things they didn't stop to look at were one of the power figures and a case of cups by the entrance. The woman mentioned potentially visiting the Penn Museum to learn more about the artifacts, and I wondered if that could be considered achieving the goals set for the exhibit by both museums.
At 4, we had our weekly meeting with the other museum staffers, which was a bit frustrating. There might just be too many people at the table, but it seemed like nobody had really listened to the part when Dani and I explained our methodology and our findings. I've been conducting research with the goal of seeing how people are using or not using the prompts in the gallery and whether they are engaging in close/directed looking at the objects. This does not seem like it will change. It was definitely interesting that the head of education said they don't really care if people learn anything from their museum visit--I wasn't sure if she was talking about the museum in general or this specific exhibit, but either way, it was certainly a revealing comment.
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| the tusk that draws the most attention (I started taking pictures of things to look less suspicious) |
Dani's Day Six Reflections
June 14th, 2016
The mornings are super slow. I don't think a soul came into the exhibit until 11:45am. In the meantime, Maeve and I were able to gain a better understanding of the museum through one of the security guards. She told us some of the things she hears people say about the museum, like "These things are stolen!" She seemed entertained by the ways people have been responding to the artifacts. She also seemed to be familiar with some of the visitors. She asked us a lot of questions too. She seemed pretty interested in what we we're studying.
Maeve and I had lunch with Jo, another intern from Bryn Mawr.
Maeve and I went back into the exhibit to observe people before the afternoon meetings. By this time, the visitors were much more diverse and seemed to be more engaged in the exhibit. This set of visitors was much more expressive, in general. People were taking pictures, laughing while using the interactive table, talking to the security guards and talking to each other. I suspect that the more people that are in the gallery at one time, the more comfortable people feel to engage with the objects. They don't suspect that their behavior is distinct from the behavior of others. It was interesting to examine how the level to which one engages with the exhibit is impacted by the presence of others. This will be especially interesting to observe during Art Splash.
We met outside the main museum to discuss Orlando, the community conversation and the day's observations.
Maeve and I returned to the Perelman building's library to catch up on our journals.
Maeve and I shared our observations with everyone. We were able to hear everyone's feedback. It was interesting to hear about the goal of the prompts and the education department's objectives. I'm interested in seeing how we modify our observation method for Art Splash.
Observations
10am- 12pmThe mornings are super slow. I don't think a soul came into the exhibit until 11:45am. In the meantime, Maeve and I were able to gain a better understanding of the museum through one of the security guards. She told us some of the things she hears people say about the museum, like "These things are stolen!" She seemed entertained by the ways people have been responding to the artifacts. She also seemed to be familiar with some of the visitors. She asked us a lot of questions too. She seemed pretty interested in what we we're studying.
Lunch
12pm -12:30ishMaeve and I had lunch with Jo, another intern from Bryn Mawr.
More Observations
12:30-1:45ish pmMaeve and I went back into the exhibit to observe people before the afternoon meetings. By this time, the visitors were much more diverse and seemed to be more engaged in the exhibit. This set of visitors was much more expressive, in general. People were taking pictures, laughing while using the interactive table, talking to the security guards and talking to each other. I suspect that the more people that are in the gallery at one time, the more comfortable people feel to engage with the objects. They don't suspect that their behavior is distinct from the behavior of others. It was interesting to examine how the level to which one engages with the exhibit is impacted by the presence of others. This will be especially interesting to observe during Art Splash.
Meeting with Monique
2pm 2:45pmWe met outside the main museum to discuss Orlando, the community conversation and the day's observations.
Journaling
3pm-3:45pmMaeve and I returned to the Perelman building's library to catch up on our journals.
Meeting with Evaluation Department, the Education Department and Damon
4pm-5ishpmMaeve and I shared our observations with everyone. We were able to hear everyone's feedback. It was interesting to hear about the goal of the prompts and the education department's objectives. I'm interested in seeing how we modify our observation method for Art Splash.
Dani's Day Five Observations
June 11th, 2016
On this day we chose to test our observation method and note the key behaviors of the visitors and anything else that stood out to us. Honestly, I felt pretty uncomfortable watching people so closely. I was afraid of getting too close. I also sensed that many of the visitors seemed very aware of my presence, which made me feel a little strange. For example, I caught several people watching me in the space. I've noticed this in other parts of the museum (especially upstairs) when I'm by myself. People double look over their shoulders and follow me with their eyes. I've been doing a mini experiment that consists of examining how people respond to me when my badge is/isn't showing. I will find a way to manage these thoughts and feelings, so that they don't impact the quality of my recordings. I'm really looking forward to the interviews and getting a sense of how people have been thinking about the exhibit. People will probably be less likely to question my presence in an interview.
Overall, I felt that the conversation went well. I feel like most people were able to leave thinking about appropriation and appreciation a little differently. I was also glad that most people felt comfortable enough to share and be transparent. I also enjoyed getting to know Naomi a little more. I'm super interested in getting to talk to her and Damen (I apologize if I spelled his name wrong) about what they've been doing to reach diverse communities and their interests in art, diversity and activism in other settings.
"Pilot" Observations
10am- 2:30pmOn this day we chose to test our observation method and note the key behaviors of the visitors and anything else that stood out to us. Honestly, I felt pretty uncomfortable watching people so closely. I was afraid of getting too close. I also sensed that many of the visitors seemed very aware of my presence, which made me feel a little strange. For example, I caught several people watching me in the space. I've noticed this in other parts of the museum (especially upstairs) when I'm by myself. People double look over their shoulders and follow me with their eyes. I've been doing a mini experiment that consists of examining how people respond to me when my badge is/isn't showing. I will find a way to manage these thoughts and feelings, so that they don't impact the quality of my recordings. I'm really looking forward to the interviews and getting a sense of how people have been thinking about the exhibit. People will probably be less likely to question my presence in an interview.
Community Conversations
2:30pm-4ishOverall, I felt that the conversation went well. I feel like most people were able to leave thinking about appropriation and appreciation a little differently. I was also glad that most people felt comfortable enough to share and be transparent. I also enjoyed getting to know Naomi a little more. I'm super interested in getting to talk to her and Damen (I apologize if I spelled his name wrong) about what they've been doing to reach diverse communities and their interests in art, diversity and activism in other settings.
Maeve Day 5
Saturday was the first day of testing out our newly formed methodology. People don't really show up until 11 AM, but that gave us time to chat with the security guards and read the materials on Vlisco provided in the study room. The Vlisco materials made it clear that the company is really focused on its ties to African femininity in all its forms--their advertisements were targeting nostalgia and connections to motherhood as well as a high-fashion palate and businesswomen.
It's definitely easier to understand how visitors are making meaning from the exhibit when they are with other people, because their conversations and interactions make it a lot clearer what they're thinking and what they find important in the exhibit. I wrote my observations on six maps, but some couples/families stayed together for the duration of their visit, so I was technically observing more than just six people. It's hard to choose which person I want to observe when they walk in, because I only have a split second before they start engaging (or not!) with the exhibit.
The most notable visitor experience I had also raised a lot of questions for me. I was following a member type (white woman in approximately her sixties) for a little over twenty minutes when she went to ask the security guard something about one of the power figures. The security guard (with whom we had briefly interacted at the beginning of the day) then referred her to me. She seemed vaguely knowledgeable about the power figures and African history in general, and her question had to do with something on a label that didn't make sense to her (she was misreading it). Because it was just a question of legibility, I was actually able to clear it up, but I kept emphasizing that I really didn't know much about the figures, the exhibition design process, or really anything in there. She was very interested in the hand gestures the power figures were making and wondered aloud if it might have something to do with the Black Panthers. I was at a loss for words, but managed to tell her that since these all came from the Penn Museum, she might be able to find more information there. Are we allowed to keep the observations even if visitors interact with us? What should we tell guards--and visitors, for that matter--about what we're researching?
After that experience, I decided to go to the library and read a little more about Vlisco on the internet. It was about 1:45, and I wanted the knowledge to be fresh in my mind for the community conversation at 2:30. I wasn't very surprised by how difficult it was to find any information about Vlisco that hadn't been put out by the company itself. I'd be really interested to see a more comprehensive study of their policies, history, and interactions with Africa--since I'm interested in fashion, I'm intrigued by the tangled web of cross-cultural exchange they have woven alongside their textiles.
One of the first things that came out of the Vlisco conversation was the acknowledgement that many of us at the table were using the word "we" to refer to Western tastes. Most of the visitors mentioned being struck by the colors and patterns, and wondered at the boldness used in African design. One person mentioned that the effect of this color shock was that it "got me ready for difference," a statement I really liked. Another exhibit was brought up for a comparison point, and while discussing it, a man said that "even though these fabrics weren't made in Africa, they represent Africanness"--something Vlisco would probably love to put in their promotional materials. Some of the interesting questions that arose from the conversation were the problem of who could be said to be influencing whom, what it means to call something African (or European or global), how making meaning out of fabric can be a form of resistance, and who is determining the parameters of African femininity/African taste? I tried not to get too worked up talking about wearing clothing to send messages--it had been mentioned multiple times at the table as an example of something distinctly African, but I wanted everyone to realize that it wasn't so much that African women are the only people using fashion to send messages, rather that they had a much more complex and codified language for it. I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about clothes and their meanings, but I often forget that everyone else in the world isn't sitting around trying to literally wear their hearts on their sleeves.
After discussing everyone's reactions to the exhibit, the history of Vlisco, and the role of African women (specifically the Mama Benz) in fashion, the conversation shifted to focus on appropriation. The first part of the conversation had been really interesting to me because I am used to thinking of appropriation in a solely negative light. It reminded me that appropriation is about taking something and infusing it with new meaning, which can be negative--like when people wear Native American war bonnets to festivals because it "looks cool" without recognizing the deeper meaning of the garment and the complex history of Native oppression--but it can also be positive, like when African women take numbered fabrics and give them new names that absorb the designs into their cultures. I also enjoyed hearing everyone's personal stories about cultural appropriation, because it really seemed to help clarify the discussion.
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| How to pretend you aren't observing someone: take pictures of everything else around you. |
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| People really like to imitate this guy's stance. |
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| The best suit ever probably. But it was designed by an African-American--so is it African? |
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| I love the back of this dress. |
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