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.