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.