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.

A mask in "Imagine Africa"

Objects in the regular Africa exhibit

Lots of information

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.

While not every object has a paragraph of information, the majority of them do.

"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.

Even the photographs have explanations!

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.

This is the panel from the above photo.

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. 

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