Maeve Day 19

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

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

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

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