Maeve Day 26

I used Tuesday morning to write blog posts at home. I met with Monique, Dani, and Summer at the Penn Museum a little after 1 PM for lunch and a chance to catch up on what we'd been doing. After lunch, Dani and I had some free time to walk around the museum. The labels contain far more information than is available at the art museum, of course, but many of them also acknowledge the artistic process by which the objects were created. For example, two large ceramic lions sit by one of the entrances to the Chinese gallery, and their description included historical/contextual information (what lions symbolized, when they were commissioned, why the female and male lions were different) as well as an explanation of cloisonne (the technique that produced their designs). I recognized the word from seeing it in the Chinese galleries at the PMA, but I realized that I'd never actually seen an explanation of what the process was, at least not one that I understood. The Penn's labels often took into account the artistic history and procedures that might be seen at the PMA, only they had ethnographic information as well. One of the things that really bothered me about the Penn was how the galleries are organized. It's pretty difficult to find your way around the museum, it's hot and dark and dusty, and many objects are tucked away in strange corners and tiny rooms. The Egyptian and Asian galleries felt weirdly empty, even though they were full of objects. The exhibits just had a vaguely disorganized feeling to them, as though they were undergoing renovations, and the massive vaulted ceilings emphasized how little there was to look at besides the objects themselves. The Penn feels outdated, dusty, and almost painfully academic, which is a shame because many of their labels are quite transparent about the museum's involvement in obtaining the objects. The Iraq/Ur exhibit, which was obviously more recent, mentioned the looting of the museums in Baghdad and the failures of the U.S. army to protect the objects, the complicated relationships established among international museums on exhibitions, and so on.

At 3:30, we met back up with Monique and Summer and went to the tour of the African collections. I didn't catch Dwaune's last name, but I thought it was really interesting that she is only the keeper of the collection and there isn't currently a curator. Though I think the fact of the solitary expedition had been mentioned to us before, it continues to strike me as outrageous that the Penn Museum only conducted one African expedition ever. It was to Sierra Leone in 1937, which is surprisingly late for a museum expedition. That collecting bias on the museum's part can be seen in the collections, but it just reminded me of how evident it is in the show at the PMA, where pretty much every object is from west and central Africa. I thought it was really interesting that many of the objects were (probably? definitely?) made to be sold to colonists and museum expeditions rather than being made for everyday use, and I wanted to know more about how that is dealt with in terms of seeking accuracy. I also wish I knew more about the African collections at other museums, just so I'd have something to compare it to in my mind. Dwaune mentioned turning down things like paintings, which made me realize I'd never heard of anyone saying anything about African paintings before, and I want to know more about that. When we walked through the collections, I couldn't help wishing I could compare some of the textiles they have (which are older and produced in Africa according to actual African tastes) to the Vlisco patterns. I still want to know more details of how the objects in Look Again were chosen (and why they left out baskets, musical instruments, and masks), but I thought it was fascinating that they were apparently copied almost directly from the book about the 1986 exhibit.

After the collections, Steph gave us a brief tour of the Africa exhibit. It was interesting to look at it again after my first trip through, way back at the beginning of the summer. I was shocked that Imagine Africa has been up since 2011--it's so obviously a temporary thing, but that kind of permanence is really frightening to think about as what five years of visitors have been "learning" about Africa. The Africa exhibit is tiny, especially in comparison to most of the other exhibits. That one room is about the same size as the Etruscan gallery upstairs, and Africa is an entire continent, not one specific culture from one specific country. The themed cases are interesting in that they disrupt the idea of people being tied to their land, but I felt like they homogenized the continent and were just confusing for when I was trying to place things in my head. The African objects were lacking a lot of context--the other interns pointed out that not only did they generally not tell you where a culture was from, the objects weren't dated, they didn't tell us much about how objects were made, and it was all very generalized. Someone said that the visitor is left to piece the exhibit together on their own, which I thought was a really great observation. I have no idea what I was supposed to take away from that, other than the idea that a lot of stuff was made in Africa. It made me wonder if the Look Again exhibit is really as different from the Penn exhibit as they purport themselves to be. There are definitely good aspects to the Penn exhibit (I think I was far more positive the last time I visited), but at this point, it's kind of shameful how static it is.