Wedding History

My apologies for not checking in for awhile. After my last post, I spent a couple of weekends away, in New York and Philadelphia. I had the chance to visit the Philly Museum of Art, Independence Hall, and the Liberty Bell, so I'll share my impressions and photos of those places soon.

In the meantime, I found something interesting closer to home. This Sunday, the University of New Hampshire Museum is putting on an exhibit of historic wedding dresses to complement a bridal show being held on campus. According the university's press release, the exhibit was created from the Irma Bowen Textile Collection, a collection of more than 600 samples of women’s and children’s clothing from the 1700s through the early 20th century.

According to the university's press release, the dresses on display this weekend will include a "wool designer gown covered with hand stitched lace and netting from the house of Maison Rouff in Paris and a burgundy long sleeve silk taffeta. Both dresses are circa 1890." They will also include an orange flapper-style dress. As UNH Museum Curator Dale Valena says, "“The exhibit helps to show the history of wedding dresses. I think people will be surprised to find that they weren’t always long and white."

You can read more about the exhibit here and here.

I'm Published!

Some of you might recall the post I wrote in May, pleased as punch that I passed my thesis defense and completed my thesis project. Well, I'm happy to report that after some revision over the summer and into the fall, the project has now gone online!

In the words of the museum's website:

Discover the life and times of Midshipman Pardon Mawney Whipple as he participates in some of Old Ironsides’ most daring exploits. Encounter a lost world of heroism, sacrifice, and determination – a world brought to life by Whipple’s own letters and personal possessions.

Without further ado, may I present "In the Zenith of his Glory: Pardon Mawney Whipple, United States Navy"? The exhibit is currently featured on the museum's main page, as well as its permanent home in the "Collections and Library" section of the website. How very exciting!

Artifact Repatriation

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post about "The Restitution of Cultural Property in the Modern Age." It was a post sparked in large part by meeting Dr. Robert Anderson, former director of the British Museum. He spoke at my graduate university that spring and then later joined my classmates and I in our museum studies class. It was supremely interesting to get a perspective on artifacts like the Elgin Marbles from someone who once actually had power over said artifacts.

Last Monday, I came across two stories on Reuters and BBC News detailing more nationalistic conflict in the museum world centering upon the "return" of certain artifacts. From the BBC, "France's Louvre museum returns five frescoes to Egypt." And from Reuters online, "Egypt to ask British Museum for Rosetta Stone."

Now, here's the thing about "returning" objects to countries where they were excavated. On the one hand, I completely understand the desire of a country to have intellectual and physical control over an object - a thing of wood or bone or stone or something else entirely - that hails from their shores. I do.

However, isn't it of some significance that most of these objects were excavated and placed in the stewardship of a museum solely because some first world nation provided the funding and vision to do so? And that most of these objects are better cared for in their current (non-original) countries than they would likely be in their "home" nations?

I understand that this issue often becomes about the White Man and his history of very very bad interactions with poorer nations. And for good reason, I know. However, as a museum professional, I keep coming around to some of the basic tenets of collections care: care & preservation of artifacts and public access to said items. These ideals are painfully practical but, to me at least, incredibly important. I say whoever can care for the collections better and ensure greater public access (the eternal Sophie's choice) - wins them all!

Museums in the News

A museum news roundup from the last month. All stories from the New York Times. Some pretty interesting stories in the last month!

• Death of a Visionary Director

• Seeing Green in the Natural History Museum's Food Court

• A Museum Hails Caesar

• A Museum that Roars Once a Month

• Living Along Museum Mile

• Museum Directors on Collections and Exhibitions

• The Manly Art of Museum Curating

• Museum is Displaying Treasures of the Other Evolution Pioneer

• Plan in Baghdad to Put Iraqi Artifacts Online

Lincoln in Dance Form

Now, as a museum professional, I normally turn to things like exhibits (brick-and-mortar or online), educational programs, and publications to educate the public about an historical topic. However, I recently reconsidered historical learning based on something written by an old friend of mine, Anna.

We've known each other since we were about two years old and she recently completed her MFA in dance performance. She's since moved to L.A. and started a blog featuring her thoughtful reviews of local dance performances. In October, she posted a review of a performance called "Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray," danced at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. As she so aptly puts it:

Bill T. Jones’ Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray moves through the legends, impressions and famous words of Abraham Lincoln to discover a man and his enduring relevance and challenge to America. Fondly Do We Hope pursues this admirably ambitious vision with a deluge of projected and spoken text, riveting performance of an original musical score, bits of video, and glorious dancing.

I think I like this. Anna's review of the performance does a great job assessing its merits from the perspective of a dance scholar. I would obviously have to see the performance myself to sum it up from a historian's point of view, but I like the idea, at least.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things, but it seems to me that one of the great things dance can do is convey emotion. And one of the great things the teaching of history can do is help us connect with people in the past. So, accompanied with the proper framework of historical context, I can see a performance like this as a powerful tool to both teach about history and help the audience relate to a great man like Lincoln and the very human emotions he experienced in his vaunted life.

Curators in the 21 Century

It was called "The Romance and the Reality: Curating at Small Museums" and the title drew me right away. The session description in the NEMA conference booklet helped, too:

The romantic view of a curator is often one of a scholar researching and studying his or her collection, organizing exhibitions, publishing catalogs, and presenting all of it to the public in the museum setting—oftentimes, nothing could be further from the truth. Join three Nantucket curators, from three different museums, as they lead a roundtable discussion of the reality of the curator’s role in the 21st century. This discussion will be particularly useful to new curators but all are welcome.

When I first decided to go to grad school and earn my master's in museum studies, I was not sure at all what area on which I wanted to focus. Until I began work at Strawbery Banke in May of 2007, I had never actually been paid to work in a museum, as such. I had worked in my undergraduate college's archives and interned at a national historic park, but I didn't have a strong sense of the different types of jobs available in a museum or what path I wanted to follow.

In the winter of 2008, I began an internship with SBM's curatorial department, which led to a part-time position as a curatorial assistant for close to a year. This was a wonderful experience for me, as the folks in that department are both eminently knowledgeable and extremely approachable. I then went on to intern for about nine months in the curatorial department at the USS Constitution Museum. Again, this was a great opportunity to work with very smart people at a very cool museum.

Now, I work one afternoon a week as the Curator at New Castle Historical Society, manage the Wentworth-Gardner and Tobias Lear houses (which involves some light curatorial work), and, in my unrelated role as Program Coordinator, observe the curatorial activities at Haverhill Historical Society.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I'd like to think that in the last few years, I've gotten a pretty good sense of how curators operate in New England museums. And what that NEMA panel discussion and my own experience have proved is that no two curatorial positions are exactly alike. This is a role that shifts and moves depending on the museum. However, one of the themes of the panel was the definition of the role. It will change as we move more into a world of online exhibits and sensory interactivity and new technology. The important thing, all of the panelists seemed to agree, is that curators take an active part in defining their new roles.

We must embrace the ease of access inherent with online exhibits, while fiercely protecting the idea that there is no substitute for seeing the actual object. We must continue to produce fine scholarship on the artifacts of our past, while acknowledging the breakthroughs of the present and the future. Above all, one panelist pointed out, we must (to some degree at least) break out of our mold as the omniscient experts and learn to learn from visitors and others something about what we hold in our collections.

NEMA 2009

Long day today. I attended the New England Museum Assocation conference in Nashua, NH. Usually, I try to go for at least two days, the Wednesday and Thursday sessions of the conference. This year, however, I had too much going on with two of my jobs to take the time off for more than one day.

The conference today was interesting and it was nice to see people and do some networking. I've gotten some great ideas for posts from some of the sessions I attended, so expect to see some of those soon. However, since I was on the road to Nashua before 8am and just got home an hour or so ago, I'm off to bed for now!