Tag Archives: Museums

Pilgrimage

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Art Rant, material culture, Museums

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Former President Barack Obama Oil on canvas by Kehinde Wiley, 2018. National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.)

Note: This was written some weeks before the Kim Sajet’s piece in The Atlantic appeared. Upon reading that, I decided to publish this essay.

Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of President Obama hangs on a partial wall fronted by a velvet rope. Stanchions create an approach to the portrait, and people are lined up as if they’re waiting for communion, waiting to approach an altar. Which they are. The portrait is more vivid, more alive, in person than in print or online. The line of people–still long, still rapt, months after the painting was installed– is as moving as the portrait itself.

I knew I would like the portrait because I like the artist. The first Wiley I saw was at the MFA Boston, John, 1st Baron Byron hangs in a long hallway of a gallery, the chinoiserie background red and vibrant, loud the way 18th century wallpaper could be. Tendrils wrap around the subject’s legs, flat against the navy blue chinos, and without regard to the light that reflects from his palm. It stopped me in my tracks.

John, 1st Baron Byron. oil on canvas by Kehinde Wiley. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.2013.633

Obama’s portrait pricked my eyes with tears, not only for what I missed– the cool intelligence, the restraint, the reasonable domestic policies–but for the line of supplicants. There was a crowd of people who were moved the way I was moved, by the representation of a person. They were moved because of what the painting stood for, and how it represented the embodiment of an idea.

Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” portrait collage captures the beginning of the idea, Wiley’s portrait the mature realization. A copy of Fairey’s 2008 poster hung in my Providence living room, flatter than the original collage, stylized to a near caricature. Wiley’s portrait would suffer as a poster, print rendering the floral background lifeless, draining it of the light that saturates the portrait in person. The portrait glows on the gallery wall: Wiley has captured “hope” in paint and made it feel alive.

HOPE, by Shepard Fairey. Screenprint, 2008.

That light and life captivate viewers and draw them to the painting; they respond not only to what they know it represents, but to how the idea and accomplishment are represented. Watching people get in line to see a painting– no other presidential portrait, no other portrait, captured people’s attention and interest this way– proves not the popularity of a past president but the power of an object.

Wiley’s portrait, suffused with light, may be a modern altarpiece to the cult of celebrity, drawing crowds to worship an idol created by the media. Or it may be the physical representation of quintessentially American ideals of equality and progress, depicting a god of the mythical post-racial present. Or perhaps it’s a superficial representation of a superficial success, thin paint to match a thin pre-presidential resume. How we interpret an object is colored by our biases, but our response is not: our response is intuitive and automatic. That’s what I see in the queue to view Wiley’s portrait: people responding instinctively to beauty.

Sometimes I forget that no matter how interpretation and meaning layer an object, the first response is instinctive. It may be so fast we (almost) miss it, an impulse leaping across a synapse, but it is often the most honest response; the one we need to pay attention to so we can better understand how an object is presented to us or the public. The power is intrinsic to the object, whether an inlaid table or a portrait: the maker speaks to us through the object. Wiley’s portrait and the crowd who came to see it reminded me of that basic truth: the power is in the object. A curator’s label and presentation are secondary to the immediate response of the viewer to the object. There’s nothing like the real thing.

Museum Monday: GWU & Textile Museum

03 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Museum Review

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Friday I found myself in Foggy Bottom with time to spare on a parking meter in Alexandria, so I cast about for someplace to explore. For the first wearing of my favorite boots this season, the Mall seemed too far, so I chose the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum. Once upon a time, the Textile Museum had its own home, but as with so many museums, it could not support itself, and found a new home within a university. GWU is also home to the Albert H. Small Center for National Capital Area Studies, which collects Washingtonia, documenting the evolution of the District of Columbia’s landscape and built environment.

University museums make me a little nervous the same way museums associated with private hereditary-based membership organizations do– there’s an increased level of exclusivity beyond the usual white marble stairs and bronzed glass doors. Is the museum for the public, or only for the students? How well does the museum integrate with the community around it? That’s not much of a concern for the GWU Museum, given that it is embedded in a neighborhood primarily comprised of college students, but the hands-on lab is clearly oriented towards school groups of all ages, and school groups have their own (slightly half-hearted) page.  Still, it’s not like Penn’s Museum, which is embedded in a very different kind of neighborhood.

Still, the front desk staff were friendly helpful, suggesting two ways to see the museum (basement up, via the stairs or top down, via elevator). I chose the stairs. The basement level featured selections from the Textile Museum Collection, Textiles 101 and Faig Ahmed: Nonvisual Language. It’s a good thing I’ve got years of museum training because Ahmed’s work is really tactile. I wanted to plunge my hands into the first piece I saw, a luscious red wall hanging. Really: you want to get your hands in it.

Shibori in a drawer in Textiles 101

Textiles 101 provided the chance to touch, a welcome relief after looking. There were drawers to open, and a large explanation of the types of weave structures that make up textiles. A very helpful security guard recommended (insisted) that I watch the video on the 2017 Maryland Sheep to Shawl Contest,  which I did enjoy. As the only person in the galleries, my heels echoed and I attracted quite a bit of (friendly) attention.

On the second floor, I found the Alfred Small Collection of Washingtonian’s Eye of the Bird: Visions and Views of D.C.’s Past which I found incredibly helpful in understanding the evolution of the city, and in orienting myself when on the ground. The diagonal streets and circles are confusing to someone  familiar with grids, or cowpaths, or grids laid over cowpaths, so I need all the orientation I can get. An unexpected treat was a lovely 1830s dress with whitework pelerine, illustrating resident dressed for one of my favorite eras.

The Basics:

Admission:
Free (suggested donation, $8; front desk staff waved me in when I brought up AAM)

Hours:
Monday and Friday: 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday–Thursday: 11 AM–7 PM
Saturday: 10 AM–5 PM
Sunday: 1–5 PM

Closest Metro: Foggy Bottom (Blue, Orange, and Silver Lines)

This is That

24 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by in History, Living History, Museums

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Mark Rothko: another suicidal abstract bad-boy painter from the middle of the last century, so what?
This is what: a day at the museum when then the last painting in the Napoleon exhibit is presented in such a way that it was, in effect, the same as the last painting I happened to see.

Napoleon on his Death Bed
Untitled (Primary Title) oil on canvas by Mark Rothko, 1970. VMFA

Rothko wasn’t one of my top-ten favorite artists, but he was the top of the list of color-field painters I liked when I was studying art. He’s the kind of artist who grows on you as you mature, the way eating habits change with experience. The article I’m reading now compares his work to Roman villa murals, and that makes sense when you encounter his work. It’s color and not color, depth and surface, immersive. Simply immersive. Rothko creates a world that exists within your own head; his paintings invite you into his mind, which then occupies yours. It’s not always comfortable, given Rothko’s own dark visions. It remarkably effective in its apparent simplicity, the colors hovering over one another, creating depth with saturated color.

Red, Orange, Orange on Red oil on canvas by Mark Rothko, 1962. St. Louis Art Museum, 129:1966
No. 22 (Untitled), 1961, oil and acrylic on canvas by Mark Rothko, 1961. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., 1985 1985:9

The first Rothko I saw must have been in Chicago, though the first one I remember is Red, Orange, Orange on Red in St. Louis; I must have seen the Albright Knox’s not long after they acquired it– the red and black are more familiar and more comfortable, in a way, than the orange and red.

But this is a history blog, you say, a costume blog. Why are we talking about Rothko? We’re talking about Rothko because seeing a Rothko– standing in front of an actual Rothko, taking a breath and looking— is an experience. An emotional experience. Reader, I wept.*

Just as the projected waves washed the walls of the final gallery in the Napoleon exhibit, so too did the blues of this untitled painting move. They vibrated with emotion, and I was immersed in blue, a kind a symphony of color, as close as I will ever come to synesthesia.

And that’s what good exhibits do, what good history does, what accuracy does. It renders the past visible, tactile, sensible, immersive. It catches us, and we fall down. Art, history, culture: if we are sucked into that otherness, hooked by feeling, we are more likely to learn something.

As stood before the Rothko, I noticed a Cornell– and a teenager noticing the Cornell. Joseph Cornell’s boxes were my first obsession, when I skipped school to go to the Art Institute of Chicago to spend my day surrounded by Cornell’s tiny universes, transported to another place.

Untitled (Primary Title), painted and papered wood and glass box, with wood, plaster pipe, metal rings, nails, and string by Joseph Cornell, probably 1950s. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 96.41

Isn’t that what we’re trying to do, every time we dress in these funny clothes, visit historic sites, reenact the past? Aren’t we all seeking some sublime moment, when this solid present becomes the ether of the past? Sometimes the way to understand that most readily is to study something else entirely– like a Rothko. Or a Cornell. Sometimes the way into a thing is sideways, when understanding and inspiration come from an unfamiliar place, when me make connections we don’t expect.

L’Empereur Napoléon Ier sur son lit de mort, oil on panel by Denzil O. Ibbetson, 1821.

Death and Napoleon and Rothko and Cornell all seem obviously connected to me– and not just through the symbolism of the rich cobalt blues.

*I do this in museums: when I walked into the Kaufman Gallery at the NGA, tears welled in my eyes at the sight of so much beauty.

Tripping in Richmond

20 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Events, History, Museums

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Visiting the Stately Home: an early touristic diversion

Friday night, Drunk Tailor and I waited until the worst of rush hour in NOVA was over and headed south to Richmond, surprised not to be engulfed in a terrific thunderstorm of the kind we are becoming accustomed to driving in. We had planned a weekend trip to see the Napoleon: Power and Splendor exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a traveling exhibit, but this is the first time I’ve been close enough to see it, and we had the added benefit of being able to attend in costume with the Regency Society of Virginia. (Reader: I required a new outfit.)

The idea of visiting a museum in costume is incredibly appealing, and all the more so when you can visit galleries of objects from the time period your costume replicates. Add to that the layer of traveling on the weekend in the clothes from the time when tourism first became a “thing” (at least among the monied classes), and you have a recipe for an excellent adventure.

(Somehow, while often at events together, Drunk Tailor and I are rarely seen “together,” so images like this are nice to have.)

If you are going to play the tourist, especially if you are visiting the “spoils” of the former emperor, you have to dress appropriately. American tourists today may travel in camo crocs and backwards baseball caps, but people in the past dressed for touring and it seemed appropriate to dress for this trip.

Admiring the panorama. (Cropped only to enhance periodicity)

This trip, with the fun of visiting in period clothes, reminds me of the books still in storage, and the books I have yet to read — one on early country house tourism— that document the changes in how people spent their time and consumed goods, and the reasonably concurrent rise of both the museum and the department store.

Raptures about the mounting, I think, but we might as well we shopping.

Peale and Zola have more in common than you might think, or at least Mr. Peale and Mr. Selfridge. These compendia of material goods are similarly structured — both organized around themes or types, whether ladies’ lingerie or Oceanic art– and have similar aims of edification and [cultural] consumption.

When your hat sees its cousin in a case….

All in all, an excellent trip, with much to see and talk about. After finishing our tour of the Napoleon exhibit, we lunched (another experience similar to the department store) and toured more of the museum, and had a day well spent.

Pulling Back the Curtain

06 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Museums

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The Artist in His Museum by Charles Wilson Peale. 1822. Coutesy Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

I read this blog post hoping to find some insights that might help me as I figure out what comes next. I found myself irked instead.

Be Prepared to Struggle.

3. Be prepared to struggle.
The museum education field is not for the faint of heart, or people who want a 9-5 job. One of my mentors advised me that the days are long, but the years are short. The hours will hurt, you will get tired of the near-constant balancing act, and you might even question if you’re making an impact. Hang in there. Find your network (local, regional, or national). Share your vulnerabilities with people you trust. Delegate if you can. Most of all, document your successes and create a portfolio that illustrates why your efforts matter.

What is hidden between those lines? Be prepared for your life to be subservient to the needs of the museum? Be prepared to give everything– but document all you do because you’ll need to prove your value, no matter how much you sacrifice?

Saint Catherine, by Bernardino Luini. State Museum of Azerbaijan. (c) Stourhead; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation. You will not achieve sainthood by sacrificing your sanity to a job.

Why would you put your work ahead of your life? (YES, I KNOW that’s not exactly what that post is suggesting, but that’s how it often ends up.) Encouraging people to work hard is good, but telling them they should expect to, and will, suffer isn’t good. That feeds the beast that chews up and spits out eager, idealistic young people on a routine basis. The museum is definitely not going to tell you it loves you, or visit you in the hospital. You need the time to build your own life, a circle of friends or family, interests of your own to feed your soul. And that means you will need boundaries, and need to have some “evenings, weekends, and holidays” when work is not required or expected– though I know that those hours are required and that people have to work them because they need the money.

Sculpture Hall, after 1913 installation of ceiling lights and before 1928 installation of fountain, c.1920. St. Louis Art Museum

Museum education staff are on the front lines– certainly more so than the curatorial, research, or exhibition design staff– and their work is immediately recognized and experienced by visitors. Museum education staff include a wide range of folks, depending on the organization. Costumed interpreters, gallery guides, program managers and assistants to develop and run fun but educational activities for all ages, curriculum developers who work with teachers to ensure that museu visits and activities for school groups meet the local or common core standards, and lots more. Sometimes the education staff are paid less than the curatorial and collections staff– and they’re pretty underpaid to begin with. Education staff are, to a larger degree than collections staff, expected to work evenings, weekends, and holidays, often without holiday differential pay, and receiving “comp” time instead of overtime.

Now, all that said, the blog post also contains these points

1. Gain skills outside of your intended field.  Learn how to budget. Like, really budget. What would you do with $2,000? How about $250,000? Know the numbers, and know how to speak business. If this isn’t your comfort zone, join the club. Take free online courses (edX is my go-to), and expand your skillset to include some productive surprises.

Victoria and Albert Museum, interior view (South Court), late 19th century (V&A PH.1156-1905)

Guess what? Budgeting IS part of your intended field. Sure, educational methods for reaching kids is directly related, but there is hardly a museum job in the world that doesn’t need to deal with money to some degree. The better you understand the way a budget works, the way grant budgets work and what you need to account for, the better you will understand the place you work and why things are the way they are. (Translation: the better you will understand how you are being rewarded– or not.

 

2. Work hard, be nice.  One of the best things to do when you’re starting out (or moving up) is to do excellent work and share it with your peers, supervisors, friends, and anyone who can provide constructive feedback. The museum world is a teeny-tiny place, so be nice to everyone you meet.

Be nice. As a woman, I often hate hearing that. I’d rephrase this one to “Do the best work you can without killing or compromising yourself, and be generous to the people who help you.” Develop the radar that lets you know when your colleague is using you– and someone will, trust me. Eventually someone will take credit for your work (ask me how I know), or betray a confidence, or a boss will keep moving the goalposts for a promotion, raise, or title change.

The North Court in the late 19th century. Museum no. E.1101-1989. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Museums aren’t easy to work in– there’s no field that’s always easy to work in– but we accept far too much because we love what we do. We are charmed, seduced, by the beauty of the objects, the mystery of the concepts, the scale of reach. But like a bad lover, museum administrators and boards can exploit our passion and use it against us. Don’t think they won’t.

If you don’t work in a museum, substitute your position title and/or field for the museum-specific words in this post. I believe everyone should be paid a fair wage, have decent working conditions, and the ability to have a robust and satisfying personal life as well as a job they find meaningful.