Tag Archives: resources

Support Your Local Museum

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

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I have the sense of two groundswells about to converge: one about museums, libraries and archives limiting access by closing or charging fees, and one about museums spending money on things they shouldn’t. There has been a lively conversation among fellow former-employees about a midwestern museum’s purchase of a piece of real estate. It is a tawdry tale, and seems a grand waste of money and goodwill.

Then there are the libraries that have closed, and the state archive that is closing to the public. And the small historical organization that charges per hour for research visits. And the place that charges a daily research fee for non-member, out-of-state residents.

ETA: New York Times coverage today of the upcoming closing in Georgia.

Folks, when you hear the word culture, you need to take out your checkbooks.

If you can “do a google,”  you can figure out who I am. But what do you think I do all day? Do you think I pattern dresses, or catalog muskets, or research painters, or study the stylistic changes in mahogany tea tables over a 30-year span?

I wish.

Do you think I wet-vac basements, change HOBO or PEM batteries, monitor and adjust air handling unit fan speeds, read boiler specs and warranty info, or keep on eye on carpenters?

Each day, I do some of those things, and some of the content-related things.

But mostly I think about money. If I don’t think about money at work, it wakes me up at night. What if I don’t get that green buildings grant? Where will I get that $78,000 for well drilling? How much does it actually cost to page each item requested in the Library? Will we ever be able to microfilm newspapers again? What do we do when the money for boxes runs out–there isn’t any more grant money after we spend this. Is there another grant I can write? How much of that $100,000 budget cut has to come out of my budgets? What will we have to stop doing?

I wake up every day at about 4:00AM, and get up by 5:00; vertical is less panicky than horizontal.

The answer to most of this is money. There’s another groundswell out there to kill the NEH, and what the heck, if places can’t make it on what they can raise, let ’em die.

Really? This is what our history has come to?

Do you know how you can help? The single most important thing you can do to make sure your history is accessible, your favorite museum stays open, your favorite objects are up online?

Join. JOIN your favorite museum. It’s probably pretty cheap. You can join mine for $40. This is such a deal. You get free admission, a magazine, a newsletter, email updates, and the knowledge that you’re helping us, we know, and we appreciate it. Want better catalog records? Become a member, and donate to an annual campaign. Write a check for a museum to buy a better camera. To buy an external hard drive for image back up. Write a check to support archival supplies. Or insurance. Or a new carpet for a gallery. Or to replace a battered book.

Every dollar counts. So does every member.

If you want to know how your museum spends its money ETA: and where it gets its money, in the US you can look them up on Guidestar. There you’ll find the 990s for most 501(c)3’s in the states. This is how I know which place in my state has a budget ten times as large as my museum’s, and which place has one 10% the size of mine. Guess which one I joined.

What time is that dress in the museum?

21 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by in Clothing, History, Museums

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Guess what: they might not know for sure. Many garments donated to museums are given without clear dates, especially older garments donated in the 20th and 21st century. That means that dating the garments is, well, tricky.

You can find many dated to 1776 by donors. Everybody wanted to be associated with such an important event…especially around 1876, and 1976. Where I work, a dress like the one to the left was given to us with the firm statement that the fabric had been brought from England to RI (how did that work with Newport blockaded?), and that the dress was from 1776. Clearly, it is not.

To the right is Deborah Sampson’s dress, possibly her wedding dress: Don’t know who she was? Read here.

Deborah Sampson’s is a closed-front round gown. Look at the catalog record, and you’ll also note the date: 1760-1790, a thirty-year spread. Why is this? Fabric gets remade, for one thing. Deborah Sampson Gannett’s dates are 1760-1827, so if this is her dress, we know she didn’t wear it in this size or style in 1760. But fabric can easily pre-date a garment. The V&A sometimes had three dates for their Spitalfields silk gowns: the date of the fabric, the date it was first made into a garment, and the date it was altered into a new style.

Sampson marries in 1785. That seems like a plausible date for this dress, given its style. That’s where the 1790 comes in; yes, it could be that late, it’s conservative in New England and makes a nice ending to a “circa” date. So how else might this dress be dated? 1785-1790? 1780-1790, fabric possibly earlier? Given the database I know HNE uses, the date field is a little tricky (we use the same one). If I were to catalog the dress, I think I’d use 1783-1788. Why 1783? Because we know Deborah Sampson was probably not wearing dresses in 1783: she was in the Army roughly 1778-1783. I’d add 5 years to that because it encompasses the date of her marriage, 1785, and indicates that I’m not convinced or have no firm documentation that this was in fact her wedding dress. That’s just how I would approach this if the dress was in my museum and is not intended as a criticism of HNE’s cataloging. And it’s not to suggest that my own catalog records don’t need work, because they do.

What does this mean for researchers and costumers? When I do research, because I know how the process can work, it means I’m often skeptical, or wish that the reasoning behind the date was explained—especially behind a 20 or 30 year range. It also means you have to fact check yourself, with independent verification. For that, I use period images, which I’ll explore in another post.

Mourning Embroideries

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in History, Museums

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As a rule, I dislike samplers. Sacrilege, I know, but the rows of letters and numbers and tidy stitches seem to me like running in place, instead of running to get somewhere.

But I do like pictorial embroideries, and on this day, posting about a frothy bonnet in a painting in a Sotheby’s catalog seemed…well, too trivial. So instead, here’s a fantastic mourning picture from the Met. By Charlotte Brown, of Rhode Island, it memorializes Salome Brown and her husband Moses Brown, though not the Moses Brown.

Just because I’m not a fan doesn’t mean I don’t recognize types. In a google image search, I found this item, and knew immediately it was Rhode Island. Made in 1808, it lives at RISD, and a textile designer has done wonderful things based on it. Both RISD’s and the Met’s have the weeping woman, the weeping willow, the urn/cenotaph feature, the pastoral landscape.

But wait…the provenance of the Met’s picture is minimal: “Once property of the late Florence Maine, antiques dealer of Ridgefield and Wilton Connecticut. (Advertisement of embroidery in August 1953 Antiques magazine.)” So I started searching for Moses Brown and Salome Brown in the Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Database, and I came up empty.

Yes, there are Moses Browns. There is no Salome Brown. But I can’t find a Moses with these dates. That doesn’t mean he didn’t exist, or that this isn’t a Rhode Island sampler; not every cemetery has been transcribed and not every headstone survived.  There is one Charlotte Brown with a date worth considering, and she is the daughter of Thomas and Rebecca Brown, and would have been 7 when this was made. Not impossible, but I’m not fully sold yet. I now have more questions about the one at the Met, and about the people memorialized. Those questions may well be answered in an accession file at the Met, but sitting on the public side of the catalog record, I have questions that only research can answer, and that I hope will one day be done as part of the Sampler Archive Project. 

For now, I think I’ll enjoy a sense of visual literacy in Rhode Island imagery, the lasting beauty of these memorials, and let it go at that.

Feeling Shifty

09 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Clothing, Making Things

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It’s clean now, but in the photo you can see some of the abuse a shift takes in a day or two of real wearing. This shift was made from the Kannik’s Korner pattern. The first shift I made is now on a mannequin at work; I used Mara Riley’s Instructions, and they worked, mostly, with some operator error. I’m tall, and that means that proportions for my clothes sometimes have to be adjusted. The third shift I made was a late-18th century version, adjusted for the change in style and my height, and it is by far the best one yet.

So now I know I need to make another mid-18th century shift, what will I do? The first place I’ll start is with Sharon Burnston’s awesome article, The Cognitive Shift. This is one of the best pieces I’ve read on costume history and the logical, methodical approach is one that not only explains her process, clarifying objects and construction, but also sets a standard for how other garments could be considered.

Among the points Sharon has made over time is the lack of decent linen available for making shifts and shirts. What we can get today is too heavy, too coarse–it lacks the hand of the linen items made in the period we’re reenacting, and not just because the objects have been washed. The fabric is simply different, and unavailable. What  I think I’ll try (having exhausted whatever shift linen I bought from a sutler) is this light weight linen, not softened. I have some that was used for a cap, and so far seems to be working out. Once it is washed, it seems to have a decent drape and appearance.

My impression is not of a fine lady, and that is at least a saving grace. I don’t want to go all the way down the social ladder to wearing an oznabrig shift, but I do want to be as accurate as I can be–and as comfortable.

A Box in a (not quite) Day

27 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in Making Things, Reenacting

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Since I made a new knapsack based on the example in the Fort Ticonderoga collection (see also Henry Cooke’s work, or The Packet III, page 28), I had paint. When you have paint, you want to put it on something. I put mine on a box.

Ikea had ‘Kartotek’ birch ply boxes one year, and the Young Mr was using some as treasure chests in his room, but now that he’s growing up a bit, he was willing to have one remodeled. The lines were pretty basic and the construction simple enough that I thought we could do a kind of recon on this box. (Recon is Library Lingo for “retrospective conversion.”)

First, I took it apart and sanded it. Don’t forget to cover work surfaces and expect to sweep/tack cloth up dust from both the box and everything around the box. Mr. S helped me out by drilling out the riveted handles, and re-drilling holes large enough to take the rope we had. It smells like hemp, but I have no idea where it came from–perhaps a Christmas tree excursion.

All good so far, sanded, drilled, and ready to take the paint. I thought one coat would be enough, since I had the red stain underneath, and wear and tear make things look better, so, fantastic! Time to put it together.

Hold on there, pilgrim. I looked at the screws. They were Phillips head, and not really brass. That’s not right! I’ve crawled under enough old tables to know that screws are flat, slot-head, and made of brass in this time period. With the rise of the screw gun/cordless drill, this kind of screw is no longer easy to find. They’re all Phillips at the big box hardware stores, and our little speciality store recently downsized and rearranged.

Was I really screwed? No, thanks to the interwebs. Slot-head brass screws are still used in marine applications, so I was able to order a bag from Amazon–the local chandlers seem to have given way to WestMarine, and they seemed only to have stainless steel screws.

The package came on Wednesday, I got out the screw driver, and after what totals up to a day’s work, we have a box for the Young Mr S to stash his stuff in when in camp. I expect the box to soon contain one book about dragons, several sticks and rocks, a tangle of fishing line, an empty candy wrapper, and an apple core. Also, homework that counts towards his grade.