Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070106
Conal McCarthy
What was the first museum you remember visiting?I was born in September 1942 during the war. My parents came from Poland. Three weeks after I was born, 6,500 Jews from my father’s hometown, Opatów (Apt, in Yiddish), 65% of the population, disappeared overnight. All but 500 were sent to the Treblinka death camp, and the rest to a forced labour camp. So I grew up in an immigrant neighbourhood in the immediate postwar years. I went through an ultra-Orthodox period (my parents were horrified). I became not only strictly kosher, but also I observed the Sabbath very strictly. That meant I could not ride, spend money, turn on the radio, write, tear paper . . . I could do almost nothing. Except . . . I could walk to the Royal Ontario Museum. . . . and I did. So this was before the era of helicopter parents. At the age of 10, 11, 12 years old, I would walk out of my house, through Queen’s Park, to the ROM, and that was my beloved childhood museum.
{"title":"Destination Museum","authors":"Conal McCarthy","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070106","url":null,"abstract":"What was the first museum you remember visiting?I was born in September 1942 during the war. My parents came from Poland. Three weeks after I was born, 6,500 Jews from my father’s hometown, Opatów (Apt, in Yiddish), 65% of the population, disappeared overnight. All but 500 were sent to the Treblinka death camp, and the rest to a forced labour camp. So I grew up in an immigrant neighbourhood in the immediate postwar years. I went through an ultra-Orthodox period (my parents were horrified). I became not only strictly kosher, but also I observed the Sabbath very strictly. That meant I could not ride, spend money, turn on the radio, write, tear paper . . . I could do almost nothing. Except . . . I could walk to the Royal Ontario Museum. . . . and I did. So this was before the era of helicopter parents. At the age of 10, 11, 12 years old, I would walk out of my house, through Queen’s Park, to the ROM, and that was my beloved childhood museum.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75850423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070115
Emily Stokes-Rees, Blaire M. Moskowitz, Moira Sun, Jordan Wilson
Exhibition Review Essay:Exhibition without Boundaries. teamLab Borderless and the Digital Evolution of Gallery Space by Emily Stokes-Rees Exhibition Reviews:The Colmar Treasure: A Medieval Jewish Legacy. The Met Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York by Blaire M. MoskowitzShanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai; Suzhou Museum, Suzhou; and PMQ, Hong Kong by Moira SunThe Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology. Exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York City (14 February–7 July 2019) and the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia (20 July–24 October 2019) by Jordan Wilson
{"title":"Exhibition Review Essay and Reviews","authors":"Emily Stokes-Rees, Blaire M. Moskowitz, Moira Sun, Jordan Wilson","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070115","url":null,"abstract":"Exhibition Review Essay:Exhibition without Boundaries. teamLab Borderless and the Digital Evolution of Gallery Space\u0000by Emily Stokes-Rees\u0000Exhibition Reviews:The Colmar Treasure: A Medieval Jewish Legacy. The Met Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\u0000by Blaire M. MoskowitzShanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai; Suzhou Museum, Suzhou; and PMQ, Hong Kong\u0000by Moira SunThe Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology. Exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York City (14 February–7 July 2019) and the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia (20 July–24 October 2019)\u0000by Jordan Wilson","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81777220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070116
Nicholas Thomas, Adrian Locke, N. M. Kahanu, Simon Jean
Curating Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts by Nicholas ThomasAn Internal Response to Oceania from the Royal Academy of Arts by Adrian Locke“Exhibiting Oceania”: Conversing with the Curators (or Truth-Telling in Real Time) by Noelle M. K. Y. KahanuOcéanie in Paris by Simon JeanOceania Catalogue by Lagi-Maama
{"title":"Reviewing Oceania","authors":"Nicholas Thomas, Adrian Locke, N. M. Kahanu, Simon Jean","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070116","url":null,"abstract":"Curating Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts\u0000by Nicholas ThomasAn Internal Response to Oceania from the Royal Academy of Arts\u0000by Adrian Locke“Exhibiting Oceania”: Conversing with the Curators (or Truth-Telling in Real Time)\u0000by Noelle M. K. Y. KahanuOcéanie in Paris\u0000by Simon JeanOceania Catalogue\u0000by Lagi-Maama","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"112 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77279096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070107
E. Lehrer, Monika Murzyn-Kupisz
Looking beyond Poland’s internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are represented in longer-standing folk and ethnographic museums whose mandates have been to represent the historical culture of the Polish nation. How have such museums navigated growing internal pressures to incorporate Jews and reconsider the boundaries of “Polishness” alongside external pressures to rethink the function and approach of ethnographic museology? Based on three museums that have taken three different approaches to Jewishness—what we call cabinet of Jewish curiosities, two solitudes, and ambivalent externalization—we assess the roles played by inherited discourses and structures as well as human agents within and beyond the museum. We illuminate how social debate about the character of the nation (and Jews’ place in it) plays out in museums at a moment in their transition from nineteenth- to twenty-first-century paradigms and how a distinctively Polish path toward a “new museology” is emerging in conversation with and resistance to its Western counterparts.
{"title":"Making Space for Jewish Culture in Polish Folk and Ethnographic Museums","authors":"E. Lehrer, Monika Murzyn-Kupisz","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070107","url":null,"abstract":"Looking beyond Poland’s internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are represented in longer-standing folk and ethnographic museums whose mandates have been to represent the historical culture of the Polish nation. How have such museums navigated growing internal pressures to incorporate Jews and reconsider the boundaries of “Polishness” alongside external pressures to rethink the function and approach of ethnographic museology? Based on three museums that have taken three different approaches to Jewishness—what we call cabinet of Jewish curiosities, two solitudes, and ambivalent externalization—we assess the roles played by inherited discourses and structures as well as human agents within and beyond the museum. We illuminate how social debate about the character of the nation (and Jews’ place in it) plays out in museums at a moment in their transition from nineteenth- to twenty-first-century paradigms and how a distinctively Polish path toward a “new museology” is emerging in conversation with and resistance to its Western counterparts.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"92 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73311748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070105
James Beattie, L. Stevenson
This article presents new historical research on Asian art—particularly Chinese art—in New Zealand through the examination of the content and reception of the Loan Exhibition of Oriental Art, which was held in Christchurch from May to June 1935. It situates the exhibition within the context of Depression-era New Zealand, examines the place of Chinese art, in particular, in the developing cultural nationalism of New Zealand of this period, and highlights the role of one local connoisseur in the making of the exhibition. Moreover, the article’s focus on the southern hemisphere fills a gap in global histories of Chinese art exhibition in this period.
{"title":"\"[W]hat Beauty in Oriental Art Means\"","authors":"James Beattie, L. Stevenson","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070105","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents new historical research on Asian art—particularly Chinese art—in New Zealand through the examination of the content and reception of the Loan Exhibition of Oriental Art, which was held in Christchurch from May to June 1935. It situates the exhibition within the context of Depression-era New Zealand, examines the place of Chinese art, in particular, in the developing cultural nationalism of New Zealand of this period, and highlights the role of one local connoisseur in the making of the exhibition. Moreover, the article’s focus on the southern hemisphere fills a gap in global histories of Chinese art exhibition in this period.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83282704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070102
Johanna T Zetterstrom-Sharp, Chris Wingfield
In February 2016, students at Jesus College, Cambridge voted unanimously to repatriate to Nigeria a bronze cockerel looted during the violent British expedition into Benin City in 1897. The college, however, decided to temporarily relocate Okukor to the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This article outlines the discussions that occurred during this process, exploring how the Museum was positioned as a safe space in which uncomfortable colonial legacies, including institutionalized racism and cultural patrimony rights, could be debated. We explore how a stated commitment to postcolonial dialogue ultimately worked to circumvent a call for postcolonial action. Drawing on Ann Stoler’s and Elizabeth Edwards’s discussions of colonial aphasia, this article argues that anthropology museums risk enabling such circumvention despite confronting their own institutional colonial legacies.
{"title":"A \"Safe Space\" to Debate Colonial Legacy","authors":"Johanna T Zetterstrom-Sharp, Chris Wingfield","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070102","url":null,"abstract":"In February 2016, students at Jesus College, Cambridge voted unanimously to repatriate to Nigeria a bronze cockerel looted during the violent British expedition into Benin City in 1897. The college, however, decided to temporarily relocate Okukor to the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This article outlines the discussions that occurred during this process, exploring how the Museum was positioned as a safe space in which uncomfortable colonial legacies, including institutionalized racism and cultural patrimony rights, could be debated. We explore how a stated commitment to postcolonial dialogue ultimately worked to circumvent a call for postcolonial action. Drawing on Ann Stoler’s and Elizabeth Edwards’s discussions of colonial aphasia, this article argues that anthropology museums risk enabling such circumvention despite confronting their own institutional colonial legacies.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87460958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070104
Toby Burrows
Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts were a significant commodity in the antiquarian sales market throughout the twentieth century, sought out by very wealthy collectors and small-scale buyers. The history of this manuscript market has not been analyzed systematically. This article is a first attempt to identify themes and trends across the century, beginning with the dominance of the great American Gilded Age collectors like Henry Huntington and the Morgans and their need to memorialize themselves. It argues that future research needs to assemble comprehensive data on prices and buyers in order to make possible more systematic analyses of trends and activities, and a more sophisticated understanding of the different reasons for which collectors collected and of the changing nature of manuscripts as objects with their own biographical trajectories and their own agency.
{"title":"Collecting Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Twentieth-Century Great Britain and North America","authors":"Toby Burrows","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070104","url":null,"abstract":"Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts were a significant commodity in the antiquarian sales market throughout the twentieth century, sought out by very wealthy collectors and small-scale buyers. The history of this manuscript market has not been analyzed systematically. This article is a first attempt to identify themes and trends across the century, beginning with the dominance of the great American Gilded Age collectors like Henry Huntington and the Morgans and their need to memorialize themselves. It argues that future research needs to assemble comprehensive data on prices and buyers in order to make possible more systematic analyses of trends and activities, and a more sophisticated understanding of the different reasons for which collectors collected and of the changing nature of manuscripts as objects with their own biographical trajectories and their own agency.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84772265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070111
Johan Hegardt
This article derives from the research project entitled “Art, Culture and Conflict: Transformations of Museums and Memory Culture around the Baltic Sea after 1989,” which was financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University. It discusses how history museums in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have reacted to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the conclusion of the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic states. It argues that the Cold War is understood by the museums as a special historical epoch not comparable to any other historical period in these six countries. It concludes that to be able to deal with this particular point in history we either need to metaphorically put the Cold War in between red brackets, as it were, which makes it possible to address the Cold War when needed, or to place it outside the historical narrative of the modern rise of the five discussed nation-states.
{"title":"History between Red Brackets","authors":"Johan Hegardt","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070111","url":null,"abstract":"This article derives from the research project entitled “Art, Culture and Conflict: Transformations of Museums and Memory Culture around the Baltic Sea after 1989,” which was financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University. It discusses how history museums in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have reacted to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the conclusion of the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic states. It argues that the Cold War is understood by the museums as a special historical epoch not comparable to any other historical period in these six countries. It concludes that to be able to deal with this particular point in history we either need to metaphorically put the Cold War in between red brackets, as it were, which makes it possible to address the Cold War when needed, or to place it outside the historical narrative of the modern rise of the five discussed nation-states.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82281154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070113
Sheila K. Hoffman, Dominique Poulot, Bruno Brulon-Soares, Joanna Cobley
There is no doubt that we live in fraught times. In the world of museums and cultural heritage protection, we feel it keenly. As symbols and microcosms of respective cultures, museums are thought to reflect society or, at the very least, sections of society or certain historical moments. But the extent to which museums should and do reflect the diversity of people in those societies is the question du jour. Sometimes, it seems as if this question is an internal one—the practical struggle of often underfunded institutions to square the injustices of a past that is encoded into collections with a newfound awareness of visitors, or the theoretical debate about just how multivocal, democratic, and oriented toward social justice a museum can be before it ceases to be a “museum.” The consequences of such struggles and debates can often seem far removed from the concerns of ordinary residents, who may only occasionally visit museums or heritage monuments. Our perception of this disregard perhaps calls into question the impact of our work. But in times of crisis, that doubt is removed and the relevance of cultural heritage becomes clear. Crisis often crystallizes what is most important. That is not surprising. In this special section, we explore the sometimes surprising nature of the aftermath.
{"title":"Aftermath of Cultural Heritage Disasters","authors":"Sheila K. Hoffman, Dominique Poulot, Bruno Brulon-Soares, Joanna Cobley","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070113","url":null,"abstract":"There is no doubt that we live in fraught times. In the world of museums and cultural heritage protection, we feel it keenly. As symbols and microcosms of respective cultures, museums are thought to reflect society or, at the very least, sections of society or certain historical moments. But the extent to which museums should and do reflect the diversity of people in those societies is the question du jour. Sometimes, it seems as if this question is an internal one—the practical struggle of often underfunded institutions to square the injustices of a past that is encoded into collections with a newfound awareness of visitors, or the theoretical debate about just how multivocal, democratic, and oriented toward social justice a museum can be before it ceases to be a “museum.” The consequences of such struggles and debates can often seem far removed from the concerns of ordinary residents, who may only occasionally visit museums or heritage monuments. Our perception of this disregard perhaps calls into question the impact of our work. But in times of crisis, that doubt is removed and the relevance of cultural heritage becomes clear. Crisis often crystallizes what is most important. That is not surprising. In this special section, we explore the sometimes surprising nature of the aftermath.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87843502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3167/armw.2019.070109
N. Dias
In this article, I reflect on the experience of attending Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s class Performance Studies Issues and Methods at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the 1990s. Recalling the classes and field trips to events and sites in New York City, and the emphasis that she placed on reading texts and taking field notes, I consider the lessons I learned for performance studies, anthropology, and museums, and also for teaching, research, and scholarship in general. Why did this practice of taking notes from the field, from books in particular, and the note-taking practice in general, play such a central role in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s teaching? The steady and consistent focus both on theory and on the observation of social practices was a means of opening up new spaces for theoretical analysis or for a “performed theory,” to use Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s term.
{"title":"Field Notes and Reading Notes","authors":"N. Dias","doi":"10.3167/armw.2019.070109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070109","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I reflect on the experience of attending Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s class Performance Studies Issues and Methods at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the 1990s. Recalling the classes and field trips to events and sites in New York City, and the emphasis that she placed on reading texts and taking field notes, I consider the lessons I learned for performance studies, anthropology, and museums, and also for teaching, research, and scholarship in general. Why did this practice of taking notes from the field, from books in particular, and the note-taking practice in general, play such a central role in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s teaching? The steady and consistent focus both on theory and on the observation of social practices was a means of opening up new spaces for theoretical analysis or for a “performed theory,” to use Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s term.","PeriodicalId":40959,"journal":{"name":"Museum Worlds","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78888906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}