House Museum Research Articles

Review: Reimagining Historic House Museums: New Approaches and Proven Solutions, edited by Kenneth C. Turino and Max A. van Balgooy

Review: <i>Reimagining Historic House Museums: New Approaches and Proven Solutions</i>, edited by Kenneth C. Turino and Max A. van Balgooy

An Integrated Geometric and Material Survey for the Conservation of Heritage Masonry Structures

This paper reports the knowledge process and the analyses performed to assess the seismic behavior of a heritage masonry building. The case study is a three-story masonry building that was the house of the Renaissance architect and painter Giorgio Vasari (the Vasari’s House museum). An interdisciplinary approach was adopted, following the Italian “Guidelines for the assessment and mitigation of the seismic risk of the cultural heritage”. This document proposes a methodology of investigation and analysis based on three evaluation levels (EL1, analysis at territorial level; EL2, local analysis and EL3, global analysis), according to an increasing level of knowledge on the building. A comprehensive knowledge process, composed by a 3D survey by Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and experimental in situ tests, allowed us to identify the basic structural geometry and to assess the value of mechanical parameters subsequently needed to perform a reliable structural assessment. The museum represents a typology of masonry building extremely diffused in the Italian territory, and the assessment of its seismic behavior was performed by investigating its global behavior through the EL1 and the EL3 analyses.

The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums by Nicola J. Watson

Reviewed by: The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums by Nicola J. Watson Sean Silver (bio) Nicola J. Watson. The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 336. 25 illustrations. $40 hardcover. Nicola J. Watson’s rich, beautifully written new study offers itself as a guidebook. The Author’s Effects defines, then describes the institution of the writer’s house museum, single dwellings converted or purpose-built each to celebrate a single deceased author. Possibly like the guidebook itself, the author’s house museum is what Watson calls a “small genre”; each such museum is specially constructed to offer a walk-in experience of near contact with an absent author in a domestic space proper to them (7). These spaces are slightly fugitive, at least considered categorically. While it is true that fans of a particular author might know to seek out the museum dedicated to that author’s memory, and that guidebooks have long known how to organize tours around notable sites in local celebrities’ lives, the “writer’s house museum” is not a category recognized by any index, nor is there any central resource for finding them nor single associated professional organization. Partly as a result, no critical discussion of the author’s house museum exists. This is the gap filled by this book, written “to reflect upon the form of the writer’s house museum, given current historical, cultural, intellectual, and popular trends” (16). She visits them, and invites us to visit, too. Readers of Studies in Romanticism will probably be familiar with more than a few of the museums Watson visits: the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, where resides his skull and a reconstruction of his head; Rydal Mount and Gardens, the house cohabited by the diarist Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother, William, for the last four decades of their lives; the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, in the rented room off the Piazza di Spagna where Keats spent his last days. So, too, these memorialized writers and their contemporaries were familiar with the first examples of the form: Keats had made his pilgrimage to the Shakespeare Birthplace Museum, where he scratched a memorial in the glass; Hawthorne had visited the Samuel Johnson House in Uttoxeter, which memory he recorded in print; Washington Irving visited Scott’s Abbotsford, the neo-Medieval castle Scott constructed as a monument to his body of work. The Romantic moment was a hingepoint in the establishment of thanatocentric tourism, what is sometimes called “necromanticisim”: the crossing of dead personalities with persistent places. The generation of the Romantic writers was the first both widely to seek out the sites of prior authors, and also to be memorialized in their turn. The Author’s Effects isn’t a history, however, and it doesn’t sustain a historical narrative. It offers only a brief discussion of why the institution of the author’s house museum sprung up in its modern form in late [End Page 237] eighteenth-century Europe and Britain. Some reasons explicitly mentioned include the political instability of the century’s last decades, which (Watson argues) drove a desire for the countervailing stability of iconic personal figures; the rise of secularized theories of immortality, signaled by the small genre of “graveyard writing”; and the development of tourism, especially to sites of particular cultural resonance and recognition. Other reasons are touched upon, but mostly left silent: the rise of nationalism and the nation-state; the emergence of the public and the public persons it tends to lionize; the evolution of biography, especially to capture the lives of poets; the development of a discourse around the remains of authors, marked by William Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres”; and the historical development of the public or semi-public museum, of which the British Museum is generally taken as the signal example, and which was, of course, visited and popularized by many of the people who would later have museums dedicated in their honor. Not a history, then, but a guidebook: The Author’s Effects begins with an exhortation to start the tour, and ends with an invitation to exit through the gift shop...

INTEGRATION OF LITERARY HERITAGE INTO MEMORIAL SPACE OF A MUSEUM

The article discloses opportunities of widened presentation of literary heritage in historical and artistic exhibitions in Russian literary and memorial museums that are considered by the author as an alternative for reconstruction of memorial space based on typical materials. In reliance on an idea of key role of visual means in social and cultural communication, the author claims that text representation in visual format through the use of the newest technologies of museum design helps to refine effectiveness of perception of conceptional block of museum exhibit by a visitor, its capabilities to draw people's attention. Research sums years­long experience of work of three Russian literary museums (Varlam Shalamov's House Museum (Vologda, Vologda Oblast), Vasily L. Pushkin's House Museum (Moscow), Nikolai Gogol' House – Memorial Museum and Research Library (Moscow)), that shows usefulness of synthesis of memorial component of museum activities and spatial and figurative approach to presentation of literary heritage in museum space.

Stewards of Memory: The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon ed. by Carol Borchert Cadou

Reviewed by: Stewards of Memory: The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon ed. by Carol Borchert Cadou Anna Nau Stewards of Memory: The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Edited by Carol Borchert Cadou, with Luke J. Pecoraro and Thomas A. Reinhart. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780813941516 Hardcover: 280 pages Mount Vernon is known to most Americans as the historic home of the first president of the United States. It is also considered the birthplace of the historic preservation movement in the United States. The continuing legacy of the latter forms the central subject of Stewards of Memory. This diverse collection of eight concise, readable essays by respected scholars and preservation professionals uses Mount Vernon as a case study offering a cross-section of current theories and practices in historic site preservation and management. These include cultural landscape research, digital documentation tools, and the challenges of achieving more inclusive historic interpretation. The book grew out of a 2013 symposium celebrating the 160th anniversary of the purchase of Mount Vernon by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA). As the oldest preservation organization in the United States, the MVLA’s contributions to preservation have been well established. The essays here succeed in presenting a window into the paradigms and practices of current work, as lead editor Carol Borchert Cadou, former Senior Vice-President for Historic Preservation and Collections at Mount Vernon, sets forth in the introduction. But the volume would have benefited from an organization that grouped the essays in such a way as to make those themes more apparent. This shortcoming, however, does not detract from the contribution made by each essay. Together, the essays offer enriching interdisciplinary insight into the challenges, needs, and opportunities facing America’s historic sites and house museums in the twenty-first century. This is facilitated by the contributing authors’ diverse backgrounds that include history, architectural history, historic preservation, architecture, archaeology, and collections management. In the opening essay, “New History in Old Buildings,” Carl R. Lounsbury presents an engaging examination of how historic site research and interpretation has evolved over the last fifty years. The new social history methodologies of the 1960s and 1970s fostered broader definitions of historic and architectural value that moved beyond the early twentieth-century model of commemoration and antiquarianism. Drawing on his own experiences at Colonial Williamsburg and other sites in the southeast, Lounsbury traces how scholars have incorporated advances in archaeology and materials analysis along with more inclusive research and survey practices to reach new understandings of sites like Mount Vernon. This research has in turn revised concepts of early American society. Expanded research methodologies are only one part of the preservationist’s toolbox, as George W. McDaniel demonstrates in his essay on “whole place preservation.” In “Stepping Up and Saving Places,” he examines five cases that illustrate varying degrees of success in the preservation of historic sites and their broader environments, including Mount Vernon and the Ashley River region around Drayton Hall in South Carolina, where McDaniel formerly served as director. He argues that effective preservation demands thoughtful management of change in the landscapes surrounding historic sites through proactive, widespread community support. That support requires strong partnerships and advocacy as well as an understanding of larger economic and social contexts. In his essay entitled “’We Have Done Very Little Investigation There; There Is a Great Deal Yet to Do’,” Luke J. Pecoraro examines another aspect of cultural landscape preservation in a brief summary of past and current “Archaeology of George [End Page 43] Washington’s Mount Vernon.” He presents new efforts to understand and protect the larger cultural landscape of the site—the historic core and the original eight thousand acres—as a means to tell a broader history of its multiple generations of owners, occupants, and uses. This includes a program to document forgotten slave cemeteries using GIS (geographic information system) software to analyze historic maps and visitor accounts as well as continued efforts to protect Mount Vernon’s historic viewshed along the Potomac River. Historians of the American preservation movement may find the essays by Lydia Mattice Brandt and Scott...

Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts by Marla R. Miller

Reviewed by: Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts by Marla R. Miller Ritchie Garrison (bio) Keywords Massachusetts, Women’s history, Labor, WorDking women, Rural capitalism Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. By Marla R. Miller. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 432. Cloth, $64.95.) Marla Miller’s latest book is a deeply researched and nuanced microhis-tory of working women in Hadley, Massachusetts. Grounded in the papers of Elizabeth Porter Phelps and the family’s surviving house, now the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House Museum, Miller links Phelps’s often cryptic observations about her everyday life and the people in it to build compelling stories about the town’s social and labor relationships. She synthesizes her observations and interpretations with the findings of scholars who have studied the Connecticut River Valley, colonial America, and the early republic. The results celebrate the achievements of those scholars, revise some popular and academic assumptions, and add detailed perspectives about the varying conditions and struggles women faced. The book rewards patience. Miller uses Phelps’s writings to surface patterns in the social lives and labors of a variety of women. Her subjects include those who were poor, privileged, industrious, slothful, healthy, addicted, pregnant-out-of-wedlock, widowed, emotionally drained, and busily in motion during episodes of their life courses. While readers catch glimpses of them, the records are too fragmented to build longer biographies or fully grasp what caused most of them to do what they did and why. Weaving back and forth, Miller works her web of entangled relationships but the evidence leads inevitably to a certain amount of repetition in diff erent chapters as she sorts out patterns of work. Skimmers will miss the subtleties; patience with the repetition allows readers to understand better the choices people made. [End Page 497] Miller divides the book into three broad categories: Women, work and community; Livelihoods; and Topographies. Although she includes many of the men in these women’s lives, they play a supporting role in the book’s analytic armature. The book explores the usual themes of female labor in managing child care, food preparation, laundry, and cleaning. But she also reminds readers that many women used whatever extra labor they commanded to intensify various forms of household craft production—dairying, spinning and weaving, and clothes production— and critical service industries, including teaching, health care and nursing, storekeeping, and hospitality. Like others in the Western world, Hadley residents participated in what Jan de Vries has referred to as the “Industrious Revolution.” These activities required considerable organizational and people skills. As a member of one of Hadley’s elite families, Elizabeth Porter Phelps commanded greater resources than most others in town, but responsibility of managing them taxed Phelps’s emotional well-being, energy, and patience. Her workers included enslaved Africans, young women, single mothers with young children, widows, women with specialized craft and service skills, and a shifting workforce of day laborers. A few lived with the family for years but most arrived and departed according to their individual situations. Recruiting and keeping good workers was a recurring problem. She endured female workers who got pregnant from intimacies with the farm’s hired hands, and seemed to have limited success enforcing work discipline short of dismissing the help she regularly and anxiously sought. The detailed analysis of Phelps’s work force is an outstanding contribution because it forces readers to compare interpretive generalizations about labor relationships with the specific choices and circumstances of historical actors. Equally important are Miller’s sharp-focused chapters on production strategies and services in which women held critical craft and procedural knowledge. Scholars have studied some of these topics such as spinning and weaving or midwifery. Others such as cheese-making and tavern/inn-keeping have received relatively less attention. The book also does an excellent job exploring the labor contributions of Native Americans and people of color. This level of inclusion is one of the book’s finest achievements. The book raises a number of questions about the timing and causal factors that shaped Hadley’s cultural landscapes. The author introduces the Hadley landscape and the Porter...

The Author's Effects: On Writer's House Museums by Nicola J. Watson

The Author's Effects: On Writer's House Museums by Nicola J. Watson

Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi

Reviewed by: Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi Vincent Pelote Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong. By Ricky Riccardi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. [432 p. ISBN 9780190914110 (hardcover) $34.95; ISBN9780190914127 (e-book), $47.25.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong is author Ricky Riccardi's second book on the trumpet player and vocalist affectionately known to millions as "Satchmo." It follows his award-winning and critically acclaimed earlier book, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011). That earlier book covered the last twenty-five years (1946–71) of Armstrong's life and art, while his current work covers the years 1929–47. Riccardi, director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, relies on access to the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes that Armstrong made during his lifetime. These tapes contain stories, reminiscences, jokes, and conversations with others and is a treasure trove of research source material for anyone writing a book on the great man. There are also scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings and other materials that Riccardi makes copious use of, along with material from other sources. In Riccardi's first book, he defended Armstrong from wrong-headed critics who consistently disparaged Armstrong's recordings and performances, mostly with his All-Stars. Once again, Riccardi takes on the critics in the jazz press as well as those in the Black and White mainstream press against criticism of Armstrong's recordings and performances from his big-band years. He was attacked by the jazz press for abandoning jazz and becoming "commercial" by leading a big band and performing pop tunes and other nonjazz material. The Black press criticized him for what they considered his racially offensive performance practices (e.g, jokes with Black stereotypes, references to "darkies" in certain songs, etc.), and the White press also took issue with Armstrong's performances, sometimes using racist language in doing so. All the while, he was generally very popular with audiences—both Black and White—who wanted to be entertained, and Armstrong knew how to do that quite well. It is Riccardi's assertion that Armstrong was more than just a jazz musician. He was a pop icon and entertainer who not only led a big dance band that showcased his playing and singing of popular songs but also was renowned as a radio and movie personality. In fact, Armstrong [End Page 231] can be credited with a number of firsts for Blacks in radio and movies. In 1937, as host of the Fleischmann's Yeast Hour, Armstrong became the first African American to host a commercial radio broadcast. The film Pennies from Heaven (1936) gave Armstrong the honor of being the first Black actor to get top billing, alongside Bing Crosby and the movie's other White stars. His popularity was such that he was the first African American jazz musician to publish his own autobiography (Swing That Music [New York: Longmans, Green, 1936]). The popular fairy tale that many jazz critics like to push is that after Armstrong's groundbreaking jazz recordings in the 1920s—starting with his early output with King Oliver, continuing with records made with Clarence Williams, and concluding with his own Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions—he had pretty much stopped creating meaningful contributions to jazz and went commercial. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riccardi chronicles Armstrong's career starting in March 1929, when he and Black musicians Happy Caldwell and Kaiser Marshall took part in the first integrated jazz recording session—with White musicians Jack Teagarden, Joe Sullivan, and Eddie Lang—that produced the jazz classic "Knockin' a Jug." The following recording session with Armstrong, accompanied by members of the Luis Russell Orchestra and White banjoist Eddie Condon, produced "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," which OKeh Records decided to issue in both the "race" records catalog (aimed at the Black buying market) as well as its popular series. Discographers should be aware that Riccardi, in his notes section (p. 344), clears up...

History of Ghafur Ghulam House Museum

History of Ghafur Ghulam House Museum

Konuttan Müzeye Yapı-İşlev Uyumu: Beyoğlu Bölgesi

Bu çalışmanın amacı, tarihi konutların müze olarak işlevlendirilmesindeki uygunluk düzeyinin ortaya konulmasıdır. Konutların müzeye dönüştürülmesinde uğradığı müdahale şekli ve düzeyi çerçevesinde problem ele alınmıştır. Tarihi yapıların işlevlendirilmesinde mevcut yapının sahip olduğu değerlerin korunması ile yapının yeni işlevini karşılaması arasındaki dengenin kurulması önemli bir noktadır. Çalışmada, yeniden işlevlendirmede, konutlara yapılan müdahaleyi tespit etmek için görüşme, mekân analizi ve yerinde gözlem çalışması yapılmıştır. İstanbul’un Beyoğlu ilçesi içerisinde bulunan ve konuttan müzeye dönüştürülmüş Adam Mickiewichz, Masumiyet, Orhan Kemal ve Doğançay Müzeleri çalışma alanı olarak belirlenmiştir. Müze ev işlevinin konut yapılarının sürekliliği açısından uygun olduğu, sanat evi ve koleksiyon evi olarak kullanıldığı noktada mevcut yapıya müdahalelerin arttığı ve aslının daha az korunduğu gözlenmiştir. Sonuç olarak tarihi yapının korunmasında bir yöntem olan yeniden işlevlendirmede mevcut konutun mekânsal boyutları ve birim sayısı dikkate alınarak işlev önerilmesi, müdahale düzeyini en aza indirmekte ve böylece mevcut daha iyi korunabilmektedir.

To be Welcome without Reservation: Seeing a Future for Archaeology at Mount Clare

ABSTRACT The Mount Clare Museum House in Baltimore, Maryland has potential to offer a new approach to community service in Baltimore inspired by archaeological findings, but one that is different from a traditional historic house model. Facing challenges surrounding relevance and institutional survival, the site as a museum sits at a crossroads. The site managers of Mount Clare, a former plantation, historically erased and muted Black histories. However, those histories now drive the rejuvenation and reinvention of the museum. The move of the archaeological collections to the city’s control opens possibilities for more connected archaeological and community service program with the people who live around and use Carroll Park.

«Aquí se venden bolis»: tensiones sociológicas a propósito de la gestión cultural de la Casa Museo Rafael Núñez en Cartagena de Indias

En Cartagena de Indias, el boli es un refresco popular, envasado en una bolsa plástica y que se consume congelado. Uno de los más apetecidos incluye como ingrediente la popular bebida gaseosa Kola Román, mezclada con leche; esta es una bebida creada en 1885 por la familia de Soledad Román, esposa de Rafael Núñez. En febrero de 2019, un cartel publicitario que anunciaba la venta de bolis de kola con leche, colgado en una ventana, en la fachada de la Casa Museo Rafael Núñez en Cartagena de Indias, fue arrebatado a la fuerza de su lugar por una vecina del barrio El Cabrero. Para la creación del cartel, existió un ejercicio creativo e intelectual que buscó poner en diálogo historia y cultura bajo la premisa del «giro sociológico», que a partir de junio de 2018 determina el carácter de las actividades educativas y culturales en la Casa Museo, y que recoge postulados de la sociología de la cultura desarrollados por Pierre Bourdieu. La investigación busca ilustrar el funcionamiento del giro sociológico estudiando como caso la exposición temporal «Aquí se venden bolis» para identificar las tensiones en los usuarios respecto al estatus que la Casa Museo Rafael Núñez les merece.

Imagined interiors – imagined collections

Cabinet paintings showing an (art) collection in an interior developed as a genre in the early seventeenth century in Antwerp. The depicted collection could be the actual art collection in an imagined, idealized interior, or, more metaphorically, it could also be an imagined, fictional collection of paintings, sculptures, scientific instruments, silverwork, textiles, and naturalia such as flowers or shells. Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625) and Pieter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), among others, used this genre in a series illustrating the five senses. These imagined interiors also influenced the caprices by Panini and Piranesi of a cityscape that is a collage of buildings, ruins, and archaeological fragments. In this essay, we relate these fictional representations of collections – objects as well as architectural and archaeological fragments – with the collections and scenography of (house) museums. We consider two house museums in particular: the house of the architect and collector Sir John Soane in London and the Museum of Innocence by writer Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul. House museums traditionally expose collections aside from a museological scenography but in their historical, domestic setting – “frozen” in another context and epoch. The two selected cases, however, were initially conceived as museums and contain an eclectic collection, presented as a pastiche, with a domestic setting that is strongly theatrical or even artificial.

Lessons from Glen Burnie: Queering a Historic House Museum

ABSTRACT In this article I make the case for including queer narratives in historic house museums, both because including queer history in public history settings is important in its own right and as a way to invigorate museum interpretations and appeal to wider audiences. I dispel concerns about “outing” historical actors and describe some language and ways of thinking about historical sexuality to assist educators in their interpretation. I then shift into the case study of Glen Burnie, a historic house museum that completely revised its interpretation to center the house’s last residents and its preservationists, a gay male couple. The museum’s interpretive shift leverages the efforts of both men to create public and private domestic experiences that create an immersive new house tour experience and can be used to create a critique of the portrayal of gender roles and heteronormativity at many historic houses.

The “Rich Gay”? Small Museums &amp; Funding “Difficult” History

AbstractThe authors compare the prevalence of LGBTQIA identities in the general public and particularly in the museum workforce with the lack of funding for exhibitions and programming around LGBTQIA topics, especially in small museums. They investigate historical research in Curator’s archives to understand how museums have handled subjects considered politically or culturally challenging, and the ramifications for funding of these projects. By looking to present‐day examples of historical house museums, the article draws attention to the creative community organizing approaches to fundraising that can increase representation of LGBTQIA people and cultures.

Curating the selective memory of gentrification: the Wulixiang Shikumen Museum in Xintiandi, Shanghai

ABSTRACT The relationship between micro-narratives of house museums and the macro-narrative of urban development constitutes a gap in the research on the gentrification of historical urban areas in China. The commercial redevelopment of two blocks of Xintiandi, located in the core of Shanghai’s former French concession and a major tourism destination, embodies one of four major urban heritage conservation methods applied in the city. We argue that the Wulixiang Shikumen Museum, which is Xintiandi’s primary cultural facility, reinforces an argument of ‘modern nostalgia’ that has characterised heritage production in Shanghai. Our discursive analysis, based on site visits and interviews, focused on the museum’s architectural layout and the collection and interpretation of materials relating to a nostalgia discourse that integrates cosmopolitanism, tradition and cultivation, considered as attributes of Shanghai’s modernisation during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. We argue that the micro-narrative of this museum contributes to a macro-narrative of development, which, as exemplified by Xintiandi, encourages the gentrification of Shanghai’s historical neighbourhoods. We further argue that an authorised version of Shanghai’s semi-colonial past legitimises wider social and economic changes, while obscuring memories associated with decades of collectivisation.

Alexander Burganov. In the depths above reality. (Antique motifs in the context of creative work)

For decades, images of antiquity have appeared in the creative work of academician Alexander Burganov. The sculptor declaratively emphasizes his focus on the cultural tradition which evolved from the cradle of Antiquity and which is, therefore, understandable to anyone who shares its humanistic ideals. The article refers to his personal exhibitions and events of the last decades: “Dreams Within Us. A Magic Crystal” at the Moscow Central House of Artists in 1987, “Magic Realism” in Germany in 1993, “Antique Motifs in Modern Sculpture” in the Burganov House Museum at which he presented his “legends and myths of Ancient Greece” in 2017, and the exhibition held in the Antique Hall in the Museum of Archeology of the Westphalian Wilhelm University of Münster in 2013. Works and cycles, never directly illustrating ancient mythology but unconsciously translating the archetypal, the transcendental through personal experience, a sensory reaction, are considered. The frequent presence of Burganov’s works of art in an “intermediate” state, in the process of transformation, which makes it easy to detect the surreal component, is their feature. Burganov’s "antique" sculptures organically exist not only in exhibition halls but also outside them - be it the courtyard of the Burganov House Museum or the square in Brussels where the sculptures in the window display of the Burganov House at the Grand Place are no less eye-catching than the monument in the same square. Noble restraint (with clearly readable spectacularity), bearing in itself, within itself, dreams and passions, reality and mysticism, gives Burganov’s "antique" images-metaphors a special feature that requires comprehension of the slow, at the same time the reasonable and the emotional in order to be able to penetrate the limits of the immanent artist’s impermeability.

Identity, Belonging, and “Dead Silence”: Towards a Prospectus for Change in the Representation of Black Residents in English Historic Houses, 1714–1837

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between Georgian historic house museums in England and their historic Black residents. The aim is not only to critically analyze representations of Black individuals in historic houses, but to lay the foundations for the development of a prospectus for change. By visiting three house museums with known Black historic residents, this article begins development of such a prospectus. I provide suggestions for the curation of permanent exhibits that inspire a sense of belonging in visitors, and challenge the traditionally uncritical narratives that have been presented in stately homes. It is hoped that this research will continue with a wider breadth of locations and time periods, eventually working towards change within the heritage sector, which will have impact outside of our discipline and on ideas of the past in the public imagination.

The revival of Byzantium through early twentieth century domestic collections in Greece: Tradition, modernity and gender

ABSTRACT Between the two world wars, affluent and intellectual men and women in Greece assembled and displayed in their private homes in Athens collections of Byzantine and pseudo-Byzantine objects in order to recreate personal renderings of the ‘Byzantine world’. Some of these collections, like the one by Dionysios Loverdos, ultimately transformed into house museums; others, like the collection owned by Eleni Stathatos, were donated to institutions where they are exhibited to this day; finally, a few, like the one by Eleni Kanellopoulou-Zouzoula, were dispersed and disappeared once their owners passed away. In this paper, I discuss these collections and their development against the backdrop of the Byzantine revival in Greece and the support and promotion of Byzantium and its art by the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. I focus on these collections as interior decoration; the appreciation and understanding these collections enjoyed, which varied according to the gender of the collector; and the changes in meaning as these collections went from the domestic to the institutional.

Exploring the Convergence of House Museums and Community Archives

Current trends in the heritage field suggest that libraries, archives, and museums may benefit from working together, sharing resources, and sharing spaces – be it on the web or physically. This paper will argue that one type of museum, the house museum, would benefit especially from converging with local community archives. Community archives provide visitors with a direct connection to their community through their specialized collections and intimate focus. Meanwhile, house museums allow for a level of immersion in the exhibit that purpose-built museums do not. Their local focus also ties them to a specific community, just as community archives are tied to their local community. Together, house museums and community archives can provide a more nuanced understanding of history to their community and improve the social standing, resources, and outreach of both institutions.&#x0D;